Why must numbers go up?

[MerricB]

Thanks, MerricB!

I must admit, those figures don't pop right into my head as an intuitive assessment.

(The replacement of everything from 2 failures through 6 with 3 does not appear in the third consolidated errata, issued two months after the DMG, either, so I infer that there is at least a fourth.)

Good inference. (FYI, current updates).

Skill challenges are wacky. The maths behind them is odd, to say the least, and although I give figures up to 90% there, I have often found that the actual percentage chance of a character who is using the right skill is... 100%

Skill challenges really don't work when you just sit down and roll dice. I'm negotiating with the Duke. +10 on my Diplomacy checks, I need a 12. Need 6 successes before 3 failures. Roll. Roll. Roll. Roll. Roll. Roll. Done! Dull as dishwater.

The skill challenges I've seen *work* impose more structure onto the system. Take this one, from the recent D&D Encounters series: the idea is you're travelling through Undermountain, following a map, trying to get to a particular spot. Instead of mapping out and having lots of encounters in Undermountain, the travel is done via skill challenge:

* One character makes a Dungeoneering check to interpret the map.
* Regardless of the success of that, they find themselves with a really tough encounter (which as 1st level PCs, they really won't be able to take). They can sneak by it (group Stealth) or have one person distract it then run (Endurance). Or maybe it is a trap, where someone has to disarm it (Thievery). Failure brings loss of surges, etc.
* Repeat until 6 successes are achieved, or the group fail three times (in which case they get beaten up a lot before they achieve their goal).
* If the group is really lost with Dungeoneering, then they can ask someone (or something) using Streetwise or Intimidate to get back onto track.

It's a nice way of abstracting away something that otherwise could take a very long time. No, not sandbox, but really good skill challenges allow for some interesting play.

The question is this: what do skill challenges reward?
* Good skill selection during character creation
* Good choices of which skill/tactic to try next during the challenge

Getting the latter to apply is hard work; it's very easy to just say "roll this, this and this and you're done". It's much better when the players have to think about what they're doing. Unfortunately, the role of the actual skill numbers in skill challenges tend to be a bit binary. If you have the skill, it's rarely a problem. If you don't have the skill, you have a problem. The interesting choice is more "Do I use Bluff or Intimidate?" when you have both...

Against these "level appropriate" skill challenges, 4e retains a few "level independent" skill rolls, such as the Athletic check needed to jump something. I'd be happier if it had a few more of these; especially as the skill check target numbers should be harder than the skill challenge numbers!

Cheers!

 

[pemerton]

The question is this: what do skill challenges reward?
* Good skill selection during character creation
* Good choices of which skill/tactic to try next during the challenge

Getting the latter to apply is hard work; it's very easy to just say "roll this, this and this and you're done". It's much better when the players have to think about what they're doing. Unfortunately, the role of the actual skill numbers in skill challenges tend to be a bit binary. If you have the skill, it's rarely a problem. If you don't have the skill, you have a problem. The interesting choice is more "Do I use Bluff or Intimidate?" when you have both...

If the goal is simply numerical success in the skill challenge, I agree with what you've said. I think it gets a bit more complex when the players care not only about manipulating the situation to allow them to apply their numerically best skills, but also care about the ingame implications of the way the skill challenge is unfolding. For example, if they don't want a reputation as cruel, they might be hesitant to use Intimidate even though that would be a numerically strong option.

 

[LostSoul]

pemerton - I think that only happens when the DM doesn't have a pre-planned outcome. I'm pretty sure the DMG suggests that the outcome of the skill challenge is fixed, for both success and failure.

 

[pemerton]

LostSoul, you're probably right about that.

It seems to me that the GM has to have some general conception of where the skill challenge is headed, or else it becomes too hard to set a complexity. In particular, you can't easily increase the complexity on the fly, because that penalises the players for not adopting a strategy that is well-suited to a more complex challenge - such as more liberal use of aiding another. Although maybe you could handle this by allowing secondary checks to eliminate failures - as it becomes obvious that the players are more invested in pushing through a more complex situation, the PCs in the gameworld make the effort to change the existing ingame situation to one more favourable to their purposes. (Reducing complexity - ie when the players are happy with the situation they have arrived at from a smaller number of successes - seems fine, and I've done that in play without any trouble - it just reduces the XP award.)

But to get the most out of the mechanic there has to be scope for the players to shape the action and the direction that the skill challenge takes - otherwise (it seems to me) you're not really getting the benefits of an extended conflict resolution mechanic.

I think I said somewhere upthread that the relationship between level and complexity as the two dimensions of mechanical difficulty is something that the rules really need to explain in more detail - thinking about your point has made me get a clearer sense of one reason why this is so. So far it hasn't caused me huge problems, but you're making me wonder if it will in the future.

Have you had any experience with increasing the complexity of a skill challenge on the fly?

 

[vagabundo]

I'm still finding my feet with skill challenges and I've had some truely awful ones.


But the ones that have worked well for me (a mechanical bridge trap and influcing the council) have had very strong goals and i put some work in to them before hand. I'm not good at "ad-hoc"ing a skill challenge just yet.

I'm please with the outcomes I had for the council SK, it really influenced how my adventure progressed, it was very open ended. If it was a total failure the BBEG would have take over the Seven Pillared Hall and the PCs would have been in big trouble.

 

[Ariosto]

Bringing this back around to the actual topic of number inflation and, specifically, of arbitrarily inflated DCs, what do we see?

We see that it is the DM's discretion that determines whether the chance of success is 90% (single roll against DC), or less than 16% (Complexity 5, -5 for secondary skill).

That's pretty close to the range from 100% to 0%. Moreover, that is by a much more conservative reading of the rules than I know many 4e DMs -- who could cite chapter and verse -- maintain.

On the other hand, one can hit an AC 20 points or more above one's bonus only 5% of the time, and hits one so far below 95% of the time. That "reflexive" adjustment not only creates the 19:1 "cliff", but narrows the really workable "plateau". Going beyond 3:2 tends to be coupled with already significant differences in hit points and damage that the hit chances reinforce.

That raises again the question of "why", because D&D went for a long time with chances to hit generally increasing by level. I don't recall anyone scoffing at a purple worm because of its modest AC. Being able to hit it (or, for that matter, Orcus) did not mean one was going to beat it!

 

[ExploderWizard]

That raises again the question of "why", because D&D went for a long time with chances to hit generally increasing by level. I don't recall anyone scoffing at a purple worm because of its modest AC. Being able to hit it (or, for that matter, Orcus) did not mean one was going to beat it!

Yup. Hit points are not such a bad thing when allowed to do thier job. I like the idea that a small army of regular soldiers can defeat the purple worm (probably at great cost) but a handful of heroic adventurers can do the same job perhaps at a lesser cost.

The concept of that small army not being able to score a hit against that semi-soft target larger than a house due to level differences is absurd and prime example of the game world being subservient to the mechanics.

 

[ggroy]

The concept of that small army not being able to score a hit against that semi-soft target larger than a house due to level differences is absurd and prime example of the game world being subservient to the mechanics.

If you were to redesign the D&D mechanics (any edition), what would you do to get around this problem of level differences?

 

[ExploderWizard]

If you were to redesign the D&D mechanics (any edition), what would you do to get around this problem of level differences?

It was already done. Higher level characters got better at hitting (attack bonus) yet defenses (AC) were based on what made sense for the target. So a large bloated worm was not super difficult for the typical soldier to hit and adventurers of high level could scarcely miss. You could see easily that the adventurer was improving in skill due to an increased overall hit percentage.

Now that worm had the hitpoints of a small army so many hits were needed to defeat it. If the high level adventurer had as much difficulty hitting the broad side of a barn at 15th level as he did swinging a sword at a kobold at level 1 how could he say there was measurable improvement over his career?

To do this we would have to make the worm so tough that a soldier couldn't even hit it. Then the high level fighter looks impressive for hitting the broad side of a barn 50-65% of the time. It also means that a single worm could wipe out armies of thousands unless our hero happened to be nearby. This is perfectly OK since such a creature won't spawn unless a hero capable of hitting it is nearby.

 

[ggroy]

The +level/2 adjustment to AC and other defenses in 4E D&D, is insidious in this regard.

Older TSR editions of D&D didn't have as precise a scaling of AC with level.