I'm not sure what to make of this statement. In one sense, it is a meaningless distinction. If you are incorporating the dicerolls into the narrative of the game, then the rolls are both resolving and dictating in-world events. In another sense, the dice rolls can never "dictate" in-world events. Other than success feeling vaguely positive and failure feeling vaguely negative to the players, there's really no constraints on what success or failure means.
Let me try putting it another way. As I see it, a dice roll should happen because an action or event is happening in the game and you need a way to resolve that action.
It is not the results of the dice roll I have a problem with, it is the reason you roll them in the first place.
With skill chellenges, an action or event is happening in the game because a dice roll needs to be made. The skill chalenge rules have told you to roll some dice so now you are finding things for the players to do to justify those dice rolls. The critical subject and point of drama is the dice roll, not the event in the game world. This is a philosophical distinction.
Or to put yet another spin on it: in a skill challenge the actions are interchangeable - one action is just as good as another as long as it results in a success. Once the Skill Challenge is over they are all the same. skill challenges parcel things up into weird little mini-game bubbles. Without skill challenges the game can change with every action, based on that action, in a continous chain of causality.
You also misunderstand me if you think I am letting players do things too easily or bypass obstacles. Actions still require rolls to see if they succeed. My examples were deliberately cliché, not actual things I have run - I have yet to run a rickety bridge obstacle (although if I did I am confident that I could make it compelling without having to make it "OMGEPIX!!!")
Until you come up with a good example, it's really hard to tell what the actual problem you are having is.
Maybe you could give me an example of an excellent skill challenge, and then if I still have problems with it I can better describe them to your satisfaction?
Let me try putting it another way. As I see it, a dice roll should happen because an action or event is happening in the game and you need a way to resolve that action.
It is not the results of the dice roll I have a problem with, it is the reason you roll them in the first place.
With skill chellenges, an action or event is happening in the game because a dice roll needs to be made. The skill chalenge rules have told you to roll some dice so now you are finding things for the players to do to justify those dice rolls. The critical subject and point of drama is the dice roll, not the event in the game world. This is a philosophical distinction.
The dice roll is (or can be; it is in my games) prompted by an event in the game world. I've seen my share of challenges in which the DM just asks for who's rolling what skill, but that's not inherent to skill challenges.
Yes, I'm finding things for the PCs to do. That's part of what a DM does. If I've posed a challenge to them, the intent is that the scene be at least interesting, even if the challenge itself is either trivial or impossible. Because I can't necessarily know ahead of time how they'll approach the challenge, some of the complications that arise will have to stem from the approach they take. If they just wanted to cross the rickety bridge, I could have the bridge ropes fray and ask for their reactions to that, but if they take another approach I'm allowed and obliged to give it complications (or, if they simply want to bypass the challenge, to give them the effects of failure, which I'm obliged to make interesting). I suppose having their own ropes fray is a bit of a railroad, but I could have wind gusts come up, or a flock of bats fly up from below, or another, heavier creature start to move out along their pully system. I'm allowed, by the skill challenge mechanics, to come up with interesting complications. DMs already did this before skill challenges were really codified, but in my experience those tended to be due to the DM not liking the fact that, say, the PC could ace skill checks so easily. They seemed punitive, rather than just interesting.
Or to put yet another spin on it: in a skill challenge the actions are interchangeable - one action is just as good as another as long as it results in a success.
Not so. Not every action has the potential to move toward success. That's part of the point of primary skills: the DM isn't required to allow anything to work, though they're encouraged to find ways to allow things to work.
Once the Skill Challenge is over they are all the same. skill challenges parcel things up into weird little mini-game bubbles. Without skill challenges the game can change with every action, based on that action, in a continous chain of causality.
I'm not sure what this means.
[N]o difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions. - L. Tolstoy
Let me try putting it another way. As I see it, a dice roll should happen because an action or event is happening in the game and you need a way to resolve that action.
With you so far.
It is not the results of the dice roll I have a problem with, it is the reason you roll them in the first place.
Right, the reason being because something is happening and you need to resolve it.
With skill chellenges, an action or event is happening in the game because a dice roll needs to be made. The skill chalenge rules have told you to roll some dice so now you are finding things for the players to do to justify those dice rolls. The critical subject and point of drama is the dice roll, not the event in the game world. This is a philosophical distinction.
You lost me. The players are making rolls because they are attempting to resolve the situation, and you need a way to assess their progress. I don't understand the "philosophical" difference you describe for two reasons: I am not sure what you are contrasting the skill challenge with, and I'm not sure what the difference is.
Or to put yet another spin on it: in a skill challenge the actions are interchangeable - one action is just as good as another as long as it results in a success. Once the Skill Challenge is over they are all the same. skill challenges parcel things up into weird little mini-game bubbles. Without skill challenges the game can change with every action, based on that action, in a continous chain of causality.
This is typical pablum offered by those who dislike skill challenges for no decent reason, so they invent explanations. At this point I start to doubt whether you want to have an honest conversation or whether you just want to bash skill challenges without bothering to understand them. Every single argument in this paragraph has been specifically refuted by myself and by other posters in this thread. You're either not reading or not trying to understand.
You also misunderstand me if you think I am letting players do things too easily or bypass obstacles. Actions still require rolls to see if they succeed. My examples were deliberately cliché, not actual things I have run - I have yet to run a rickety bridge obstacle (although if I did I am confident that I could make it compelling without having to make it "OMGEPIX!!!")
I'm only going off of what you wrote. You suggested that a player should be able to construct a rope and pully system and thus bypass a skill challenge – i.e., without having to make any checks or expend any resources whatsoever. If this is not an actual example of an actual challenge that you would actually run and an example of an actual solution that you would accept, then it's just an example you invented in order to arrive at your own preconceived conclusion that skill challenges are dumb. This is why it's impossible to respond to a bad example without simlply acknowledging that the bad example is bad.
Maybe you could give me an example of an excellent skill challenge, and then if I still have problems with it I can better describe them to your satisfaction?
I'm not sure I can provide you with an example of an "excellent" skill challenge because like all other aspects of the game, excellence is determined primarily by the players involved and the random events that they encounter. What I can provide is an example of a skill challenge that was successful. Coming up with the scenario is nothing more than what I would call "a good start."
Recently my players were seeking to escape from certain lands by moving downriver to the sea. They had a variety of options. They could make their way through the woods, they could pay the dwarves for passage across the mountains, they could traverse the goblin swamps, they could reach out to their contacts amongst the elves, etc. They opted to return to a village that they had recently been run out of by an angry mob and attempt to secure passage on a boat.
I didn't feel that they should just be given a boat – this is a risky proposition, after all. So I opted for a skill challenge. It's a fairly minor, but fairly risky, skill challenge so I thought they should make 5 successes before 3 failures.
They returned to the village under cover of night, cleverly circumventing the gates and thus avoiding a hassle with the guards. They made their way to the docks and there they split up.
Two party members went into a nearby pub and brothel to see if they could secure passage from the unscrupulous sailors inside.
Two party members went straight to the docks to see if they could easily steal a vessel sturdy enough to take them downriver.
Inside, one PC made a circuit of the room eavesdropping on the conversations. It was late at night so the men were very shady indeed, and the women even moreso. She made a perception check to eavesdrop and failed (1 failure), so she overheard only one possible prospect, an obvious smuggler who planned to leave shortly under cover of darkness and head down the river with his illegal cargo.
PC2 cozied up to an older, friendly gent at the bar and began pumping him for possible leads. She made a couple checks here as part of the investigative process – insight and diplomacy as I recall – and succeeded at both (2 successes). The man took an interest and suggested he might have a boat she could use, but he became intrigued by her and she had to deflect questions about the earlier riot. She made a bluff check and failed (2 failures), causing a nearby hostile prostitute to become suspicious and excuse herself.
PCs 3 & 4, meanwhile, snuck past the guards patrolling the docks (3 successes) and began investigating boats. They made a thievery check to assess their prospects and succeeded (4 successes).
At this point I knew that they should be very close to accomplishing their goal, but also very close to failure. Whatever happened next would be the fulcrum that everything tilted upon. Because I was using the skill challenge scoring system, I knew that I should have the pieces in place for either total success or failure.
The thievery check gave the party three viable prospects for a boat to steal, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In other words, it would require at least overcoming at least one more obstacle in order to take them. The PCs inside, meanwhile, had secured the assistance of the old drifter but had also aroused suspicion as to their true nature.
Bare in mind that at this point the party has not been told they are "in a skill challenge bubble" or any nonsense like that. They have chosen their actions and I have adjudicated them accordingly. Each one seemed like a viable attempt to resolve the problem so each one progressed them forward slightly. The only way that they know that they might be on the cusp of something is because of the mounting tension of the narrative. They know that they are very close because their next step is to board a stolen boat or to escape the pub without being detected, and they know that failure at either would be disastrous because, obviously, being caught stealing a boat or being recognized as the instigator of a riot would be pretty bad.
The players decided out-of-character that taking the drifter and his boat was probably the best prospect. PCs 1 & 2 exited the pub and began making their way to his vessel. As the party reconvened, the two human-looking characters were joined by the pixie and the dragonborn who had been skulking about unnoticed. I requested a perception check to determine if they were being watched.
Had they succeeded at this check, I would have told them that they are being watched and they'd better hurry. The would have boarded the drifter's boat and escaped while the prostitute shouted for the guards.
However, they failed the check, so as they made their way towards the boat they were attacked by the prostitutes, who turned out to be vampires in the service of the local vampire baron whom they were attempting to evade, and the zombie thralls that the prostitutes had created from decades of patrons who failed to pay their tabs.
I am having a really hard time understanding your various claims. This wasn't some magic bubble where special rules apply, it was just that the PCs had a set task (one they had chosen themselves, I would add), and I wanted to develop that task into a fully-fledged scene with actual tension. The players decided that they wanted to split up, that two of them would look for boats to steal and two of them would chat up locals, that they would eavesdrop, sneak, and cajole. I only set the DCs based on the difficulty of their various actions and set the number of required successes vs. failures for my own purposes to help me gauge how far along each task should move the storyline and how much tension they should feel at the end.
Your various claims seem to be obstacles that you have invented for yourself and now refuse to abandon, despite the fact that you have been clearly told that they are not applicable. Making checks interchangeable, asking for checks for the sake of asking for checks, and creating the impression that each challenge the PCs face is completely adrift and unrelated to every other challenge are all symptoms of bad DMing, not facets of skill challenges.
don't understand the "philosophical" difference you describe for two reasons: I am not sure what you are contrasting the skill challenge with, and I'm not sure what the difference is.
I'm contrasting it with skill checks that arise organically, outside of a skill challenge. As for the difference; I'm not sure I can find yet another way to describe it. Think of it as the rolling of the dice (not the result, the actual rolling) as being predestined, vs not being predestined. It's a subtle difference perhaps, but one I think is important.
This is typical pablum offered by those who dislike skill challenges for no decent reason, so they invent explanations. At this point I start to doubt whether you want to have an honest conversation or whether you just want to bash skill challenges without bothering to understand them. Every single argument in this paragraph has been specifically refuted by myself and by other posters in this thread. You're either not reading or not trying to understand.
ad hominem, blah blah. For the record I was very excited about skill challenges when 4E first came out, but that has steadily waned over time.
It's a fairly minor, but fairly risky, skill challenge so I thought they should make 5 successes before 3 failures.
That sounds like a fun time and a good session, but this sentence it where is starts to clash with me personally. Before they even told you what actions they are taking, you have decided how many successes they need and how many failures they must avoid. No matter what approach they take, it will still be the same difficulty and take around the same amount of time.
If they had not split up and had all gone to steal the boats, the eavesdropping would have proved unnecessary (fair enough) but the actual theivery around the boats would have magically become harder (requiring more checks). The various strands were unconnected - they could all have been seperate skill challenges that all had the same result on success.
I only set the DCs based on the difficulty of their various actions and set the number of required successes vs. failures for my own purposes to help me gauge how far along each task should move the storyline and how much tension they should feel at the end.
So it seems like a form of railroading, but instead of controlling what happens you are controlling how fast or how many tasks.
That's a bit harsh, I admit; all good DMs can play with tension and pacing. I just prefer other methods. I can see that skill challenges can be a useful tool to structure out-of-combat encounters and plan ahead. I might even find a good place to use them in specific situations, but for experienced DMs I think they are likely to be unneccessary 90% of the time. When I realised I was OK with that I decided to stop using them "just because I ought to" and now replace them with more organic play.
Your various claims seem to be obstacles that you have invented for yourself and now refuse to abandon, despite the fact that you have been clearly told that they are not applicable. Making checks interchangeable, asking for checks for the sake of asking for checks, and creating the impression that each challenge the PCs face is completely adrift and unrelated to every other challenge are all symptoms of bad DMing, not facets of skill challenges.
I said in my first post that I don't like Skill Challenges and I am trying to work out exactly why. I am exploring these particular reasons. My motivations are not hostile towards you, or even towards skill challenges; I am just trying to understand my own reactions, which I presume must be based on something because they were not my intial ones (perhaps it was a bad sandwich I ate?). But here we arrive at another ad hominem implication at the end of your post - a shame since I enjoyed the actual play you described. Thanks for your help, but goodbye for this thread.
I'm contrasting it with skill checks that arise organically, outside of a skill challenge. As for the difference; I'm not sure I can find yet another way to describe it. Think of it as the rolling of the dice (not the result, the actual rolling) as being predestined, vs not being predestined. It's a subtle difference perhaps, but one I think is important.
The distinction you are making is nonsensical. Skill checks do not arise "organically," they arise because somebody rolls the dice. It's utter nonsense to claim anything else. There is absolutely nothing natural or compulsory about skill checks in any way, they are the result of our choices as storytellers.
ad hominem, blah blah. For the record I was very excited about skill challenges when 4E first came out, but that has steadily waned over time.
You don't know what an ad hominem is.
It's a fairly minor, but fairly risky, skill challenge so I thought they should make 5 successes before 3 failures.
That sounds like a fun time and a good session, but this sentence it where is starts to clash with me personally. Before they even told you what actions they are taking, you have decided how many successes they need and how many failures they must avoid. No matter what approach they take, it will still be the same difficulty and take around the same amount of time.
Well I was pretty confident that they were going to make some kind of check somewhere along the way. I mean, it would have been pretty damn shocking if they didn't.
This is just a way of ensuring that a given task requires the proper amount of effort, and that we spend a fair amount of time on it. It's no different from giving a monster a certain amount of HP.
If they had not split up and had all gone to steal the boats, the eavesdropping would have proved unnecessary (fair enough) but the actual theivery around the boats would have magically become harder (requiring more checks).
This is nonsense. Stealing a boat would not "magically" have become "harder," I would have told the story differently. That's my job, I'm a storyteller.
Do you watch any cop shows? There is a show called "Flashpoint" that somewhat resembles a DnD team. The show is about cops who respond to unusual situations such as bombs, hostage situations, and spree killers.
Sometimes when the cops find a bomb, there are 45 minutes left in the show and takes the entire rest of the episode to defuse it. Sometimes they find a bomb and there are three minutes left in the episode, and all it takes to defuse it is clipping a single wire. Sometimes they need to bring in a specialist to defuse the bomb, and sometimes it's simple enough for anybody to do.
The difference isn't "magic." There is no supernatural force compelling a bomb found at 3:02 to be way harder to defuse than a bomb found at 40:23. That decision is all about story pacing. Similarly, if a player attempts to steal a boat at 7pm when we have been trying to acquire a boat for less than five minutes, of course there are going to be more complications that arise than if he tries to steal the boat at 8pm after completing a whole series of precursor tasks while we have been trying to acquire the boat for an hour and five minutes. In one situation, stealing the boat is just the beginning. In the other, it is the tension-fueled climax. In one situation, the player has spent over an hour preparing for this one crucial moment. In the other, he is instigating a new adventure with an all-too-easy act of casual criminality.
The various strands were unconnected
I'm not sure what this means.
- they could all have been seperate skill challenges that all had the same result on success.
They could have, yes. I'm not sure what you were expecting. Did you think that the skill challenge mechanic would lead to wildly different results? How would it manage that exactly? As I have said three times now, the scoring system is nothing more than a pacing mechanism. Some DMs are going to have an exceptional sense of story pacing and find no value in the scoring system. Bully for them. For most people, having a means of measuring and scaling the players' progress and is immensely valuable. Some DMs have no need for monster mechanics whatsoever. They don't track hit points, they don't write down abilities, they don't keep track of defenses. The monster gets hit when they feel it should get hit and dies when they feel it should die. Most DMs do not have this level of comfort and control within the system.
I typically use the scoring system when I get blindsided by the players attempting something that I had not planned for, because I have enough going on without having to worry about pacing as I'm trying to come up with interesting story elements on the fly. I typically don't it when I have a good handle on what the players are doing because I've had the time to give it some thought beforehand and I am more comfortable with my gut reactions, and able to refer to my notes for story complications. I also use it for very long challenges that span a great deal of real-world time, so that I can keep track of how far along I expect the players to be, and how close they are to failing, using a few hash marks in my notebook.
I only set the DCs based on the difficulty of their various actions and set the number of required successes vs. failures for my own purposes to help me gauge how far along each task should move the storyline and how much tension they should feel at the end.
So it seems like a form of railroading, but instead of controlling what happens you are controlling how fast or how many tasks.
This use of the word "railroading" is nonsensical. Words have meanings. You can't just toss out "ad hominem" and "railroad" and expect that they will metamorphize into something that makes sense when you haven't bothered to apply them in a manner consistent with their actual use and definition.
That's a bit harsh, I admit; all good DMs can play with tension and pacing.
It might be if it made a lick of sense. As is you might as well have said it's a form of banana because it cheeseburgers but not leotard. I can't really be too insulted.
I just prefer other methods. I can see that skill challenges can be a useful tool to structure out-of-combat encounters and plan ahead. I might even find a good place to use them in specific situations, but for experienced DMs I think they are likely to be unneccessary 90% of the time. When I realised I was OK with that I decided to stop using them "just because I ought to" and now replace them with more organic play.
I still object to your use of the word "organic." Organic, as used by storytellers, describes a feeling that they are trying to evoke, a desire for the reader to avoid looking at the puppet strings. But the strings are always there. You are still making decisions and choices about how the players' actions impact the world and the twists and turns that story takes as a result.
This use of "organic" is exceedingly common amongst DMs, and it's unfortunate. Often it is used interchangeable with "logical." It's a way of abdicating responsibility for the narrative. "I can't help that blah, blah, blah, that's just logical." It's just logical that a player should be able to poof a rope and pulley system into existence and thus resolve an obstacle without making a single check. Of course! No. You chose to have the story take that turn because it was your gut reaction, but there is nothing logical or organic about it.
The structure of skill challenges is a tool, as I said before. Use them when a little structure will help you. Don't use them when they don't. But don't make up nonsense justifications about how your approach is logical and organic because you are an experienced DM who doesn't railroad and skill challenges are a magical bubble that require rolls for the sake of rolls and all rolls are interchangeable. That's all just BS.
I said in my first post that I don't like Skill Challenges and I am trying to work out exactly why. I am exploring these particular reasons. My motivations are not hostile towards you, or even towards skill challenges; I am just trying to understand my own reactions, which I presume must be based on something because they were not my intial ones (perhaps it was a bad sandwich I ate?). But here we arrive at another ad hominem implication at the end of your post - a shame since I enjoyed the actual play you described. Thanks for your help, but goodbye for this thread.
And here you prove that you really have no idea what ad hominem means.
An ad hominem is a fallacy that attempts to dismiss an argument based on some external or irrelevant qualities of the arguer. For example, if I said "You're ugly, therefore you're wrong," that would be an ad hominem. In this case, I am accusing you of stubbornly clinging to objections to skill challenges that are unrelated to their actual use. This is not an ad hominem. You have made a criticism of skill challenges that shows either ignorance or misunderstanding of almost every post in this thread that spoke positively about them. You have misrepresented yourself and (edit: sorry confused you with the OP. You haven't bothered to hide your distaste for skill challenges, although you also haven't bothered to read the other posts in this thread.) you have invented situations – situations that you admitted were poorly applicable – in which you contrast skill challenges with a solution that you yourself would not accept in order to argue that skill challenges are bad. When it was pointed out that your complaints about skill challenges were the result of poorly implemented challenges rather than inherent features, and are problems that are by no means unique to skill challenges, you retreated to an abstract "philosophical" distaste and used loaded words like inorganic and railroading to contrast skill challenges with this poorly articulated philosophical alternative. This is not the way that a person who is open to learning new approaches behaves.
Railroading is an approach to DMing the negates or ignores player choices. If a player chooses to steal a boat, and I ask him to make a stealth check to avoid a guard, that's not railroading. Railroading is if a player chooses to steal a boat, and I say, "You fail. Maybe you would like to try the mountain path like I planned for you to instead?" Asking the player to make checks in order to accomplish goals is as much railroading as requiring the player to actually fight a dragon in order to defeat it, rather than just declaring it defeated and moving on. Of course I control how long it takes and how much effort is required to accomplish something. That's practically the DM's job description. It's an utterly nonsensical application of the word.
Not sure how everyone else runs their tables but I figure since I find Skill Challenges, especially in an RP Style Campaign, to be interesting then I would contribute my thoughts on the matter as well.
When do I use a Skill Challenge? When a task proves to be a little more complicated than the mundane information shakedown or exploration
Maybe they are entering a tavern a Crime Lord uses as a front for his business. That would require them to either bribe the bouncer to let them in or prove that they are not there to cause trouble. In that case I would consider a Streetwise (Easy DC), Bluff (Medium DC), Stealth (Hard DC), Diplomacy (Medium DC), or just a straight bribe. Depending on how well the player rolls any one of these challenges I might trigger an event inside the tavern as a reward or punishment.
I then take into consideration the background of the characters. If one is a Rogue or generally thuggy type person I might make it easier on them, but harder on someone who looks out of place. From there I go based on their actions. If their approach isn't stirring up trouble then the amount of times they need to succeed goes down. If they are causing trouble with their actions (not failure, but perhaps a stronghanded approach) then it goes up.
Given that I also use the alternative reward of Reputation with certain Factions in game they also might call in favor to get what they want. In the end I just go with what feels logical based on their actions and the general feel the table has going on. Maybe that means I have an innate understanding of pacing or I am just House Rule happy, but whatever the reason my players tell me pretty regularly they are glad I am the one DMing and that my campaigns make them love playing.
In the end I think the way people run Skill Challenges should be determined is by the group of players as a whole. If they are combat optimized then cutting back on the skill challenges to when they are needed only and making harder combat sessions would be better than making them do something they find boring. However if players aren't so much into the combat and prefer using their brains I see no reason that players shouldn't be allowed to roleplay their way through the game (when fighting isn't called for) and have the skill challenges adjust to them.
What do I think this does? It encourages them to approach skill challenges using their roleplay as its basis. My players get a better sense of when aggression will work as opposed to being gentle. It also gives them a sense of teamwork since everyone is able to contribute to the situation in their own way. Suddenly the Cleric of the party is trying to talk information and a key out of someone and the Fighter is following backing them up with keeping a lackey out of the way with a dirty look and a hand near their sword.
Or maybe the Fighter comes in and starts making noise while the Sticky Fingers member of the party pickpockets the key out of the distracted mark's pocket. Sure it isn't finesse, but those are the stories the players are going to remember when the campaign is said and done. More importantly though it makes the challenges not be a completely dry affair.
I would like to commend 5shilling for PMing me to get his final word in, and then promptly blocking me so I couldn't respond. Stay classy dude!
Apparently the "ad hominem" he thought I was making was that I was saying he was a bad DM and therefore his arguments that skill challenges are inorganic railroading that require skill rolls for the sake of skill rolls and make all rolls interchangeable could be dismissed on that basis.
So let me clarify:
Firstly, I did not call 5shilling a bad DM. To my knowledge, I have not ever called an individual on these boards a bad DM. What I said was that each of these things – railroading, inorganic feel, interchangeable rolls, and rolls for the sake of rolls – are symptoms of bad DMing. While there are handful of flawless DMs and a handful of truly awful DMs out there, most DMs are good at some things and bad at others. All DMs require a constant expense of effort or else they fall prone to certain common habits. DMs may temporarily exhibit these bad habits, including those mentioned above, for a wide variety of reasons, but mostly those reasons fall into a category of being distracted by something besides the game. Exhaustion, boredom, hunger, a fit of the giggles can all cause DMs to lose their focus and fall prey to bad DMing. One distraction that is very, very likely to cause a DM to exhibit the symptoms above is when they are struggling with new mechanics. This also affects players, and it's one of the reasons it can take many sessions for a new game system to feel comfortable. None of these issues are unique to skill challenges, nor to DnD. When 4e first came out, there were very loud and persistent complaints that the system as a whole caused or even required these problems. The same is true of the 3e. Every game system with an active forum will see this complaint from new players. In this case, 5shilling insisted that these were required elements of a skill challenge despite the fact that those speaking positively about them had specifically warned against each of them. I myself warned against three of the four in my first two posts.
Secondly, even if I had called 5shilling a bad DM, that still would not be an ad hominem. The problems that 5shilling described, being symptoms of bad DMing, necessarily had to be teased out from the inherent nature of skill challenges in order to determine if they were worth addressing. If I were to post on a car forum that my car is totaled and would never run again because it has a flat tire, then the fact that I am obviously a shoddy mechanic is not an ad hominem but rather by far the most daunting problem that I am having with my car. If you complain about skill challenges, and then list a bunch of problems that are not endemic to skill challenges but rather to a particularly poor implementation of them, then the fact that you are implementing them poorly is very much on-topic and relevant.
So while I did not, and would not, call 5shilling a bad DM, it's definitely safe to say at this point that he really, really doesn't know what ad hominem means.
Excellent posts Iofgren, and I think you handle skill challenges very well. I fully agree with your methodology, and would love to pick your brain sometime about tweaking a few skill challenges in my own campaign.
Does anyone know of an example (audio would be awesome!) of a skill challenge (for a party, not just one character) being run in an actual game? Do you tell the players all of the possible skills and then let them decide how to use them? Or do you let them try things whether or not those skills are on your list? What if they just stare at you blankly? Do you say "now we're having a skill challenge!" or do you just ask them what they do now? Do you let one player take multiple actions in a row, or do you make them take turns?
An example from my recent game...
A teleportation circle flares to life during the King's birthday celebrations and a slightly singed apprentice Mage topples through. In my notes I have that the apprentice Mage was sent thru by his master when the master's tower came under attack by a red dragon: the tower is some 20 miles from the King's castle (I.e. a dragon with overland flight speed 15 could cover it in 2+ hours). In the back of my mind I am thinking about a skill challenge divided into roughly three 45 minute time segments, but I have no notes about what skills the PCs might use (IMO that's up to the players to imagine, not me).
After questioning the apprentice for several minutes, the PCs realize that the red dragon is indeed coming to the King's castle and calculate how much time they have to prepare.
FIRST SEGMENT
The Mage chimes in first, and decides to cast a divination to receive Bahamut's counsel (so he's busy for 30 minutes). Unfortunately he rolls a '1' on his check. Bahamut is strangely silent on the matter. In this case, i am not tracking # of failures cause it's mostly irrelevant. The main price the PCs pay is unproductive time.
The barbarian is unsure what to do, so she waits for the Mage to complete his ritual.
The paladin wants to help with troop and ballistae placements, and as its entirely in character, I see no need for a check. He just does it. I give him tokens to place that represents soldiers, archers, and ballista.
The fighter looks for explosives to create a smokescreen. Again no check is needed, he comes up with some Greek Fire which will serve his purpose. Likewise the bard advises the knight commander to set up firebreaks and create smoldering fires to create a smokescreen, and succeeds on his Diplomacy check. This will have the effect of blanketing the town in smoke so the dragon will have a hard time targeting specific areas.
SECOND SEGMENT
I ask the Mage what he is up to and he wants to question an emissary of a foreign nation who gifted the king with the Orb of Green Dragonkind. A successful Insight check reveals the emissary has been subjected to supernatural terror and never fully recovered. The Mage muses on what this means.
The barbarian questions the apprentice more thoroughly, no check just roleplaying, and learns that his master Fastilbras is the wizard she was looking for (character quest). No effect on the overall preparations, but important to the character.
The paladin gives a motivational speech to the troops, making a great Diplomacy check which ensures the soldiers won't panic and flee their posts at sight of the dragon.
The fighter and bard, working together thru roleplaying and a Bluff check, convince the local priest to let them use the chapel's bell tower chain to fend off the "dragon, who serve evil and injustice." This unlocks what 4e D&D coins a "terrain power."
THIRD SEGMENT
There are hippogriffs in the King's stables, but since none of the PCs have ridden a flying mount before, I ruled they'll need to spend one time segment training with a hippogriff if they want to fly safely. The warlord, paladin, barbarian, and Mage all decide to get aerial mounts.
The fighter did something else (cannot remember).
INTERPRETING THE RESULT The PCs got 4 hippogriffs. They got a "massive chain" terrain power. They got control of 3 ballistae, 10 archers, and 20 men-at-arms (who wersufficiently inspired not to break ranks at sight of the dragon). They created a blanket of total concealment above the city. And they ensured that no fire would spread out of control.
