D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's worth having a look at Savage Worlds' Dramatic Tasks, if you haven't already.

They're basically an evolution of the skill challenge rules, but I found that adding in degrees of success, making the choice to aid other characters much meaningful and having a system for adding complications made the whole thing much more compelling than the 4e version.

And the inclusion of the metacurrency of Bennies also makes a big difference as well in that it introduces a resource management aspect and helps mitigate anti-climatic results (which I found were often an issue in 4e).

Yeah, I haven't played SW, so I am not really exposed to how it works. It SOUNDS like they have a much tighter focus/scope than an SC. I mean, there would definitely be some overlap, but then maybe the explanations I have read are not very accurate or relate to older editions? The only substantial explanation I found online was an HOUR long!!!! youtube video, and I don't think I'm up for that, lol.

 

[Don Durito]

Yeah, I haven't played SW, so I am not really exposed to how it works. It SOUNDS like they have a much tighter focus/scope than an SC. I mean, there would definitely be some overlap, but then maybe the explanations I have read are not very accurate or relate to older editions? The only substantial explanation I found online was an HOUR long!!!! youtube video, and I don't think I'm up for that, lol.

Not really. Savage Worlds has separate chase rules so you wouldn't use it for a chase, but otherwise there doesn't seem to much difference in scope. The book does say "tense dangerous situations with a time limit" but of course that's all relative. I'm not really sure what previous editions said. The latest Adventure Edition is my reference point.

I'm sort of stunned that someone would take an hour to explain it as the rules take only two pages in the book.

This is pretty much what they are:

1) Set the number of rounds and the number of tokens needed (the book gives rating based on difficulty. Tokens are basically successes
2) Players draw cards for initiative and act in initiative order.
3) Players attempt an action and roll a skill. If they succeed the party gets a token. If they get raises (increments of 4 over the TN) they get additional successes.
4) Players may instead choose to support another player. They roll a skill and if they succeed they grant the player a +1 to a roll and for every raise an additional +1 (This doesn't sound like a lot but it can actually be quite significant as the raises mean that a success on a support role (especially with a raise or 2) could end up meaning an additional success for another player and therefore increasing the overall total for the party.
5) If the card any player drew for initiative has a club then there will be some kind of complication on their turn. If they fail a skill roll during this turn then the whole task will fail. However, this does not apply if the character attempts to support, and they may also choose to spend their whole turn dealing with the complication rather than attempting to advance the party toward success.

The metacurrency adds an extra dimension here also. Instead of binary pass/fail it tends to be pass/pass with resources significantly drained/fail.

That's most of it. I'm leaving out a few options for adding extra complexity, but not a lot.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And if you want subtle distinctions and 'handles' on which you can distinguish things, then tags (4e keywords essentially), at least in my design, present that. You don't need multiple different incompatible subsystems to do that. You can simply design a tag which applies a specific handling for pretty much anything anywhere. You want 'Undead' to be impossible to backstab? Well, write it into the backstab rule! Or the Undead rule that goes with the tag, whichever. You can have infinite distinctions of any degree (it could get unwieldy if too many of them interact I suppose, but that seems like a 'spherical cow' kind of problem to me).

That kind of approach helps, but I'm not convinced it altogether addresses my issue (and I have some sympathy for trying to universalize the process; one of the things I think makes D&D quite as difficult to handle for some people and generally creates a fair number of problems that crop up with the system is the massively exception-based design that's always been present with spells and powers of one stripe or another, and frequently with feats and similar constructs); at the very least you can run into a situation where none of the extent special-handling options aren't adequate (which I realize you reference in your "design" wording), and at that point it seems to make as much sense to me to have common design principals and just design a set of subsystems (in a consistent pattern) for all the expected uses for a campaign. There may come up something that doesn't precisely fit one, but I think that'd be rare enough (if you understand what your campaign/game/setting is about) that the likely brute-forcing of the closest extent subsystem wouldn't be onerous.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Pemerton has part of it, but there's also the issue that 4e skill challenges tend to be, from lack of a better term, set; within use of a given skill you have what you bring to the table (from skill, attribute and other bonuses) and that's it. The only choices you really have (when even that's true) is what skill you apply (and a lot of times that's not an option either). In the middle of an exchange in a lot of Cortex action scenes, things like Assets and SFX can be brought into play (sometimes as trade-offs, sometimes with Plot Point costs). This makes the whole process much more dynamic than a skill challenge.

To me that's because skill challenges are badly explained and it would take about two short paragraphs in the PHB to fix that (4e was rushed out before it was ready). I use them as scene pacing and resolution mechanics on the "three strikes and your ridiculous plan fails" principle.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, why does 'research' necessarily require adjudication? I mean, it MIGHT, but there is no inherent reason, because I wouldn't be approaching 'game as simulation of world'. In the later approach, which is common in D&D for example, the research MUST be resolved with some mechanic, because that is "the law of the world" regardless of any meaning to it in larger terms. In HoML if the wizard is just researching something that he can use later, perhaps, it is just an interlude. These can produce results, but it is more like "I spent my money, I got my stuff." There seems little need to roll dice for that...

This might not be a satisfactory answer to you, but my answer would be "Because I want it to be." Now what the resolution means is something I have considerable flexibility about; my actual favorite execution of such things was in the (unfortunately made toxic by emerging information about its author) third edition of Chill; it was very unlikely for research to give you nothing (if nothing else, you can find out there's apparently nothing to find), but it could range from a mixture of red herrings and useful information to not only telling you what you were looking for but giving you some information that's useful that you weren't even looking for at the time.

I don't particularly want that to be deterministic. Nor do I want the process when trying to determine if the PCs in a post-apocalypse setting can construct a fortification in time to be so; I want the resolution system to tell me if so, and if not, what degree of failure they have (is the fortification partly ready? Is it ready but flawed?)

What do you mean by 'fundamentally interesting'? What determines if something is 'interesting' to you?

When it comes to resolution, its whether there are steps in the process where meaningful decision making, ideally modified by personal and external resources is present. That's the problem I have with one and done, and even many step resolution systems; they often don't really have much decisions to make, and often the ones that are there basically come down to "How to do it" and "obvious mistakes".

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I can see where you are coming from with this comment. That is not really a concern IMHO. I mean, yes, an SC could 'resolve' something (by the success of the party). OTOH it can exactly snowball you further into adversity! Same with the individual checks within that SC, 2 fails puts you in a pretty 'snowballed' position. You are down to hanging by a thread at that point (and the fiction should reflect that).

This was an example of what I referred to as subsystems you didn't want to engage with if you could help it because they actually made your task harder. In the ideal, the ability to make decisions in steps allows you with careful play to make success more likely than with single-roll, or at least mitigate the failure-state of that, but simple multi-step resolution can easily fail that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, as I say, I see it in terms of connectivity. This was a huge problem with AD&D. Because it has all those wonky different VERY specific subsystems it is literally impossible to logically impose an advantage universally, or a disadvantage. Some things are d6 roll low, some roll high, some are other kinds of dice, and heck if you happen to be a Ranger then its a 3rd kind of die for the same thing! It is bonkers.

I suspect strongly trying to get around that was part of the reason for the everything-but-damage-is-a-D20 ethos of 3e. Like you say, it was less like a system than a random assortment of mechanics dropped into a game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's worth having a look at Savage Worlds' Dramatic Tasks, if you haven't already.

They're basically an evolution of the skill challenge rules, but I found that adding in degrees of success, making the choice to aid other characters much meaningful and having a system for adding complications made the whole thing much more compelling than the 4e version.

And the inclusion of the metacurrency of Bennies also makes a big difference as well in that it introduces a resource management aspect and helps mitigate anti-climatic results (which I found were often an issue in 4e).

The biggest issue is that there's not a huge number of useful options for changing the game up in mid process other than Bennie application; there are things that add bonuses to skill rolls but they don't say much about what you're doing other than "using Skill X".

 

[Thomas Shey]

To me that's because skill challenges are badly explained and it would take about two short paragraphs in the PHB to fix that (4e was rushed out before it was ready). I use them as scene pacing and resolution mechanics on the "three strikes and your ridiculous plan fails" principle.

That's a good address to the snowballing problem, but it doesn't really make the process any more interesting from where I sit.

 

[Don Durito]

The biggest issue is that there's not a huge number of useful options for changing the game up in mid process other than Bennie application; there are things that add bonuses to skill rolls but they don't say much about what you're doing other than "using Skill X".

Perhaps, but I don't think I'd want any more complexity for a set of rules that have to cover such a wide variety of different types of tasks.

If I had something I wanted to focus on specifically, then I would want something with a bit more nuance. As I said Savage Worlds has it's own chase rules which work a bit differently, although you could obviously use the Dramatic Task rules for Chases if you want (or for combat).