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Oct 2, 2012 -- 1:48PM, AbdulAlhazred wrote:

Oct 2, 2012 -- 8:16AM, dmgorgon wrote:

Oct 2, 2012 -- 3:14AM, Shasarak wrote:

Oct 1, 2012 -- 7:24PM, AbdulAlhazred wrote:

Uhhhhhh, I'm the DM, it will take as many successes as I say it takes.

Which brings us right back to the begining again.

Why have SC's if you are not even going to actually use them?  Or are they just trap options for the DM's who do not know enough not to use them?

I agree, and what I found is that SCs don't get used completely unless you railroad the players through them.

As a DM, I think they are a waste of time to develop.  Even a perfectly developed skill challenge won't always play out as you had expected and you'll be forced to improvise anyway.     In this case, developing a skill challenge requires a good DM, one that is capable of predicting all the possible outcomes of any given situation before the game even starts.  

Let's say the goal is to sneak into the castle.  The skill challenge(s) you design might include climbing over the wall at night or wearing a disguise to enter through the main gates.  In fact, you might end up writing half a dozen different skill challenges in hopes that you have covered all the possible actions the players might perform.    In fact, you might be very proud of all the work you put into them and had them reviewed on the D&D forums.   The problem is that all that work will be in vain. The PC might decide to bribe the guard that watches the northern wall to drop a rope and look the other way as they climb over.    In that case all the stealth checks you had originally created to sneak past the guard and climb the wall are not used.    As the DM, you've just wasted your time developing these skill challenges.

Finally, I think that far more XP should be rewarded to the PCs for executing a good idea that circumvents an encounter / SC.   

What's the alternative? You are still going to have to detail all the points where the players might send their PCs to get into the castle and detail the difficulty of all the things they might try. If they try something you didn't think of all that work is still in vain. This has nothing to do with SCs, it is just a hazard of building a very sandboxed adventure. There are a few ways to deal with that of course. The simplest and most frequent is the DM just railroads things. Another approach would be to make it all more abstract and have the focus be on something else, like the personality interactions of the PCs and NPCs or something (so maybe the doing stuff in the castle is sort of backdrop and the real action is social (maybe gaining the trust of an NPC or something).

Of course you may also just do the straightforward thing and detail all the possibilities, old school. Every room and hallway is described. Yup, some of it will get skipped, but wonder of wonders if you have a good SC framework then you can toss together the more straightforward SCs in a matter of moments. Nothing much is lost, just like "Room 4b - 6 orcs, hit points 8,6,5,3,2,2, spears and daggers" really wasn't a big loss back in the day if nobody ever got there.

That's why I suggested obstacles instead of skill usages. That way they can overcome them in any way they want, not just skills and they are easier to design. You could design them with a few suggestions like DC 14 stealth check, but they could overcome it with an invisibility spell or a distraction. This would open up the skill challenge system and make it more acceptable for all play styles...

Oct 2, 2012 -- 2:34PM, AbdulAlhazred wrote:

Oct 2, 2012 -- 1:51PM, Promitheas wrote:

I see your point diffan.

In my opinion sc created an unnecessary box for something that could be way more simple and then struggled to create loopholes all around to get out of that box or shoehorn things into it.

Example

Why you need primary and secondary skills. Why secondary skills helped players think out of the box? You present a situation and you let your characters free to interact with it. Do they want to bribe the guards? do they want to climb the wall? do they want to unfold another sail so the ship will go faster? Let them, go with the flow. You are presenting something and you are basically reacting based on what you have in mind.

There is nothing new about that now is it?

What Im afraid here is giving new dms or groups new to roleplaying "wrong" assumptions about skill challenges.

Lets take our negotiation example. Dmg should emphasize that you should have a vague definition of the npc personality the players are gonna negotiate with. Is he proud, arrogant, shy, crazy? Set some personality traits in your mind and then present him to your players. Give them a narration perhaps betraying a thing or two if you wish and let them interact... Thats about it.

I guess you may say my biggest fear with sc is this. An arrogant duke negotiates with pcs. One of them decides to intimidate him by proclaiming that if he wont help them they will kill his children. Roll. Failure. Ok it doesnt work let carry on.

Everything should matter, rolls, descriptions, circumstances everything. I dont want to see new players just keeping tabs of succeses and failures and missing the actual point/fun which is interaction.

Well, I think the lists of skills were for the DM more than anything. Nothing in the SC presentation indicates that the DM would or should ever tell the players "these are the primary and secondary skills". The presentation suggests that DMs might explain which skills might be relevant to obvious courses of action at any point (so the players probably DO know what the primary skills are) but the whole notion that the DM lays out the SC like some road map for the players to follow makes little sense to me. It sure has been persistent, but it is not even suggested in the rules and certainly doesn't match with what I see good DMs doing.

In all fairness though, I don't consider the "list of skills" presentation of SCs to be very good. I think the "list of obstacles" is better, as suggested above. You can add to that a list of resources, which you can use to generate advantages.

So, my "steal the McGuffin from the castle" SC might have:

Obstacles-
1) Moat
2) Outer walls
3) Inner keep
4) Traps guarding McGuffin
5) Alarm Spell
6) Outer guards
7) Inner guards

Resources-
1) Guards loyalty is low (bribery)
2) Secret tunnel into keep (need map)
3) Passphrase for alarm spell (buy from Joe)
4) Rope of Climbing (need to get from Emporium)

That should cover things at a basic level, you'll add some DCs and whatever, your success and failure conditions, and you're ready to go.

I like the resources. Maybe they make some good perception rolls and find the secret tunnel without the map, or maybe they have the map and find the tunnel without making a check at all. I like where this is going...

Oct 2, 2012 -- 6:02PM, Shasarak wrote:

Oct 2, 2012 -- 4:24PM, Shasarak wrote:

Because frankly the thought of watching a number slowly creep up to "success" just leaves me cold.

Actually I think my main complaint about a set number of achievements is that it smacks of the MMORP quest "Kill 50 pigs and I will give you a McGuffin" style of game which is bad enough on the railway track of a computer game but reeks in an actual game.

What if it were based on the number of obstacles that were overcome. Like maybe they get past the outer wall, fail at the guards and have to fight them, sneak into the inner building, and fail to get past some traps taking damage, but succeed at stealing the McGuffin. Then you could tally up the xp for each obstacle and give them a balanced amount of xp. It wouldn't be about X number of failures before Y number of successes or whatever. It would be achieving the goal. If they failed to get past the outer wall they would fail because without getting past the outer wall you can't retrieve the McGuffin.