Two Example Skill Challenges

[Just Another User]

Do you want to jam a spike into the floor to keep the walls from crushing in? Do start examining the trap itself for a weakness?

If all you want to do is say "I disable the trap" and get by with that, the skill challenge system is probably not for you.

Yea, if one llike mechanics that make sense skill challenges probably are not for him.
Do you ask your players to explain how they swing the sword to a goblin, too? As I said, I'm not a thief, I should not have to know how to disable a trap to play one. look at the OP, player found (apparently) a control panel of some kind, I use my thievery skill to turn the trap off, what else I need to explain?

Of course they would. It counts at least as much as any other skill.

but it would make a lot less sense. You disabled the trap and yet it is not disabled because you must reach an artificious and arbitrary number of "successes". To avoid the cognitive dissonance I just use the appriate skill last, at least it would make my head hurt less. This would not make it less forced.

Perception would not apply whenever it's inappropriate. Attempting to use perception in Escape from Sembia, for example, would take some explanation rather than just "I roll perception".

pfft, that's nothing "I look around to make me an idea of the situation" It is a sentence valid for almost any skill challlenge. +1 free success.

While there are instances where skill challenges are inappropriate (such as simple locked doors), the crushing walls trap is a fine place for a skill challenge - nobody says you need to disarm the trap, you just have to get out of the room without dying. That being the case, Thievery is only one of many possible ways to resolve the situation and manifestly not "the one skill that makes sense to use".

Soyou don't need to unlock the trapdoor ?
so what if the player enter the trapdoor before they have enough successes? If the answer is "something else bad happen" then I can see the players NOT enter the trapdoor if not as a last resort, waiting to collect enough successes to avoid the complication, which is forced, contrived, unrealisitic and counter-intuitive, and yet the most natural reaction froma group of players "we are in a deadly trap, there is an easy way out but before we use it we want to roll some random skill check because we know that if we escape just now there will be some other complication"

 

[2eBladeSinger]

Here's the philosophy, I think -

Outside a "skill challenge" you can make single checks and rolls. You come to a locked door in a dungeon, the rogue moves up and unlocks it. Bam, Thievery check, no problem."

...Example trucated

I think this is a better example of a skill challenge trap. However, I still have a problem with the abstracting of what should be very specific solutions: The trap has a single trigger and a single solution (the switch). If the PCs use their skills creatively to find the trap (e.g. History or Dungeoneering rather than Perception and Thievery) that is just the PCs being clever and roleplaying well. It's still worth XP in my book. There's no reason to make it a skill challenge wherein four failures means death. It's time that will kill the PCs.
1. The trap is triggered
2. The PCs have three rounds to find the switch to deactivate it
3. The PCs need to locate the switch, and then deactivate it.
4. The PCs can use any skill they find relevant to disarm the trap. The DM decides if the skill is ultimately relevant.

Otherwise we have a situation where traps have triggers because of successful HIstory checks not discovered with the creative use of History checks. I'm all for creative use of skills; I'm all for awarding XP for creative use of skills. What I am not for is new mechanic that is more awkward and less believable than the mechanic that already exists and has existed.

Let me use one of my own examples: A long long time ago, in a dungeon far, far away I was a player in a game and our party was exploring a keep we had cleared. We knew in one of the rooms, there was a secret door. (we knew this because a foe had escaped into it and we found the room empty with no exits). None of the elves could find the door in the traditional elven way (d6s) so the party started taking candles from the chapel and walking around the walls slowly (the DM rolled dice) and we found nothing. Then we poured barrels of ale on the floor (the DM rolled dice) and we found nothing. Then we tossed flour into the air (the DM rolled dice) and we found runes outlined on some stones in the corner and subsequently found the door.

My point is that getting to use skills creatively does not ipso facto make a skill challenge. In a skill challenge, four failures would mean we wouldn't find the door and no matter how much time we'd spent looking for those runes, we would have needed five more successes before we were allowed to 'win' the challenge.

 

[Delgar]

I personally like it, but I am going to play devil's advocate for a moment. Does this seems a bit video gamey (yeah yeah, I went there). I mean really though. The orcs just keep coming? Where are they coming from? Is it really an infinite army of orcs chasing them down? Do they have a spawn? How fast are they respawning, every 2 seconds?

Hey no problem.

Well when I say unlimited orcs, I'm just implying a number greater then is neccessary to define.

Take the Lord of the Rings movie where all the orcs come crawling out of the wordwork. There weren't really unlimited orcs there, BUT there were so many that there was no way for the group to kill them all.

So, in the time frame of the challenge as I set it up, there would be no way for the party to kill ALL the orcs, therefore there was no need to define how many.

Anyway, ultimately I just whipped up two examples to see if I could turn some standard movie tropes into an interesting, tense skill challenge. I think that the skill challenge rules can achieve these results.

 

[Hussar]

but it would make a lot less sense. You disabled the trap and yet it is not disabled because you must reach an artificious and arbitrary number of "successes". To avoid the cognitive dissonance I just use the appriate skill last, at least it would make my head hurt less. This would not make it less forced.

That's the point. You haven't disabled the trap. There is no "Disable Device" skill check anymore. In a skill challenge, no single skill check ends the challenge (unless of course, it's the one that causes pass/fail). You used Thievery on the panel - ok, fine, you succeeded in achieving 1 of the necessary successes. By the same token, failing the Thievery check will not not result in the trap being set off.

Sure, you don't describe how you swing the sword, but, you do describe more than "I attack". You have to attack a particular target. This orc, or that orc? You also have numerous mechanics in 3e that can affect that attack - flanking, power attack, expertise, etc. etc. So, your example of having to describe how you attack isn't exactly looking at all the variables.

Yes, you don't say "I swing for his head." But, by the same token, you also don't have to say, "I do X with the trap." You state a goal and then justify whichever skill you want to use to achieve that goal. How you achieve that goal does not have to be defined in anything more than the fuzziest of terms.

 

[Lacyon]

look at the OP, player found (apparently) a control panel of some kind, I use my thievery skill to turn the trap off, what else I need to explain?

Once you find the control panel? Not much. Go ahead and roll Thievery. Success means you make it a certain amount into disabling the trap.

but it would make a lot less sense. You disabled the trap and yet it is not disabled because you must reach an artificious and arbitrary number of "successes". To avoid the cognitive dissonance I just use the appriate skill last, at least it would make my head hurt less. This would not make it less forced.

One check disabled the trap in the example because a perception check had located the control panel, a pair of insight checks had given assistance into the nature of the mechanisms, an athletics check slowed the walls enough to buy him some time. Without any assists it would've taken 6 Thievery checks to disable.

pfft, that's nothing "I look around to make me an idea of the situation" It is a sentence valid for almost any skill challlenge. +1 free success.

That gets you nothing in Escape from Sembia. It gets you something in a lot of other challenges. Either way, it's not a "free" success anymore than Thievery is a "free" success - you still have to roll the check, and if you're better at Thievery than Perception or Insight, it's Thievery that's the easy success, not the other way around.

Soyou don't need to unlock the trapdoor ?

Sure you do, if it's locked.

so what if the player enter the trapdoor before they have enough successes?

The lock, for one (if there is one). Athletics checks to get the party up to the ceiling and out the door. You need X more successes.

If the answer is "something else bad happen" then I can see the players NOT enter the trapdoor if not as a last resort, waiting to collect enough successes to avoid the complication, which is forced, contrived, unrealisitic and counter-intuitive, and yet the most natural reaction froma group of players "we are in a deadly trap, there is an easy way out but before we use it we want to roll some random skill check because we know that if we escape just now there will be some other complication"

a) There's no particular reason why the players need to be allowed to leave without gaining X successes - see the above example, where you still have to make enough checks to get the party out the door, possibly checks to unlock it, etc.

b) There's no particularly good reason for the players to know whether a complication is waiting for them or not. They don't know how many successes they need.

c) "Let's stay in here and try some random skill checks" doesn't work. "Let's stay in here and try to disable the trap" might, but you risk death by trap instead of unknown bad stuff by complication. You're welcome to assume that players who do, for some reason, know how many successes they need, will choose to risk death by trap instead, but there's no actual benefit to them for doing so.

d) There's no reason you can't, if you want to set the whole thing up in advance, decide that it only takes 5 checks to disarm the trap, but takes 6 to get the whole party out the secret door, and checks to do one or the other don't count on the other side. You probably need to be careful about tweaking the system this way (allow a bit more room for failure), but it's a natural extension. The system itself, however, is abstract enough that you don't need to plan the whole thing out in advance - you can know that requiring X successes before Y failures at DC Q is a level N challenge suitable for J players. You don't have to decide if the trap door is locked until the players are ready to open it. You don't have to know if the trap requires 1 Thievery check to disable or 4 until the players start rolling Thievery. You don't even have to know if a PC has the Thievery skill trained at all, because they can use their other skills instead.

 

[Celebrim]

You don't have to decide if the trap door is locked until the players are ready to open it.

This is precisely why I think the system isn't actually for novice DMs either. The whole 'Schrodinger's Trap' nature of the skill challenge system requires a very skilled extemporaneous DM to run it convincely, without self-contridiction, and without confusing the players. I'd never give as advice to a novice DM, "Just make things up as you need them."

And as a player it would frustrate the heck out of me. I've had a PC die to 'Schrodinger's Trap' before. The tendancy of the environment to warp so as to thwart your best ideas is one of the experiences as a player I most dislike, and one of the reasons I tend to avoid DMs who think that they can just 'wing it'.

 

[Lacyon]

This is precisely why I think the system isn't actually for novice DMs either. The whole 'Schrodinger's Trap' nature of the skill challenge system requires a very skilled extemporaneous DM to run it convincely, without self-contridiction, and without confusing the players. I'd never give as advice to a novice DM, "Just make things up as you need them."

Funny, that's exactly the advice I'd give a novice DM: don't worry about planning everything ahead of time. It can be enough work getting a basic outline and a fundamental grasp of the system. No need to overload yourself worrying about the location and DC of every lock, control panel, cliff, and secret trap door, unless you find yourself with a bunch of extra time to plan it in advance.

And as a player it would frustrate the heck out of me. I've had a PC die to 'Schrodinger's Trap' before. The tendancy of the environment to warp so as to thwart your best ideas is one of the experiences as a player I most dislike, and one of the reasons I tend to avoid DMs who think that they can just 'wing it'.

Heh. This is precisely why I think it's easier for novice DMs. There's a natural tendency towards escalation on that side of the screen, and newer DMs don't have experience holding them back. The skill challenge system, meanwhile, gives them guidelines on when to stop thwarting the players.

 

[ThirdWizard]

And as a player it would frustrate the heck out of me. I've had a PC die to 'Schrodinger's Trap' before. The tendancy of the environment to warp so as to thwart your best ideas is one of the experiences as a player I most dislike, and one of the reasons I tend to avoid DMs who think that they can just 'wing it'.

Hey, at least the environment is warping based on set rules and not DM fiat!

 

[hbarsquared]

And warping due to player interaction and problem-solving, instead of whatever the DM deems to be the "right" answer.

 

[Celebrim]

Hey, at least the environment is warping based on set rules and not DM fiat!

The environment isn't supposed to warp at all.