Untrained/trained Skills....Noooo!

[jasin]

Thank god, the people I play with are actually entertaining and the GMs actually understand how to switch between groups at different locations and keep them occupied.

With a group of such superior quality, you should have no trouble adapting even to Saga-like skills then.

Meanwhile, less excellent DMs and players might find their games improved by a system that makes it easier for the DM to engage most of the group.

So everybody's happy, right?

 

[Zurai]

How else would you design a party-based game?

By including enough solo/fragmented party content that the aforementioned individual strengths and weaknesses have some face time as well?

 

[Zurai]

Ah, but we're not supposed to be emulating fantasy or sci-fi movies, are we?

Says who? I've heard the designers say several times that they want the game to feel more cinematic.

 

[Grog]

By including enough solo/fragmented party content that the aforementioned individual strengths and weaknesses have some face time as well?

If you can do this without making everyone else sit around doing nothing while one player has all the fun, then great.

IME it doesn't usually work that way. So I prefer that the whole party be engaged in the game as often as possible.

 

[Zurai]

If you can do this without making everyone else sit around doing nothing while one player has all the fun, then great.

This is a player problem, not a design problem. If players cannot stay interested in the game when they aren't the ones doing the immediate action, how do you ever get through combat?

 

[Grog]

This is a player problem, not a design problem. If players cannot stay interested in the game when they aren't the ones doing the immediate action, how do you ever get through combat?

Please. The break between turns in combat is not nearly as long as the break between "turns" can get in other situations. As Remathilis pointed out, if the party rogue decides to scout out an area by himself (because he's the only one who has a chance of staying hidden), that basically amounts to a solo adventure for the rogue while the other players twiddle their thumbs.

That most certainly is not a player problem.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

It is; you can't make knowledge checks {in SWSA} with a DC of 15 or higher untrained.

I was thinking the same sort of thing while reading just abit upthread, altho in keeping with my favorite Sean Reynolds rant on avoiding absolutes, I think I would prefer a rule similar to:

Untrained attempts for checks of DC 15 or greater incur a -5 penalty to the check.
In this fashion it would be 'possible' for an untrained character to pull something out of hat of knowledge, but very rare.

This would put the spread for higher level uses to 20 points instead of 15. Perhaps a good thing?

 

[Celebrim]

As Remathilis pointed out, if the party rogue decides to scout out an area by himself (because he's the only one who has a chance of staying hidden), that basically amounts to a solo adventure for the rogue while the other players twiddle their thumbs.

That most certainly is not a player problem.

Wait a minute here. It might not be a player 'problem' but it is a player decision. The DM doesn't decide whether the whole party or just one rogue is going to scout out something.

You can pretend all you like that this has to do with disparities in skill levels, but its nothing of the sort. It's the inherent nature of scouting that small groups draw less attention to themselves than large groups. Even if the entire party was sneaky rogues, it would still be a perfectly valid choice (and maybe even the safest choice) to just send one player character in on a scouting mission.

Suppose you have a party of 8 sneaky rogues, and each has a 95% chance of sneaking into and out of the camp without being noticed.

If I send in the whole party, that's a 33% chance that we will rouse the camp. I'm far better off sending in just one sneaky rogue (preferably the sneakiest), so that I have a 95% chance of mission success. If I absolutely need more than one rogue for some reason (maybe I have to carry out something heavy) I'm going to choose to send in the minimum number of players to carry out the mission because that's the smart thing to do. If something goes wrong, then I'll try to sneak in with whoever didn't go the first time to rescue the first player/group. I'm not going to go, 'Hey. Let's risk a campaign ending TPK because its not fun for some of us to wait for an hour while one guy does his thing.' And if one of the other players suggested that he wants to risk the mission and the party and possibly the campaign because its boring to stay behind, I'm going to percieve that player as being a serious liability.

The fact everyone is reasonably likely to succeed does not inherently turn an individual challenge into a group challenge. Just because everyone could theoretically climb the wall, doesn't mean that you don't send one guy up first and have him throw down a rope for everyone else. To force it to be a group challenge there needs to be some additive rather than subtractive value to more people (odds of success have to go up rather than down, as almost never happens on a stealth mission), and usually there has to be a tightly constrained ammount of time to complete the task. And to force it to be a skill challenge as well, you have to have a situation where less skillful classes don't have a stronger alternative solution which more or less gets around the need for skill ranks completely (for example, turning invisible, flying, etc.)

 

[Zurai]

Wait a minute here. It might not be a player 'problem' but it is a player decision.

Thank you for explaining it much better than I have been.

Everyone else, read what he just wrote and ignore what I've written. He said it a lot better.

 

[MerricB]

I'm hard pressed to think of a single example of a fantasy or sci-fi movie or book that I've enjoyed where the characters were together for the entirety of the plot, and never once had to split up - which has the benefit of exposing both their strengths and their weaknesses.

Indeed. Good novels and films will normally break up the party.

However, how many good novels do you know where you have to skip 50 pages of the text and wait 1 hour (doing nothing) before you can start again?

This is a game, not a novel.

Player downtime is a big, big problem in most games. In any three-hour 3-player game, you can normally expect each player to get 1 hour of play and 2 hours of downtime. (That's boardgame, cardgame, RPG, etc.) However, the length of each period of downtime is important.

Thankfully, in D&D, being a RPG, even not acting can be fun as you're watching the other players do stuff. This can really come to the fore in role-playing sections, as the other players enjoy the banter between their spokespeople and the DM's NPCs.

Bad is when the adventure design *forces* this downtime on players. It's acceptable if the group chooses it. It's not acceptable when the rogue just wants to rob houses "because". (Me!Me!Me!Me!Me!)

Cheers!