So its all about combat again?

[Fenes]

As for choosing not to speak, my point was that it's pretty straightforward to design a social encounter where the player of the dwarf will want to speak, even if s/he knows the check will fail. Just as it's pretty easy to design an encounter that will make the wizard get involved in melee, even though this is not an optimal tactic for a wizard.

The goal for skill challenges was: Make a system for social encounters where the whole party takes part in. Now, why would anyone first create incentives to not take part by making participation by unoptimized characters hurt the party, and then force them to take part anyway?

Why would one do that, if one can achieve the same effect by encouraging participation? It makes no sense at all.

 

[pemerton]

The goal for skill challenges was: Make a system for social encounters where the whole party takes part in. Now, why would anyone first create incentives to not take part by making participation by unoptimized characters hurt the party, and then force them to take part anyway?

Why would one do that, if one can achieve the same effect by encouraging participation? It makes no sense at all.

For me, it's about creating a framework that will produce complications in the situation.

The incentive for the player to take part is that s/he wants her PC to be in the midst of those complications.

Again, that's why I think the multi-dimensional stakes are important.

If situations are being framed with single-dimensional, win/lose stakes, then I agree that skill challenges won't work.

But if situations are framed in that way then the playtest goal of having players describe actions and the GM adjudicate a stat and skill won't work either - players will always try to hedge and lobby to get their biggest numbers into play.

Conversely, to make skill challenges work, and to make the idea of flexible and varied stats work, requires setting up situations in which players don't feel that there only choice is to bring their biggest numbers to bear. Ie when losing the challenge isn't the worse thing that can happen.

 

[Fenes]

For me, it's about creating a framework that will produce complications in the situation.

The incentive for the player to take part is that s/he wants her PC to be in the midst of those complications.

Again, that's why I think the multi-dimensional stakes are important.

If situations are being framed with single-dimensional, win/lose stakes, then I agree that skill challenges won't work.

But if situations are framed in that way then the playtest goal of having players describe actions and the GM adjudicate a stat and skill won't work either - players will always try to hedge and lobby to get their biggest numbers into play.

Conversely, to make skill challenges work, and to make the idea of flexible and varied stats work, requires setting up situations in which players don't feel that there only choice is to bring their biggest numbers to bear. Ie when losing the challenge isn't the worse thing that can happen.

In my opinion, skill challenges do remove complications because they are so rigid. You need 4 successes before you get 2 failures and you succeed. Period.

If the party has to infiltrate a costume ball at a noble's mansion I'd not frame that as a skill challenge, but simply let the players act out their plan, and see if it succeeds, reacting to every action according to its outcome. Say they fail their attempt to make costumes - so what? They can repeat it as long as they have time for it. That should not count against them. But failing to blackmail the major domo into giving them access? Or failing to forge the invitations? That can have consequences, requiring them to react to that. completely. How many different tasks they need to complete is something even the GM cannot say in advance so how could he/she set a given number of successes in advance?

 

[Dausuul]

Well, sure, silo-ing is one way to handle this. But I think they've said that Next won't have silo-ing.

X before Y is just like hit points - X hit point to win, Y hit points to lose - but with the players rolling all the dice and every hit delivering 1 hp. There's nothing wrong with introducing a critical system as well (Essentials has something a bit like this with its advantages system).

The only way it's like hit points is if you institute a rule that every time you miss with an attack, you hit an ally. If you add another warm body to your team in combat, your team is more powerful, period. You have the option to spend resources keeping that warm body alive, but you don't have to; PCs in desperate straits can let their teammates drop and focus on victory. If you add a warm body to your team in a skill challenge, you may well be worse off for it.

But regardless, I have never seen a skill challenge that was either fun or believable without a hefty dose of DM fiat to make it work. Here's what I've seen happen any time the DM runs a straight-up skill challenge:

#1. Each player plays "Mother-May-I" with the DM to find the highest skill modifier the DM will let her use.
#2. Players go around the table, try to find different ways of phrasing whatever rationales they deployed in step #1, and roll d20s in turn until the DM announces success or failure. The DM gives a contorted, unconvincing narrative whose obvious goal is to string the players along until they reach the prescribed number of successes. Now and then, the DM may decide that some player's excuse for using Skill X has expired and send her back to step #1.

What we have here is a mechanical system which is both rigid and mindless. There are no decisions to make, and no way to think "outside the box" and get an advantage. Mechanically, all you do is sit there and roll your best applicable skill until the challenge is over. The DM's task is to cloak this tedious reality from the players with narrative flash and dazzle. But D&D players are pretty smart, and in many cases they've been on the other side of the DM screen. It's not hard for them to figure out what the DM is doing.

The only way to make it fun is to either a) make the system less rigid (if you come up with a clever idea, you can get an auto-success or even multiple successes), or b) make it less mindless (different skill choices have different effects and the mechanics of the situation change as the challenge proceeds). The sample challenges in the DMG take the latter route, which says something about what the designers thought of their own system.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I gotta say, [MENTION=58197]Dausuul[/MENTION], your description of an SC is pretty much exactly what my experience has been. Even when there were good ones, it was a good one because the narrative razzle-dazzle was good.

I think the mechanics of an SC are functional, and part of what was lacking was any tactical or strategic decisions in the SC on behalf of the PC's, since the PC's mostly didn't have abilities that could be used on an SC aside from skill checks, and mostly didn't have active opposition.

It's like if all you could do in combat was say "I attack," and every time you missed your party just took a certain % hp of damage, and the only choice you had in the matter was an assortment of weapons that you had a different bonus to, but were otherwise identical.

What makes combat more interesting than that is an assortment of options, and an active opposition. SC's could use both, and would probably be fine. You could add in "codified SC's," too, so that a DM has ones ready to insert, and a player has a sense of what they can accomplish.

 

[Neonchameleon]

So? Make it so you don't trade combat capability for social capability, and this is no problem at all. And frankly, a rigid "you need X successes" system is a bad thing - social challenges vary, and the number of successful tasks should vary as well with regards to what happens.

Like in combat: If the knight gets an unfortunate double crit the cleric has to save him, someone else has to pick up the slack, and instead of needing 10 hits now you need more "successes" to survive the encounter.

Um... that's not so much needing more successes as the impact of a couple of failures.

A social task where I just need 7 hits, without any rhyme or reason, and without my actions changing the following tasks, is worthless.

Good job that's not what the rulebook recommends.

Skill challenges are a DM-centric pacing mechanic rather than something the players should be trying to solve directly.

Which is why, if you stick to rigid "needs this many successes" systems, you don't count failures, you limit the "rounds" the players have to get the needed successes. Suddenly everyone is encouraged to take part, since they can only help.

That would possibly work better. And would make excellent alternative rules The downside is the number of successes per round needs to be party dependent rather than party-independent.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

What we have here is a mechanical system which is both rigid and mindless. There are no decisions to make, and no way to think "outside the box" and get an advantage. Mechanically, all you do is sit there and roll your best applicable skill until the challenge is over. The DM's task is to cloak this tedious reality from the players with narrative flash and dazzle. But D&D players are pretty smart, and in many cases they've been on the other side of the DM screen. It's not hard for them to figure out what the DM is doing.

The only way to make it fun is to either a) make the system less rigid (if you come up with a clever idea, you can get an auto-success or even multiple successes), or b) make it less mindless (different skill choices have different effects and the mechanics of the situation change as the challenge proceeds). The sample challenges in the DMG take the latter route, which says something about what the designers thought of their own system.

I think there are two things at work here, which puts me, if I understand both of you correctly, partially in agreement with you and partially with pemerton:

1. There isn't enough mechanical heft to the 4E skill challenge system. This has all kinds of negative repercussions, but the main one for this discussion is that it removes or negates likely player decision points. Having some form of "hit points" replace "successes" and "failures" in a 4E skill challenge would thus be one possible way to partially address this limitation, analogous to the same decision making prompted by a decreasing set of hit points.
2. The nature of 3E/4E skills (generally allowing rerolls, binary results, escalating DCs, etc.) is not conducive to having bounded conflict resolution. Nevertheless, some bounds are necessary for this part of the game to mechanically matter.

Or, you can't tack a poorly explained conflict resolution system, meant to have some narrative influence, on top of a poorly thought out skills system, meant to have some simulation influence, on top of a mainly gamist character system--and then expect it too somehow all work great and be understood by everyone.

All that doesn't mean the results in 5E for interaction and exploration need to be rules heavy. They can be about as light as the core combat rules are thus far. It does mean that whatever interaction and exploration mechanical choices are present, they must be integrated into the ruleset--and thus allowed to change it somewhat at the fundamental level.

 

[Grimmjow]

people are freaking out about the playterst being a lot of combat which needs to stop. Its only been out for a week or so, just wait

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I gotta say, @Dausuul , your description of an SC is pretty much exactly what my experience has been. Even when there were good ones, it was a good one because the narrative razzle-dazzle was good.

I think the mechanics of an SC are functional, and part of what was lacking was any tactical or strategic decisions in the SC on behalf of the PC's, since the PC's mostly didn't have abilities that could be used on an SC aside from skill checks, and mostly didn't have active opposition.

My experience doesn't match that. My experience with skill challenges have mostly been good--albeit with a hefty does of DM adjudication to insert those decision points. I took it as a given when I first read the rules that each roll would affect the situation--and thus "evolve" the skill challenge, as a natural extrapolation of the mechanics and their purposes.

I'll grant that the rules didn't teach this very well, and the early, atrocious examples actively steered people away from it. No, my most critical comment on skill challenges is that I knew how to make them work because I had read and run Burning Wheel--and was already geared to do some of those BW things because of slowly accumulated experience.

Just the BW concepts of "Let it Ride" and "Say Yes or Roll the Dice" applied consistently to skill challenges make them immeasureably better, and pull much of the pressure off of the "narrative razzle-dazzle". That's not an accident, since the purpose of those BW concepts is to mechanically enhance the narrative and focus on the parts that matter.

 

[Neonchameleon]

But regardless, I have never seen a skill challenge that was either fun or believable without a hefty dose of DM fiat to make it work. Here's what I've seen happen any time the DM runs a straight-up skill challenge:

#1. Each player plays "Mother-May-I" with the DM to find the highest skill modifier the DM will let her use.
#2. Players go around the table, try to find different ways of phrasing whatever rationales they deployed in step #1, and roll d20s in turn until the DM announces success or failure. The DM gives a contorted, unconvincing narrative whose obvious goal is to string the players along until they reach the prescribed number of successes. Now and then, the DM may decide that some player's excuse for using Skill X has expired and send her back to step #1.

I've seen this but it's never happened when I've been running. Let's repeat what the actual guidance says:

Begin by describing the situation and defining the challenge. (DMG p 74)

More so than perhaps any other kind of encounter, a skill challenge is defined by its context in an adventure… Define the goal of the challenge and what obstacles the characters face to accomplish that goal… You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results. (DMG pp 72, 73)

When a player’s turn comes up in a skill challenge, let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. As long as the player or you can come up with a way to let this secondary skill play a part in the challenge, go for it… In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no… This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth… However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation… you should ask what exactly the character might be doing … Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge. (DMG pp 73, 75)
​

So what I've done is that I've begun by describing the scenario and listened to the player's responses and their plans. I've gone round the table asking each in turn what they are doing to contribute to the plan.

When they describe their actions I tell them what skill to use (I never let someone just say "I roll bluff") and I work out whether it's core or assistance and the difficulty. This is IMO in line with the skill challenge guidance out of the book ("you should ask what exactly the character might be doing") Sometimes they are playing to their character's strengths, knowing that if they can find a creative use of animal handling that will help I'll let them use nature. I then see if they passed or failed and make a check on a piece of paper, and describe the outcome of their action in narrative terms.

If they failed by a little I probably introduce a narrative complication. (If they failed by a lot and they know it, I normally just smirk and they know there's a complication there).

On the third complication the plan fails. Unless they've been smart enough to not just engage with but subvert the complications (engaging with them is just an extra success). If the PCs reach enough successes, and I'm handling the narrative at all well, the plan succeeds.

What I never do is tell the players they are in a skill challenge (although some of my players are smart enough to guess). Give the players the skill challenge table and the whole thing falls apart. Give the players the fiction, and the skill challenge as DMs tool becomes an excellent non-arbitrary way of setting the difficulty for resolving an insane PC plan.