Skill Encounters: What are Advantages?

[Trit One-Ear]

I haven't been keeping up to date on all the changes and different approaches to Skill Challenges. Our group has had some pretty... adamant disagreements about them, to the point where I've generally avoided them because of this.
All these recent threads have resparked my interest and passion to make these work. And for this I thank you all.
My only question I have right now is...

What the heck is advantage in a skill encounter?
I've glanced at the D&D Next rules, and know about it's use there. But the contextual clues I've pulled together make it sound like something completely different.
Is this a Rules Compendium change? I've read the DMGs one and two, and don't really feel like grabbing another book to "fix" Skill Encounters...again.

Any contextual help to understand this would be awesome!

Trit

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=6678017]Trit One-Ear[/MENTION] Yes it's in the RC, page 160.

Paraphrasing: Skill challenges of complexity 3+ should have ways for the adventurers to gain an advantage, something to help them remove an accumulated failure or gain a success more easily. They recommend 2 advantages for complexity 3; 4 advantages for complexity 4; and 6 advantages for complexity 5. (Personally I find that a touch excessive with the corrected DC table). The DM can either determine which advantages are available in the context of the skill challenge in advance, or let the players' creative skill use determine when advantages comes into play.

Examples from the RC include:

• Success vs. hard DC counts as 2 successes
• Success vs. hard DC removes a failure instead of adding a success
• Success vs. easy DC counts as a success
• Allow repetition of same skill check at moderate DC to gain a success

Personally, I also use these as advantages:

• Allow a group skill check at moderate DC to gain a success
• Grant an auto-success with a non-skill/special action
• Provide special "DM only" insight into skill challenge

Personally, I think of it more as a guideline (along with the rest of the skill challenge rules). Also, I frequently deviate from the RAW skill challenge rules because I find them insufficient to handle a wide array of scenarios with enough interesting options and twists to keep players engaged. So while I appreciate the skeleton rules framework they provide, I realize they are more of a proto-multi-tool, and not an actual multi-tool. IOW any skill challenges I make generally involve a considerable amount of work on my part, more so than prepping a combat.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I would take a look in this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340549-Skill-Challenges-in-5E where we have discussed the assorted problems the 4e skill challenges can have, and how to run a skill challenge that doesn't suck.

Personally, I think the most obvious thing is that when a PC describes what he does and rolls a skill check, the DM has to let outcome affect the skill challenge in a way thats easily recognizable to the players. In other words, for every roll, you have to be able to give more information that feeds back to the players and let them come up with new ideas to try out.

Personally, I am not a fan of encounters consisting of a single skill challenge. Instead I you create a scene with multiple locations and maybe some combat encounters thrown in. For instance let's say the PC's gets some information of an incoming orc raid and wants to get some help from a Lord Mumblename.

Instead of just moving along to a skill challenge where they are supposed to persuade him of the importance of sending some troops, you could rather use several locations that builds up to persuading the Lord. Maybe the PC's want to find and capture a orc scout? Persuade an semi-important to tell the Lord of what he saw? Some PC's would maybe try to discover if there are any advisers that would oppose the Lord sending troops and find a way to get an audience without that advicer being present?

Take the orc scout part. Here you could for instance have the PC's either succed at a simple skill challenge and find a lone orc scout, or fail, and run into a small orc ambush. It's easier to create logical consequences for less complexity skill challenges and in this case, all the PC's need to help out if they fail at the challenge, so it's basically a win-win situation for you as a DM.

 

[pemerton]

In my game I treat the "advantages" as, in effect, bonus tokens that the players can spend when they hit the right sorts of trigger (as described in the Essentials rules). So I have three dice on the table for a challenge - one for successes accrued, one for failures accrued, and one for advantages remaining.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

(snip) Personally, I think the most obvious thing is that when a PC describes what he does and rolls a skill check, the DM has to let outcome affect the skill challenge in a way thats easily recognizable to the players. In other words, for every roll, you have to be able to give more information that feeds back to the players and let them come up with new ideas to try out. (snip)

I reckon that's th best single paragraph - or single sentence if you just take the first sentence - effectively describing how to make a skill challenge work. Good stuff.

 

[Trit One-Ear]

Thanks for the details and advice guys. As always, love coming here to clear my doubts and confusion.

Trit