Anatomy of Failed Design: Skill Challenges

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MartinHarper
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Post by MartinHarper »

violence in the media wrote:If the party gets separated, can a single PC complete a preexisting skill challenge they come across? Can a DM run a game for a party of 1? Can he include Skill Challenges if he does? Would that be like Schrodinger's Skill Challenge then? Only doable by a single person until someone else observes?
Well, for some things, you could legitimately vary the complexity depending on the number of people. Getting five people to climb the Cliff of Doom is five times harder than getting one person to climb the Cliff of Doom, and you could model this with five times more required successes in X rounds.

For other things, like convincing the king to invade Alderac, the complexity should be fixed, and hence sometimes the Bard is going to think "hey, there's no way I can convince the king on my own". And that does seem weird.
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Post by Kobajagrande »

And besides, am I missing something or do the skill challenges just boil down to "roll a bunch of dice. See if you passed or not". Which is a great change from "roll a single dice. See if you passed or not" exactly... How?
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Post by Starmaker »

MartinHarper wrote:Getting five people to climb the Cliff of Doom is five times harder than getting one person to climb the Cliff of Doom, and you could model this with five times more required successes in X rounds.
Climbing in a group is easier, just ask any mountaineer.

Kobajagrande wrote:And besides, am I missing something or do the skill challenges just boil down to "roll a bunch of dice. See if you passed or not". Which is a great change from "roll a single dice. See if you passed or not" exactly... How?
1. It's harder to assess or vary the actual chance of success.
2. It takes more time.
3. It's never clear what to roll which basically turns the game into "mother may I".
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Post by mean_liar »

FrankTrollman wrote:Actually, even with Aid Another limited to zero, it's pretty easy for a Bullysaurus, Half-Elf Diplomancer, or other specialist to succeed at skill challenge sub-tests on a 1+. This makes skill challenges an act of magical teaparty where the end result is known - so long as no other player sticks their dick in and entertains the possibility of failure.

Players are NOT encouraged to involve themselves, because all players share the same pool of success and failure. Which really means that there are a finite number of total dice that will be rolled, and every time any player who is not the biggest specialist picks one of those dice up, he's picking up a die that could have been rolled by the specialist. Even if the players differ in skill bonus by one point, it is still actively harmful for the players other than the guy with biggest bonus to roll a die at any point in the process.
In your 1st paragraph you're talking about having 1 specialist cover the whole challenge. Then there's the assumption that there's a static DC that everyone has to hit regardless of skill.

Isn't that only a problem in the design of the challenge? If it's, "roll Diplomacy until you win" then your critique is its most applicable, but what about a situation where you only get to have 2 successes contribute from Diplomacy, and 1 from Athletics, and etc etc.?

Ideally, you'd design a Challenge to suit the party: out of 5 players, you could pretty easily come up with a way to involve 3 or 4 of them at any time. Any 1 or 2 players are using Aid Another actions but I think that's acceptable so long as you rotate who the shutouts are.

Doesn't that design then encourage participation from all characters and players?
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Post by MartinHarper »

Starmaker wrote:Climbing in a group is easier, just ask any mountaineer.
Absolutely. I'll try to be clearer. If only one person does anything, perhaps because the others are unconscious, then getting five people up the Cliff of Doom is harder than getting one person up the Cliff of Doom. However, if all five people are helping then it is indeed easier. Essentially, the more people that have to get to the top of the cliff, the bigger the task is, but the bigger the taskforce.

You can model this by requiring (number of people) successes in two rounds of checks, which I think gives you the behaviour you're expecting.
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Post by mean_liar »

After reading Doom314's post in the other thread...

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49900& ... &start=175

...I don't think this is a productive discussion.

I've found a way that cludges through the Skill Challenges that doesn't look anything like the DMG version that leans heavily on my experience GMing in order to make work. They're presented terribly.
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Post by shadzar »

So this is the thread that lead me here form several other boards talking about it.

I will just say skill challenges are a big flop. I read in one thread about the original having something to do with a method form Alternity, and that game was a flop and Bill S and Rich Baker need to stop trying to incorporate it into D&D because it sucked, and Bill S should not be using his position at WotC like LW did to try to force a game nobody wants onto the public.

Buck Rogers sucked as an RPG idea, and so did Alternity, so stop it already.

Also skill challenges are just an excuse for people that cannot roleplay and need to roll dice. This should be discouraged, and stop trying to roll for everything.

The entire skill challenges are just that, another system to play around with skills on the character sheet. Let the players do some work in the game and stop making systems devoted to min-maxing a character out.

It is a novel idea, for a low thought game, but D&D never was one of those. Casual gamers can just handwaive things and if you want to make it more simple for people having problems, then don't design some convoluted system for it. Just flip a freakin coin. Heads you pass, Tail you fail, and each person in the group gets a chance.
Last edited by shadzar on Sun Jun 28, 2009 8:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by koz »

shadzar wrote: Also skill challenges are just an excuse for people that cannot roleplay and need to roll dice. This should be discouraged, and stop trying to roll for everything.

The entire skill challenges are just that, another system to play around with skills on the character sheet. Let the players do some work in the game and stop making systems devoted to min-maxing a character out.

It is a novel idea, for a low thought game, but D&D never was one of those. Casual gamers can just handwaive things and if you want to make it more simple for people having problems, then don't design some convoluted system for it. Just flip a freakin coin. Heads you pass, Tail you fail, and each person in the group gets a chance.
What you were saying made sense until we got to this drivel. While it may seem good to you to just 'roleplay everything', it doesn't work for a number of reasons.

1) Some people are naturally not good at this kind of stuff. That's OK - people play combat-focused characters without ever learning how to fight themselves, right? Well, yeah, so thus, people who aren't good talkers do play people who are. However, to represent how good given folks are in combat, we have a system. If we don't have the same for social ability, something is wrong, and it just punishes people who aren't good at talking or improvisation. Alternatively, it lets people who ARE good at it get an advantage where they don't deserve one. In short, your argument rests on very poor logic.

2) 'Min-maxing' is not some kind of Satanic cult, which is what you make it sound like. It's a legitimate approach to character design, because quite frankly, subpar people don't survive in a world of adventurers.

Please try to present arguments that are at least halfway not shitty, halfway not tired and halfway not disproven by anyone on the planet who has two points of IQ to rub together.
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Post by Kobajagrande »

The only slightly useful place for skill challenges mechanic is when there is a need for a skill during combat. The "one guy picking a lock while the others keep enemies at bay" kind of scene. In those kind of scenes I can see gathering a number of successes being dramatic enough to justify it.

However, using them as some "everything not combat" system just shows how crappy and useless it is. Not due to mathematics behind them, but how they simply show the utter inability of any dramatic portrayal of just about anything. Negotiate a multilateral peace agreement? In 4E it boils down to "ok guys, you do the Aid Another, and I'll roll the Diplomacy. And we'll do that 10 times". Yeah, that's interesting and amusing way of spending the evening.
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Post by TavishArtair »

"Min-maxing" is how people in the world we live in behave in general terms, because we ultimately are looking to get the most out of life in some sense, unless you've actually achieved the Zen trick of not thinking about thinking while still thinking. The only difference is people in our world are not able to respec their time, so to a certain extent sometimes we get a smattering of skills we wouldn't have otherwise, and then only if we do not read the skill descriptions closely (a common phenomenon early on, less so as we get more experience in general). Real people do game the system of this world and become superspeed ninjas or superstrong athletes or supersmart geniuses or supercharismatic leaders, especially once they get enough experience to see how the system of life works. Sure, a lot of people only make these kinds of super-achievements later in life, right before they start losing their edge in physical terms, but that only suggests that there's a downward curve that most games don't really represent well.
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Post by Roy »

Mister_Sinister wrote:
shadzar wrote: Also skill challenges are just an excuse for people that cannot roleplay and need to roll dice. This should be discouraged, and stop trying to roll for everything.

The entire skill challenges are just that, another system to play around with skills on the character sheet. Let the players do some work in the game and stop making systems devoted to min-maxing a character out.

It is a novel idea, for a low thought game, but D&D never was one of those. Casual gamers can just handwaive things and if you want to make it more simple for people having problems, then don't design some convoluted system for it. Just flip a freakin coin. Heads you pass, Tail you fail, and each person in the group gets a chance.
What you were saying made sense until we got to this drivel. While it may seem good to you to just 'roleplay everything', it doesn't work for a number of reasons.

1) Some people are naturally not good at this kind of stuff. That's OK - people play combat-focused characters without ever learning how to fight themselves, right? Well, yeah, so thus, people who aren't good talkers do play people who are. However, to represent how good given folks are in combat, we have a system. If we don't have the same for social ability, something is wrong, and it just punishes people who aren't good at talking or improvisation. Alternatively, it lets people who ARE good at it get an advantage where they don't deserve one. In short, your argument rests on very poor logic.

2) 'Min-maxing' is not some kind of Satanic cult, which is what you make it sound like. It's a legitimate approach to character design, because quite frankly, subpar people don't survive in a world of adventurers.

Please try to present arguments that are at least halfway not shitty, halfway not tired and halfway not disproven by anyone on the planet who has two points of IQ to rub together.
He does a nice job parodying it with the coin toss bit though.

By the way, you forgot to mention that if you're just going to make up random stuff, you can do that for free and don't need to burn cash on rulebooks.
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Post by Crissa »

Kobajagrande wrote:The only slightly useful place for skill challenges mechanic is when there is a need for a skill during combat. The "one guy picking a lock while the others keep enemies at bay" kind of scene. In those kind of scenes I can see gathering a number of successes being dramatic enough to justify it.
This is actually a really good point.

Creating additional rolling doesn't make the roleplay more interesting.

However, we still want to make challenges other than combat interesting... And we don't want to cripple people who have less experience when they play characters - that takes away the point of roleplaying!

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Post by shadzar »

Mister_Sinister wrote:
shadzar wrote: Also skill challenges are just an excuse for people that cannot roleplay and need to roll dice. This should be discouraged, and stop trying to roll for everything.

The entire skill challenges are just that, another system to play around with skills on the character sheet. Let the players do some work in the game and stop making systems devoted to min-maxing a character out.

It is a novel idea, for a low thought game, but D&D never was one of those. Casual gamers can just handwaive things and if you want to make it more simple for people having problems, then don't design some convoluted system for it. Just flip a freakin coin. Heads you pass, Tail you fail, and each person in the group gets a chance.
What you were saying made sense until we got to this drivel. While it may seem good to you to just 'roleplay everything', it doesn't work for a number of reasons.

1) Some people are naturally not good at this kind of stuff. That's OK - people play combat-focused characters without ever learning how to fight themselves, right? Well, yeah, so thus, people who aren't good talkers do play people who are. However, to represent how good given folks are in combat, we have a system. If we don't have the same for social ability, something is wrong, and it just punishes people who aren't good at talking or improvisation. Alternatively, it lets people who ARE good at it get an advantage where they don't deserve one. In short, your argument rests on very poor logic.

2) 'Min-maxing' is not some kind of Satanic cult, which is what you make it sound like. It's a legitimate approach to character design, because quite frankly, subpar people don't survive in a world of adventurers.

Please try to present arguments that are at least halfway not shitty, halfway not tired and halfway not disproven by anyone on the planet who has two points of IQ to rub together.
1- Then if you aren't good at social interactions and need something from the system because you cannot "roleplay" it, then flip a coin or something or pass to another player to try. You don't need to waste time developing some system to sell to people, or better yet re-using some system from a failed game that nobody liked to begin with just to try to make parts of the overall sucky game live again.

All you have to do is work with the player. There is not going to be a one way to help these players because theya re all different. What it does is introduce the lack of need for roleplaying at all. You need only roll dice to pass any social/non-combat challenge in the game. This is the job of the DM to help figure out where his players are lacking in being able to play parts of the game and help them, not the designers to try to make something for the entire game to have some one-size-fits-all fix for shy people or somesuch.

2- Min-maxing is for munchkins. You get out of something what YOU put into it. The game has combat yes, but isn't the only portion of the game. If you have half of group A join with half of group B, where A is only combat focused, and B is only non-combat focused, then you will not have a working group. Some of the people are always bored when there are parts that aren't going towards what they min-maxed for.

There isn't going to be a system where you can ever min-max a non-combat situation such as skill challenges unless you devote your time to that system, nd just everyone go by the dice.

The best stats min-maxer will probably find themselves at odds still with a good roleplayer for the situation, wherein the good roleplayer may have much worse stats and have a better chance of success because of the roleplaying done. This is the nature of a social game. So either you must appease the skill challenge min-maxer by only using that and forsake anyone wanting to roleplay rather than using the SC system to make it fair, or just scrap the entire system.

Diplomacy is not some skill that should be on a character sheet, but is part of the role played by the player.

It is the age old wars of playing RPGs further enphasized by a faulty system for helping people that cannot roleplay that well, but still want to play an RPG. You don't need rules printed in a book to try to make some system work for every player as not every player that doesn't roleplay well is the same. That is what the DM is for, and as part of their job EACH and every DM must learn their players and how to make the game work for them. Doesn't matter if it is some RPGA game, or a LGS game, or home game, that must always be done. The DM must understand his payers and make the game work for the group at hand. No rules system can do this for the DM so that it works for everyone.

Once you have removed that min-maxing proces from the roleplaying, you can devote those skill points to other usefull things that cannot be roleplayed in the game like jumping or theivery or knowledge checks, etc to see what the character would know that the player does not yet know.

Each DM just has to do his job and get to know and work with his players to make the game work for those specific players.
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Post by Fuchs »

Why couldn't jumping be roleplayed? If you require people to make speeches for their characters, why not have them jump as well? And what do you mean, knowledge checks can't be roleplayed? Let's see if those are real roleplayers, and know the MM and Campaign Book by heart!

Want to pickpocket? Don't be a minmaxer, show me if you can get my wallet!
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Post by Roy »

Fuchs wrote:Why couldn't jumping be roleplayed? If you require people to make speeches for their characters, why not have them jump as well? And what do you mean, knowledge checks can't be roleplayed? Let's see if those are real roleplayers, and know the MM and Campaign Book by heart!

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Want to stab the dragon in the face? Hold on while I rent a crane. You get your sword and we'll see how you do.
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Post by Kaelik »

Shadzar, you have two characters, Bardy McBard the Charismatic, and Ugly McQuiet the Hated.

A good system should involve Bardy McBard being better at convincing people of things than Ugly McQuiet regardless of which player is controlling them.

There are people who are good at being convincing. There are people who are bad at it. The Players natural ability to convince people of things should not determine their characters ability, just like my personal ability to punch people in the face has no influence on my characters ability to punch faces.

It is possible to have a different design goal. However, every single game that has a codified skill system is declaring, "We want McBard played by a 12 year old brat to be more likely to convince the King than McQuiet played by a Trial Lawyer."

There is a word for not having a social system and putting it up to player ability. That is called Magic Tea Party. And it has absolutely no business being within 100 miles of a game in which people have a Cha score.


Secondly, skill challenges don't just represent Diplomacy. They also represent (supposedly) dealing with the environment, surviving a flash flood, climbing a giant rock face with traps going off in your face, ect.

I will personally let your character win D&D forever if you are actually so crazy that you think character success at climbing shit should be based on how good the player is at climbing shit.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Hi Shadzar! I'll address your point for a second, but then I'd like you to do a tangential favor for me.
shadzar wrote:There isn't going to be a system where you can ever min-max a non-combat situation such as skill challenges unless you devote your time to that system, nd just everyone go by the dice.
So there isn't any min maxing of a non combat mechanics... unless they exist and someone min maxes them?

And look, I'm all in favor of arbitrary role played crap as a means of dealing with many of these parts of game play. But you think that can't be exploited?

Amateur dramatics skills aside. You are talking about what essentially is a game of "May I please Sir?" with the GM. And you can totally game that system, the GM is full of exploitable loopholes to negotiate your way through. It's just a mildly different skills set to remembering to pick all your options so they stack up in a large pile.

Now onto my favor...

Phone Lobster's Basket Weaver Survey!
OK so you've expressed an opinion that there are players (presumably like yourself) who aren't "Min Maxer's", "Munchkins", or Combat obsessed psycho clowns or whatever.

However I have a theory that these players, these "Real Role Players" if you will do not really exist.

So could you answer these survey questions for me.

1) Do you choose to use an RPG rules system where ~90% of the rules focus on combat?

2) Are ~90% of the rules you actually use in game play combat related rules?

3) How much time would you say you spend resolving combat in your various sessions? 10% or less? 80% or more? Something else?

4) Of the time you don't spend resolving combats how much of it is spent maneuvering to effect combats, such as sneaking, socializing or using other negotiations with the GM to try to effect, apply or avoid combat circumstances, allies, abilities, ambushes, environments, etc... ?

5) Of the events you would deem "Most Important" to the outcome of the "story" of an adventure or campaign (such as defeating the villain who was trying to destroy the world or whatever), how many of those events were combat events? What proportion of such events were instead resolved using Profession(Basket Weaving), or something like it?

5a) If such formalized skills as Profession(Basket Weaving) displease you, how many such events were instead resolved by just negotiating with the GM until he agreed that things just turned out a certain way "Because of Role Play"?

5b) If 5a applies, were the players in your group OK with that happening? Or were some displeased for some reason?

6) Are your characters specialists at Combat? That is, are their classes and professions actually primarily Combat related in nature?

7) Have you ever selected a selectable character ability simply because it made your character better at Combat?

8 ) Do you enjoy resolving combat in RPGs?

9) Do you enjoy resolving Basket Weaving in RPGs?

10) Do you ever try to "Role Play" a situation using no formal rules but disagree with your GMs determination of the results?

11) Are you in fact Big Foot, the Lockness Monster, or a Bunyip?

So anyway I could, and should make a longer quiz, but if you could get me some answers on that some time soon I might start keeping some sort of record of this.

It's all for science. Though I'm afraid if your answers DO indicate you are an actual real life Basket Weaver I will have to send native trackers into the Jungle to shoot you with tranquilizers so we can bring you in to prove your actual existence and start a captive breeding program to save the species.

Just like I would if you answer yes to question 11.
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Post by Kaelik »

PL, the difference between min maxxer and roleplayer isn't between people who actually try to make effective characters. That's everyone.

It's just that min-maxxers are people who are good at it or who when they see someone better, wish they could be that good.

True Roleplayers are people who when they see someone better than them at it, decide that that person shouldn't be allowed to be better than them, and should not do as well in order to make the Roleplayers life easier, since that way they don't have to do work or learn anything.
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Post by Orion »

Question Four of you survey seems blatantly unfair: you could very plausibly make a low combet/ high "roleplay" game where the ENTIRE GAME was made up of increasingly creative ways to avoid having a combat. I don't think that having possible combats in mind while playing is really evidence one way or another.

That said, I agree with the rest of your post.
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Post by Fuchs »

Real Roleplayers do not roll dice, they pack real weapons and take real damage! It's a bit hard on the DM, fighting all players at once, but a good DM needs to be able to handle that, and invest in some full plate.

Incidentally, there are finally real consequences: Injuries won't be magically gone after a day of rest, and players may even be arrested for stabbing a DM. That should discourage players from always choosing to fight.

And falling damage can finally not be minmaxed away anymore.

Magic is not overpowered anymore (unless you allow the optional "use molotow cocktail instead of fireball" rule), and player characters level much slower - no more 1-20 in 6 months!

And finally any player whose PC survives to higher levels can feel like a real hero!
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Post by Parthenon »

No, wait, this could be cool. How about in 4e when you perform a ritual you have to describe to the DM what magic materials you are using and draw out the pentagrams and so on on the floor. Or even if you don't bother doing that, have he effectiveness of the ritual be dependant on how well you describe you doing it and your body language, gestures and pronunciation.

Sucks to be you if you've only done sympathetic magic and your DM prefers rune based magic.
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Post by Roy »

Parthenon wrote:No, wait, this could be cool. How about in 4e when you perform a ritual you have to describe to the DM what magic materials you are using and draw out the pentagrams and so on on the floor. Or even if you don't bother doing that, have he effectiveness of the ritual be dependant on how well you describe you doing it and your body language, gestures and pronunciation.

Sucks to be you if you've only done sympathetic magic and your DM prefers rune based magic.
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Post by Previn »

Kaelik wrote:PL, the difference between min maxxer and roleplayer isn't between people who actually try to make effective characters. That's everyone.

It's just that min-maxxers are people who are good at it or who when they see someone better, wish they could be that good.

True Roleplayers are people who when they see someone better than them at it, decide that that person shouldn't be allowed to be better than them, and should not do as well in order to make the Roleplayers life easier, since that way they don't have to do work or learn anything.
Forgive me, but I think you're describing a personality defect in an individual rather than the mindset of every role player. There's nothing about min/maxers that precludes them from the same 'shouldn't be allowed to be better than me' mind set.
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Post by Falgund »

Phone Lobster's Basket Weaver Survey!
It seems you just described Amber Diceless RPG, where there is only 4 attributes and some powers, the attributes being:
* Psyche: How good are you at magical combat + willpower
* Strength: How good are you at unarmed combat + feats of strength
* Warfare: How good are you at armed combat + tactics/strategy
* Endurance: How long can you keep up

The only resolution mechanic is the GM comparing the corresponding attributes and then eyeballing it. Skills are defined by the character background, and you can have the background you want (and as you play an immortal, and due to the existence of almost-timeless planes, there is no limit... only what the GM can accept).

Note that the rules advise the players to forget their attribute values after character creation, only the GM should have them.

In a nutshell: Codified Magical Tea Party.

Those are Roleplayers.
Kobajagrande
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Post by Kobajagrande »

Falgund wrote: * Psyche: How good are you at magical combat + willpower
* Strength: How good are you at unarmed combat + feats of strength
* Warfare: How good are you at armed combat + tactics/strategy
* Endurance: How long can you keep up
Was this the predecessor to that F.A.T.A.L. RPG?
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