Anatomy of Failed Design: Skill Challenges

[Kaelik]

Now present an in depth definition of "everyone" that includes the party members, does not include their hirelings, includes the Barbarian they left drunk at the tavern because he sucks at diplomacy, and does not include the Barbarian Drunk at the Tavern because he is roleplaying his character.

Oh wait. You can't.

[NineInchNall]

The solution is not to arbitrarily force all players to participate. It is to create a mechanic that rewards the players for contributing. I mean seriously, is that such a fucking hard concept?

You want X to happen, so you create a mechanic that gives incentives for doing X. You don't simply say, "You must do X."

'Cause that would be lame.

[Titanium Dragon]

The solution is not to arbitrarily force all players to participate. It is to create a mechanic that rewards the players for contributing. I mean seriously, is that such a fucking hard concept?

You want X to happen, so you create a mechanic that gives incentives for doing X. You don't simply say, "You must do X."

'Cause that would be lame.

Combat arbitrarily forces all players to participate as well in 4th edition, because if they don't, the encounter becomes overwhelming in many cases. And this isn't a bad thing.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Combat arbitrarily forces all players to participate as well in 4th edition, because if they don't, the encounter becomes overwhelming in many cases. And this isn't a bad thing.

Skill challenges get harder the more people you have participate. Combat gets easier the more people you have participate.

And before you misrepresent my statement, yes, there are some qualifiers to this statement. If you have four barbarians for a 'diplomatize the king' skill challenge then having a bard participate increases your chance of success. If you're fighting a dragon in tight quarters then having an army of naked peasants decreases your chance of success.

But that's the general rule.

I really don't see what's so difficult about this.

[Titanium Dragon]

Combat arbitrarily forces all players to participate as well in 4th edition, because if they don't, the encounter becomes overwhelming in many cases. And this isn't a bad thing.

Skill challenges get harder the more people you have participate. Combat gets easier the more people you have participate.

And before you misrepresent my statement, yes, there are some qualifiers to this statement. If you have four barbarians for a 'diplomatize the king' skill challenge then having a bard participate increases your chance of success. If you're fighting a dragon in tight quarters then having an army of naked peasants decreases your chance of success.

But that's the general rule.

I really don't see what's so difficult about this.

Having 5 people in the party doesn't actually make combat easier, because you also face an extra person worth of monsters, from a mechanistic point of view.

[Thymos]

TD:

That's retarded. Fighting a level 14 dragon is easier with 5 level 14 people than 4 level 14 people.

Since when do skill challenges scale to the number of people in the group?

Do you disagree that the best way to get everyone involved is to make them want to all get involved?

That's what we're trying to say. You seem to disagree and think the best way is to arbitrarily force everyone to be involved.

[Guyr Adamantine]

[/lurk]

TD:

That's retarded. Fighting a level 14 dragon is easier with 5 level 14 people than 4 level 14 people.

Besides, an extra set of actions and options is worth more than the additional ennemies, if only because of the team's versatility.

Assuming, of course, that the extra character isn't useless against the specific opponent. (Enchanter versus undead, for example)

[Lurk]

[Data Vampire]

TD:

That's retarded. Fighting a level 14 dragon is easier with 5 level 14 people than 4 level 14 people.

The standard challenge has one normal monster per player.
Fighting that extra monster is supposed to level out the challenge.

[Doom]

Except, of course, where it doesn't. In fact, I'm putting together a long piece on how many monster abilities vary dramatically depending on party size, and offer crude, minimal suggestions for how GMs can adjust for that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Except, of course, where it doesn't.

What the hell does that mean? Sure, there are some abilities like 'gain an extra point of attack per enemy within 10 squares of you', but they're the exception, not the rule. Your party isn't hurt more by the level 14 dragon breathing fire on everyone in a four-man party than a level 14 dragon breathing fire on everyone in a six-man party.

[Thymos]

TD:

That's retarded. Fighting a level 14 dragon is easier with 5 level 14 people than 4 level 14 people.

The standard challenge has one normal monster per player.
Fighting that extra monster is supposed to level out the challenge.

Skill challenges don't scale by party size. He was using Monsters as an analogy. If we are going to keep a relevant analogy here, we shouldn't scale one and not the other, and since Skill challenges do not scale and it's fairly easy to understand party sizes increasing when dealing with the same monster for the analogy nothing should scale.

I fail to see the objection, all that Lago was trying to do was make it clear that as far as fighting monsters go, not encounters, it's easier when you have more people. As opposed to skill challenges.

[Draco_Argentum]

With this condition, they are identical (well, extremely similar). Here's why:

Not really. X success in Y rounds is like combat. You never think to yourself, 'if only the fighter was dead this'd be easier'. X successes before Y failures does have that effect. The worst part is that it forces people to contribute fail to the encounter.

You're forcing character actions, which is annoying for people all the time. The fact that you're forcing people to make the group lose is just plain galling. You don't have people not take actions in combat because twiddling your thumbs there is retarded. Non-combat mechanics should be the same.

[Data Vampire]

What of the aid another option?

Let's say that I'm helping some fix a car. As I'm not knowledgeable in this area or mechanically minded. Because of that I really shouldn't mess around with the parts and would likely do more harm that good if I tried. However, I could still assist.

[RandomCasualty2]

Even if you fix the math, the basic problem remains that skill challenges have no meaningful choices. It's still just about picking the skill with the biggest bonus and mindlessly rolling. Has anyone even proposed a fix to that?

Since really, if you don't fix that, the rest of it is pretty meaningless.

[Username17]

Having 5 people in the party doesn't actually make combat easier, because you also face an extra person worth of monsters, from a mechanistic point of view.

This is straight false. While a "balanced combat" contains an extra monster, it isn't necessarily there. Any particular combat is easier if you have 5 people than if you have only 4. A particular combat could be against 4 enemies or 5 enemies. If you have 4 the first is considered balanced and the second is considered hard. If you have 5 players the first is easy and the second is balanced.

No particular encounter ever gets any harder just because you have more man power. The fact that the DM may send a different encounter against a more powerful party is just sleight of hand on your part.

-Username17

[Doom]

Except, of course, where it doesn't.

What the hell does that mean? Sure, there are some abilities like 'gain an extra point of attack per enemy within 10 squares of you', but they're the exception, not the rule. Your party isn't hurt more by the level 14 dragon breathing fire on everyone in a four-man party than a level 14 dragon breathing fire on everyone in a six-man party.

Uh, think that through a bit...the dragon's breath just did 50% more damage to the party in your example.

Granted, the party has roughly 50% more health, but the fact still remains that the breath attack does MORE, not less.

TD is, of course, talking about adjusting the encounter based on party size, but even in this case the effectiveness of monster abilities does relate to party size in a way that simply looking at the 'experience point budget' just isn't looking at the big picture.

Let's take a better example. Consider a level 8 character, against 1 Flameskull...that fireball attack isn't particularly devastating, eh? Easy win for the character (let's omit the possibility of a tiefling, a particular character with a particular advantage in this case. If it's a problem for you, consider the monster, "Iceskull", same monster, just dealing ice damage now, so same experience point cost).

Now, let's have 2 characters against two Flameskulls...still not bad.

5 level eight characters against five Flameskulls? Bad.

6 on 6? Mathematically a TPK in one round, if the Flameskulls go first, and massive devastation in most instances.

I could go with more subtle examples, but, absolutely, the effectiveness of monster abilities varies with party size (for an example of a negative relationship, consider Dominate...).

Note: not in any way disputing that if you keep the encounter fixed, adding characters will make the combat easier. Obviously, it does, outside of bizarro sitatuations.

[Thymos]

Wow Doom314, way to completely miss the point.

Take the original dragon example. The 4 man party is not hurt any more by adding 2 people. Those 4 people are hurt just the same, but they have 2 more people for the retaliation.

I'm not even going to respond to the second part of your post except to say:

The level 14 dragon is easier to kill with 6 level 14 characters than he is with 4. You and TD are the only ones bringing encounters scaled to parties into the picture.

[Username17]

Also, and this is important: in 4e a monster is not as powerful as a character of the same level. The more characters you have, the greater a relative bulge your team has over their team. 100 PCs vs. 100 monsters would be way easier than 5 PCs vs. 5 monsters.

More people on both sides brings the results closer to the average, and gives a greater proportional weight to the side who are more powerful.

-Username17

[Red_Rob]

There's just no real point to skill challenges beyond mindlessly tossing dice.

You pick the applicable skill with the best bonus and you roll it. Seriously that's the only strategy to it. It's not about roleplaying or tactics. A skill challenge is just a very simple algorithm where you run from best to worst of your skills and find whichever one your DM will let you use.

That's it. No roleplaying, no tactics... just roll a die.

Even if you fix the math, the basic problem remains that skill challenges have no meaningful choices. It's still just about picking the skill with the biggest bonus and mindlessly rolling. Has anyone even proposed a fix to that?

Since really, if you don't fix that, the rest of it is pretty meaningless.

Given these points, is it worth trying to fix skill challenges, or as Frank has pointed out would anything you ended up with be so far away as to be a skill challenge in name only?

[Kaelik]

I fucking agree with RC about this specific non combat mechanic. (Which never ever fucking happens ever.)

So I'll take a stab at it:

Skill challenges as an idea are about:

You have to do some shit not in combat! Roll Skills a bunch!

Now, this is different from the actual skill entries where you do something by rolling a skill check, because it's about a "challenge" that you beat by "rolling skills" which is against some DC.

Now, the obvious fact is that if you can use whatever skill has the highest bonus, you want to use that one. So you take your highest bonus skill: Athletics, and you see if you can convince the DM to allow you to tumble to impress the king.

If the DM says no, you move to your next highest skill: Knowledge History, and see if you can know something about some past king and make an analogy to him doing what you want.

The DM buys it, you roll +X vs Y and get a result of 1 added to value A or Value B depending on if you exceed Y or not.

Now, this is a shitty minigame in an entirely mechanics sense, what you are doing is going down a list of numbers from highest to lowest, and when the DM says yes, you can roll that number against the DC and that's it.

The only even arguably interesting part of this, and the only part of it that involves any player input at all (seriously, I will write you a Python Program that does everything else for you) is the part where you try to make up a reason the skill applies to the situation.

Frankly, this part is shitty.

It's like entering combat, but instead of a grid or movement or attacks with status effects, or even variable damages, you had to land 4 hits before you missed four times.

You have 3 attack values:
+7 Slashing
+5 Piercing
+3 Bludgeoning

You are fighting the Golem, so you make up an attack (I leap forward and chop it's arm off!) DM: You know that it reflects sword blades. (I Stab it in the eye) DM: It has no Eyes. (I draw my hammer and bang on it).

We don' tolerate that shit in combat, it's stupid. The DM doesn't get to tell you what you can and can't do with your actions, and making up your own shit in order to get a binary hit or miss value is stupid.

So while you might try to 'fix' skill challenges by forcing participation, or making the math work, or limiting which skills can be used so players don't get to make up bullshit reasons to use their highest skills, all of those are actually worse, because they seriously remove all the player inputs until you actually just run the computer program I write, and it tells you what skill you used (The highest that was allowed by the DM/system) and whether you succeed or fail.

But it's still just you trying to dress up the outcome of a computer program output.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Even if you fix the math, the basic problem remains that skill challenges have no meaningful choices. It's still just about picking the skill with the biggest bonus and mindlessly rolling. Has anyone even proposed a fix to that?

People have proposed two fixes:

1) Making the skills that will work much more rigid. This means that no matter how hard you try, you can't use 'Heal' in a 'convince the Ice Queen' skill challenge. This way instead of people picking their highest skill and trying to justify it you have people trying to figure out which skills are most likely to work and using them. Skill challenges become a puzzle where people make deductions about the nature of the challenge and try to solve it that way.

The biggest problem is that 4E just does not have enough skills to run a skill challenge compellingly like this. It's usually extremely obviously what skills will be helpful because there are so few of them. I'd even go as far as to say that Shadowrun does not have enough skills to support this method of play.

2) Eliminate rigidly defined skills altogether. Your skills are now stuff like 'Blacksmith' and 'Butler'. So while you 'spam' the same skill repeatedly you have to keep coming up with new justifications for how it works.
For example, in a 'scale the castle walls' skill challenge someone would use their 'Cowboy' skill to make a check to make a horse jump really high and then another Cowboy check to grab onto a castle rampart with their lasso.

This structure is a lot looser for skill challenges and leads to more magic teaparties. And thus argument. Again, 4E can't really support this method; skills are too narrowly defined. While it would be amusing and innovative to hear how someone with the Innkeeper or Gravekeeper skill would get into a castle, someone whose skill set consists of Heal/Religion/Insight/History is going to get boring after the first couple of skill challenges.

[RandomCasualty2]

1) Making the skills that will work much more rigid. This means that no matter how hard you try, you can't use 'Heal' in a 'convince the Ice Queen' skill challenge. This way instead of people picking their highest skill and trying to justify it you have people trying to figure out which skills are most likely to work and using them. Skill challenges become a puzzle where people make deductions about the nature of the challenge and try to solve it that way.

The biggest problem is that 4E just does not have enough skills to run a skill challenge compellingly like this. It's usually extremely obviously what skills will be helpful because there are so few of them. I'd even go as far as to say that Shadowrun does not have enough skills to support this method of play.

The problem is I really can't think of many situations where the skill you want to use isn't going to be obvious, even in a game with a lot of skills like SR. And really, your DM should tell you for the most part, because if you're trained, you'd know if that falls under your skill or not.

So all narrowing the skill set does is require that people have a certain skill.

Really it seems that you don't want a skill challenge at all, but rather just an overall puzzle challenge. Shadowrun is great for these, in that you may have three possible ways of infiltrating a building. Do you go the front door and rely on your bluff/forgery. Do you try to hack the back entrance, or do you try to scale the building and use the air ducts? Alternately you can decide to forgo skills and blow a hole in the front with a rocket launcher.

And that has some meaningful choices to make that people can have fun with and it's a lot more interesting than the 4E style skill encounter, where it's just :"There's a queen sitting here, see if you can convince her to help you."

I mean if you're going to do a purely social puzzle, you might as well just require the PCs to say the right thing and not really use skills at all, except maybe as mediums to gain clues into the queen's motivations. Because really the use of skills is going to be either real obvious (use diplomacy) or it's going to be some obscure bullshit "what am I thinking now?" puzzle (use history because she wants to hear about the elven wars for some reason).

2) Eliminate rigidly defined skills altogether. Your skills are now stuff like 'Blacksmith' and 'Butler'. So while you 'spam' the same skill repeatedly you have to keep coming up with new justifications for how it works.
For example, in a 'scale the castle walls' skill challenge someone would use their 'Cowboy' skill to make a check to make a horse jump really high and then another Cowboy check to grab onto a castle rampart with their lasso.

Yeah, this could work, assuming the entire challenge was just about making shit up. I don't really know how fun it would be after awhile though.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The problem is I really can't think of many situations where the skill you want to use isn't going to be obvious, even in a game with a lot of skills like SR. And really, your DM should tell you for the most part, because if you're trained, you'd know if that falls under your skill or not.

Well, just because you're a super-trained stealth-guy doesn't mean that you're going to sneak into the castle without a hitch. Doing this approach should mean that there are a series of branching challenges in a skill challenge rather than just binary outcomes.

Really it seems that you don't want a skill challenge at all, but rather just an overall puzzle challenge.

How is a puzzle challenge different from a skill challenge?

I mean if you're going to do a purely social puzzle, you might as well just require the PCs to say the right thing and not really use skills at all, except maybe as mediums to gain clues into the queen's motivations. Because really the use of skills is going to be either real obvious (use diplomacy) or it's going to be some obscure bullshit "what am I thinking now?" puzzle (use history because she wants to hear about the elven wars for some reason).

That's why I said that skills have to be much more subdivided than they are now. Diplomacy/Bluff/Intimidate is too broad: you now have Seduce, Joke with, Debate, Bargain, Physical Intimidation, Blackmail, Obfuscate, Appeal, Convince, Plead, Torture, and more.

I'm sure you could see the drawbacks of such a system already. I'm not saying that it's right for D&D, I'm just saying how you could get a version that works and is fun.

Yeah, this could work, assuming the entire challenge was just about making shit up. I don't really know how fun it would be after awhile though.

Making shit up was part of the design goal of 4E skill challenges, though; it was advertised as any skill being able to get past a skill challenge.

Now obviously that's not what's going on (read the DMG examples if you don't believe me) but that's what they were going for.

Though I agree, this kind of gameplay should be used sparing and if the DM has a lot of preparation. Requiring players to constantly Magic Tea Party their way past obstacles will get frustrating after awhile.

[RandomCasualty2]

Well, just because you're a super-trained stealth-guy doesn't mean that you're going to sneak into the castle without a hitch. Doing this approach should mean that there are a series of branching challenges in a skill challenge rather than just binary outcomes.

Sure, but the choice of which skill to use is still obvious.

"You see a sentry" (stealth)
"You come to a locked door" (open lock)
"There's a trapped corridor" (disable device)

So it's just a series of rolls, probably with a less binary effect. It's still not all that fun or engaging and you have no meaningful choices.

How is a puzzle challenge different from a skill challenge?

A puzzle challenge is basically a logical puzzle of analyzing the NPCs motivations and making them an offer that would interest them. For instance, Lord Darkor may hate the dwarves. He may not care that the neighboring roads are being raided by trolls and probably doesn't want to help. Until you mention that you have a plan to make it look like the dwarves attacked the trolls and thus start a war between the two. This gets the lords attention and makes him more willing to add troops to your cause.

A skill challenge is generally just rolling dice. You pick a skill and you roll it. Now the difficulty in choosing the skill may rank from trivial to a pure guessing game. Generally you're just going to diplomacy spam. And if diplomacy doesn't work, you're rather at a loss for what might work. Now unlike the puzzle social encounter, the skill one doesn't have much of a great story behind it. You wave your magic skill wand and suddenly the NPC agrees. Where as in the other scenario, you're telling a much more interesting story. Do the PCs really want to go through with the plan to incriminate the dwarves, or do they want to try to screw over Lord Darkor by not keeping up their end of the bargain? Either one could have possible consequences and has the PCs make real roleplaying choices in character.

And that's going to give you much more engaging stories than any social skill wand will ever give you. Because "I'll help you because you rolled an 18" is a very shitty reason for any kind of storytelling game.

That's why I said that skills have to be much more subdivided than they are now. Diplomacy/Bluff/Intimidate is too broad: you now have Seduce, Joke with, Debate, Bargain, Physical Intimidation, Blackmail, Obfuscate, Appeal, Convince, Plead, Torture, and more.

I'm sure you could see the drawbacks of such a system already. I'm not saying that it's right for D&D, I'm just saying how you could get a version that works and is fun.

Well, I've yet to really see a great social system. The most I've seen is Shadowrun's loose system which is basically just a nice way of fast forwarding through trivial stuff, like haggling over the price. And even still I'd probably want to RP out anything that's really important to the game, and not just use the dice.

I haven't really seen any kind of detailed social system yet that really improves the story. In fact the more of a system you have I think the less people think of NPCs as characters and more as pieces on a board. When you have to think "what does the queen want to hear in this spot?" that's more thought evoking than "Lets do seduce. I'm good at seduce, and she's totally a chick."

Making shit up was part of the design goal of 4E skill challenges, though; it was advertised as any skill being able to get past a skill challenge.

Now obviously that's not what's going on (read the DMG examples if you don't believe me) but that's what they were going for.

Yeah, honestly I think this is part of the "we don't know what the fuck we're doing with skill challenges" problem. I mean in the sample skill challenge examples before 4E came out, you had truly stupid shit like a bunch of adventurers coming up on some trap in a monster's corpse or something... and some guy was gaining successes by using athletics to climb a tree branch for supposedly a closer look. You could also use knowledge skills or something as well. And for some odd reason, botching your knowledge skill could actually set the trap off, even though your only action was "I'm trying to recall if I heard anything about traps like this."

But the trap knows if you failed at thinking and blows up in your face.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So it's just a series of rolls, probably with a less binary effect. It's still not all that fun or engaging and you have no meaningful choices.

When you look at that challenge as an after-action report, it looks binary. However, if you don't know with at the time you're making the decision with certainty the outcome of any action then the decision becomes exciting.

In your example, what if after the rogue picked the locked he saw the king's pet tiger sleeping in the hallway? Moreover, challenges shouldn't be presented in a simplified manner. The answer to 'You encounter a locked door. What do you do?' is obvious. The answer to 'You see two gnolls guarding the orc general's tent. What do you do?' is not. The answer to 'how are you going to infiltrate the city that's had a zombie infestation to get to the resistance HQ' has a lot of potential answer. The question of 'you know the secret entrance to the resistance HQ is somewhere in this alley. What do you do?' only has one or two solutions.

Well, I've yet to really see a great social system. The most I've seen is Shadowrun's loose system which is basically just a nice way of fast forwarding through trivial stuff, like haggling over the price. And even still I'd probably want to RP out anything that's really important to the game, and not just use the dice.

You're getting on your 'I don't think social systems should be rolled' kick again so from now on I'm going to ignore what you say when you bring up your personal beliefs into the design of a system that can encompass more than social skills.

But the trap knows if you failed at thinking and blows up in your face.

That's what happens when you have binary outcomes.