Two Example Skill Challenges

[Kraydak]

Celebrim needs to get over his I am right retoric that no one is caring about. Come on Celebrim at this point your about as useful as a troll. Everyone has all ready admited you are right, but that it means absolutely nothing. If you don't like it then don't use it. I for one am interested in new challenges we can think up, and different ways of using it. Some of what you say does make us think. Just drop the whole I did this all ready in 3E. Your idea of what happens when the players do nothing is a good point and should be asked. Not because it proves anything, but because it can bog things down and we should be prepared with examples of how to handle that in a skill challenge.

Celebrim's point has been that Skill Challenges might sound like a good idea from afar, but the closer you look at the mechanic, the more problematic they appear. This is probably one of the reasons you aren't supposed to use them in situations where the results really matter (TPKs being possible): skill challenges are at best a good way to gloss over relatively unimportant events which might otherwise take up a lot of RL time (not an insignificant feat in and of itself, mind). Trying to introduce skill challenges that matter results in silliness where the speed of traps increases linearly with party size and other fun things (in pskought's example, the Warblade drawing a weapon *extra* fast counted as a success despite weapons being utterly irrelevant to the encounter in the first place).

 

[pskought]

Sounds like you did a pretty good job. In 3E, I'd be careful about two things, mostly:

First, keep an eye on characters' skill bonuses. If one PC gets a +10 or +15 skill-boosting item, it'll be really hard to make a skill challenge DC that he has the possibility of failure and isn't auto-fail for the other PCs (or even that PC with another skill). Just a few of these is probably fine, it just means that they can get one success automatically and still need to use other skills later in the challenge. Likewise, if there's a whole bunch of these items spread around the party, you can just make the challenges tougher and still have a meaningful challenge. A lot of these in one character's hands and none in the others is a situation you'll want to watch out for.

Second, make sure each PC has enough different skills that they can attempt and have a chance to hit your DC, to keep things interesting. Some classes just get a tiny number of skill points in 3E.

The other thing I'll point out is that separating the successes and failures for each individual is probably fine overall, but you may find characters wanting to be able to help each other out, loaning successes to each other, or bearing the brunt of another's failure. Take that idea far enough and you'll probably come back to the apparent 4E conclusion of just making it a total number of successes/failures for the group, and using description to convey the nature of their cooperation.

Good points, thanks.

There was brief consideration of the PC's total skill points/bonuses but I went ahead with the low DC anyway. My understanding of the preview material is that the massive skill discrepancies from 3.x are going mostly away in 4E, so I felt safe previewing the concept, and letting the numbers sort of self-correct when we change editions. Until then, I just plan to just keep the XP rewards fairly low.

I totally missed the opportunity of making it a group challenge, that's a great idea. Maybe the next one!

 

[Celebrim]

Celebrim's point has been that Skill Challenges might sound like a good idea from afar, but the closer you look at the mechanic, the more problematic they appear.

Well, in a nutshell, yes.

That and the fact that most people seem to be avoiding the potential pitfalls by defining 'skill challenge' in a very loose manner and fudging as necessary. If you are willing to be flexible about how many successes and failures solve or fail to solve the problem, if you are flexible about whether not doing something is the same as failure, if you are flexible about how you tally successes and failures, if you are willing to exclude skills according to what you feel is reasonable for the situation, design the challenges such that its nearly impossible to fail, deal with players who are playing nicely in the box, if you are willing to exclude alot of skill scenarios from the skill challenge system because they just don't fit, and if you are flexible about whether or not everyone in the party is contributing then sure you can avoid the nuttiness. But such assertions about how it works fine with a combination of DM judgment and house rules aren't necessarily convincing defences of the system as a system. After all that fudging, you are left with 'skill challenge' meaning little more than 'some skill checks might be rolled, probably more than once by more than one player'.

It's going to be interesting to see how the real system works in its write up and what it says, because I've seen alot of claims about the new system by fans - many of them contridictory.

 

[Lacyon]

Celebrim's point has been that Skill Challenges might sound like a good idea from afar, but the closer you look at the mechanic, the more problematic they appear.

I'm not sure how much closer you can look than actually using them in play. All the reviews from actual users that I've seen have been positive, and the downsides don't seem to actually have much negative effect for said users during actual gameplay.

This is probably one of the reasons you aren't supposed to use them in situations where the results really matter (TPKs being possible): skill challenges are at best a good way to gloss over relatively unimportant events which might otherwise take up a lot of RL time (not an insignificant feat in and of itself, mind).

Non-TPK is not the same as the results not mattering. You shouldn't typically be throwing PCs up against fights that you expect to end in TPK either.

Trying to introduce skill challenges that matter results in silliness where the speed of traps increases linearly with party size

This is a problem of innumeracy if it exists. See my above posts for ways of dealing with the issue systemically. (I don't know how the designers actually deal with it in the rulebook. Maybe they don't. Regardless, it's only a problem if you let it be one.)

and other fun things (in pskought's example, the Warblade drawing a weapon *extra* fast counted as a success despite weapons being utterly irrelevant to the encounter in the first place).

This is a "problem" of allowing irrelevant checks to count, not one inherent to the skill challenge system per se. Of course, mechanically, the challenge was still exactly as difficult for the PCs to achieve as it was supposed to be. The only problem is one of dissonance, and if nobody notices the dissonance, it's not really a problem.

 

[Lacyon]

Well, in a nutshell, yes.

That and the fact that most people seem to be avoiding the potential pitfalls by defining 'skill challenge' in a very loose manner and fudging as necessary. If you are willing to be flexible about how many successes and failures solve or fail to solve the problem, if you are flexible about whether not doing something is the same as failure, if you are flexible about how you tally successes and failures, if you are willing to exclude skills according to what you feel is reasonable for the situation, design the challenges such that its nearly impossible to fail, deal with players who are playing nicely in the box, if you are willing to exclude alot of skill scenarios from the skill challenge system because they just don't fit, and if you are flexible about whether or not everyone in the party is contributing then sure you can avoid the nuttiness. But such assertions about how it works fine with a combination of DM judgment and house rules aren't necessarily convincing defences of the system as a system. After all that fudging, you are left with 'skill challenge' meaning little more than 'some skill checks might be rolled, probably more than once by more than one player'.

Ah yes. Lump together everyone who will use the parts of the system and not others, or who will use the system one way and not another, and you will have what appears to be a mass of contradictions.

In reality, a set of guidelines which leads each group to use something like 75% of the total is a good set of guidelines so long as the 25% unused is different from group to group. It's especially good when compared to the prior set, which is pretty close to null.

In other words, what you're complaining about as a bug is in fact a feature.

It's going to be interesting to see how the real system works in its write up and what it says, because I've seen alot of claims about the new system by speculators and homebrew designers, pimping out the mechanics for their own use - many of them contridictory.

Fixed it for you.

 

[Celebrim]

Celebrim needs to get over his I am right retoric that no one is caring about.

Who, me? Could you point to my 'I am right rhetoric'?

If you don't mind, do me another favor and when you want to discuss something with me, address me rather than making an appeal to the thread like I'm not in the room or something.

Something like, "Celebrim, shut up. Get over yourself.", would be far more respectful. I can take it.

Everyone has all ready admited you are right, but that it means absolutely nothing.

First of all, not everyone has admitted I'm right. Second of all, getting everyone or anyone to admit I'm right is not the point. I really don't care whether you think I'm right or not. What I care about is whether I think I'm right. I'm trying to learn something here. I've already learned a thing or two I didn't know before I tried to get my thoughts in order to reply to various people.

If you don't like it then don't use it.

I won't. However, thinking about structured skill challenges has made me think about some things I might do.

I for one am interested in new challenges we can think up, and different ways of using it.

Me too.

Some of what you say does make us think.

Then I would argue that if I'm still thinking, and you are still thinking, that I'm not a troll.

Just drop the whole I did this all ready in 3E.

Errr? Why? It's fundamental to my point that the way people - not just me but also for example the OP - are handling skill challenges is not really different than 3E, and that the new unique feature of the 4e 'skill challenge' - the tally of failures and successes - if taken literally gets in the way as much as it helps. I am trying to argue that simply tally systems are 'dumber' than DM judgement, and that if a DM does want to keep track of success and failure in a non-arbitrary manner that he should be open to tallying successes and failures using different methodologies than just summing up successes and failures thus far. For example, some encounters might work better if you track the difference between success and failure - where what matters isn't 'I got X successes', but rather 'I have X more successes than I have failures'. I can think of at least 1 published 3.X adventure that does this in a scenario. I can discuss all sorts of sitautions where this is more effective. Another variation might be, "Get X success before turn Y", where you don't care about failure so much as getting everyone involved. I can think of all sorts of scenarios where this is better, for example, it removes the problem of 'We'll just stand back and let the guy with Skill Focus do all the work because we don't want to risk a failure on a check'.

And so forth.

I've been arguing since the mechanic was unvieled that it was an unnecessary strait jacket on DM arbitrartion that had no bearing on the best way to handle complex skill scenarios. The fact that complex skill scenarios are possible in existing scenarios is critical to this line of argument, because otherwise you get 'It's not perfect but its better than nothing.' My response is precisely, 'Not only is it not perfect, in many cases its worse than nothing.'

Your idea of what happens when the players do nothing is a good point and should be asked. Not because it proves anything, but because it can bog things down and we should be prepared with examples of how to handle that in a skill challenge.

I think it proves something. At the very least it proves that the write up in the DMG better have alot of clarifications along these lines to prevent confusion, bad rulings, bad design, and bogging things down.

But its just one problem among many. There is a whole other class of problems which involve, 'What happens when the player tries to solve the problem in a way that doesn't involve skills (as defined by the game) at all?' Using spells is one obvious example. Another example is demonstrated by the player who has a concrete proposition, but doesn't know what skill is involved. For example, in the closing room trap there might be a stout 3' mithril bar in the room. One player might propose, "I go over to the mithral bar and roll it such that it is perpendicular to the room in hopes that its strong enough to keep the walls from coming together." Now, this isn't a particularly skillful action. As a strength check, the difficulty is trivial. Do you penalize the player by making them roll a skill check for a trivial action? How do you handle this anyway? Without a skill system, the answer is pretty clear. You figure out what the break DC of the bar is, what the strength of the trap is, and you decide if the trap breaks or bends the bar - thus saving the players (or at least giving them a nearly indefinately long time to solve the problem). With a skill system, if you aren't just willing to toss it out, the answer is complicated.

Or what about, "I set my immovable rod agaisnt the wall." Skill check, or toss this whole notion that we need to tally successes and failures out the window?

 

[ZetaStriker]

One thing Celebrim keeps bringing up that he's obviously misunderstanding is that he thinks DM's will say "you can't use that skill". That's not the case at all, and flies in the face of everything a skill challenge represents. Any skill can be used, as long as the player can find a way for it to fit the situations. DM's judge this on a case by case basis; they wont just say "Athletics is useless here". The point of the skill challenge is for players to use their skills in ways they wouldn't ordinarily, and to encourage creativity. And no, that isn't something that applies only to rp-lite groups; even a heavily rp focused group might not always think creatively when it comes to challenges such as these.

For instance, say that the skill challenge consists of traveling to the summit of a small mountain of living flesh, the terrain of which is actively trying to prevent the PCs from ascending, and in the worst case, trying to kill them(no, that doesn't mean that it's death vs. success, but that failure might lead to the party finding themselves back at the base with some HP damage). You might ring up a list of likely skills the PCs could try, but some things, you might assume to be rather useless. You might discount Diplomacy, Intimidate and Bluff, for example. But then the party's rogue uses Bluff to feint at a tentacle, allowing him to pass by while its distracted, and the Fighter uses Intimidate to draw more of the grasping tentacles towards himself to make travel easier for the rest of the party? You'd be hard pressed to think of an idea for Diplomacy as well, but if a player thought up something that he could actually apply it to, would you really shoot him down just because it relies upon that skill?

 

[DM_Blake]

One point of clarification:

I'm fairly sure that the suggestion to NOT use this ssytem when it can result in player death lies in the random nature of dice.

You tell a player, or a group of players, that 4 bad rolls means he/they die, then let them roll them, they might make good rolls, or they might make bad rolls. They might survive the first time, the first several times, the first many times, but sooner or later, they're going to get those 4 bad rolls and then its TPK time.

Now it's true that in combat, the players could suffer from a string of bad rolls and end up in a TPK. But, combat is usually resolved by scores of dice, maybe even hundreds of dice - with that many rolls, the odds of one side having way better or worse luck than the other side is slim. In all statistical analysis, larger sample sizes (more dice to roll) means more reliable outcomes (less depended on randomly streaky good/bad luck).

And if it does happen, the DM has a whole lot of control over a combat TPK. If the DM rolls behind a screen, the monsters might also have a string of bad luck (read: the DM fudges the rolls to save the party, turning hits into misses, crits into hits, high damage into low damage, etc.). Or the monsters might simply make bad decisions (the owlbear decides to go eat the party's pack mule rather than finishing off the last conscious party member). There are many ways a DM can pull a combat out of the TPK realm.

But, with skill challenges, every die rolled is rolled by the players. Worse, if the DM has already said "You die after X failures", the players will know when they roll that last failure. The DM can't fake it, fudge it, or make the failures go away. Basically, now all the DM can say is "You all die" or, e.g., "Behold, Elminster teleports in and alters reality to save your butts".

Now, if the DM never told the players the number of successes/failures, and the players roll their final failure, the DM can fudge by increasing that number on the spot, and the players will never know. Or reduce the number of success (if they still need 3 successes, but only one failure will kill them, when they roll their first of those 3 remaining successes, tell them that they solved the problem and eliminate the risk of rolling a failure before rolling the remaining 2 successes).

In a nutshell, the skill challenge system leaves fgailure up to the dice, and to only a few die rolls, in fact. With just a few die rolls, and no way to fake it, it is inevitable that some skill challenges will be failed. That's the nature of dice. And if those failures can result in TPKs, then TPKs will happen.

Hence the suggestion not to use Skill Challenges in such a way that death will occur on a failure.

 

[DM_Blake]

For instance, say that the skill challenge consists of traveling to the summit of a small mountain of living flesh, the terrain of which is actively trying to prevent the PCs from ascending, and in the worst case, trying to kill them(no, that doesn't mean that it's death vs. success, but that failure might lead to the party finding themselves back at the base with some HP damage). You might ring up a list of likely skills the PCs could try, but some things, you might assume to be rather useless. You might discount Diplomacy, Intimidate and Bluff, for example. But then the party's rogue uses Bluff to feint at a tentacle, allowing him to pass by while its distracted, and the Fighter uses Intimidate to draw more of the grasping tentacles towards himself to make travel easier for the rest of the party?

It's impossible to deceive a tentacle with a feint (just like it is impossible to deceive a fist with a feint, or deceive a sword with a feint) - you can only deceive the mind controlling the tentacle, fist, or sword. Are we assuming the mountain is sentient, intelligent, able to view the actions of the players (or sense them in some fashion that might be susceptible to a feint - scent and tremorsense probably cannot be feinted)? If I know the mountain is just a mindless-flesh-mountain-zombie-thing, especially if the players also know this, then I either tell the player it won't work ("your character knows better than to try this, so find another skill") or I tell him it didn't work ("you tried it, and it failed no matter what you roll on the die"). In the latter case, it's an interesting discussion as to whether it counts against the total number of failures - if we disallow a skill, and the player tries it, does his failure tally against the total, or do we only count failures of valid skills that roll badly?

Likewise, intimidate will also not work against a mindless-flesh-mountain-zombie-thing. Even if it is sentient, it might have so many tentacles that the other players gain no benefit from the fighter's intimidating a few of them to grapple him. What if the ranger is 100' ahead of the fighter, will intimidating the tentacles (or the sentience conrolling them) near the fighter help the ranger in any way?

Sometimes a DM just has to tell a player "no, that idea won't work." I don't think the version of the game even matters - 3e and 4e DMs will have to make these kinds of rulings.

You'd be hard pressed to think of an idea for Diplomacy as well, but if a player thought up something that he could actually apply it to, would you really shoot him down just because it relies upon that skill?

If a player metagames, and his thought process is "Well, I'm a wizard. I have points in a bunch of knowledge skills, and spellcraft, and diplomacy, and underwater basket weaving. What can I do? Well, we already researched this mountain at the Sage's Tower, so we know everything about it, so none of my knowledge skills will work. I cannot spellcraft my way up the mountain. And this is no time for basket weaving. Hmmmmm, I guess I better try diplomacy since that's all I have left. Now, what line of garbage can I throw at my DM to convince him to allow diplomacy? Ah, I have it! I will use phenomonology on the mountain to convince it that I'm not really here..."

Yeah, I'm not going to allow that in my game.

A player who tries to craft up all sorts of excuses to use a skill he is good at, for no real reason other than to avoid using the skills he is not good at, is going to come across the same way as the student trying to tell the teacher why he didn't turn in his math. "Uh, yeah, like, the dog ate it."

That said, I'm sure there will be times when a player comes up with something valid. Something that makes sense. Something that doesn't come across as a lame excuse to use a strong skill rather than a weak one. In those cases, I will absolutely reward his creativity by allowing the skill use.

Otherwise, sometimes a DM just has to tell a player "no, that idea won't work." I don't think the version of the game even matters - 3e and 4e DMs will have to make these kinds of rulings.

 

[2eBladeSinger]

The OP scenarios (as well as any other HB challenges I’ve read so far) all seem to involve some combination of traps and combat. One thing many people are overlooking is that the combat system, perception and thievery skills all work very well, as is, to resolve trap and combat scenarios. It isn’t necessary to shoehorn these things into a new mechanic. I believe traps have their own challenge system that may or may not involve multiple dice. IMO, if a skill challenge is answerable by the use of one or two repeated skills, then it should probably just be resolved the old-fashioned way. No need to have the Warlord make a diplomacy check to get the door open. Skill Challenges should take a wider view. A scenario that really does involve, or could involve, multiple PCs using a wide variety of skills, perhaps over a longer period of time, is a skill challenge.

(e.g. The PCs need to find a cultist in town by the name of Tobin. It’s a 6/4 challenge. If the challenge is passed the PCs will find him in temple alone. If the challenge is failed, Tobin will get word and flee.)