Venture-Agent, France—Paris
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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.
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Venture-Agent, France—Paris
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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.
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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.
Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
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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.
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Venture-Lieutenant, New Zealand—Christchurch
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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.
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Venture-Agent, France—Paris
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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).
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Venture-Lieutenant, New Zealand—Christchurch
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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.
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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.
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Venture-Agent, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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I think skill challenges 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 . 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 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.
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.
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Venture-Agent, France—Paris
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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.
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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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.
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Venture-Agent, France—Paris
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I don't think you get why I'm fed up with skill challenges. It doesn't have to do with the mechanics in and by themselves.
I lately played a recent quest.
There are 4 encounters in it. One of them is a skill challenge that really struck me as the embodiment of my disgust of skill challenges. It features: 5 NPCs to convince and 1 to distract, 5 duels to perform, 5 people to look for and an escape route to find.
NPCs are not described besides their name, gender, alignment [sic], ancestry and one sentence. Example of such a sentence: This individual takes notes of all the activities.
The escape route is not described either.
Only one PC can perform this activity at a time. Once the PCs have either two successes or a single critical success on this task, no further attempts may be made; they’ve prepared as much as they can. While the other Pathfinders perform distracting activities, one PC can attempt to find less noticeable places to help with the escape, or even set up simple snares and the like to thwart potential pursuers.
The Thane is aware of all of these machinations, but lets them play out.
They believe allowing the plan to progress will make for excellent entertainment. A PC who succeeds at a DC 15 Perception check to Seek or DC 13 Stealth check to Sneak allows PCs to locate various blind spots. A PC can also attempt a DC 15 Crafting check to Craft simple snares or distractions that could aid in their escape.
Critical Success Let the PCs know they have earned two successes towards a future challenge. Though they won’t know it yet, they gain either 2 Chase Points to use on any one obstacle or 2 Edge Points which are only
earned once.
Success As critical success, except the PCs gain only 1 Chase Point or 1 Edge Point.
Failure The PCs earn no points.
Critical Failure The PCs lose 1 Diversion Point as the Thane finds their disastrous attempts at subterfuge boring. That PC may not reattempt this task.
And duels are not described.
During the third round, the Thane puts forth a call for some skilled combatants. Multiple PCs can participate, though if no one elects to, the Thane asks if they truly don’t feel up to such a challenge. Should no PC step up to duel, the PCs lose 1 DP. PCs not dueling can use this
time to attempt to locate the Volls. Rather than a standard fight, the duel is a performance and takes as long the other activities. Participating PCs need to succeed at three checks before getting three
failures to win the duel against the fey chosen by the Thane. The Thane wants an interesting fight, so they have chosen a combatant for each PC that roughly matches their skill. During the fight a PC can attempt
the following checks to overcome their opponent. A critical success counts as two successes and a critical failure counts as two failures.
• A DC 13 Acrobatics check to Tumble Through can leave the opponent off balance and open.
• A DC 17 Athletics check to Trip or Shove puts the opponent at a serious disadvantage.
• A DC 15 Deception check to Feint embarrasses the opponent and leaves them open.
• A DC 15 melee Strike to land an impressive blow that would have made contact if not for the Thane’s magic making such attacks harmless.
• A DC 13 Performance check to Perform might not land a telling strike, but the PC looks so good that no one minds.
So what is the GM supposed to do with this adventure summary? Spend countless hours of work making up the adventure and ending up with a full-fledged 5 hours scenario? Or just lay all that down with no description forcing players into a stream of absolutely pointless rolls and no roleplay (as you can't roleplay or describe what you're doing when you absolutely don't know what you're doing or who you're speaking to).
And this quest is not an exception, it's a general trend. We are moving away from a roleplaying game into some form of bad boardgame (well, combat is nice, but still it's no roleplaying game).
There's a serious issue. For anyone to write that adventure and not realize it's deeply problematic is extremely concerning to me. We reach the stage where the GM has to rewrite (well, write as nothing is written) the entire adventure. That's not what PFS is supposed to be. Adventures should be usable with minimum prep and it should be roleplaying game adventures.
Or, you have to accept bland, repetitive, meaningless adventures, specifically catered for bad GMs. Because turning an adventure into a stream of pointless dice rolls is bad GMing, it doesn't lead to memorable experience.
I GM since the start of PFS2 and I have to put in more and more work on adventure preparation. In season 1, I was roughly rounding corners. I started significant rewriting in season 4. But the more it goes and the more I feel I have to rewrite everything. That's not a good trend to me. Maybe I'm not the target audience but I feel the target audience won't grow our hobby. You can't reduce expectations indefinitely, at some point there are no expectations left.
I don't know if I'm the only one to realize it, if we are all boiling frogs in our pots. What I'm sure of is there's a population of players who like roleplaying games more than subsystems and with the slow replacement of roleplay and investigation by subsystems I feel slowly pushed toward the exit. And I clearly don't think it's a voluntary trend, for me it's lazyness that pushes writers to do that. The PFS team should question the direction adventure writing takes.
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RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16
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I only have an issue with skill challenges when they're designed poorly or run incorrectly. A good skill challenge encourages roleplaying. A bad skill challenge forces players to roll-play.
A good skill challenge has the GM present an open-ended problem and allows players to decide how to solve it. Specific skills are only mentioned when the GM adjudicates the player's proposed solution or when players are stumped and need a hint.
A bad skill challenge has the GM present a problem and then explicitly lists the solutions. GM lists the skills; player rolls the one with the highest bonus; end turn. There's no decision-making here. Chases earned their notoriety because they almost always fell into this structure in 1st Edition.
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** spoiler omitted **...
I get what you're saying about the subsystems, but just to check an assumption: Quests are supposed to last 1 hour (Quests 1-13) or 2 hours (from Quest 14 onwards); Not 5. You don't have to flesh out a whole background for barely relevant NPC's unless you want to.
As for me, I do absolutely love skill challenges, but I dislike most implementations of the subsystems. Some are just too complex to introduce as a segment within an adventure (such as infiltration/ heist), and some are often just poor and overused implementations (influence). In most cases, the subsystem becomes a mini-game that gets in the way of roleplaying: Like, what the heck are you supposed to discuss with your fourth or fifth attempt to Influence an NPC?
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Venture-Agent, France—Paris
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I agree with both of you. I hope PFS team's aware of that (or at least read us).
I also think there are differing populations when it comes to skill challenges and roleplaying games in general. Roleplaying games are always a balance between role and roll, and some players will prefer more role, others more rolls.
But I think with skill challenges we are crossing a line where we are losing players (at least me, I feel less and less engaged by recent seasons). I've taken some time looking at the most recent quests, namely The Elsewhere Feast and Infernal Infiltration, and they both favor rolls over role so much that for me it doesn't qualify as roleplaying game anymore. In my opinion, it's deeply problematic, Pathfinder 2 is no board game.
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Agreed on the "way too much..." influence encounters bandwagon. Some are simply too long and the game devolves into...just tell me what to roll so we can move on...
we've been short cutting them lately and cringe when the judge mentions the next dinner party event.
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
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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've seen the reverse to be also true. I've had players with bad/few skills go first because they knew they couldn't clear the obstacle in one go. Going after the rest would only cost them their precious victories, while I ruled you couldn't go into the negatives (can't have -1 chase points). The people without the appropriate skill go first, then the skilled people. If the obstacle wasn't cleared, they'd go in reverse, hoping they clear the obstacle before the differently skilled people crit fail again.
"Looking ahead" isn't in the rules by RAW (as far as I can find), but seems reasonable. That makes the decision process a lot easier, but doesn't help if you're also bad in those skills.
My main issue with skill challenges is that I've seen a lot of players who just don't have a lot of skills, or have a wonky stat distribution so that they don't have backup skills. I've seen several Barbarians or Fighters with +4 STR, +3 CON, which leaves only two or three more stat increases across four stats. Plus, they tend to favour Athletics since that's their only STR skill, which leaves only two more skills they most likely only have a +1 in. Rolling at a +3 or +4 at best while others are rocking a +6 or +7 just doesn't feel like you're contributing. I know, it's a conscious choice when you make such a stat spread, but that's objectively the "best" way to make a Barbarian. Go have fun with your skill challenges when you only have one "good" skill.
I like skill challenges, and they've been streamlined a lot, but I think it's still easy to be dead weight (or worse, a detriment) in some skill challenges when everyone HAS to compete.