Skill Challenges : invisible ones ?

[surfarcher]

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

I mean challenges that follow Rules As Written, generally as presented in DMG, DMG2 and the Rules Compendium.

My point was that folks take a very narrow view of what is presented in these and, as usual, the devil is in the details. In particular I like to draw attention to things like DMG86's Allow Options Besides Skills, where they are really spelling out that SCs really needen't be limited to skills. Limiting them to skills, IMHO, makes them a lot less interesting and a lot less useful.

In fact the only thing I hate about Skill Challenges is the term itself! I just call them Challenges!

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

It depends on your perspective. Some folks adamantly refuse to implement certain flourishes in their gamer unless it's supported by RAW. And RAW is a good place to start when something is new or you aren't great at it.

Certainly as you begin to grok Challenges you needen't limit yourself strictly to RAW.

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

Yes they are. Charles Ryan has also done some interesting work on ideas for SCs. Check out Game Design « The Fascinating World of Charles Ryan - one of the old versions also used "pips", which was interesting.

 

[surfarcher]

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.

Sounds like your DM doesn't really grok them! I'd call this bad implementation.

The time my players had to prove the Paladin wasn't the murderer? The time they had to help the silver dragon get two of her eggs back? These were all interesting Challenges that played out with great joy around the table. If I had said "this is a Skill Challenge" we would have reverted back to trudging through skills. Instead they had a particular goal with clearly defined repercussions for success or failure. They worked towards succeeding with all the resources at hand.

 

[surfarcher]

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.

LOL! The worst Challenge my current group ever played was the first one! It was also the only one where I told them it was a Challenge, the one where I "trained" them in how I run them and how to play them.

I opened by saying something like this...

OK this we are going to play through a 'skill challenge' now. Some of you may have heard of or played these before.

I do them quite differently from many folks and I consider the mechanic more of an accounting tool. You won't normally be aware that a Challenge is in progress.

And don't let the common name fool you. They are certainly not restricted to the use of skills. Not by a long shot!
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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.
...snip...

This!

 

[surfarcher]

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...

Not bad. I would generally adlib this after taking some preparatory steps. The entire exercise becomes driven by the PCs action.

After I set the objectives, consequences and the opening scene (framing) I simply ask "What do you do?".

Hhmm... Back in the day very little was written out for me and I adlibbed most of it. Is that skill somehow becoming lost? Or was it never really that common?

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

If done right, definately!

Our Dwarf Pally was very immersed when he got arrested. And the rest of the party was extreemely keen to clear his name when they heard of the upcoming execution.

Another example is the raid on a caravan of 75+ orcs, half-orcs and humans to disable the arcane device keeping the Silver Dragon from her eggs. That ran in an accelerated "skirmish format" combat and my players were deeply absorbed and highly aware of the time constraints... Which exceeding would have brought about a likely-fatal combat. Well that's how it felt to them, anyway.

 

[surfarcher]

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".

That's going to make for a horrible challenge.

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).

I'm trying to weave a story based on the player's actions. A well placed spell, a perfectly timed martial display, a particularly good application of a skill at the right moment, greasing the right palm at the right time. All these things are pivotal moments in stories. As is screwing any of those up.

That's what successes and failures are, pivotal moments in the story. It doesn't matter if skills are used or something else is used. The PCs expend something to make that pivotal moment come out in their favour.

Sometimes the PCs fail and try to make up for it with more expenditure of somethings. Other times they expend extra somethings to steer the situation in their favour before a pivotal moment. The Rules Compendium recognises all of this and puts it under the category of Advantages.

So, to me, it's a framework for designing story, accounting progress and measuring success. It's there to help you build a story, support that story and give that story a direction and purpose.

For my money that's what a Challenge is about. As soon as you take the story away you revert to a menu of skills that you choose from and it becomes... Well, it becomes just horrible, to be honest.

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.

Like I said - just horrible, to be honest.

 

[Imaro]

You know one of the things I am thinking about experimenting with, as far as SC go, is that the success or failure determines who has narrative control over the story... in other words when a player scores a success they get to describe the positive effect the success has on their goal, along with the specific action(s) they took to achieve it with said skill within the confines of the current story. A failure, on the other hand, allows the DM to describe a narrative setback (as well as the actions that caused it to come about) that affects the group or player. So with this system, the DM would just have to come up with failure conditions for the skills used... as opposed to success and failure conditions.

I guess what I am wondering is how would you implement something like this and still keep it "invisible" without running into the whole... first successful skill check by player is narrated as a success for the whole challenge? Or do people think it would be better when running something like this for it to be known that the PC's are in a SC and need X successes to reach said goal before Y failures?

 

[Hussar]

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.

The problem is, without knowing that we are in a skill challenge situation, why would I bother? In a non-SC situation, I roll my check and off we go. I make my Nature check, for example, and that gives me a result that the DM will tell me.

Unless I should start being proactive with every skill check (and that would get annoying too), why would I suddenly start being proactive with one check and not with another.

We need to cross the wilderness. Ok, a nature check lets us do that. But, suddenly, for no reason, my nature check doesn't work like that. Suddenly, my nature check leaves me stumbling around in the dark forest, when yesterday, my nature check let me travel X miles.

I guess I should take the hint that now I'm in a skill challenge, but, sheesh, if it's going to be obvious, then why bother trying to hide it?

I'm not saying that we just go with a straight up mechanical thing where no narration is going on at all. That's incredibly boring. But, gimme a hint here. Let me know, as a player, what you as the DM want. I loathe pixel bitching with a passion. If you want me to get detailed and you want to run a skill challenge, play the trumpets, get the fanfare going. Every roll matters. How you narrate that roll matters.

But, for the love of pete, gimme lots of details to work with. Don't be coy.

 

[Rune]

The problem is, without knowing that we are in a skill challenge situation, why would I bother? In a non-SC situation, I roll my check and off we go. I make my Nature check, for example, and that gives me a result that the DM will tell me.

Unless I should start being proactive with every skill check (and that would get annoying too), why would I suddenly start being proactive with one check and not with another.

Not what I'm suggesting. What I mean, is that your DM should (if unhappy with the way challenges have been feeling) be letting your in-game decisions dictate what your rolls will be. That is to say, you decide to do something based on the situation, the DM tells you what skill to roll to make it happen. You know, roleplay a little. The DM in this model uses your skills as a tool to resolve your decisions.

If this is a style of play your DM wants to try, it will require player participation. You (plural) can't just look at your character sheet for the best applicable skill to roll next; you have to look at the situation described by the DM and find elements to work with, leaving the mechanics to your DM.

Of course, if you are not interested in this approach, none of the above applies, but, in this case, you should really have a good conversation with your DM, because it sounds as if the two of you are looking for entirely different things out of skill-challenges (and skill-use, in general).

 

[Kerranin]

The big thing with running a skill challenge is that the players be aware that there is some sort of consequence of failure - this is true even if you don't tell players that it is a skill challenge.

The consequences of failure don't have to be explicit, there are various ways to make it clear that the skill-checks are not consequence-free.

 

[Badwe]

Like I said - just horrible, to be honest.

yes, I was sharing some of my failures with the thread. I've found with skill challenges you have to do a lot of different things and see what works. Also I have a ton of gamist players so i suspect that a sufficiently elaborate attempt at a carefully woven and multithreaded story runs the risk of falling on deaf ears. Also, the more stringently you spell out your story, the more you're likely to get tunnel vision if the players think of something unconventional. Either way, you always need to play to your PCs.