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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Noumenon" data-source="post: 5064761" data-attributes="member: 70102">Rob Donoghue offered an interesting alternative to skill challenges in a <a href="http://rdonoghue.blogspot.com/2010/01/3-things-to-not-do-with-skill-challenge.html" target="_blank">recent footnote</a>:All I want to add to this idea is this: What about a three-stage table check, where only those who succeed get to advance to the next round, and the mix of successes and failures determines the next round's narrative?What I liked about the table check is that with only one roll per player, it's worth the trouble to think of a unique application for one of your skills.  "My elf hunts the orcs carrying the captive hobbits by simple Endurance, running across the plains.  My ranger uses Nature to spot bent blades of grass without breaking stride.  My dwarf uses Diplomacy to ask nomads on the plains for horses and directions."But four's not quite enough rolls for an interesting challenge.  Reminds me of 3.5's "Everybody roll a Spot check to avoid the surprise round."  How about this?  Whichever players make their rolls, that decides whose approaches work -- the narration adjusts to match, and only those players advance to the next round.  In our chasing orcs example, if the ranger's Nature check and the elf's Endurance check succeed, but the dwarf fails his Diplomacy check with the Riders of Rohan, there's your narrative hook for the next round.  "You make good enough time to keep the trail from going cold.  Gimli, you insult the horse-master, Eomer, who tells you he would cut off your head if it were a little higher from the ground.  Also, he's already slaughtered the orcs and didn't find the hobbits."  This eliminates that pass-fail feel that skill challenges have, where that third failure basically means you achieved nothing.  Now you have partial success and failure with every round.  Also, it lets players try different approaches that shape the narration and not just garner successes or failures.For the next round the dwarf is out, and Nature and Endurance aren't the right skills any more. (No more orcs to track down.  Notice how this eliminates the boredom of the one guy trained in Nature rolling the same check every round of the challenge.)  Now the ranger makes a Perception check to see if the hobbits got away before the slaughter (success) and the elf tries a Diplomacy check to get the Riders to mount a broader search (failure).  The narration follows the check results: "You find the hobbits' belts and tracks, but the riders won't help search for them because the tracks lead into the haunted forest of Fangorn."  With this survival-based skill challenge, the mechanics aren't forcing Gimli's player to participate-but-not-really with Aid Another just because he's not trained in Nature.  (Rob goes into the problems with the Aid action in his post.)  The spotlight stays firmly on the Nature expert, though using an action point will let Gimli back in for the next round.In the third and final round, Aragorn makes one History check, which fails because it's Legolas who has the relevant training, and they fail to find the hobbits.  But the narration has brought us to the point where it makes sense for the failure to represent finding a strange white-robed wizard instead.  If they had all failed their checks in the first round, that might have forced them to give up and follow the other hobbits down the river.  So you get many varied degrees of failure from this approach.The complexity of the skill challenge becomes how many rounds you have to get successes in to win.  This fulfills Rob's requirement for complexity in his post:If the interesting part of your adventure plan for the day is the chase, do the complexity three challenge.  If the interesting part is a setpiece battle with Grishnakh, then do a complexity one skill challenge.  The difficulty can be just the same, with the right DC, but the effect on pacing is much different: it's a much shorter chase, one round of rolling and right to the action.What do you think of this approach?  Too difficult to do on the fly?  Too likely to leave players out of the action?  Someone else's idea and I didn't know about it?  I really like how it lets one player chase the criminal through the streets with Streetwise, and the other try to Intimidate bystanders to ask "Which way did he go?", and it really matters which of them rolls high and low.  Not just "one success, one failure, both try again four more times."</blockquote>

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