Lots of the early LFR ones are poorly handled but I've played through a couple of good ones now, and as a DM I'm learning better how to run them, and now they work very well for me.
I'd like to meet these mythical "good" skill challenges that follow the rules in the DMG. In my experience, skill challenges have been good in direct proportion to how many of the DMG rules they throw out or otherwise ignore. For example Spec 1-1Show
The maze encounter from Spec 1-1 is not perfect but is better than most skill challenges. In it, each player who was in the maze had to roll a check each round (the DMG skill challenge rules state that players can choose to pass rather than roll) to avoid being drained by the walls of the maze or to make it to the center with only limited flexibility on how one could use skills to proceed through the maze or to avoid drain. There was also no set number of failures that would doom the skill challenge--the skill challenge is over when you win, give up, or die. That's it. (By the DMG rules, 3 failures and you're done). All successes were not equal. Some skills could keep you from losing a healing surge. Other skills could move you towards the center of the maze. All failures were not equal. If you try to fool the maze into thinking that you were actually blessed by Shar and fail, the consequences are worse than if you simply try to use your dungeoneering to navigate the maze like you would a cave. The party was not required to work together. PCs could explore separately, in which case they would need to get six successes individually rather than collectively in order to succeed. You can change goals in the middle of the challenge. It requires six navigational successes to find your way to the center. It requires two to find your way back out. So, if you get three successes but they were costly enough that you think you have to retreat, you then need two more successes to escape.
In short, while the maze encounter in Spec 1-1 gives XP as though it were a skill challenge, its design contradicts nearly all of the DMG rules for skill challenges along the way to actually reflecting navigation through a malevolent maze of living darkness.
The other skill challenge that strikes me as being effective (I thought it was a bit too meanspirited to cite it as a model of what I want to see in other mods) is the Spec 1-2Show
Climb the chain skill challenge in spec 1-2. While I haven't read it, when I played the mod, it provided a solid challenge and actually gave the feel that our characters were experiencing a long, arduous, and very dangerous climb.
This skill challenge also ignored the majority of the rules for skill challenges. 1. No abstentions. If you wanted to climb the chain, you had to complete the skill challenge. Someone else couldn't make your athletics check for you. 2. No auto-success on the basis of other peoples' successes. If you couldn't manage the DC 10 (or DC 0) athletics check for the requisite 500 feet, then you were in trouble. If you couldn't make it, your party would have to find a way to take you with them or they would have to leave you behind. 3. Fixed and concrete obstacles. There were no "I remember an ancient portal to the temple of the sky and use history to avoid the skill challenge" moments. A section of the chain was burning with red-hot sigils. You had to find a way to get past it. 4. No set number of failures. As long as you were willing to accept the consequences, you could keep going. If you wanted to quit, you needed to find a way to get down while you were still able to do so, but either way, the challenge wasn't over until you reached the top or the bottom. 5. Failures were not identical. Fail your athletics check to climb and you might fall. (So, you would be advised to make sure you don't fail). Fail your check to disable the blast glyphs and they would attack you. Fail to disable them a second time and they would attack again. Fail an endurance check and lose a healing surge. (The last one was a pretty clunky mechanic which I did not like).
Before there was a skill challenge mechanic you wouldn't have let them do that, so don't let them do that now. Get the players to tell you how they are getting the paladin past and get them to make the appropriate rolls - just like before there was a skill challenge - and use the result of those checks in the skill challenge success tally.
This only works if the plan the players come up with calls for a roughly similar number of successes to the complexity of the skill challenge in the mod and all failures would logically have equal consequences.
Going back to this example, it's fine to require everyone to make a stealth check to get to the wall and everyone to make an athletics check to climb over it, but unless it's a complexity 12 skill challenge, they will acquire successes or failures much too quickly for the "have everyone roll checks and count the successes" route to work. (Additionally, in this approach, successes and failures should not all carry the same weight. A failure on the athletics to climb the (short) wall should not be as consequential as a failure to accurately observe the guard schedule). I agree with your approach to what a good DM should do, but I don't think you can shoehorn it into the skill challenge mechanic.
A good DM should do what he did before the skill challenge mechanic was introduced and should not attempt to shoehorn it into the skill challenge mechanic. In short, the skill challenge mechanic is a complete and total failure.
I'd like to meet these mythical "good" skill challenges that follow the rules in the DMG. In my experience, skill challenges have been good in direct proportion to how many of the DMG rules they throw out or otherwise ignore. For example
4. No set number of failures. As long as you were willing to accept the consequences, you could keep going. If you wanted to quit, you needed to find a way to get down while you were still able to do so, but either way, the challenge wasn't over until you reached the top or the bottom. 5. Failures were not identical. Fail your athletics check to climb and you might fall. (So, you would be advised to make sure you don't fail). Fail your check to disable the blast glyphs and they would attack you. Fail to disable them a second time and they would attack again. Fail an endurance check and lose a healing surge. (The last one was a pretty clunky mechanic which I did not like).
You do know that the point to the 3 Failures is not to stop the PCs from progressing through the challenge?
The point to the 3 Failures is to give the DM a point at which he can go "ok something should happen now" not for the DM to say "you messed up lets stop"
The SPEC1-2 challenge is one you cannot fail - you must climb the chain to reach the top and be able to continue with the module. This is where the 3 Failures comes in - the DM now has a measure to go "at this point the bad guys get this advantage"
The point you make about having every PC make the check for climbing the wall or whatever is missing the point. Have them propose a plan for getting around those problems and make checks for that - not have 12 checks across 2 skills.
This only works if the plan the players come up with calls for a roughly similar number of successes to the complexity of the skill challenge in the mod and all failures would logically have equal consequences.
Which is exactly what I have been saying for some time now: if the author and reviewers picked the right complexity, most plans chosen by the players require roughly a similar number of successes. I know that there are several out there were experience and DC was more a guideline than the actual challenge. Still, player actions are remarkably unpredictable, so blaming the system for something that is impossible to avoid is a bit odd. There is a DM for a reason.
In your example, the players could decide to send out a scout to two sides of the street. These make a Stealth or Bluff check to remain undetected, and to alert their fellow PCs for the guard patrols. The other PCs then do NOT need to make that Stealth check to cross the streets since they would only cross when there is no guard in sight. Furthermore, climbing walls is one of those things were people really do not all need to make that Athletics check. Only one needs to get up to drop a rope and drag people up. Besides, I have never met a group of PCs that lacked both physical and social skills and this particular example had two distinct paths (physical and social). I did forget the sewer path which would involve the Knowledge group somewhat.
A good DM should do what he did before the skill challenge mechanic was introduced and should not attempt to shoehorn it into the skill challenge mechanic. In short, the skill challenge mechanic is a complete and total failure.
I will keep repeating myself, but: A good DM will let the players make a plan and still keep it a skill challenge were players not only need their out of character tactical skills, but at least also use the skills of their characters (in short: they need to make those skill checks). It might be a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but I always find it odd how often I hear stories of were being a smart dominant player is thought of as the same as being a good roleplayer (and I am not saying you fall in that category Elder_basilisk, it is just one type of group that seems to have difficulties with skill challenges). Just because you as a player can come up with a good plan, does not mean your character can pull it off. You have those skill list on the character sheet for a reason.
I will keep repeating myself, but: A good DM will let the players make a plan and still keep it a skill challenge were players not only need their out of character tactical skills, but at least also use the skills of their characters (in short: they need to make those skill checks).
And if the plan reasonably succeeds in fewer checks, or would require more checks than the skill challenge lists as the number of required checks?
Or if the plan wouldn't fail on a certain failed check, but would based upon the listing of the skill challenge?
What's gained by having this number of successes and number of failures put in place by the skills challenge? How does this improve upon simply having the DM decide when the party has succeeded or failed?
In short, imho, the mechanics of a skill challenge doesn't add to the experience but rather it places an unneeded hurdle for the judge to circumvent.
Except that if the players understood the mechanics of skill challenges it does exactly the opposite of forcing the table to spend more time on the issues and actively discourages participation.
It depends on how the DM portrays the challenge. If you explain the challenge in such black and white terms as to make the skill obvious and remove opportunities for thought/mystery/discussion, then yeah, the best PC will step forward and the others will stay quiet. If you couch the scenario in mystery or in larger more complex terms, then PCs will react accordingly and will come up with different ideas. What is more important... being good at climbing or being stealthy? Do they need to send someone that is a defender up first, in case there is combat? Should they send a ranged combatant, in case there are foes there ready to sound the alarm? Properly set, a challenge is not black and white and creates real consideration.
I'm always amazed by how different each gaming system is. D&D has always suffered (across all editions) by linear play with "get to the point/roll" mechanics. In a game like Spycraft or Legend of the Five Rings, you might spend an hour exploring how to reach the enemy stronghold and have both the players and DMs working completely without a script. This seldom happens in D&D. What did happen in past editions is that it did not matter. You ended up at the keep exactly where the mod expected you to end up. Now there is a potential mechanic to involve more players and force more attention to the issue. Yes, done poorly it exacerbates the problem and adds mechanical die rolling to linear play, but that's only if done poorly.
Elder_basilisk wrote:
How did the wizard climb the cliff? We needed three athletics checks so the fighter and barbarian did it (twice) and the wizard and cleric rolled dungeoneering and perception checks. No need to describe the barbarian as the lead climber climbing to the top and lowering a rope for the others who the fighter then led in the climb, showing them how to do it and giving them a hand in the rough spots.
This is up to the DM. I will say that 4E suffers from a timing issue. By framing everything as an encounter, skill challenges have an XP target and rolling dice target but are marginalized in XP importance (usually) as compared to the long "important" combats. This leads to DMs wanting to hand-wave in the name of speed. It is unfortunate. But, the DM ultimately has the responsibility of what to do in a limited time. I would argue that the game is much better hand-waving a quarter of a brute's or elite's HPs than pushing scheming PCs to rush through their skill challenge planning.
Elder_basilisk wrote:
How about participation? Even a cursory glance over the skill challenge mechanic reveals that the worst thing a party member can do is contribute a failure. If your fighter does not have the appropriate skill, the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut
The rules do tolerate some failure. Two of them, in fact. Usually, this allows for a failure up front as a PC correctly RPs their PC trying something at which they do not excel or as a PC tries something just because they happen to be the ones in front. A common scenario is a PC RPing with an NPC, suddenly finding that their words matter (making a social check). As they fail, they have a good reason to say, "Let me introduce you to my (charismatic) friend..." this friend, usually talented, will usually make the checks without a problem.
And, keep in mind old vs. current vs. future. The current mods have better skill challenges than the old ones. The article that broke down the skills by class to show which ones were rare... this should have been in the DMG (at least at a general level), but it escaped even the designers. We are all learning. As we learn, we find that the best skill challenges give the PCs room to experiment and try different skills. Yes, they usually will pick a few PCs to lead the way, but that is ok.
Compare this to Spycraft, where you have Dramatic Conflicts. This is a one-PC (almost always) event where that one PC gets to take on a major situation with their expert skill (driving in a chase, hacking a network, etc.). The rules make for brilliant play... for one person. They both rock and fail because of that.
Skill challenges, I would argue, are an inferior system but with a much better sharing of the burden. And, for a somewhat basic RPG like D&D, they do a good job of helping newer players (or quieter players) participate.
D&D just isn't Legend of the Five Rings, where traits/rings (similar to abilities) and skills and exploding dice and void are complex enough to allow many PCs to be able to try most challenges and have a decent chance at success. And, D&D is much more linear as well. This is just a basic part of the game... though good DMs and well-written encounters can change that.
Elder_basilisk wrote:
More like, "we have figured out how to minimize the damage done by a truly horrid and abysmal mechanic--usually by not using it." If only the authors, designers, and admins would do the same and consign it to the scrapheap of history with weapon vs armor type.
I agree skill challenges are written weakly in the DMG. The errata only helped to make this a greater area of confusion. I consider them to be an Alpha-level rule, requiring much greater testing to really become a sound mechanic.
At the core, I agree in large part (but not completely) with many that argue that the mechanic is completely unnecessary. Where I disagree is that this is usually true for experienced DMs and players, who could RP a game based on everyone being a paper bag and have amazing stories to tell about the experience. But, many players are shy, new, less experienced, and unsure of how to participate in an open-ended game. For them (and I think they may make up more than 50% of the gaming population), the skill challenge rules offer an adequate (sometimes good) way to gain their involvement and make skills matter. No, it isn't a fantastic system, but it can work and I disagree with the degree of your complaint about the system.
Fantastic experienced players and GMs will take a skill challenge and use it as the basis for what they want to do anyway. No good DM will turn down a logical idea from a player. They will assign a DC and roll with it. They will add to what is printed, adding new options and creating story around what the PCs do and how it plays out. I don't think skill challenges harm this. I think they help, actually, by providing an outline of possibilities to consider (somewhat akin to bullet points for NPC comments).
I don't see any mechanic making D&D into what Spycraft and L5R does for non-combat encounters. The games are just very different. It would take much more to do that and I don't think D&D designers desire the game to change in that way.
Let me close by saying I suspect you and I would have great fun together at the table. I think we just disagree on how bad the skill challenge system is and the level of its effects on the game.
And if the plan reasonably succeeds in fewer checks, or would require more checks than the skill challenge lists as the number of required checks?
Do you actually even bother reading my posts? Because I get the distinct impression you don't.
Quote myself: "Here is also a number of successes/failures you should aim at and which we think captures the majority of tables."
"I wholeheartedly admit there is more then enough room for improvement on how we implement skill challenges in adventures. Often complexity of a skill challenge appears to have been picked based on xp needs and not the goals of the challenge itself."
In short, if the right complexity has been picked, then more often then not the amount of checks needed to reach the goal of the challenge is more or less the amount the complexity requires. Authors cannot predict what the players might do, so they might have picked the wrong complexity. In that case the DM needs to implement his DME power and call the challenge just as a DM should call a fight that is already finished and has become just a boring repetitive string of d20 rolls.
In short, if the right complexity has been picked, then more often then not the amount of checks needed to reach the goal of the challenge is more or less the amount the complexity requires. Authors cannot predict what the players might do, so they might have picked the wrong complexity.
Well I guess we're coming at things in a different way here.
I think that skill challenges place the focus on the wrong place.
Instead of trying to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle it becomes a balancing of skill checks. Numbers of successes or failures shouldn't mean anything in and of themselves. The context of what succeeded or what failed should matter much more than just tallying these two numbers and having the DM weave a story based upon them.
How does number of successes & failures have any bearing on anything, after all?
If you are going to ignore that, then what are you really using from skill challenges? That's really the only mechanic.. and it's a flawed one at that.
You, for one, advocate altering the way some skills work just so that they can fit into the success/failure mold. Why break the system for this mechanic?
The rules do tolerate some failure. Two of them, in fact. Usually, this allows for a failure up front as a PC correctly RPs their PC trying something at which they do not excel or as a PC tries something just because they happen to be the ones in front.
The rules may tolerate two failures, but they don't tolerate rolling a skill you're not good at--not even once. Here's how the math works.
If you are up against a complexity 6 skill challenge, you only get about even odds of succeeding at the skill challenge if you roll every skill at a 70% success rate. If you want much better than even odds of succeeding at the skill challenge, you have to ensure that every skill you roll has significantly better than a 70% success rate.
Now, let's say you contribute a failure up front. Now, there are seven more rolls to go and you can only afford to fail once. If you want to even have 50/50 odds of succeeding at the skill challenge, every individual skill your party rolls has to have more than an 85% chance of success. If you want better than even odds of succeeding at the skill challenge, you have to ensure that no one in your party rolls anything that fails on anything other than a 1. (Though even that doesn't give you great odds).
And that is a complexity six skill challenge. If you spot a complexity 12 skill challenge a failure up front, your party is baked.
That is not a mechanic that tolerates failure. That is a mechanic that exacts harsh and relentless punishment upon failure.
Now, in LFR, the widespread use of the "that'll do" card mitigates this problem, but that is no excuse for using a bad mechanic any more than "feign surprise" cards were an excuse for writing autosurpise into Living Greyhawk mods.
Perhaps you would respond by saying that rolling a skill you are bad at is not automatic failure. Fair enough. However, it still has a very dramatic impact on your party's odds of success for the skill challenge. The best way I have figured to aggregate the odds of success on a skill challenge where skills are rolled with different probabilities is to use the following formula: Cx=the chance to succeed with an individual skill roll. C1 is the chance to succeed at the first roll. C2 is the chance to succeed at the second roll, etc. N is the maximum number of rolls made. (For evaluating the chance to succeed at a skill challenge, this will always be the maximum number of possible rolls before the skill challenge is complete).
the nth root of ((C1)(C2)(C3)(C4)(C5)(C6)(C7)(C8)...(Cn)) is the aggregate chance you have to succeed on any individual roll.
Therefore, if, in a complexity 6 skill challenge, you roll: 1 roll at 100% odds 1 roll at 30% odds 2 rolls at 50% odds 5 rolls at 75% odds your overall chance to succeed is the same as though you had rolled all of your rolls at: the 8th root of ((1)(.3)(.5^2)(.75^5))
So, in that scenario, the party's overall odds of success are as though they had made every roll at 60.4% odds. That gives the party a 32% chance to succeed at the skill challenge.
This can also answer the question "If I know that one doofus is going to make one roll at 30% odds, what do the rest of us have to do in order to make up for that?" If one character is going to make a 30% roll, everyone else has to roll at 79% odds just to bring their odds of succeeding on a complexity six skill challenge up to 50/50. If you want to get 80% odds of still beating the skill challenge with one character making a single roll at 30% odds, every other roll has to be made at 92% odds.
That is not forgiving of failure.
A common scenario is a PC RPing with an NPC, suddenly finding that their words matter (making a social check). As they fail, they have a good reason to say, "Let me introduce you to my (charismatic) friend..." this friend, usually talented, will usually make the checks without a problem.
Mathematically, if you adopt this approach to a skill challenge, you have either already lost or you are counting on "that'll do" cards to save your bacon.
And, keep in mind old vs. current vs. future. The current mods have better skill challenges than the old ones. The article that broke down the skills by class to show which ones were rare... this should have been in the DMG (at least at a general level), but it escaped even the designers. We are all learning. As we learn, we find that the best skill challenges give the PCs room to experiment and try different skills. Yes, they usually will pick a few PCs to lead the way, but that is ok
SNIP
At the core, I agree in large part (but not completely) with many that argue that the mechanic is completely unnecessary. Where I disagree is that this is usually true for experienced DMs and players, who could RP a game based on everyone being a paper bag and have amazing stories to tell about the experience. But, many players are shy, new, less experienced, and unsure of how to participate in an open-ended game. For them (and I think they may make up more than 50% of the gaming population), the skill challenge rules offer an adequate (sometimes good) way to gain their involvement and make skills matter. No, it isn't a fantastic system, but it can work and I disagree with the degree of your complaint about the system.
I could not disagree with this more. Experienced players and DMs are able to endure and even succeed despite the skill challenge mechanic because they understand how unforgiving the math behind it is and are able to adapt their tactics to compensate. They also usually pack at least one "That'll do" card per player as an anti-skill challenge defensive mechanism. Experienced DMs can discard the rules completely or bend them on the fly to create something that sorta works.
It is inexperienced players and DMs who are hurt the most by the skill challenge mechanic.
Inexperienced players are hurt by it because they frequently fail and they do not understand why they failed or what they can do to change it. (The influence of the odds of individual rolls on the overall success of the skill challenge is rather complex The errata to the original DMG DCs somewhat mitigates this for low-complexity skill challenges but only because it lowers the bar to the point where it is very difficult to fail them. What is worse, the natural response of an inexperienced player to the scenario presented by a skill challenge is exactly opposite to what the strategic response is. The natural response (which is likely to be that of the inexperienced player) is to try to do what the situation calls for, however good at it you are. That response is punished unrelentingly by the mechanics. The strategic response is to try and find an excuse to roll what you're good at, no matter what the situation is--and if you can't, do nothing or aid other. That is not likely to be the response of an inexperienced player and it's not good for the game either.
Inexperienced DMs are hurt by skill challenges because they usually use the rules and the examples from the DMG as a starting point and in this case, the rules are not helpful. The examples in the DMG are counterproductive.
Much like 1e weapon vs. armor type and random parasite infection tables and rolemaster crit charts, a good DM can make a game work even if he uses those rules. However, their presence serves to degrade the games run by inexperienced DMs.
Fantastic experienced players and GMs will take a skill challenge and use it as the basis for what they want to do anyway. No good DM will turn down a logical idea from a player. They will assign a DC and roll with it. They will add to what is printed, adding new options and creating story around what the PCs do and how it plays out. I don't think skill challenges harm this. I think they help, actually, by providing an outline of possibilities to consider (somewhat akin to bullet points for NPC comments).
My experience in local play is that it is maybe one DM in four who is willing to do something this. The majority of the DMs look at the primary skills and say, "you need to roll one of X, Y, or Z." Then ten minutes into the skill challenge, they will say, "let's cut to the chase--you need to get at least one success with the bluff skill in order to win. All the successes in the world with other skills won't help." We may get up to about half of DMs if we include mitigating the effects of failure by expending a daily power in a creative and logical way. (For instance one DM allowed us to use hunger of hadar to block the fire knives from chasing us after we failed the required bluff check to get into their hideout three times in a row). But that is still half of LFR games that are being hurt by adherence to the skill challenge mechanic. Doubtless, there would be other errors if we didn't have that, but the hippocratic oath should be instructive here. First, we should ensure that the rules do no harm.
