I think there's a problem with dice

[Dean]

So I've been thinking a lot about skill challenges (in general, not for 4E), and what tends to make them so much less interesting than combat challenges. Now the answers for that are numerous and many of their aspects probably deserve whole threads to try to tackle them. But at its base I think the problem is something very very big.

Dice.

Combat challenges have players combining different elements, using different abilities, draining different resources. And at the end of all of that there is a random success-vs-failure generator that uses a die. That's fine. But when I tell a player to roll a hide check the ONLY THING he is doing is rolling a die. There are no decisions involved, no resources being used, no different tactics that can be employed within the games mechanics. Just a flat d20+hide. And if he sneaks past one guard and has to disarm a trap and then vault over a series of obstacles to get to the golden orb then the ONLY thing he is doing is rolling 3 static d20's. He doesn't even need to be there. Skill checks don't grab players past the FIRST roll I notice and that's why skill challenges are so dreadfully dull. Because the longer it is the more apparent it is that you, the player, should probably be doing something better with your time.

For this reason I think Deadland's magic system can be quite good. In that to cast spells you draw cards and try to make poker hands. And in that there is SOME element of choice there it can be entertaining to do even iteratively. Because there is something for you the player to be doing.

However my suggestion is not actually (neccesarily) to redo the mechanics for all roleplaying games so that every time you need to disarm a trap you do some sudoku or whatever. But is instead to try to figure out a way to make skill challenge d20 rolls as engaging, or near as engaging, as combat d20 rolls.
Perhaps "action points" and their many variants would do well for this in that they would allow for the player to, on any given roll, choose whether or not they want to add to it or re-roll it or whatnot. And then at least while there was a reservoir of those points there would be some element of choice involved.
Perhaps there could be a "Push" option where you may add to a skill check some bonus if you were willing to take some HP damage, then that would be resource management that players might care about.
Or perhaps the skill system should be revised so that -degrees- of success matter quite a bit more. So that passing a given check with a +10 over the target score meant you achieved your goal "Expertly" gaining significant advantages. So going +10 over a DC 20 jump check would mean the difference between making the 20 foot jump but landing prone and landing upright and not provoking attacks of opportunity in your landing area. This way a player could perhaps have a reservoir of points (say 20 a day) that he could add whenever he chose in any increments to any roll. Though no more than +10 at a time. So on any given check he has choices based on his results. If he failed he will consider if conserving his points is more valuable than failing this given task, and if he succeeds he has the choice of using reserve points in order to achieve "Expert" success.

What do the rest of you think. What's kicking around in your heads? Lets get together on this. I think making skill challenge rolls entertaining might be very rewarding. And that any progress we made towards this particular problem might be able to be applied to lots of areas in d20 games.

[erik]

I think dice definitely serve a very useful role as random number generators.

However, I think it has been said and most would agree, that 4e would make a much better card game than RPG. So any deviations in that direction would be likely to be a good thing.

I'd prefer having cards that you can draw and then use to do certain tricks or bonuses with skills or combat or what not.

[For Valor]

Tome of Prowess for your "Do X this well vs. that well based on how well you rolled".

And I've always wanted to play a dynamic system where you run with a hand rather than dice.

[Dean]

Yeah Tome of Prowess is more or less exactly the skill system I would recommend for option 3.

The hand option wouldn't be unworkable. I think it would have to be very very generic however. So one card might have "Push" add +5 to a roll made this turn but lose your level in hp, and another might have "Re-roll one die rolled this turn, add -2 to the roll" and etc etc. I think being fairly metagame and generic might be the only way to have them legitimately apply to all possible skill uses.

It would also be nice, though perhaps this is slightly outside of this discussion, if whatever we did stopped the "march towards failure" effect that most skill challenges have. Where the dm wants you to jump from a rooftop, hide from guard 1, move silently past some sentry, and then disarm the trap to get the treasure. This is a very reasonable and even fun thing to have to do but unlike combat if you fail ONE of these tasks you have failed entirely. And that is super super lame. So many of the suggestions I've been offering have been basically trying to make it so that, within reason, your character should probably just pass most skill checks he's asked to make if he's willing to spend the resources. But MAKE their be resources and make him care about them and ideally enjoy using them. Both card systems and static resource drain systems might be able to accomplish this.

[Crissa]

Those are very good ideas.

However, the math there... I'm not sure how to approach it.

-Crissa

[Red_Rob]

However my suggestion is not actually (neccesarily) to redo the mechanics for all roleplaying games so that every time you need to disarm a trap you do some sudoku or whatever. But is instead to try to figure out a way to make skill challenge d20 rolls as engaging, or near as engaging, as combat d20 rolls.

Skill challenge mechanics will never be as engaging as Combat simply because so much of the game is built around the combat engine. You would literally have to design another game and graft it onto D&D to get that effect.

I do think more could be done to make the process interesting though. As you say, you need the system to force you to make choices and trade offs, without the best choice being immediately obvious in all situations. Any time you can compare two numbers and simply pick the highest you have not made an interesting choice, which is why the 4e skill system sucks my balls.

Lets look at what choices Combat has going on:
Action management - you can only do so much in one turn.
Tactical positioning - able to strike vs. safe from retaliation
Hit points - A resource management based win condition
Charged abilities - use now vs. use later.

The interest in combat comes from the interplay between these sometimes contradictory goals. This also allows for different tactics, such as all out attack vs. action denial vs. turtling etc. Any skill challenge system needs to have roughly this many things going on to make the choices interesting.

[TheFlatline]

For this reason I think Deadland's magic system can be quite good. In that to cast spells you draw cards and try to make poker hands. And in that there is SOME element of choice there it can be entertaining to do even iteratively. Because there is something for you the player to be doing.

I've played Deadlands. While the magic system is novel, it slows the fuck out of the game in reality. I mean seriously, it's a hand of poker in the middle of an RPG, that nobody else takes part in. At the *best* you have maybe a minute or two of downtime each time a spell is cast, at worst with decision paralysis the time skyrockets. And this is real world performance, not theoretical. It's why we eventually quit playing Deadlands. It took to long to do anything mechanically.

The reason why skills suck isn't that you're rolling dice. It's that somewhere along the line the game has to make sacrifices to speed up gameplay. Skills generally aren't the major focus of any RPG, and the ones that they are, tend to handle combat like a skill check. Otherwise it'd take 20 minutes to skill check out a blacksmith making a sword, while you go through a tabletop version of blacksmithing.

A perfect example of how extra fiddly skills can drag a game down exists in Spycraft. Not even getting into the "dramatic systems" (like the chase system), you add options for skills via feats and equipment and it slows the game down. It seriously shouldn't take 5 minutes to resolve a skill check. Sometimes in Spycraft it does.

Whatever system you propose as a solution, it needs to be quick, and if it's not quick, it needs to involve as many players as possible. Otherwise it's a flat out failure from a gameplay standpoint.

I also tend to look warily on any system that bases your character's mechanical performance off of the player's own skillset. In Deadlands, I can simply choose not to play a hexer if I suck at poker. If that's the default skill system however, you've just closed off the game to me completely.

The opposite can break the game too. If I'm an excellent sudoku player, and sudoku is the "mini game" that resolves skills (using something you said as a purely theoretical example), then I'm going to over-perform compared to an "average" character. Either way, my character becomes limited by what *I* can do, which is completely contrary to why you play a roleplaying game in the first place.

I'm all for giving a player options, but you have to take a large swath of ideas into consideration before you commit yourself to the path you're wanting to take.

[TarkisFlux]

There's a focus problem here. You're swapping between two different game levels and not even noticing it. Hiding is not a mini-game. Hiding is a specific action you can take in the infiltration mini-game, in the same vein that a melee attack is a single action you can take in the combat mini-game. Complaining that when you tell a character to hide he rolls a single d20 and is done is like complaining that when a character says he hit's some guy with a sword he rolls a single d20 and is done. It's not a problem with the action (not necessarily, though there are probably issues in this case) but with the whole mini-game framework.

Asking "how can I make hide more interesting?" is asking the wrong question. No matter what bizarre mechanic you tie to your hide check, it won't be anymore interesting than swinging a sword or making other guys roll a save. Combat works because you can take several different characters with several different skills (hitting people, magicking people, hidey-stabbing people, rooting people, whatever) and they can stack their individual successes into a combat mini-game win against a team trying to stack their individual successes into causing a loss for them. So you really need to back up a bit.

The right question is "how can I construct the X minigame so that characters can throw different skills and abilities at it to build up to a win while an opposing party tries to do the same thing?" You need to make sure that you can actually use multiple abilities in the minigame. So if we were doing the infiltration minigame, you could make a good argument for needing to be able to coordinate hide, move silent, open lock, disguise, bluff, and maybe diplomancy and intimidate along with some specific abilities. You'd want to make sure that they could be used in conjunction with each other such that everyone can contribute to getting through or getting some part of the group through and meeting up later. And everyone means everyone, if you want it to be an interesting minigame you don't get to exclude people from it. They should have differend strengths and tactics, but they should all be able to play. So some of the group might just sneak in unnoticed, some might disguise themselves up and just walk in out in the open, others might charm a guard or two and then slip them poison to get by, and some might just provide a distraction for the rest of the party to better do what they need and get picked up later. And that stuff needs to be able to happen simultaneously, so that each of them can alter their tactics to assist someone who's not having a good day. It's not quite as tight as the combat minigame, but that's what you'd need to do to start getting there.

After that you need to decide how you feel about single points of failure. If you like the rocket tag aspect of high level 3.5 you can just have people beating your hide check mean that they see you and sound the alarm and force you to use some other ability to continue on or else fail. It's really not all that different from failing a save against any SoD and needing to recover or otherwise alter your plans, but it is a single point of failure that may ruin your further contributions to the minigame. If you don't want that in your skill mini-games, then you need to tone down failures. Someone beating your hide / move check by a point or two might just mean that they think they heard something and become suspicious, but beating it twice would let them actually find you (or locate your quadrant, and then find you, or whatever). And if you can see them perk up you could alter your plans accordingly, or one of your teammates could. It changes it from a larger failure to a a setback that brings them closer to winning and pushes you a bit further away from it, just like failing a to-hit roll does in combat.

[RandomCasualty2]

The problem with skill checks is that they're just not going to be particularly engaging because skill challenges by their very nature are going to be rather arbitrary and generalized.

Now you can very well create a mechanic out of it, where you play some weird board game to win a challenge or what not, but that ends up distancing people from what's going on, since the "pick a lock" minigame is going to be more like playing chess than actually picking a lock, unless you design a series of minigames for all manner of tasks involved.

And that's a lot of work, because they have to be good minigames too.

Picking a lock may look something like that mastermind game, where you have to guess the right pegs in a certain amount of time. Though how you'd incorporate PC skills into that, I don't know.

Diplomacy has always had this problem too. Either it tends to be a boring die roll with no PC interaction or it's a magic tea party system that often just ignores the character in favor of the player's social skills.

[CCarter]

Hi Deanruel

Just to nitpick, you go from noting that you're talking about "skill challenges generally" (i.e. any skill check) to 4e skill challenges specifically later on. I think it'd make sense to not have the same terminology here for both.

Also note with your Jump example, in 3.5 RAW a character *does* need to beat the DC by 5 when jumping, or they end up prone - unless they have a rank in Jump.

I agree that when skills are just a random die roll its dull, though. Having more character abilities tie into a skill check can help (at least the player can feel good about having them come into play).
Other that that, a skill can have default effects that differ, even if the result is successful - that is, if my Intimidate is higher than my Diplomacy, I can still be incentivized to use Diplomacy if using Intimidate even if both have the same short term effect (they become Helpful), if Intimidate also has the secondary effect that the guy I'm threatening decides to stab me later when I'm sleeping. Deciding which skill to use then becomes part of the 'minigame'.

As far as abilities go - I once pondered having a completely weird system where skills have separate "success" (d20 roll) and "effect" (a damage roll, say default d6) - so that skill use paralleled combat. Then assign a HP total to your skill challenge. You could buy abilities that paralleled feats (like Improved Critical, Power Attack, Weapon Specialization or 'Weapon Finesse) basically as 'skill tricks' (as described in Complete Scoundrel) to enhance the effect.

[Koumei]

Diplomacy has always had this problem too. Either it tends to be a boring die roll with no PC interaction or it's a magic tea party system that often just ignores the character in favor of the player's social skills.

This won't help lock picking, hiding or jumping, but I'm currently hashing out take 2 of Social Combat rules. I want to make sure it works on some passable level before I start posting it up though.

[Dean]

Ok. So I've been taking notes on what everyone has been saying and I have two big ideas based on all the points I've been able to take from discussion so far. The ideas are divergent and fairly different and I think to genuinely think and develop one through we will have to pick one to go with, at least at a time. So I will present both of the options I see at the moment as having high potential. But first as design precepts I think ANY option we come up with should:

-Include all players whenever possible.
-Watch for anything that adds needless length, keeping this in mind in particular because skill challenges absolutely can and will be lost and making something take 20 minutes which is eventually fruitless will be a horrible addition to the game.
-Accept that the skill system can be improved, yet that it will never be able to match the combat system in variety and granularity just because so much of D&D's mechanics are devoted to combat.
-Keep skill challenges challenging but reduce the potency of single failures drastically.

So with those design considerations in mind I can think of two ideas that seem probably in adding considerable value to the skill system.

System 1: Create a system of mostly metagame abilities (possibly in card form), variants of which are possessed by every player. These abilities will be able to alter die results for skill checks and will be able to be designed to allow cross player play. Meaning one ability might be "Push: gain a +5 to a skill check roll you are about to make, take your level in damage after making the roll". While another might be "Rouse Spirits: If played on yourself you gain a +2 to a skill check you are about to roll, if played on the party then everyone gains +1 to all skill check rolls they make this turn" While another might be "Cross Fingers: If another player has just lost a roll by 2 or less you may allow them to re-roll that die". Etc.
As an additional note I might possibly add for this system that any failure a character rolls on a skill check should be re-rolled. If the second roll succeeds then the check barely fails, likely allowing further checks in almost all circumstances. Only if the second roll fails as well has failure been "disastrous" in some manner.
Finally perhaps create a system where checks can be "aided" by secondary members who in turn can make their own checks in any area that they can convince the DM could plausibly help the primary roller. Maybe any successes they make can be used to add to primary members totals, or to cancel failures or something. Basically find some system of tallying successes and not so much failures so that it's beneficial to have the stupid fighter try to distract the guard with a bluff check, cause if he succeeds it helps and if he fails it doesn't matter.

System 2: Recognize that only a select number of skill subsystems would honestly be important. And then create systems to increase tactical use and granularity of those systems. By this I mean create increased rules for the following skill "Systems"
The Stealth Sub-game (Hiding, Sneaking, Moving Silently, Picking Locks maybe?)
The Social Sub-game (Talking, Cajoling, Bargaining, Gathering Information, Intimidating)
The Athletics Sub-Game (Jumping, Tumbling, Balancing, Flipping, and honestly almost certainly running. It's about time D&D had a system where at least a small chase scene was something bordering on possible and hopefully even entertaining)
and maaaaaaybe a Knowledge Sub-game. Now I've never seen that really greatly desired but maybe that's the current systems fault and if the system existed and were better then the situations to use it would come up more. So the Knowledge sub-game would be about Research and Invention and Testing and Discovery.
So work very hard, one system at a time to expound on the pieces that make up each of these subgames. And that way we could still have a game where making a Ride check was still just a flat roll. But that the more deeply developed skills (Stealth, Social, and Athletics) would have a much higher granularity which ideally would have systems all of their own. So perhaps Stealth might have a detection rating for characters which would be changing like their HP in that environment or what have you. Don't get hung up on that example. Just consider this overall idea of expanding systems to make the parts of the game that honestly genuinely see regular use given more rules coverage to allow greater enjoyment.

What do you all think?

[Crissa]

Good start. Now, where's that design process thread? That'd be a good one to read to make sure you're following the right path.

I'd put riding/piloting into your chase game. And I'd try to make riding a horse as similar to running fast as possible.

-Crissa

[violence in the media]

System 1: Create a system of mostly metagame abilities (possibly in card form), variants of which are possessed by every player. These abilities will be able to alter die results for skill checks and will be able to be designed to allow cross player play. Meaning one ability might be "Push: gain a +5 to a skill check roll you are about to make, take your level in damage after making the roll". While another might be "Rouse Spirits: If played on yourself you gain a +2 to a skill check you are about to roll, if played on the party then everyone gains +1 to all skill check rolls they make this turn" While another might be "Cross Fingers: If another player has just lost a roll by 2 or less you may allow them to re-roll that die". Etc.

This could work, depending on how cards get distributed and used. For example, in the local groups I've played with, no one ever used Action Dice because there is a strong possibility of them being useless. Maybe the d20 roll is so low that the Action Die couldn't have helped, or the Action Die comes up a "1" when you needed a "3". Given that you can also use these dice on Saves and such, it didn't make much sense to waste them on anything where your life wasn't on the line.

That said, I think that these cards should be scheduled for use after[/i] the d20 is rolled, just to avoid the additional kick-in-the-teeth that burning a card and taking damage would be on top of failing the roll. You could also include cards that didn't affect the roll, but modified the result. So a card like Lucky Break might get played after flubbing a hide check and, instead of finding the character, the guard gets distracted by another guard coming in and asking if he wants some pie. A negative event still happened (+1 guard), but not the expected negative result (being spotted).

As far as doling out the cards, I'd probably start with dealing 5 to each player at the start of each session. I don't know about drawing more, as that may get excessive. If you decided to keep the cards flowing through the session, I might limit drawing until a player is down to 0-1 cards remaining. You'll have 25-30 cards in play to begin with, which should give you experience to evolve the deck to your group's tastes, adding and removing cards as you guys find them too weak or powerful.

Would you allow players to play cards only on their own rolls, or on the rolls of anyone in the party? How many cards could be played on a given roll? I'd lean towards initially allowing cards on any PC roll, but only one card on any given roll.

Additional card idea: Darkest before the dawn Treat that "1" you just rolled as if it were a "20".

As an additional note I might possibly add for this system that any failure a character rolls on a skill check should be re-rolled. If the second roll succeeds then the check barely fails, likely allowing further checks in almost all circumstances. Only if the second roll fails as well has failure been "disastrous" in some manner.

Why put a second roll in to get a "degrees of success/failure" measurement? Why not just determine such via distance from TN?

[Clutch9800]

Remember "Deadlands".

The magic system was based on normal playing cards, with the backstory that Hoyle had actually been a magician and had collected all of those rules as a grimoire. That was a neat concept.

I spent three days in a Booth at GAMA with Shane Hensley one time. Too bad that at the time I had no idea at all who he was or what he'd accomplished. He was a very "regular guy".

Clutch

[Dean]

Pardon this bit of light thread necromancy but does anyone have a link to Frank's Design Process thread. It was mentioned back a bit and I recall reading it before. And I've been doing some work on this stuff and felt like giving it a readthrough.

[Leress]

Pardon this bit of light thread necromancy but does anyone have a link to Frank's Design Process thread. It was mentioned back a bit and I recall reading it before. And I've been doing some work on this stuff and felt like giving it a readthrough.

Here you go

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=31521

[Maxus]

Ninja'd.

On a side note, five minute response time. Way to go, Leress.

[Dean]

At 1:30 in the morning (my time) no less.