Two Example Skill Challenges

[Just Another User]

(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.

While I don't disagree with you, I think here we are enetering the insidious ground that are personal tastes, I think the preparation for battle works better if abstracted (just the preparation, not the battle itself) something like (for example) if you win the challenge you start the battle with 50 lv3 "Peasant Militia", if you fali with 20 lvl 1 "Scared Commoner", if the extra units and levels come from near villages, morale for better fortification or just better training is not relelvant. Of course a DM could handle all than not abstractly i.e the diplomacy with near temple give you X, the history check give you Y, ecc, but this need either a very experienced DM to come up on the fly with appropriate (and balanced) rewards for every check or a lot of preparation and a certain degree of railroading in the "!no, you can't do that because I didn't thought of it before and I'm not prepared to it")
Skill challengs have the advantage tobe a) simple to use even for inexperienced DM and b) to give player a certain grade of freedom in how they use their skills.
Just to avoid possible misunderstanding when I say abstracted Imean not-detailed the escape from Sembia is abstracted becuase you don't need a map of the city or the number and stats of every single guard, it is abstracted enough that a succesfull history check literaly "create" a secret escape tunnel in the sewers. In the same way the defend a village is abstracted because the DM don't need a map of the place or to know exactly how many
people there are in the village or even if there are near villages where to ask for help, these informations will come out depending even on the decisions of the players.
Of course some DM could have a detailed map of the place and stats for many, if not all, of the people in the village, in that case probably skill challenges could not be appropriate to the situation.

 

[Celebrim]

Huh. That's all I ever expected it to be...

Really? Because later on in this post you expect it to be something else very novel and new. Read closely. What I said is incompatible with what you said later in the post I'm quoting.

I hadn't even seen task vs. conflict resolution mechanics discussed before the skill challenge system was mentioned.

Huh? Among other things, I don't know how many times I've discused the nuances of 'I make a search check' vs. 'I search behind the painting' or the advantages and disadvantages of abstracting several detailed die rolls into a single stunt to encourage more cinematic heroics. Granted, since I was comparing 1e to 3e I was most often focusing on what was different in the task resolution between the two, but I know there have been lots of discussions on similar themes before. Either that or I was just imagining making people upset and angry.

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.

But my point is that this isn't how most people are playing when they post examples of introducing skill challenges into thier games. The OPs examples look nothing like that. In those examples the door was unlocked because he made a skill check to unlock it. The trap was disarmed because he made a skill check to disarm it. In 90% of the examples of incorporating skill challenges into the game I've seen, they haven't been this sort of novel game play (and I agree it is new to D&D) that you describe. Instead, they look more like simulationist gaming than not, and I'm arguing that that is actually better for most peoples games than this novel subsystem you are a proponent of. In other words, by getting it 'wrong' they are in my opinion getting it right. In other words, by getting it 'wrong' - by not playing in what you are saying is the 4e style - they are nonetheless having a rich interactive experience using what is basically 3e (and earlier style) task resolution. And that's great IMO. What I don't want to see is the IMO narrowly applicable and for most tables jarring 'skill challenge' as you describe it get in the way of what I see as a reinnaisance in interesting simulationist encounter design.

 

[D'karr]

Really? Because later on in this post you expect it to be something else very novel and new. Read closely. What I said is incompatible with what you said later in the post I'm quoting.



Huh? Among other things, I don't know how many times I've discused the nuances of 'I make a search check' vs. 'I search behind the painting' or the advantages and disadvantages of abstracting several detailed die rolls into a single stunt to encourage more cinematic heroics. Granted, since I was comparing 1e to 3e I was most often focusing on what was different in the task resolution between the two, but I know there have been lots of discussions on similar themes before. Either that or I was just imagining making people upset and angry.



But my point is that this isn't how most people are playing when they post examples of introducing skill challenges into thier games. The OPs examples look nothing like that. In those examples the door was unlocked because he made a skill check to unlock it. The trap was disarmed because he made a skill check to disarm it. In 90% of the examples of incorporating skill challenges into the game I've seen, they haven't been this sort of novel game play (and I agree it is new to D&D) that you describe. Instead, they look more like simulationist gaming than not, and I'm arguing that that is actually better for most peoples games than this novel subsystem you are a proponent of. In other words, by getting it 'wrong' they are in my opinion getting it right. In other words, by getting it 'wrong' - by not playing in what you are saying is the 4e style - they are nonetheless having a rich interactive experience using what is basically 3e (and earlier style) task resolution. And that's great IMO. What I don't want to see is the IMO narrowly applicable and for most tables jarring 'skill challenge' as you describe it get in the way of what I see as a reinnaisance in interesting simulationist encounter design.

And I don't think anyone has said that the two systems are mutually exclusive. Why would skill challenges make the older task resolution go away or get in the way?

 

[Celebrim]

While I don't disagree with you, I think here we are enetering the insidious ground that are personal tastes

Do we ever really leave that country?

I think the preparation for battle works better if abstracted (just the preparation, not the battle itself) something like (for example) if you win the challenge you start the battle with 50 lv3 "Peasant Militia", if you fali with 20 lvl 1 "Scared Commoner", if the extra units and levels come from near villages, morale for better fortification or just better training is not relelvant.

Suppose my players decided that the best use of thier time was making 'Conan the Barbarian' style preparations for the battle - fortifactions, stakes, weapon caches, etc. I've had players or been in groups that would get heavily into that sort of thing. When the battle comes am I going to tell them that there work and planning has no presence or role in the battle and that the results of the battle have no logical connection to the preparation that they made? Players IME do things because they want to produce a particular outcome. When proposition A doesn't produce outcome B, I better have a good explanation or I will be percieved as unfair, DMing badly, being railroady, and/or not listening to the players. And frankly, they would be right in that assessment.

Of course a DM could handle all than not abstractly i.e the diplomacy with near temple give you X, the history check give you Y, ecc, but this need either a very experienced DM to come up on the fly with appropriate (and balanced) rewards for every check

On the contrary, I think logical rewards are easier to come up with and handle than abstract ones. If the players win the support of a local temple, then its easier to imagine the concrete results of that than it is to abstractly imagine what that resource translates into and what abstract value it has.

As an aside, I'm not terribly worried about whether or not the rewards are balanced. If a local temple has a 17th level cleric in it that can mop up the foes easily, and didn't want that then its my fault for putting uber-PCs in local villages to outshine the players and the players credit that they used that resource. That it 'ruins' my plans is trivial. If I didn't foresee thier plans and can't handle them, again that's my bad - not the players.

Skill challengs have the advantage tobe a) simple to use even for inexperienced DM and b) to give player a certain grade of freedom in how they use their skills.

I've got 25 years of experience as a DM and I question my ability to run skill challenges as some have described them. I'm not just bringing up these examples to denegrate 4e - I'm bringing them up because I'm literally not sure I'd know what to do except toss the skill challenge out the window and go back to what I know. I'm not at all sure that skill challenges are easier for an inexperienced DM except that I think that by not understanding them, when problems arise inexperienced DMs are likely to toss the rules out the window without knowing it. Which they probably should IMO.

Of course some DM could have a detailed map of the place and stats for many, if not all, of the people in the village, in that case probably skill challenges could not be appropriate to the situation.

Again, I agree. Which I why I've said that skill challenges and dungeons are incompatible, and that you only get them to work together by ignoring aspects of one or the other.

 

[Just Another User]

But my point is that this isn't how most people are playing when they post examples of introducing skill challenges into thier games. The OPs examples look nothing like that. In those examples the door was unlocked because he made a skill check to unlock it. The trap was disarmed because he made a skill check to disarm it. In 90% of the examples of incorporating skill challenges into the game I've seen, they haven't been this sort of novel game play (and I agree it is new to D&D) that you describe. Instead, they look more like simulationist gaming than not, and I'm arguing that that is actually better for most peoples games than this novel subsystem you are a proponent of. In other words, by getting it 'wrong' they are in my opinion getting it right. In other words, by getting it 'wrong' - by not playing in what you are saying is the 4e style - they are nonetheless having a rich interactive experience using what is basically 3e (and earlier style) task resolution. And that's great IMO. What I don't want to see is the IMO narrowly applicable and for most tables jarring 'skill challenge' as you describe it get in the way of what I see as a reinnaisance in interesting simulationist encounter design.

Well, on this I totally agree, the OP examples are -with all respect- bad examples for Skill Challenges. As I've asked before, what if the player rolled and succeded a thievery check to disable the trap before to have enough success to win the challenge? . The problem is exactly that those examples are not absrtact and there is no way they can be abstracted and then would be better handled by the traditional D&D way that by skill challenges, to disamr a trap, you disarm a trap, to open a door you open a door, a knowledege check could give you a bonus, not make you win the challenge even before you touch the door.

I was not even a skill challenge fan, but that have just be because most of the skill challenges I've seen where used in the wrong situations, where just rolling skills to see if you succeded would have worked better, but now I think that there are some specific case where the use of skill challenges could improve the game. I have to see the complete rules before to say for cartain if I really like it or not.

 

[Lacyon]

But my point is that this isn't how most people are playing when they post examples of introducing skill challenges into thier games. The OPs examples look nothing like that. In those examples the door was unlocked because he made a skill check to unlock it. The trap was disarmed because he made a skill check to disarm it.

So, what they've done is to take the lessons learned from the skill challenge abstraction and applied them to their own style of play to come up with a more interesting method of resolving situations they've usually had? Sounds like something worth celebrating to me.

In 90% of the examples of incorporating skill challenges into the game I've seen, they haven't been this sort of novel game play (and I agree it is new to D&D) that you describe. Instead, they look more like simulationist gaming than not, and I'm arguing that that is actually better for most peoples games than this novel subsystem you are a proponent of.

I disagree with your assessment. The players have reacted to the situations in a "simulationist" manner, and the GM described the results of their interactions in a "simulationst" manner. The actual success or failure of the skill challenges was still determined abstractly. Had the player rolled Thievery to disarm it for the fourth (or first) success, another complication would have arisen requiring another success to actually win the challenge.

In other words, by getting it 'wrong' they are in my opinion getting it right. In other words, by getting it 'wrong' - by not playing in what you are saying is the 4e style - they are nonetheless having a rich interactive experience using what is basically 3e (and earlier style) task resolution. And that's great IMO. What I don't want to see is the IMO narrowly applicable and for most tables jarring 'skill challenge' as you describe it get in the way of what I see as a reinnaisance in interesting simulationist encounter design.

In other words, the system could probably be made more involved, detailed, and complex than we've thus far seen revealed. For some people, that involved, detailed, and complex supersystem would probably even be worth the effort to create and use.

Most of the people actually running these things right now seem to be pretty happy taking the scraps of what we've actually seen and running pretty far with them. The OP, for example, is pretty unlikely to be very disappointed in the ultimate rules on skill challenges no matter what they are, because he's already taking the barest scraps of the system and running with it - he can always fall back on his own method.

All he really needed was the barest glimpse into insight.

 

[ThirdWizard]

But my point is that this isn't how most people are playing when they post examples of introducing skill challenges into thier games. The OPs examples look nothing like that.

Aha! I see. I wasn't thinking along those lines.

I think one of the things about this whole thing has been people rethinking how to use skills. There's a middle ground that is great (and we can see them in lots of the examples). But, yes, a true conflict resolution system would be more like...

PC: I look around!
DM: Why?
PC: Maybe I can find an escape hatch.
DM: Roll it.
PC: *rolls* 16...
DM: You find a trap door in the ceiling, but it looks like it hasn't been used in some time.

That concept is what really intrigues me, personally. Other people have taken other things, melded it more with the 3e style of task resolution, and created a really neat system that doesn't look like what we've seen from 4e or from 3e in all respects. But, for me, that's great! Because, I don't think of this as anything more than advice or guidelines. I see it more as a "Hey, here's a neat way to use skills" with a framework for how to do it.

Even so, yes, I do think a combination of the two is best, the tool that matches the problem so to speak. I'm hopeful that reading the 4e DMG will help continue this line of discussion, these fun examples and play reports, and that we'll continue to evolve the system. In that respect, its given us more, I think, than 3e did, even if most people don't use it to the letter.

 

[Lacyon]

Well, on this I totally agree, the OP examples are -with all respect- bad examples for Skill Challenges. As I've asked before, what if the player rolled and succeded a thievery check to disable the trap before to have enough success to win the challenge?

There are several possible answers to this question. Possibly the most obvious is to ask the player how he uses Thievery to disarm the trap - and using his answer describe how he makes progress towards disarming the trap rather than eliminating the challenge all in one go. I'd do this if someone breaks out the Thievery skill early in the challenge.

Another possibility is to allow him to successfully disarm the trap, but introduce another complication (the PCs still need to escape from the room, for example), requiring additional successes to overcome. I'd use this option if someone breaks out Thievery when only a couple more successes are needed, and only if there's room for several more failures.

Yet another possibility is to simply allow the PCs to "win" early. I'd only personally only use this one if the PC came up with a particularly clever method of solving the problem, or maybe if the group is just getting bored with the challenge.

I'm sure others can come up with plenty more possibilities.

 

[Ravingdork]

What I absolutely hate about skill challenges, is many of the skill challenges can be overcome without any uses of skills whatsoever.

In the crushing wall trap example, no doubt one of my players would say something like "I cast my wall of iron utility spell to brace the walls and stop their movement."

How would this not be an autosuccess? How would this not be stealing the spotlight away from the other players and the skill challenge in general?

This actually happened in a practice session recently. No less then 2 of my 4 players tried to overcome the skill challenge in a manner that didn't include skills and I was forced to remind them that it was a SKILL challenge and that they should follow along so they can see what a skill challenge is going to be like in 4E.

Guess what? They don't care for skill challenges anymore as they find it too limiting.

 

[ThirdWizard]

In the crushing wall trap example, no doubt one of my players would say something like "I cast my wall of iron utility spell to brace the walls and stop their movement."

But... that's a trap not a skill challenge.

Anyway, part of the point is being creative. If the PC wants to convince the dwarven lord to aid them by charming him, then great! There might be consequences later, but that's not breaking the rules or anything.