Skill Challenges : invisible ones ?

[surfarcher]

I'd agree with that Mengu.

The thing is, challenges by RAW are actually far more flexible and open-ended than most folks realise. It's as if they read DMG2 without really twigging to what that book is saying.

One of the most common things I hear is people asking "can I let my players use powers?" or "can't I let them RP it?"... The answer being "Duh! That is exactly what DMG2 is telling you to do!" LOL

I wonder if maybe the SC ideas are just too new and different for a lot of people. Certainly the "official" published SCs don't help clarify this... Even the one in HS1 isn't that great.

IMHO DMG2 didn't go far enough in spelling out how to design and run good SCs. At least part of that will have been due to limited space. I reckon it'd take a fairly long chapter, maybe a book, to approach doing it justice.

I've said it before, stuff like this could breathe a lot of new life back into Dungeon/Dragon. Heck if I knew they were looking for that kind of material I'd take a stab at it myself!

 

[Badwe]

I make it a point to try to integrate skills into the game as much as possible, even outside the realm of skill challenges. This sometimes ends up devolving into somewhat gamist situations, but it helps the skills feel relevant. For example, my home party has many high arcana checks so i let them use it to detect nearby magic items when they're decided what encounter to crawl into next (currently in pyramid of shadows, very dungeon crawl). Other things I have done is allowed them to search for rituals in a library, by using extra time to get easier checks (or vice versa, using a strong skill to finish quickly), but this is only relevant when there is some sort of time limit.

Another thing I have done is leaned heavily on the new essentials write-ups of skill checks, and I've asked my players to read the blurbs about "improvising with x skill" to try and get them to imagine situations where they can use things. They'll often use knowledge checks to try to get random tidbits about how monsters might behave or use arcana on a disabled magical trap to figure out who might have made it.

In addition to that, I almost always create some sort of incentive for every PC to make a check rather than rallying around the person with the best check, and when I don't create that situation I accept that the players will do so. By having both, it feels more dynamic. This most often translates to skill challenges appearing in the middle of combat encounters. Another situation that came up in a pure skill challenge in the pyramid of shadows was a room that filled with gas and locked shut. Because there was constant damage being done to everyone every turn, there was a real incentive to have everyone try something.

I will almost always allow a combination of thievery and arcana muck with the environment of the encounter. My PCs also occasionally have some folks who are intent on breaking things, which helps me solve the problem of weather or not to list out successes. If i expect the PCs to try and hit something to break it, i'll assign it HP comperable to a monster of the same level, and assume a successful skill check does some fraction of damage. IE: if a trap arrow shooting statue needs 4 successes to disable and has 80 hp, every success does 20 damage.

Finally, and this is probably where I fail the most, with regards to trying to get PCs to not game the system and focus on rolls, I try to create auto-success situations. Classes like fighter often have so few social skills it's impossible for them to roleplay with any degree of believability, and they'll try to force that intimidate check every time. Instead, simply allow something that makes a lot of sense to automatically succeed. If the fighter decides to bribe an obviously corrupt official, then it succeeds outright. If a hysterical mother is told the heroes won't rest until the daughter is safe, just discreetly hide that skill check you had lined up and make it auto-succeed. I have the most trouble with this one because i have taught my players so well to use their imagination on what they could use their skills with, they rarely hesitate to roll for something.

 

[Tymophil]

@ Surfarcher : "challenges by RAW" what are they ?

I read the DMG2, and it gives good advice, but I find the answers in this thread more interesting to me.

Obsidian rules are also interesting. I begun to check them.

 

[the Jester]

I absolutely agree that many, if not most, skill challenges work best when they are invisible.

I think that 4e generally goes way too far with the "tell the players all the information" approach that it takes, though.

 

[Hussar]

I'm going to be a voice of dissent here. As a player, I absolutely want to know when it's skill challenge time. Having played with DM's who made it invisible, I found the experienc extremely frustrating. "Ok, you need to cross the wilderness to find the hideout." "Ok, fine, I make X check." "You get a little ways. You still haven't found the hideout."

Very, very frustrating. If I had known we were in a skill challenge, I could have acted and reacted appropriately. As it was, I and the other players made a couple of checks and then were left stumbling around in the dark as to why we didn't achieve anything.

I'm totally in the camp of announcing Skill Challenges. Make it exciting, get the blood rushing. Invisible Skill challenges, IMO, are just exercises in frustration.

 

[Jhaelen]

I'm going to be a voice of dissent here. As a player, I absolutely want to know when it's skill challenge time.

Well, what you _want_ isn't necessarily what is _best_ for you

I've only used 'invisible' skill challenges so far. Actually, I only explained the concept of 'skill challenges' to them after they'd finished their third or fourth one.

"Ok, you need to cross the wilderness to find the hideout." "Ok, fine, I make X check." "You get a little ways. You still haven't found the hideout."

The problem you're illustrating here is simply a matter of presentation. If, as a DM I know, the check will not result in the whole skill challenge to succeed, then I will not describe it in such a way.

First, I'd ask you where/how you're looking for the hideout. Then I'd call for a check, and then I'd announce the result.

Skill challenges (particularly extended ones) work best, if there is a noticeable partial success and/or the skill challenge has several stages or changes over time by introducing additional obstacles.

 

[Tymophil]

I'm going to be a voice of dissent here. As a player, I absolutely want to know when it's skill challenge time. Having played with DM's who made it invisible, I found the experienc extremely frustrating. "Ok, you need to cross the wilderness to find the hideout." "Ok, fine, I make X check." "You get a little ways. You still haven't found the hideout."

I had the notion that the dialogue would go that way.
"The hideout is, according to your informations, somewhere across the wilderness."
The player should say something like :
"I get to the local tavern, and try to hear more about the wilderness and the hideout." or "What do I know about the wilderness ?" or "I get to the local shop in order to find out if the bandits bought something special before leaving the town.", etc.
Actions and questions from the PC should trigger the skill tests...

Very, very frustrating. If I had known we were in a skill challenge, I could have acted and reacted appropriately. As it was, I and the other players made a couple of checks and then were left stumbling around in the dark as to why we didn't achieve anything.

I'm totally in the camp of announcing Skill Challenges. Make it exciting, get the blood rushing. Invisible Skill challenges, IMO, are just exercises in frustration.

This seems a rather good point... Do skill challenges really get that rush of blood ?

 

[LostSoul]

I don't think it matters either way as long as skill checks resolve actions taken by the player characters instead of resolving the result of a skill check.

Tymophil, I think if you announce the mechanics behind your skill check, players will be more likely to engage with your story line - they'll take actions trying to find out who Garlon is instead of waiting for you to announce that they arrive in the next scene or give them an info dump. However, some players might feel like you are telling them they have to take some kind of action, and that might get under their skin.

I would do the standard "this is what you see, now what do you do?" and tell them that they can get a minor bonus/penalty to later rolls based on what they do now, but that they don't have to do anything.

It seems like your plot is building to two specific encounters - the puzzle and the "lost at sea" bit. Can you go into that a little more? I can think of ways prior checks can build up to those scenes, but without knowing the specifics it's hard to say.

 

[Rune]

I'm going to be a voice of dissent here. As a player, I absolutely want to know when it's skill challenge time. Having played with DM's who made it invisible, I found the experienc extremely frustrating. "Ok, you need to cross the wilderness to find the hideout." "Ok, fine, I make X check." "You get a little ways. You still haven't found the hideout."

In stead of saying, "OK, fine, I make X check," say, "I'm looking for wildlife trails that might lead to a stream that we could follow. Will a Nature check cover it? Maybe with
a circumstatial +2 bonus for being trained in perception?"

Or, perhaps, "I try to find anywhere we could ford the river."

In other words, the point of doing skill challenges invisibly is to get the players acting proactively, (and, also, to encourage roleplaying the situation instead of just playing the game. If your DM is running invisible challenges, chances are s/he is frustrated with the way they play out otherwise.

 

[Badwe]

I have fallen into this trap, specifically with regards to navigating the wilderness, of underdescribing it and leaning too heavily on "This is how many successes you have, this is how many failures".

if you're a DM trying to do any kind of extended skill challenge, you want to make sure you have something completely unique to describe for EVERY single success. If you have the time, go so far as to describe a unique success for every skill, up to the number of times you're going to allow it in the skill check (obviously if the amount is infinite go back to the first described method). Additionally, some different kinds of mechanical benefits (+2 here, erase a failure, etc.) can be spread out across some of the successes. more importantly, you want a unique and meaningful setback for all 3 of the potential failed checks, as well as a penalty for 3 failed checks that still results in getting from point A to point B (ie: you find the hideout after being ambushed by the bandits).

But yeah, even the most gamist PCs will get bored with just a flat count of successes. When I was doing a skill challenge of disabling a ring of magic candles fueling an arcane ritual, because some of my PCs had really high arcana checks i made the number of successes inversely proportional to the difficulty of the check, each candle magically disabled was then not able to keep it's brethren lit. harkening back to my first post though, this was in the middle of a combat, so each failure summoned a throng of minion devils.