EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Uh...no?But how is this not replacing the actual verbalization players are making? As I mentioned above, one can't have it both ways. If you want to make things fair to people who don't want to talk... then you can't have any rules wherein actually talking or making cogent argument has an effect on the success or failure of social combat (via bonuses, modifiers or whatever). It has to be entirely about just rolling dice. That's the only fair way to make the quiet players be on equal ground to the talkative ones.
There is a middle ground you have neglected. What I usually call "sell me on it." That is, the player must still think. They must argue as a player for what they want. If I have an issue, I will question or investigate. If I think there's something missing, I will point that out.
Roleplaying the characters is a great way to do that selling-me-on-it diegetically. But it isn't required. I certainly prefer such tactics, and might be more favorable to someone who presented things that way. But as long as the player is actually thinking of how something can happen and what they would describe the character doing, even if they don't know how to do it themselves, that's enough.
This respects the fact that a Bard might be a silver-tongued seducer when the player can barely string two words together to talk to a handsome stranger: the player is still required to have a plan, they just don't need to explicitly say each individual seductive phrase, because the player probably can't do that, but the character 100% can.
But this seemingly ignores the possibility that there can be something more engaging than merely "DM says," while still being driven by players having plans and DMs asking questions and adjudicating. That's precisely what the skill challenge format does: it removes a lot of the arbitrary, "it ends when it ends" nature of the near-freeform approach, thus enabling much higher tension and emotional investment as the cutoff point approaches.Which means that yes, one would need to replace the standard part of the roleplaying question-- "What does your character do/say?" "My character does/says X..." with a series of "verbal attacks" and " verbal defenses" and "resolve hit points" and so forth-- first one to knock their opponent to 0 has made them lose the argument.
And that's fine, if that's what someone out there wants to design. But I seriously doubt it will ever be designed by anyone at WotC because it goes against what I think they think the entire premise of roleplaying is-- telling the DM what you want to do, and the DM telling you what happens.
"DM says" is too loosey-goosey. It is, necessarily, formless and vague, driven by invisible priors and beliefs inside the DM's head. You never know where the finish line is, so it's nearly impossible to capture that "oh no, we're so close, c'mon dice, don't fail me now!" feeling. The structure of SCs provides just enough objective standard for everyone to actually see where things stand, and thus to feel dread or excitement at what may lie ahead.
...why on earth should the narration have no impact? That doesn't follow at all.Yes, but your narration has no effect on the mechanics. The dice rolls and only the dice rolls affect the numbers. How you describe those dice rolls "in story" does not change anything or give you bonuses or penalties to future dice rolls (not counting gaining Inspiration from the DM which you could then use at a later point, but that's not a Combat rule, that's the Inspiration mechanic and is not specifically a part of Combat.)
The narration affects the meaning, tone, and direction of the scene. Such things are vital. They are often part of what differentiates "no need to roll, that just works" from "hmmm, okay, but that will have a high DC" or whatever else. These things can still matter enormously. I really don't see how you've established that they're somehow totally irrelevant.
They aren't rails...I have no idea why you would call it that when HP do exactly the same thing, so many successful rolls against the enemy before they get too many successful rolls against you.That's how I always saw how Skill Challenges were meant to be played in 4E and I was fine with it as a system to use if a particular DM felt they wanted those rails of '# of success before 3 failures' to help them determine when a "scene" should end.
Okay. How do your players know what your intuition says? How can they see that they're on the cusp of victory or defeat, in advance? How can they strategize when the bounds of victory are necessarily hidden from them inside your thinkmeats?Me personally though? I never used them myself, because I just relied on my own intuition to know when "okay that's enough, you have won(/lost)". Because for me... if I was capable of doing the thing you mentioned in your first point (knowing when a player had such a great idea that it should simply work)... I was also capable of knowing when the party was convincing enough or successful enough in the totality of the scene regardless of the number of Skill checks I may or may not have asked for.
But it was a good rule system I thought to help get DMs to the point when they no longer felt they needed to use them anymore.
Because that's a key benefit of the SC approach. It pulls the metric of victory out of the DM's head and makes it visible to all. Just as, for instance, the number of foes still left on the battlefield vs the number of HP the party members have.