Skill challenge overdose

[SuperBidi]

I like skill challenges. Most of my characters are rather strong at skills and I obviously like to play on their strengths.
But recently, skill challenges have become ubiquitous in PFS. Not a single adventure without a chase, the influence subsystem or another type of skill challenge.
And I'm ODing. If I could I'd give the GM my character sheet and go grab a beer during skill challenges because too many of them just kills the fun.

First, it gets repetitive. And unlike combat, skill challenges are not exactly complex/interesting from a gaming point of view.
Second, as they are now fillers, they very often don't make sense.
Third, skill challenges format adventures. A lot of early seasons adventures are no more possible now because the entire adventure would be replaced by a skill challenge. Yes, I look at you Moskito Witch, and yes, I love you.
And fourth, it turns a lot of free form roleplaying/problem solving moments into just a bunch of dice rolls.

And I must admit, from a GM point of view, I have more and more issues GMing them when I see my players having no fun playing them (some of my players are rather vocal about it). So I think this is not just me.

[cavernshark]

While I agree that certain "skill challenge" subsystems get overused, any time you roll a skill to do something, that's a skill challenge. Some of those are team based pass/fail, some of them are individual, some of them are subsystems.

I think you might be experiencing a problem with GMs who don't (or can't) take the time to really flesh out the skill challenges beyond the mechanics. Even the simplest form of "everyone gets a chance to do something" and there's a collective victory condition can be an opportunity to let people describe what they're doing. And a GM is well within their rights to provide circumstance adjustments based on those responses.

I'll admit that my delivery of these can range from explicitly "everyone roll something appropriate off this list" at the short end to trying very hard just to use narrative to explain what's going on and engage with each player to elicit their skill or work through the system.

[SuperBidi]

cavernshark wrote:

While I agree that certain "skill challenge" subsystems get overused, any time you roll a skill to do something, that's a skill challenge.

When I speak of skill challenge, I really mean the subsystems asking for lots of skill checks from all players.

I fully agree that skill challenges can be described and made in such a way that the players really engage with them. And there are adventures where there's a skill challenge that is completely central to the adventure, that everyone cares about and that is really engaging. And in general the adventure will give enough time to turn it into a great experience.

But unfortunately, with the generalization of skill challenges, you now have "filler" skill challenges. These ones are not central to the adventure, they are just another encounter. As such, the level of engagement is rather low. On top of it, there's no time to turn them into a great experience if you expect to end the adventure in 5 hours.

So the end result is an endless stream of: GM gives the different checks, some players make a small description of how they proceed but the descriptions get quickly repetitive or cut off the more the challenge advances (as engagement is rather low), the GM sometimes gives a circumstance bonus or ask for another skill, the player rolls the check, the GM says success/failure, if the PCs get to another threshold the GM describes what they get. Rince, repeat, sometimes more than 20 times.

On top of that, I find that some skill challenges don't make sense at all. They are not written with any form of verisimilitude in mind, they are written from a purely gamist point of view. So you make a chase where character speed has no impact, you sometimes have to roll Performance because it's obvious you take time to dance and sing during a chase, if a player explains that they just teleport to the end or use any other form of magic/creative idea to trivialize the challenge the GM finds any reason to say no because they absolutely have to get through the challenge. And the skill challenges are forced on you, sometimes without logic, like this arc of 2 adventures where you convince the same persons to do the same thing twice, one in each adventure, or this adventure where you have to hussle through the sewers despite the lack of time pressure.

[NielsenE]

My critique of skill challenges typically comes down to when its a multi-round iterated challenge that doesn't change much between rounds. I feel scenarios often don't give enough hooks to the beginner/intermediate GMs to bring the extended skill checks to life, and that's why it just degrades to mechanical rolling of dice. Chases or the other "everyone rolls to overcome an obstacle" versions tend to work, and also often have a sense of urgency that keeps them flowing. its the Research/Influence that often fall victim to becoming too mechanical.

As examples of ones that I think gave enough help to the GM:
Blakrose Deception -- Each round of the influence minigame had descriptive text of a new room, or changes in attitude of the person to influence, along with something bonus to interact with. So while it was a multi-round, each round can feel different, and even if a character is relatively un-invested in the needed skills, often the bonus thing allowed to them engage some times.

Echoes of Desparation -- Again each round was given narrative description that would help people approach it differently and role play, rather than only mechanically playing an virtual worker placement board game. (However this one was very poorly scaled/balanced IMO, which probably negatively affects most people's memory/experience/perception of its fairness).

For an example of a borderline experiment, IMO:
Battle For Star's Fate -- Here we have a multi-round influence system broken up across the entire scenario. With different characters coming and going, with obviously different scene setting and priorities. It should be ideal -- and I want to like the idea since it never feels like
"and now we play a minigame for a while". However, I found the context switching back and forth often annoyed players even more, and keeping track of who was around/what people had learned was harder, even with various table/online aids.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

I love skill challenges, and prefer them to combats much of the time, but you do have to fill in the edges to make them more fun for the players.

[Sebastian Hirsch]

The frequency of skill challenges has really ramped up, and personally, I feel like overusing them makes them more unpalatable, particularly the influence system, as I tend to think that it makes the RP worse, as you are busier navigating the system, and focus less on the RP.

Those systems often devolve into a lot of dice-rolling, especially discovery checks.

In general, the right subsystem can make sense - though I have seen too many chases used in situations that did not call for them - unfortunately, the issues do seem to get worse if an adventure chooses to include 2-3 of them.

When they get used a lot they really mange to take up a lot of sessions time, and as a GM that runs a lot online... fights are super easy, but illustrating a subsystem that involves player choice and a lot of rolls is hard work.
In situations where the actual impact of succeeding or failing at those roles barely matters (for narrative and or mechanical reasons) it can feel like an unpleasant drain on the player's rerolls.

[umopapisdnupsidedown]

Sebastian Hirsch wrote:

Those systems often devolve into a lot of dice-rolling, especially discovery checks.

You probably know this is a hobby horse of mine, and I pretty rarely post on the forums, but I'm gonna jump on my hobby horse here and say "people make way too many discovery checks."

The times I haven't had fun with the influence system have been the times I've played with people who, sadly, weren't very good at it. The classic example was the one in which the players had half a dozen known options to roll for Influence, but they...Rolled to Discover influence skills. At one point it was the second or third round, and my character was the only one who had put any influence points on the board...Because I was almost the only person doing something other than rolling to Discover influence skills.

It was maddening, frankly.

In contrast, when I ran the same scenario, my players rolled to Discover influence skills zero times, because they actually thought about it and quickly realized they didn't need to. And they had plenty of roleplaying opportunities, to boot.

At a certain point it's hard to blame the subsystem.

The same is not necessarily true for chases. There is a recent scenario in which a full party of 6 requires 48 successes to complete a chase. At an 80% success rate, that's a whopping 60 rolls (10 rounds). I do have beef with long chases that scale as the number of PCs, and would greatly prefer both fewer obstacles and scaling as half the number of PCs to make a chase more dynamic and more strategic. Otherwise it's just rolling and praying for it to end (at least for me).

Broadly speaking though I'm with Hmm, I get bored of combat and would be perfectly happy with more non-combat challenges. Ran my first infiltration for PaizoCon, really liked it. Would love to see more of those, for example—in place of combat, not in addition to it.

[SuperBidi]

umopapisdnupsidedown wrote:

The times I haven't had fun with the influence system have been the times I've played with people who, sadly, weren't very good at it.

For me, this sentence shows a clear issue.

Being "good" at a roleplaying game should not be about system knowledge, it should be about the way you play your character, you roleplay and take in game decisions.

Combat is quite central to PF2 and as such to be "good" at PF2 you need to know combat rules. That's a specificity of this system, one that has to be accepted (so even if I understand why you can ask for less combat, I think combat is a legitimate expectation due to the game we play).

Influence subsystem is supposed to give a framework for roleplay. But ultimately it's supposed to be roleplay. When mastering the system starts taking so much importance that you can fail at roleplay moments not because you roleplay badly, take bad decisions or are unlucky with rolls, but because of a lack of system mastery then I think there's an issue. Influence subsystem stops being a framework and becomes a minigame. But I like roleplay, I want to roleplay, I don't want to turn roleplay into a minigame as roleplay is central to roleplaying games (quite literally).

[cavernshark]

I like the Influence subsystem in concept, but in practice it does leave much to be desired and you end up having to strategize the system itself instead of really worrying about what's being said to the person. The biggest trap is the opportunity cost between Discovery and Influence. You can't spend time chatting with someone to get to know how to Influence them because you can easily run out of time to do so, especially when you often don't know how many arbitrary rounds of dialogue you're going to get. And sometimes the success or failure conditions on those influence can be very binary (e.g. you didn't hit the threshold at all so you get nothing). And it's even more complicated when you've got to also juggle the strategy of that same opportunity cost on multiple NPCs at the same time.

There are also good chases out there. I like them mechanically because they do leave room for collective group success and sometimes they allow for choices which make sense. The little bit of strategizing on who goes first makes a big difference. I'd like to see more options on chase cards where a single action against a high DC (e.g. unlock a door with Thievery) might immediately allow the party to proceed vs. some other checks to navigate through a bunch of corridors or something. The crit success condition kind of does that, and with appropriate DCs it can feel good. But this is all in how it's implemented.

That's been my biggest takeaway. If the subsystem is designed *exactly* the way it's written, they work pretty well. But sometimes they're deployed in tricky ways with different assumptions in mind. That can run against what players expect when they encounter the subsystem. One example I can think of off hand is a chase where you're pursuing someone, but they aren't actually represented on the map. You cannot actually catch them. Each time you clear a block, the narrative is they're one step ahead. This can feel like a failure to the party but the system is actually designed just to measure how many rounds it takes to get through the obstacles with scaling of the next encounter based on that. The same is true of some of the more complicated influence scenarios -- influencing a single NPC is hard. Trying to do it to 4 at a time is even worse when you don't know at all what the victory condition is. In combat, I know I need to knock out, kill, or get my enemies to flee. In a skill challenge it's often not clear.

One thing I've tried to get better at as a GM is to tell the party up front "This will look like an chase/influence, but your goal is 'X'" especially if assuming it works like a regular chase or influence will result in a bad time. There's definitely a balance in trying to expose the mechanics of the system to make it clear while also not focusing on them so heavily that it removes the immersion and interesting options. And gauging how the party looks during the execution -- if they're feeling down by results try to encourage them especially if they're actually doing better than they think they are based on their expectations of the subsystem.

[umopapisdnupsidedown]

SuperBidi wrote:

umopapisdnupsidedown wrote:

The times I haven't had fun with the influence system have been the times I've played with people who, sadly, weren't very good at it.

For me, this sentence shows a clear issue.

Being "good" at a roleplaying game should not be about system knowledge, it should be about the way you play your character, you roleplay and take in game decisions.

Combat is quite central to PF2 and as such to be "good" at PF2 you need to know combat rules. That's a specificity of this system, one that has to be accepted (so even if I understand why you can ask for less combat, I think combat is a legitimate expectation due to the game we play).

For me, the central point is, "Unless people have at least some minimum level of of competency and system knowledge with the combat rules, playing with them isn't very fun for others at the table, so we expect some level of system knowledge." That seems reasonable. But for whatever reason, that expectation is lower or nonexistent for other subsystems, which frustrates me.

Every subsystem in the game, including combat, is intended to facilitate roleplay with some level of structure. And people spend inordinate amounts of effort on combat optimization. (And a lot less effort on combat roleplay, but that's a topic for another rant...)

Despite the fact that most of the other subsystems, including Influence, are much simpler (it's really not rocket science), a lot of people don't seem to put much effort into learning or even thinking about it. And then they blame the subsystem(s).

Well, just as combat kinda isn't great if you've got a player who is spending their turns on triple guidance for partymates who aren't even going to make use of the bonus (or if this doesn't do it for you, just think of the most useless three actions you can possibly imagine), other subsystems aren't great when you've got players just derping around, either. And derping around seems to be the standard with non-combat subsystems, including Influence.

[Squark]

Running a good influence encounter takes a certain amount of skill from the GM to make things seem organic, and it doesn't help that not every challenge is entirely consistent (while weaknesses are consistently useful, the level of usefulness can range from making it easier to brute force diplomacy by lowering dcs to revealing a way to score multiple auto successes). I far prefer them to just, "roll a diplomacy check," but we could do with more guidance for GMs on how to run the system well. Adding some rp lrompts for each influence target would help with GM prep too.

[Zoomba]

I think skill challenges for this conversation referring to the specific 'Subsystems' involving skills can be good and in many cases have been used well in XFS. But there are plenty of other times where their execution has been spotty and several instances have run so many rounds and asked for so many checks that the 'encounter' tends to get drawn out, sapping the energy of the table.

For the two most common systems - Chases and Influence - my two biggest bugbears (and suggestions for improvement) are:

Chases: So many chases end up having far too many obstacles, especially when each obstacle has the same needed number of 'Chase Points' to overcome and there's no decisions involved in how to handle them.

Suggestion/more enjoyable chase possibilities: I am a big fan of the 'Fail forward with consequence' type of chases we've seen in SFS and occasionally in PFS2 where you face a new Obstacle each round regardless, but if the party did not get the needed successes they suffer a penalty (condition, damage, higher DCs for the next obstacle, etc). This keeps things moving without risking the PCs getting stuck in a 'rut' of bad rolls or lack or the right skills.
I also appreciate the sadly rare times a chase 'branches' giving the party choices as to which obstacles to face. It adds more player agency and choices to the game.

Influence: As a 'structured' RP system to sway or get info out of NPCs this can work occasionally, or in specific in-game contexts. But when the influence is done in simple rounds back-to-back with nothing in between it can feel like the PCs are just spamming their best skill over and over until they get the right amount of thumbs up. There also is a fine art to having the right number of NPCs involved. Too many and the party can spread themselves to thin to succeed (though this is a bit of a strategy vs character RP issue), while too few (2-07 imo) means IC the characters are just saying the same things to a person 5 times in a row

Suggestion: Influence encounters spread out over time, or with other events going on that could create different ways to approach the influence as the PCs react to the changes are ideal. 1e's Bid for Alabastrine is the gold standard for this, but in 2E 5-16's Influence encounter was an excellent example too.
I also feel that in so many of the 2e Influence situations so far the PCs are being assigned by the Society that they need to sway certain targets...but the breifers decline to give any help or suggestions about these (mostly) very well known personalities. Allowing some Influence skills to be delivered in advance (either in the mission briefings themselves, or via possible Recall Knowledge/Gather Info checks acting as 'free' Discovery rolls for well-known NPCs) would both help with the 'Discovery v Influence' action economy crunch and make more sense immersion-wise within the world.

One other issue I have noticed with skill challenges: they tend to have a disproportionate amount of Hero Points being used, since they involve everyone rolling a lot of d20 rolls (and have party-punishing crit-failure penalties) in a very compressed amount of time.

[SuperBidi]

I've played the last quests released. One of them contains 2 combats (low level and easy, so rather fast) and 2 skill challenges, all of that in the 2-3 hours a quest is supposed to take. So I should say cheap skill challenges: No player engagement, not much sense, just a bunch of pointless dice rolls. For me, it reached the point where as a player I'm just fed up with them and as a GM I'm now officially considering them "errors" in adventures and rewriting them.

Skill challenges can be fun. But the way they are used is much closer to a cancer that replaces all roleplay, investigation and other nice parts of adventure with low engagement cheap dice rolls making no sense. I have more fun in my job and I'm payed to do it.

[Ascalaphus]

For me, I've come to feel that for some of the minigame systems, PF2 made changes compared to PF1 that haven't turned out well.

PF1 started out with a notorious chase system where everyone is in it for themselves, and if you got stuck at an obstacle you didn't have the skill for, you were just stuck there permanently. But eventually they came up with a new chase system where the party always stays together, and every round you pass the current obstacle. What the checks measure is how well you passed the obstacle, and at the end there's a reward/punishment based on how many obstacles were passed gracefully.

PF2 seems to be doing that - the party does stay together - but you're actually stuck at an obstacle until you eventually pass it. Except sometimes an obstacle wants two of basically the same skills, like Nature and Survival. If you don't have anyone with Survival, odds are, you also don't have anyone with Nature, since they're outdoors Wis skills that tend to go together.

PF2 chases seem to be a clever worker placement game, where you carefully figure out which PC should be doing which check, and who should be staying in reserve for the next obstacle. But it just doesn't really pan out. People don't understand, or don't really want to agonize over that kind of choice, or the GM isn't letter you look ahead to the next obstacle so it's a blind choice. All in all, the worker placement aspect of the minigame is a dud.

I actually don't think chases really need all that much clever choices and decision making. A very simple system that can be executed fast is needed. Because a chase needs to feel fast, and that just doesn't pair with tactics-by-committee.

Imagine the chase system ran more like this:

GM: there's a wall blocking your way. Everyone roll athletics against an easy DC. We count successes. Okay, 2/6 successes, this one slowed you down. Next obstacle.
GM: next there's a crowd, you see your prey weaving through, let's see how you do with Intimidate or Acrobatics. Okay, some critical successes, they count double, so you get 6/6, great, you're getting through faster than your prey did.

No need to track who's gone in this round during this obstacle, and who's still available in this round for the next obstacle. No need to figure out who should be rolling checks first.

Doing it like this should make the chase resolve much faster, and actually feel like a fast event in the scenario.