Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9294558" data-attributes="member: 6790260">That would be a soft failure. (With the skill challenge setup, I would say that that is a plausible result from the players getting down to the wire--e.g. two failed rolls, but they only need one more success...and then they fail the last check.) The door is still open, but they failed to get what they wanted. That's a perfectly cromulent soft failure, and indeed is a great way to leverage the fact that SCs really enable this sort of stuff in a way that ordinary skill rolls are at best very poor at doing. The best you get is a vague "well...you didn't win, but you didn't lose, so..." And it's precisely that vague "guess it's left completely up to DM caprice" type stuff that this is great for addressing.If this is what you intend to do, then it simply isn't appropriate for a skill challenge in the first place--the Duke isn't participating in earnest, so victory was never actually a possibility.I don't think your example is anywhere near as useful as you think it is. There is an obvious win condition: the Duke agrees. There is an obvious loss condition: the Duke does not agree. Just as with the trial example, one or the other of those two states must eventually occur. In case a, the Duke fell on the "did not agree"--but non-agreement is not the same as refusal with prejudice, and thus we now have a new adventure direction, either to find a replacement for the Duke's aid, or find a more concrete way to earn or elicit his help. (E.g., perhaps if we scratch his back, he'll scratch ours.) In case b, failure is already assured--the Duke isn't negotiating in good faith to begin with--and thus there is no need to bring in skill challenge rules, for exactly the same reason that you wouldn't bring out the combat rules for dealing with "rocks fall, everyone dies." Alternatively, if success really was possible, that sort of thing would only happen in response to a very rapid failure on the players' part, because that's really obviously a failure, and not merely a soft one--the Duke is actively, but covertly, trying to break off negotiations, not just conclude them without giving the answer the PCs hoped for.Can you think of any other situations you would say have sufficient ambiguity? I'm trying, and frankly I'm coming up pretty much empty. Everything I can think of, the "ambiguity" really just resolves as:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Victory(/defeat) was never possible in the first place, so making a set piece of it is pointless and wasteful</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Actually a failure, but a very quick failure, such that things barely get started before they end</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Actually a failure, but a soft failure, inviting the action to flow in new directions</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Actually a success, but a weak/flawed success, inviting danger or problems that need solving</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Actually a success, but a very slow/time-consuming success, e.g. something that takes days to resolve (which is fine; just 'cause initiative might be involved does not mean 6-second rounds are!)</li> </ul>None of these actually induce true irresolvability where you just genuinely have no idea what's going on. Your case b, where the Duke breaks off negotiations under the hope that the problem will just go away, comes closest--but as I said, if that was the Duke's plan all along, then it was simply guaranteed failure, and if it wasn't, then that would only happen as a result of a true failure on the players' part.</blockquote>

Verification