Two Example Skill Challenges

[ZetaStriker]

EDIT: Dang it. I thought my router was having problems, so I hit stop, dealt with it, and then edited what I was posting. Didn't realize it went through that first time, when it seemed like it stalled out while loading. >_<

 

[ZetaStriker]

First of all, I'm insulted that you think I'd allow a bs line of reasoning to fly in my game. No, you can't convince a mountain of anything. It's a mountain. It can't hear, it can't reason, it can't do anything. It's just a bunch of rock. However, creative use of skills should still be encouraged. If any other living, reasoning creatures are within earshot, however, that same Wizard would be able to use Diplomacy to get that person to help. I'd count that as a success.

In the case of my example, Bluff should still work. The 'mountain' in question isn't capable of rational though, but you can trick something that runs off instinct just as easily. If someone had knowledge checked to discover that it sensed off of the equivalent of tremorsense(since the players are walking directly on it...), they could use any number of means to bluff the tentacle. Throwing something to the ground to imply an extra step and then dashing by when the tentacle lashes out in the wrong direction is one good example.

Intimidate should work too; I don't think of it as a verbal-only skill. Physically harassing and engaging tentacles would distract them from other party members, but failing to present himself as a big enough target would cause his attempt to fail. Is that not a viable taunt non-verbal 'taunt'? As for the Ranger example you used to attempt to counter it, yes, it's true, that could happen. But if even one party member is behind the fighter, such an action would benefit the party as a whole. Besides, having one character run ahead should hamper the rest of the party's attempts to move forward; they're supposed to be working together, moving forward as a group. If the Ranger makes several successes on his own that don't help the rest of the party, and reaches the top early, he'd be entirely unable to make skill checks to assist others. Of course, that's the least of his worries, as in the one-shot I'm designing with this skill challenge in it, there's a rather nasty solo creature at the top waiting to tear the show boater to tiny little pieces.

Even Diplomacy could work, in the right situation. Making mental contact with such an aberration would certainly cause a mental backlash, but if the Wizard PC managed it and weathered the effects, it would open up non-standard possibilities for Diplomacy. Of course, I still wouldn't allow BS answers in that situation, but depending on the power used, it could be possible for them to transmit emotions in a way that could be viewed as a Diplomacy check to temporarily confuse it.

 

[D'karr]

(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.)

Or they find him but he's prepared and brought in reinforcements.

I was just reading someone else's post earlier and here is a good example of a Skill Challenge.

 

[Delgar]

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.

I'm sure that it probably states that somewhere too. BUT throughout the entire game the players fate is in the hands of the random nature of dice.

Also, I mean it's an adventure movie staple to be in some IMPOSSIBLE situation, where the walls are closing in or the room is filling up with water. I figured with the skill challenge system you can try to mimic the tension that your death is imminent unless you act quickly.

 

[Delgar]

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.)

Well I disagree. I don't see why a skill challenge can't be combined with combat. In my example I could have just made the player do a search/disable. Sure, but instead I wanted to make the scene more dramatic, more edge of the seat. YMMV.

 

[Edwin_Su]

am i getting this wrong in the crushing wall trap you need 5 sucsesses to get ouy of it.
does it resly matter what skils ?

coeld 5 atletics checks trying to stop the walls also have saved them?

5 checks trying to bash the door down ?

1 spot and 4 climb checks to get out the hole in the cealing?

4 knolage checks giving info about locks and how ther are made to the tief and 1 tievery check to open the door?

4 total irrelevant but sucessful skill checks and 1 thievery roll?

 

[Just Another User]

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.)

These are some good points, I think that as a rule of thumb if you can approach a challenge with a round-by.round approach maybe the old way are still better to handle it. Skill challenges on the other hand, being abstract, works better with more abstracted scenarios, for example there is a village that is on the route of an approaching goblin horde, you don't know how many time do you have but you must prepare the village defenses, this is a, IMHO, perfect situation to handle with a skill challenge, diplomacy to ask the help of near villages,temples, etc knowledge history to better setup the fortification based on what you know of previous goblin invasions, intimidation to "persuade" the commoner to help with the defenses rather than just run away, etc.
Skill challenges are at their best with scenarios that can be abstracted IMHO, (the escape from Sembia is another good example of that), else you can have some absurd situation, like the rogue that disable the trap with a succesful thievery check but the trap don't stop because you still don't have enough successes ("ok, people. time to roll some history checks if we want that trap to stop working")

 

[Celebrim]

These are some good points, I think that as a rule of thumb if you can approach a challenge with a round-by.round approach maybe the old way are still better to handle it. Skill challenges on the other hand, being abstract, works better with more abstracted scenarios, for example there is a village that is on the route of an approaching goblin horde, you don't know how many time do you have but you must prepare the village defenses, this is a, IMHO, perfect situation to handle with a skill challenge, diplomacy to ask the help of near villages,temples, etc knowledge history to better setup the fortification based on what you know of previous goblin invasions, intimidation to "persuade" the commoner to help with the defenses rather than just run away, etc.
Skill challenges are at their best with scenarios that can be abstracted IMHO...

(emphasis added)

I agree. And yet the irony is that when you produced an example, you did not naturally produce one which was abstract. Rather, you engaged your natural DM creativity to produce a non-abstract scenario in which various concrete actions by the PCs produce various concrete results. The example you gave is not best handled as a skill challenge if you in fact want to have some sort of PC participation in the battle because each concrete action is more than just a success that contributes to overall success, but a success which contributes a particular concrete resource - reinforcements from a nearby village, low level spellcasters from the temple, fortifications to provide defenses in battle, higher moral in particular units, and so forth fepending on PC action. If the eventual intention is to have some sort of skirmish, running this as a skill challenge makes little sense because the total number of successes means much less than the particular outcome of each success. You'd probably only run it as a skill challenge if the intention was to leave the battle purely abstract as well - something that the PC's only witness or hear about rather than participate in by fighting and leading troops.

Skill challenges are at there best when not only is the scenario abstract, but each success (or failure) creates some interchangable abstract resource the total of which can be thought of as success. So far, the best designed skill challenges are those that deal with things like winning affection or prestige from a particular person or community, moving some abstract distance (Oregon Trail style scenarios, a mile is a mile), or running a merchantile business (money is money).

There have been alot of suggestions for things that are sorta like skill challenges, but not really when you look at them closely. For example, a challenge that involves running an obstacle course to prove your manhood might be resolved if you get X successes but not Y failures, but the actual skill checks involved are to some extent predecided in a way that seems to run contrary to the notion of a skill challenge. The trap as skill challenge scenarios suffer from the same problem in that yes, you can route yourself around the trap with obilique thinking, but the straight forward way through the door still involves the classic concrete techniques of 'thievery' or bashing the door down and more or less all participants (DM and players) seem to expect this. Similarly, you could run things like 'preparing a meal' or 'defending someone in court' in a skill challengy way that involved several different skills and tallying successes, but the skills to be used are still highly constrained by the concreteness of the scenario. If you do that, there is no real change in paradigm between how skills are used and how they have been used in the past in published scenarios (I can think of 'running a farm' scenarios in Dungeon and 'fighting a battle' scenarios in Dragonlance and many others that used the same basic mechanic); certainly not the big change in paradigm to a more narrativist and less simulationist construct that many early adopters of skill challenges advocated and embraced.

Of course, we haven't seen the actual rules yet. It could be that the actual rules are merely an endorsement of this long standing tradition in D&D and RPGs in general. It could be that they are not even rules at all, but guidelines readily embrassing and even listing some of the different ways of tallying up success I've mentioned. It could be literally nothing more than design advice and all this sound and thunder on all sides is over nothing. It could be that the intention is merely to give novice DMs exposure to these techniques to inspire and enliven gameplay. I'd be all for that, and I have to say that I'm impressed by and refreshed by the maturity that I'm seeing alot of DMs pickup from 4E. I love the rules of 3E but I have to admit that as a whole the game wasn't, based on my experience, good for producing quality players. Seeing players embrace the non-combat RP side of the game again is good, in no small part because it gives me some hope that the ill-effects of making the games combat more boardgame like will be mitigated.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I've mentioned. It could be literally nothing more than design advice and all this sound and thunder on all sides is over nothing.

Huh. That's all I ever expected it to be (plus more skills for PCs to better accommodate its use by more players). And, I still think its deserving of the attention. In all my years at ENWorld, I haven't seen advice along these lines before. I hadn't even seen task vs. conflict resolution mechanics discussed before the skill challenge system was mentioned. To a lot of people, that is worth sound and thunder.

As for the "abstracting" thing, the Escape from Sembia challenge is more abstract than most people have been using the skill system. As an example, take climbing a wall to get you closer to your objective (an escape). In 3e, most would say that you have climbed the wall, but you would have to put that to use somehow. The guards would have to fail their climb checks or you would have to use the layout of the city to find a direction to run which would take you out of their sight or some other such very concrete, directional, simulationist, approach to escape.

By making it a skill challenge, making the check gets you further from the guards. Why? It isn't defined by the skill itself or by the movement itself or whatever. It is defined by the fact that you succeeded in a challenge. Now you're one step closer to freedom. Why? That is for you to decide. Perhaps abstract isn't the right term... ambiguous is far better, or perhaps nebulous. How concrete you want to make the reasoning is left for the narrative. The skill itself, the skill challenge itself, they don't matter. What matters is how you want to describe the scene.

I think that concept for a lot of people is totally brand new. The skills don't define what happened? I do?? What??? That's crazy.. that's... hmm... kind of interesting. Then when you play it out, its crazy fun, interactive, and leads to all kinds of role playing. But, nobody ever suggested it to me before, so I didn't know about it. Now that I do, I think its pretty freakin' awesome!

 

[Lacyon]

Huh. That's all I ever expected it to be (plus more skills for PCs to better accommodate its use by more players). And, I still think its deserving of the attention. In all my years at ENWorld, I haven't seen advice along these lines before. I hadn't even seen task vs. conflict resolution mechanics discussed before the skill challenge system was mentioned. To a lot of people, that is worth sound and thunder.

Precisely.