Similarly, no matter how many times you state that it is a mathematically broken system, that doesn't automatically make it so. There are issues with the math, but not necessarily ones so irrevocably flawed that the system crashes and burns with every use. Given that many players on these boards have been able to use it successfully is undeniably evidence that the system can work, and with regularity. Now, is that the result of good DMs compensating for the flaws in the system? Or does it just mean that the math issues only crop up occasionally, but are glaring when they do?
Either way, the system certainly isn't failing with every use, or even with most uses. I still won't recommend a new DM dive into using Skill Challenges without first having some experience behind them, but I see nothing supporting a proclamation that they are all absolutely inevitable disasters.
Agree totally, skill challenges need some planning and are cinematic way of adventuring using something other than just brute\magical\divine force to achieve a goal. If used well they can encourage the players to roleplay their skill use with either strong descriptions or good roleplay as the ranger in the party using his knowledge nature tells the local Duke what the effect on the local livestock will be if a monster isn't killed and runs out of wildlife to eat.
Thanks for splitting the thread, MK.
Maybe this is a bit of a dumb question, but what is wrong with the skill challenge math? I think if we can nail that problem down, it would go a long way towards solving the problems with the skill challenge as a whole.
Here's a skill challenge I'm currently working on for my group. I'm not sure what needs to be done to improve this, so if anyone has suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.
SETUP
The party arrives at the bandit hideout to find the main entrance heavily guarded – a frontal assault is out of the question. However, the party spots another, unguarded entrance to the hideout atop a nearby cliff. They must scale the cliff without alerting the bandits in order to gain entrance to the hideout.
RUNNING THE CHALLENGE
Level: 5
Complexity: 2 (6 successes before 3 failures)
Primary Skills: Athletics, Nature, Stealth
Secondary Skills: Endurance, Perception, Acrobatics
Athletics (DC 12) - used when a party member tries to climb, leap, jump, or haul another player up the mountain.
Nature (DC 12) - used when a player tries to determine the safest path up the mountainside
Stealth (DC 12) – used when a player attempts to sneak past guards or find a hidden route up the mountain. At least one success on the skill challenge must come from using this skill. No more than two successes on the skill challenge can come from using this skill.
Perception (DC 12) - used when someone tries to spot an easy path upwards, failing this check does not count as a failure, but imposes a -4 penalty on the next Nature check the party makes, passing this check does not count as a success, but gives a +4 bonus on the next Nature check. Only one Perception check can be made for each Nature check.
Endurance (DC 17) – After the party makes its third Athletics check they must make a group Endurance check. If at least half the group fails, they suffer one failure towards the skill challenge.
Acrobatics (DC17) – a character may attempt an acrobatic stunt to overcome a really difficult area of the mountain. Passing this check gives a +2 bonus on the next three Athletics checks the party makes. However, failure indicates that the character has slipped or stumbled while attempting an extremely dangerous stunt, and the party suffers a failure on the skill challenge.
Success: The party scales the cliff without alerting the bandits in the caves or the cockatrices in Area 1. They gain a surprise round against the cockatrices.
Failure: The party is fatigued and by the time they reach the mouth of the cave, they have alerted the cockatrices. Each party member loses two healing surges from the strain of climbing the mountain
I think it's a good one. Only change I would make would be on the stunt. Instead of having the stunt cause a challenge fail I'd have it cost the attempting player 1 healing surge, since a success doesn't give a challenge success. The lost of the surge also reflects minor injuries the character could have sustained in the failed check.
I might go with healing surge losses on the Endurance check as well, now that I think about it. WotC's done that before on some wilderness type challenges to reflect exertion.
There are also some related posts on enworld discussing the math behind the current 4E skill challenge system with some recommended fixes. I think a related system that attempts to fix the flaws is called the obsidian skill challenge system.
I have definitely seen skill challenges encourage roleplaying, even in the middle of combat.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8
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Anyone familiar with the Conflict system from Mouse Guard?
I'm thinking of using it in place of skill challenges, should I ever happen to run a 4e game again.
Well I'm not really on either side on this but thought I would post this up since it seems to cover most of the arguments against skill challenges that I have seen (Note language not safe for work)
I've always found the small essay here to be pretty much biased garbage. Trollman wants the Skill Challenge system to be a failure and essentially pigeon holes it into a place were he can then show how its all so very flawed.
The charts showing the DCs for the revised version of the Skill Challenge system don't actually show that the system always breaks even though its insinuated that this is what the math adds up to. Since the DM sets the DCs its actually possible to use the charts to get a rough idea of how likely your PCs are to pass the Challenge though that is made much more difficult because you can't really be sure what skills the players will use.
I also find his complaints about Mike Mearls adapting the basic system to deal with the scene he wants to present to be utter bunk. Its like demanding that all combats only ever feature Orcs because Orcs was what was used in the example of combat in the PHB. The system actually adapts well for a wide variety of tasks. I suspect that Trollman's complaint is rooted in the fact that he wants the system to be a failure and if DMs are using it dynamically it might actually be very effective at presenting the kinds of scenes they are attempting to create.
In the end the analysis is essentially garbage in/garbage out.
The goal is to avoid discouraging people from trying things out of fear they will get a failure that shuts down the skill challenge for the group. It is decent rationale, and I've seen people have success with the system - I haven't found it as dynamic as the core system, though, so still use that.
This is my position as well. Some, I'm sure like alternate designs and if so well more power to them.
However my goal with a Skill Challenge is to convey an exciting scene and have my players participate in that scene in a dynamic manner. I've found that the basic skill challenge system is highly adaptable to presenting a number of different types of scenes depending on what the DMs objectives are.
Most alternate systems really improve one dimension of using Skill Challenges but in doing so limit their flexibility. Usually they make it increasingly clear that whats now going on is a kind of sub game and you can give up things like Healing surges in order to gain benefits.
I'll rarely go down that kind of route with a skill Challenge because I have little interest in presenting the players with a sub game - I want them to react to the scene itself with their characters. They main purpose of the passes and fails, so far as I'm concerned, is to let the DM determine where the story goes from here. Much of the time the players don't need to know if they succeeded or not on a skill challenge...they just need to know what happens next.
At the same time, they slightly changed the way the complexity of skill challenges worked - previously, you needed to hit a target number of successes (4/6/8/10/12) before getting half that number in failures (2/3/4/5/6). They changed this so that the number of failures is always 3 - which avoids the 4/2 issues (where 2 failures can happen very quickly and instantly end a challenge). But it makes the more complex skill challenges strangely imbalanced - you could get 10 successes (if you needed 12), and it only takes 3 failures to undo all that work. So I'm not entirely sure of the logic there, especially since official WotC products have often avoided it by presenting a challenge as a series of smaller challenges. (Which does, admittedly, work quite well.)
The problem was that the math did not work originally. You had, statistically less chance of pulling off the small low XP challenges then you did the harder big ones.
Once they made everything into X before 3 the stats corrected themselves - there were high XP challenges that were worth a lot but very hard and smaller ones that were worth less but much easier.
As you note, however, its becoming increasingly common to just run a series of small challenges. In truth its not very much fun to fail a 'hard' challenge after putting so much work into getting there.
Personally I use the really tough ones for bonus sub quest type stuff and not for the main adventure in general. Say a set of impossible to open doors that have defied all adventures that have tried to open them in the past - note that getting through the doors is not required for the adventure. If the players pull it off well aren't they cool. Usually they fail however and like other adventurers before them they have been defied by the doors.
The fact that it is late may be the cause (slightly helped by the previous post [edit: or the one before Aubrey stealthily moved in]) of me considering using Fuzzy Logic to determine the result of a skill challenge.
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That isn't really true. You can design one that can have multiple outcomes if you so desire, based on the the skill rolls and the outcomes. They have several examples in the DMG2.Sadly, there aren't any rules for those examples in the DMG2 version of the rules. (Which have DCs so low that you only have one possible result: success.)
And? They provide plenty of examples, some several pages long. If you can't read and adapt something you have seen, then it reflects rather badly on the DM. The rules as presented are very basic, and many of the more interesting skill challenges deviate from that. But as there are dozens of examples out there of different types I am sceptical of claims that that is a bad thing. Designing a skill challenge is much more art than science, and hard rules may hinder that.
And I can tell you categorically that it is quite easy to fail a skill challenge, even using the new rules. A modicum of mathematical nous will tell you that you will get a spread of results determining how the dice fall. Don't look at the average and make a conclusion along those lines.
I'm getting a little tired of being told something which I know works doesn't because of an unpresented mathematical analysis (which seems to change, given that I thought before you stated that we always fail at skill challenges, and now we always succeed). I'm happy to discuss the issue but I think you need to actually post up some evidence for your views, rather than just state them. Then we can debate the merits of the system as it is, and the possible changes people have made and how they might impact.
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The rules give you the basics. The point about a skill challenge is that it is actually an exercise in creativity, in playing with the rules, rather than following them blindly. I don't think you can really put down all the possible permutations in the rules. Frankly, they would become quite boring if they did. The rules as written provide a basic groundwork for setting DC and determining the difficulty (and the xp) to be handed out. I know there is this b~$~~%*! "fallacy" (Oberoni?) which says that if the rules don't cover everything then the rules are crap (or rather, if the rules need to be changed to work it is no defense of them to say they can be changed). However, the rules actually do work more or less, but can be adapted to create some very convoluted and intricate challenges which step beyond those rules (and anyway, there are no rules which cover everything, which is the flaw in Oberoni's thinking, since it would invalidate every rule set everywhere).
And you are changing tack. I asked you for analysis, and you gave me the old "I'm voting with my wallet" routine you gave in the thread about Cheliax, which takes us nowhere. If you have the analysis, I would be happy to see it - I doubt that the skill challenges model is perfect, and that would be an interesting place to take it rather than simply exchanging opinion.
Skill challenges can only give you a success or fail result. Why do you need between a half-dozen or a dozen rolls to get that? Even if the math worked, even if the system was impossible to be gamed, it's a really inefficient way to accomplish something we have a simple and easy mechanic to resolve.
In previous skill usage you just sat down and rolled how ever many times to get the task done, this would normally limit the characters who could take part and took loads of rolls anyhow.
For example climbing a rockface up a mountain, the skill used would be Climb which would progress you 1/3 your speed (usually 10ft per move action), keep doing this until your done or fall off the obstacle. Due to limited skill only the Rogue or possibly the fighter would be able to do this easily.
The skill challenge to me seems to encourage more than just a single skill set. It's now a case of the trained Athelete (probably the fighter or rogue) take the lead with an obstacle, due to climbing in underground environments the Dwarf could help the group progress by using his Dungeoneering or likewise with the ranger using Nature. The other characters can assist using similar skills(pointing out easier routes or nooks that can be utilied.
The DM can choose to spice it up with creatures living on the rock face requiring stealth to avoid them( they are just a protective kind of bird but could cause someone to fall if they attacked). Of course all this climbing is tiring so you'd probably require at least one endurance roll.
The example is a simple skill challenge but to me shows how the characters skills are now brought into the adventure instead of being ignored or brought down to single rolls.
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Well, Frank's views are pretty bogus in this regard. The skill challenge mechanic as written is clear that you can use secondary skills, and a well-written skill challenge will include several different types of skill anyway (the example in the DMG uses several non-social skills in a social setting). That is also written in the rules, I might add. More broadly...
The point about a skill challenge is that it is actually an exercise in creativity, in playing with the rules, rather than following them blindly.You know what? I don't need to have the players roll a d20 between seven and eighteen times, or pay money for the DMG2, to creatively make up something on the fly. This is the analysis. The rules don't do what they say they do, and even the DMG2 tells you to make up your own rules instead of using the written ones.
I should point out that people invent new rules for the game all the time to cover particular situations - for example, the rooftop chase in one of the CotCT adventures (which could have been done as a skill challenge). Unless you are suggesting that that in some way invalidates 3.5, I don't see how adapting the rules for skill challenges actually invalidates them either unless they don't work at a fundamental level as written. You say that is the case, and I await your proof with anticipation.
However, your comment about "making up the rules" in the DMG2 isn't the case anyway. What those show is how the tasks can be broken down into sub-tasks, or the simple die rolls can be incorporated into a broader narrative, while also setting out DCs and xp rewards. I'm not entirely sure what your point is. If you are saying it is bad because they haven't given full rules so you can read them and then come up with a highly complex skill challenge of the sort in the DMG2, then all I can say is that you must be incapable of reasoning by analogy. Frankly, an example is worth much more than a series of dry rules. The basic building blocks are in the book and if you can't make an intuitive leap then I'm sorry but that is not a failing in the DMG2 or by WotC. If it is the case that you have a fundamental disagreement about the way the building blocks work, that is of course a different matter.
I (and pretty much anyone else with enough creativity to play D&D at all) can be creative for free. Without rules. Rules offer only opportunities to temper creativity with fairness, so unfair rules are useless.
That's fair enough if you don't like the mechanic - no one is forcing you to use it. However, there is creativity without rules (thinking uip a new world) and creativity with the rules (adapting the skill challenge rules to suit your purposes). You seem to consider the latter to be false in some way in a way I do not. And you still have not presented an analysis of why they are "unfair" - you just keep saying it, which isn't the same thing.
And you are changing tack. I asked you for analysis, and you gave me the old "I'm voting with my wallet" routine you gave in the thread about Cheliax, which takes us nowhere. If you have the analysis, I would be happy to see it - I doubt that the skill challenges model is perfect, and that would be an interesting place to take it rather than simply exchanging opinion.
There's no way I can offer any mathematical analysis of the rules you're playing with, because the rules you're playing with exist only in your head. You've taken the examples and some stuff from published adventures, none of which has nothing to do with the written rules, and changed it in unspecified ways (including not even telling the players that there's a skill challenge).
If we want to talk about the written rules, I can do that. If we want to discuss the written rules plus clear modifications to those rules, I can also do that. But I can't hit a moving target.
I am talking about the written rules, and you seem to be twisting and turning to avoid presenting your actual analysis. I am waiting for your analysis of those rules as they are written. I have simply pointed out to you that the game does not end where the rules do. Apart from anything else I want to know what your basic assumptions are about them, since those seem to be different from mine.
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I should point out that people invent new rules for the game all the time to cover particular situations - for example, the rooftop chase in one of the CotCT adventures (which could have been done as a skill challenge). Unless you are suggesting that that in some way invalidates 3.5, I don't see how adapting the rules for skill challenges actually invalidates them either unless they don't work at a fundamental level as written. You say that is the case, and I await your proof with anticipation.People make rules to cover situations that the extant rules don't cover. That's good.
People make rules to cover extant rules that suck. That's bad.
If PF core had some terrible running-over-roofs rules that had to be replaced on the fly with rules that worked, I'd be just as witheringly critical. However! 3e has a reasonably functional skill system that offers both examples of straight use of the rules, and these rules work. It also has a series of suggestions on how to modify these rules, both with planning and on the fly, and they work as well as can be hoped.
Now, skipping over the other stuff as mostly-tangential fighting...
I am talking about the written rules, and you seem to be twisting and turning to avoid presenting your actual analysis. I am waiting for your analysis of those rules as they are written. I have simply pointed out to you that the game does not end where the rules do. Apart from anything else I want to know what your basic assumptions are about them, since those seem to be different from mine.Okay, good, So we're talking about the written rules, and not any random houserules you made up or houserules implied by the examples in the DMG/DMG2 or examples from adventures. I am hemming and hawing and trying to pin down ground rules so I don't write a two-page essay and then get "Well, if you [houserule/adjust the math on the fly/wing it/make s*#! up/write an entirely new system/use this other unrelated system] then it...
Well, yes and no. I'm happy to discuss the basic rules (although which version - DMG or DMG2, since they are different?) and it would be good to get that down and in the open. However, there are some other basic assumptions which I suspect we still will not agree upon, such as whether the more complex versions of the skill challenges which are not described in the basic rules represent a failure of those rules or simply an expansion of them. So I leave it up to you if you want to put down your analysis, as you might feel cheated and that you wated your time if my tack is less about that and more about differing assumptions to start with. Or at least be ready to agree to disagree, as it may well not come down to logical analysis.
Perhaps you should set out your assumptions first?
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Well, yes and no. I'm happy to discuss the basic rules (although which version - DMG or DMG2, since they are different?) and it would be good to get that down and in the open. However, there are some other basic assumptions which I suspect we still will not agree upon, such as whether the more complex versions of the skill challenges which are not described in the basic rules represent a failure of those rules or simply an expansion of them. So I leave it up to you if you want to put down your analysis, as you might feel cheated and that you wated your time if my tack is less about that and more about differing assumptions to start with. Or at least be ready to agree to disagree, as it may well not come down to logical analysis.As long as I don't have to defend the premise that rules that don't more or less work as written are badly written, we're enough on the same page that we can have a discussion. Laying out the rest of the premises is part of the essay if I'm doing my job right.
Lemme get some writing done.
Cool with that.
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A quick rundown of premises. Lemme know if any of these are in dispute.
Skill challenges should involve the whole party.
Skill challenges should present an interesting tactical challenge for the party.
Skill challenges should offer some advantage over the single-roll 4e skill rules.
Yes on all three. I would caveat point two in that the party doesn't need to know they are in a skill challenge for that point to be valid.
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Well, that would be an agree-to-disagree point, and I'm fine that it isn't central. That said, there is a clear example of such in the DMG2. Arguably, if you present a problem to the players they may react by suggesting skill checks they want to make. I don't think you need to say "...and this is a skill challenge" to get them interested and rolling dice. If the basic problem doesn't doesn't engage them, but the chance to roll dice does, then obviously you would tell them. I would suggest you have an issue of play-style here. I don't really think this is a house rule - the rules don't actually tell you to tell your players when they enter a skill challenge, and for more organic reasons of staying character you might prefer not to (as saying "Skill Challenge! Grab your dice!" could bring you out of the imaginary world and back to the pizza-strewn gameing table when it isn't necessary). In the end, whether this (i.e. not telling your players (sometimes) they are in a skill challenge) works will depend on the players and whether the DM is ready to run with it, possibly adjusting and adjudicating as he goes. I'm happy to accept it would not work for all groups (including probably my own).
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Well, the rules don't actually tell you to tell your players when they enter combat, but there's a yawning gap between a tacit understanding that it's time to deal with a challenge and concealing that challenge from the players entirely. But posit for a moment that the skill challenge math is utterly broken. If you want players to roll skills to overcome a series of obstacles, what's the benefit of melding all of those rolls into one clunky and non-functional system instead of resolving them individually, especially if you're not telling the players what you're doing behind the curtain?
The idea of broad skills that players apply creatively isn't a bad idea, but it's a part of the 4e baseline skill system (arguably, I don't think the skills are that broad, but that is a discussion for another thread), and not an advantage of the skill challenge rules.
True concerning entering combat, although the mechanics of combat (especially the "Roll initiative" moment) kind of give it away. That's not so much the case with a skill challenge, but it will depend on the nature of the challenge to some extent. The example in the DMG2 has the players setting out what skills they want to use to address the in-game situation they face (tracing a murderer from the body they find) rather than being told "this is a skill challenge, these are the relevant skills, please roll". The possible draw-back to this approach, and where it deviates from the rules as written, is that you may have a player who is more dominant and so ends up hogging the limelight and the skill checks. And sometimes you might want the players to know anyway, if only to speed-up play. Certainly I would agree that if the rules can be demonstrated to be fatally flawed then yes, as a general point, there isn't much point in using them. However, that has yet to be demonstrated. More broadly, the agglomeration element of skill challenges does, however, provide a framework for adjudicating how much xp to give out for non-combat situations (which used to be pretty much what the DM felt like handing out) - certainly no hard and fast rules existed before the skill challenge mechanic came out.
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The possible draw-back to this approach, and where it deviates from the rules as written, is that you may have a player who is more dominant and so ends up hogging the limelight and the skill checks.The very real drawback is that letting that dominant player hog the limelight is the best strategy.
Er, no, not necessarily - it depends what skills their character has.
I would caveat point two in that the party doesn't need to know they are in a skill challenge for that point to be valid.This is a separate tangent from a criticism of the rules-as-written, since it's a houserule I've never heard of before coming to the Paizo boards.
The concept is certainly not unique to the Paizo 4E community. The example given of a Skill Challenge in the DMG2 does not seem to indicate that the players are necessarily aware that they are in a Skill Challenge and much of the advice on breaking them up over time is going to in fact disguise that unless the DM makes it very clear to the players that they have returned to the Skill Challenge. Furthermore we have an example of one in the most recent series of Penny Arcade D&D podcasts where the players ran through a Skill Challenge while sneaking past a sleeping War Boar. None of the players indicated that they had realized they were in a Skill Challenge and the DM sure did not announce it. In fact its only in evaluating that part of the Podcast with the idea of Skill Challenges in mind is it clear that they played through one.
It's impossible for skill challenges to be an interesting tactical challenge if you don't inform the party that they're doing a skill challenge. Basically, you're deciding for the party how they're going to play the skill challenge. That doesn't engage the players any more, because you're playing with yourself and asking the players to roll the dice for you.
I'd take the opposite tack speaking from experience playing through them. Its quite difficult to make them an organic part of an exciting scene if you interrupt the scene to run some little sub-game while encouraging the players to meta-game the hell out of things. Your right down to rote dice rolling and, with a few exceptions based around using dice rolling to create tension, its just not a very fun way to interact with the fantasy world.
Ultimately here the players and the DM don't need the same information for this to be exciting - you don't read out the monsters stat blocks to the players before they get into a fight because that is not only jarring but counter productive. The goal is to get the players to have fun fighting the monsters and telling them what the monsters weak points are ahead of time as well as what the monster can do makes for lame and boring combats.
Fundamentally the players need to know what the scene is and how it evolves from their actions. The DM needs to know where the story goes from here and needs some method for giving the players XP - especially if they are running through many of these without otherwise fighting monsters to gain XP that way.
You complain that once we include the material from the DMG2 and recent adventures the whole analysis becomes nearly impossible to pull off because its a moving target - I agree but so what? I mean its extremely difficult to give an exact percentage chance for a party to defeat any given group of monsters as well. Worse yet even if we can determine some percentages is it possible to adjust those percentages to take into account that the battle will take place with a 20 foot deep trench running down the middle of the room? I doubt it - so does this mean we should not add interesting features to combat encounters because evaluating them becomes more difficult? I certianly don't think so.
Ultimately Skill Challenges are a tool for allowing players to interact with a scene in a role playing game, it does that best when the players are playing their characters and not playing the mechanics.
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Everything Jeremey mentions is in the DMG2. If you don't own a copy, you will struggle to criticise the current versions of skill challenges, since you won't know the rules and guidelines. If you are basing your comments on the original DMG version of the rules, then yes, they were statistically dubious (I crunched some numbers myself and I'm happy to agree with that) but since those rules have been superceded anyway I can't get excited (erratas happen all the time). All the other stuff you say isn't in the rules actually is, and even if it wasn't completely laid out I'm afraid I'm not going to declare a highly flexible (again, something seem to see as a failure) system that can be used in a load of different circumstances just because the rules for laying out every last sort of challenge are not specifically laid out. The rules for laying out every last encounter are likewise not there (if someone invesnts a new type of terrain, does that mean the rules for terrains are likewise a failure?) so I do not see this as a failure.
Wow, talk about a busy thread! I guess skill challenges are still a hot topic.
A quick rundown of premises. Lemme know if any of these are in dispute.
Skill challenges should involve the whole party.
Skill challenges should present an interesting tactical challenge for the party.
Skill challenges should offer some advantage over the single-roll 4e skill rules.
I'd have to say that I agree with all of these, although I'm not sure that a skill challenge has to be a 'tactical' challenge for the party. They just have to be an interesting and fun encounter for the party. If your group likes tactics, then a tactical challenge would work.
Regarding whether the party should be aware that a skill challenge is taking place, it's something that needs to be taken on a group by group basis. Certainly there is 'official precedent' for either method. I think most DMs would probably tend towards not informing their players of the skill challenge, so that they could keep up the role playing aspect of the game.