Skill Challenges that KILL

[Dragon Sin-Camealot]

You can check out my sig. Do your PC's have teleportation/escape spells planned. In real life we know how long some people need to prepare for dare-devil stunts.

Skill Challenge, Combat, or not an unknown situation can have all kinds of pitfalls. Even some worse than death.

How creative do you want to be?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Skill Challenge, Combat, or not an unknown situation can have all kinds of pitfalls. Even some worse than death.

You could end up married to a GELF.

 

[Riastlin]

I think saying 'you have to be careful when you design a lethal skill challenge' is stating the obvious.

Do you not have to be careful when you design a lethal combat encounter?

Didi anyone seriously think the OP was suggesting: 'Oops that's three fails on that diplomatic skill challenge with the king. Sorry, he has you sent to the dungeon where a man in a hood cuts off you heads with an axe! Who wants pizza?'

I may not have been entirely clear in my point, in which case, I apologize. My point wasn't that the challenge needs to be carefully designed (because that is, as you say, obvious). My point is that you need to be careful in making sure the party understands the stakes.

Sure, combat encounters need to be carefully designed, but its well accepted that any combat could result in PC death or even a tpk. While its true that a lot of DMs try to reserve PC deaths for dramatically important combats, its still understood and accepted (generally) that even the relatively unimportant fight is capable of killing someone. I don't; however, think that most players would necessarily anticipate that a skill challenge could result in death. Heck, the official advice from WotC IIRC is that failure in a skill challenge shouldn't grind the adventure to a halt.

Now as I said, I think its fine to have death as a possible consequence, but I think you need to make sure that your party understands this. Using your king example, most players would anticipate that failing that skill challenge would result in them simply not getting help, maybe even being imprisoned. However, with the right lead up, you could make it so that failure means that the king orders their deaths and that they then become persona non grata in the kingdom (assuming they escape).

Likewise, you could design a skill challenge around disabling a particularly lethal trap wherein failure means the trap goes off -- quite possibly killing those near it. Again though, I think the key is to make sure the party understands that messing with the trap could do more than just merely damaging them, that it actually has the ability to outright kill them, etc.

As I said, my point is merely that I believe that the vast majority of players will not realize that death is a possibility in a skill challenge unless you build up to it, whereas, its generally understood that any combat can kill a PC.

As for the bard vs. fighter in combat, it really depends on how you define "effective". If you merely want to look at who can deal more damage and take more damage, then sure, the fighter wins. If you want to look at who helps the party achieve their goals, then its an equal contest in my opinion. The bard may not put up the sexy numbers in combat, but she's just as vital a piece of the party as the rest when the fighting starts.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, the stakes should be reasonably apparent, but then you'd want to do that for dramatic reasons regardless. It is just bad storytelling in general to spring death on PCs unawares. So I don't think it is really a huge issue that is specific to lethal SCs. The same consideration exists with combat encounters for example in that you wouldn't spring a highly lethal one on the PCs without some build up and thus some indication to the players that "hey, this is going to be tough".

Anyway, the consequences could be less obvious in an SC on the face of it, so this should be general storytelling advice but most applicable to non-combat situations.

 

[jbear]

I may not have been entirely clear in my point, in which case, I apologize. My point wasn't that the challenge needs to be carefully designed (because that is, as you say, obvious). My point is that you need to be careful in making sure the party understands the stakes.

Agreed. I think that one of the key elements to DMing successfully is how you set the standards and the expectations for and of your players in the game. I wasn't at any stage advocating a 'Surprise, gotcha death' via skill challenge.

I do however advocate skill challenges being complex, exciting and potentially lethal. The pressure on the players should feel constant. I also advocate that they be designed in a way that all PCs participate, with good skills or otherwise. And that while a fail on a poor skill may cause a set back it would not cause an 'Insta-death'. However over the course of the challenge repeated failures or set backs create enouh dynamic and lethal changes to the situation that if not resolved by the PCs, death is a real possibility. These may not even need to be 'Overall failures'. In the case of a 'Group check' even 1 failure should lead to a complication/change in the situation requiring resolution.

I also advocate the DM allowing players to use combat powers creatively in such challenges, reward creative thinking and promote roleplay at all times. Rolling a d20 and praying being the sum total of one's experience with skill challenges is a fail in itself. You might as well eliminate them from the game if that is the way you are doing them.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I'm not sure what weight you hope to give your argument be calling me a dick. The fact you place 'kind of' in front of it doesn't change the fact that you've resorted to insults.

Perhaps it's my mistake, but you came off as rather condescending in the previous post, and not a little bit dismissive of many facts about 4e. If I misread that, I apologize, but you haven't done anything to make that reading harder to justify since.

For a start, a character with training in athletics, endurance and perception will do just fine in a deadly skill challenge. When the walls start closing in the bard can talk to it or hide in the corner all he likes and he's still going to be crushed. A deadly challenge will almost always involve physical skills, especially the ones your fighter is trained in.

I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous assumption on the face of it. Dungeoneering, arcana, acrobatics, and thievery see as much use as athletics and endurance in my experience of physical hazards, and perception is almost never primary. My current DM also has made religion and history useful at times with traps and puzzles that could have been very hazardous. You could easily have bumped those challenges up to lethal. And it is very common in my game experience and in reading published adventures to see "No more than 1 success/2 successes can be gained using this skill" or similar language. You don't see how in a complex challenge, that heavily favors the guy with lots of trained skills?

Secondly, a fighter is involved more in combat than a bard, in my humble opinion. If he does his job right he'll get into the thick of things and pin down the largest amount of enemies possibly to make them all attack him. A fighter is cool undr pressure when swarmed. A bard will quickly be sent on his way towards death if this happens.

So, we're defining combat specifically and exclusively as engaging in melee with people and taking hits? That doesn't stack the deck too heavily in favor of your argument. By that logic, the wizard is pretty worthless, too. The ability to re-arrange battlefields, heal, enable allies, AND disable enemies... these are all just worthless fluff, I suppose? All 4e classes, including the bard, can contribute immensely to a party's success in combat. Keeping that fighter on his feet when he's in the thick of things isn't exactly unimportant. Re-arranging the space so the enemies are bunched up for a wizard daily can work wonders. Sliding an ally into a flank or the fighter into a position where he can better enforce his mark is a force multiplier.

I'm not being a dick, as you suggest, I'm pointing out the fact that their are differences between classes. Some are stronger in some areas than others. Including in the amount if skills they train.

Sure there are differences. But everyone in 4e is built to be effective in combat. This is not merely a stated design goal, but also demonstrably true. Classes are on a pretty equal footing in regard to combat effectiveness, which has a far broader definition than you are choosing to apply. So why are different classes on completely unequal footing when it comes to non-combat challenges?

This doesn't make turning up the dail of lethality on skill challenges somehow unfair for some and not for others.

If stakes are low, balance differences are not very important. Your lack of capacity to affect the situation isn't harming the group. When stakes are high, relative capacity to contribute to success (or even do something slightly meaningful) becomes important. Powerlessness is not fun. It was no fun being the 3e bard who was more effective sitting on a rock and strumming his lute than actually doing something in combat, but it went from "boring with a side of irritating" to "OMG I hate this class" when you were in a big fight and people started dying while you proved completely unable to affect the outcome. Similarly, it's not very much fun running out of useful skills in the first 30 seconds of a skill challenge. It's even less fun when that happens and people are dying.

Why was fixing the one problem a design goal while fixing the other problem was not merely ignored but exacerbated?

 

[Subtlepanic]

Thanks: many interesting points here. By the looks of things, there is some scope for deadly skill challenges, if handled correctly.

Some ground rules that are becoming apparent to me:

1: Ensure the players know upfront that death is a potential outcome of the challenge.
Either by telling them outright, but ideally by the in-game circumstances of the challenge (e.g. as a form of execution, the heroes have been thrown into the "Sultan's Deathtrap" after being captured stealing from his palace).

2: Ensure that lower-skilled classes aren't nobbled by the challenge.
In a pure design sense, I don't think this applies any more or less so for lethal challenges than it does for normal skill challenges... After all, any well designed challenge should be made with that in mind (though it's what's led to some diplomatic challenges including such dubious options as "Use Athletics to impress the Lord with a feat of strength")

3: Drop the "three strikes" rule.
Instead, individual failures could perhaps put party members into danger, or deal a whack of damage. If danger zones are used, entering them opens up different skills, or perhaps even focusses down to the battlemap until the situation is resolved.

Overall, I think some form tree-structure may work for these challenges..

4: Allow use of powers and items to gain advantages or escape routes.
Again, this suggests to me that the "safest" form of lethal skill challenges may be best off as battlemap-based, using conventional initiative order. But in a way, this makes them less of a skill challenge in my eyes...

Interesting stuff. I think I'll have a go at fleshing one out on paper and see where it takes me.

 

[Delgar]

Prior to 4E coming out I wrote up an example skill challenge on how I viewed they would work. The challenge was disarming a lethal trap. I wish I could find the original thread (can't search).

But I don't see a problem with having a lethal skill challenge. There are times in a game where a skill check could be lethal. DnD has historically had save or die mechanics, why not empower your players to think there way out of a lethal situation?

Anyway here is the example I had put together (keep in mind i put this together before 4E came out based only on what rules knowledge we knew at the time)

***

The walls begin moving slowly together. Roll Initiative:

Dave: 10
Mike: 25 WOOT, I rock!
Jon: 12
Tim: 1

DM: Okay Mike what do you want to do the walls are closing in on you.
The door behind you slammed shut and is locked.

Mike: Alright I start looking for some sort of mechanism to try and shut this thing down.

DM: Okay go ahead and roll a perception check, it's going to be very hard.

Mike: Oh come on, I do this for a living! Roll Sweet 18+12 in perception is 30, that's got to be good enough.

DM: Nice, okay you spot a small imperfection on the right side of the door, because you succeeded at a hard check you can choose another skill to try and use, and you get a +2 bonus to it.

Mike: OH hell yah, I'll start working on the panel see if I can figure this thing out.

DM: Okay well if you want to start disarming it with Theivery it will be difficult, BUT if you want to try and use your insight to try and figure out how it's working it will make further Thievery rolls easier.

Mike: Okay I'll study the mechanism. Insight of 12+7=19 is that good enough.

DM: Yes, you figure out how the mechanism is working, any theivery attempts to disarm it now will be a normal check instead of a hard one.
Okay that's two successes for you guys so far. Jon your up.

Jon: Alright I'll use my Knowledge: Dungeoneering to see if I can give Mike any help with disarming this trap. Roll 1+8=9 crap I failed.

DM: Okay you've never seen or heard of anything quite like this before.
That's 2 successes and 1 failure. Dave your up the walls are still moving in on you.

Dave: Alright, I want to take a look at the mechanism and see if I can help figure it out. Is it possible for me to gamble on a difficult Insight, to give us some more information?

DM: Sure why not go ahead and roll

Dave: Alright woot 16+10=26. Is that good enough?

DM: Sure is, you can definitely tell Mike what levers are responsible for the walls moving. Okay because you succeeded at a hard check you get to try another skill at a +2 bonus.

Dave: Hmm, I think I'll just take another look around and make sure we didn't miss something, we don't want to be surprised by anything.
Perception 12+7=19.

DM: Taking another quick scan of the room, your pretty sure that you can see a trap door in the ceiling, perhaps another way out if all else fails. That's 4 successes and 1 fail. Your up Tim.

Tim: Well I'll try to use my brute strength to slow the progress of the wall to give us some more time. I'll use my athletics skill.

DM: Okay but that's definitely going to be difficult.

Tim: That's okay I'll try it. Roll 15+10=25

DM: That's just good enough to make it, you dig in and use all your might to slow the progress of the wall. Okay Mike back to you. You guys have 5 successes and 1 failure.

Mike: Well here goes nothing guys. I'll attempt to rig the levers to move the wall back into it's original position.

DM: Okay go for it.

Mike: Thievery roll 10+12=22. Good? Good?

DM: You manage to move the levers into the apporpriate position and the wall, comes to a stop and slowly moves back into it's original position.

 

[mneme]

Lethal skill challenges = go.

Yes, yes, run them right, make sure the stakes (and how close the characters are to the precipice), all that. But you don't need kid gloves in this game.

Actually, Wizards has published a potentially lethal skill challenge in Dungeon. Remember the Colosseus of Laarn? Hmm. If not, and you're a DDI subscriber, perhaps this will jog your memory: Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (The Colossus of Laarn)

In sum, the Colosseus is a deadly, invincible monster. But...you can defeat it by solving a skill challenge. There's no failure condition to this skill challenge -- if you can succeed at the challenge before teh Colosseus =kills= you, you win. If not, well, I hope you ran away, because otherwise you're probably dead. This is lovely; characters can deploy all their "staying alive" tricks, because lets face it, they're in deadly danger from death due to the loss of massive numbers of hp (because lets face it, the Colosseus may not do that much damage per strike, but the damned thing does decent damage and has a blast 5 flaming breath, and acts once for every party member you've got!), but as for all their damage/condition nonsense? No can do; this is a skill challenge. Where the failure condition is (and is obviously) death. Oh, wait, sorry; the thing eats ordinary magic for breakfast and can't be hurt; dpr is not going to help you here; nor are controller lockdown tricks.


Perception: Probably the best skill in the game, bar none. It's a primary skill in more than its share of skill challenges, a secondary skill in pretty much all the rest, and has great uses in avoiding surprise and numerous other situations to boot. Nobody should ever complain about "only" having perception. Now, Dungeonering, OTOH...

 

[Subtlepanic]

Excellent find, mneme. That's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. Interesting to see that such things exist officially, too.

Perception: Probably the best skill in the game, bar none. It's a primary skill in more than its share of skill challenges, a secondary skill in pretty much all the rest, and has great uses in avoiding surprise and numerous other situations to boot. Nobody should ever complain about "only" having perception. Now, Dungeonering, OTOH...

Actually, I use Dungeoneering quite a lot in my group. Now, Streetwise, on the other hand...