Kaelik wrote:It sounds like in every single one of those cases finding the vault is a binary thing, and you have to find the vault before you can continue on with the mission.
Yes, narratively, finding the vault is binary. You either find it or you don't.
In terms of game mechanics, though, why should the die roll (or whatever) to find the vault be a binary, self-contained output? I know D&D does it like that, but there are plenty of systems that output results of 'yes and', 'yes but', 'no but', and 'no and'.
Tying this back into our skill challenge example, say the SC is 'raid the vault and get out with the goods scot-free'. Your 5-person party has two rounds to come up with ways to lift the treasure and you get one additional roll you can distribute as you see fit. However, you also mandate that at least one of the actions taken has to explicitly for completing the following tasks: finding the vault, finding the password for the vault, evading the patrols, disabling the alarms, and getting away with the loot. Your doesn't have to succeed at a particular task but they do have to do something about it, otherwise you automatically fail at the skill challenge.
That said, as long as every mandatory task is attempted, you can still do things that will add to the overall success of the mission. For example, the party fighter convinces the shogun that the vault (rather than the shogun's personal bodyguard) is the best place to store the military relics while they're not using them. If you want to add additional complications, you can also put a limit on successes for a particular task. For example, completing the 'find the vault' task will only contribute one success. But you can get up to three successes by doing the 'disable the alarms/trap' task repeatedly.
The results of the skill challenge rest on how many successes you have.
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5-6 successes, succeeded at every mandatory task: the heist goes off without a hitch.
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7+ successes, succeeded at every mandatory task: you pull off the heist without a hitch and in fact you get some additional rolls on the treasure tables. Or a player's rival in the courts gets fired for incompetence. Or you impress the underworld and you get bonuses on checks to interact with them.
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8-10 successes, failed some mandatory tasks: you pull off the heist without a hitch. Even if there's a task you failed to accomplish entirely, something happened to make it moot. For example, you weren't able to find the vault on your own but while researching the schematics the thief lifted the Psion uses their Psychometry power to determine the map was created in the mountains.
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5-7 successes, failed some mandatory tasks: This is where we get into 'yes, but' territory. You win the skill challenge, but this is when some penalties start accruing. The court jester blackmails you. You too too long and now there's a surprise blizzard while you're transporting the loot back. There's not as much treasure as you think. The carts break while you're heading back into town. Ideally, the 'but' part relates to the parts of the challenge that you failed at.
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<5 successes: You fail the skill challenge. You get consequences depending on what mandatory tasks your party failed at. You can decide whether or not the party can recover outside this skill challenge or that's that. For example, if the party got successes on every mandatory task but disabling the alarms, you can run a Very Hard fight scene where the fiends get summoned and they're notified that the kingdom is after them. You can also throw in 'yes but/no but' as you see fit if the failure of a mandatory task would in a narrative sense logically block the plot progression of the skill challenge. So not only did you fail the skill challenge, but your lack of success on the mandatory task of 'find the vault' means that you got a 'yes but' from a rival guild who also got the information from your contact and they're going to pull off a successful raid with YOUR LOOT.
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Any number of successes, did not attempt or do some mandatory tasks: The skill challenge automatically fails. Depending on which mandatory task you didn't undertake, your adventure gets stuck there with the DM to decide.