THE TRAIL OF THRALLS 12 successes before 3 failures It will take a month of trekking through the Feywild before reaching the court of Tiandra, the Summer Queen.
Consequences (player choice): Attacked!, Lose Some Thralls, Personal Sacrifice.
Setback: Take -2 forward on next PC’s check (player describe it).
DC High: Success DC Med - High-1: Success plus setback DC Med-1 or less: Failure plus setback and consequence DC 10+1/2 level: Aid Another
Draw upon anasset (NPC, monster, circumstance, item, terrain feature, trope, etc.) to gain a +2 bonus to a skill check. You can only use a particular asset once to gain this bonus.
Victory: The PCs make it just in time to the Court of the Summer Queen. They receive a boon from a deity unfriendly to mind flayers or the like.
Defeat: The trek takes too long. The PCs cannot reach the Court of the Summer Queen before the remaining slaves turn into feral mind flayers and attack! Braaaaaains!
That is a quick skill challenge I threw together for the travelling portion. I think you can do even do a generic "Protect the Thralls" skill challenge which I'll take a look at doing if what I've done so far is up your alley.
How to Use It to Run a Shared Storytelling Session:
Describe the overarching activity. Make sure the stakes (Victory & Defeat) are very clear to the players. Ask them why they care. Ask them which of them is willing to die to see it through. Ask them what they think the Feywild is like, what they've heard of it in fairytales. What things do they expect to see or encounter? How dangerous do they perceive it to be? What steps have they taken to prepare themselves? Solicit everyone's input. Keep it rolling like a good brainstorming session. Write it all down, use some of it for your Complications and Consequences list. No answer is wrong that doesn't contradict what someone else has already said or what is known to be true in your game.
The questions above plus follow-up questions that spring to mind will be a good warm-up exercise to encourage them to get into a creative mode and ready for improvisation. When you think they're ready and you have plenty of things down on paper, hit them with a Complication. You can roll it randomly or pick one. I go for the latter because I can pick something everyone focused on during the warm-up. Describe the complication and how it's a problem for them. Then ask, "What do you do?"
The next part is tricky. The urge is to ask for a bunch of skill checks. Don't. People will likely be suggesting different things and collaborating on a plan. When they start taking actions, let them just do it. The fighter doesn't need Athletics to hack through Dense Forests. He just needs a machete and patience. Only ask for an actual check when a player(s) suggests taking an action where success and failure can both be fun. When it's pivotal. When it really matters toward resolving a Complication. If it's definitely something the whole group has to work on, make it a group check where the majority (high, middling, or low) result is the overall result for the check. Otherwise, just let one person hog the glory (or the shame). Try to share the spotlight equally over the course of the whole challenge though.
On a high DC roll, their plan goes off without a hitch. Awesome - mark a success. On a middling DC roll, their plan works, mark a success, but there's also a Setback. If you've been soliciting input this whole time, you should have a lot of context to work with for ideas on what that setback is or better yet, just ask your players. When the next Complication arises, ask them how the Setback works against them in this situation. For example, a middling roll to deal with Dense Forests may mean leaving an obvious trail (Setback) for Stalking Predators to find. So the next check to, say, hide from the fey panthers will be harder. A failed check means both a setback on the next Complication and a Consequence. Offer one or more of them to the players and let them choose the one that is most interesting to them and ask what it means in context. What happens to the thralls? What was your personal sacrifice? Of course, they'll probably choose Attacked! because who doesn't like a good combat? Good. You said you'd have some encounters along the way anyway!
Now, the DCs are set fairly high for unfettered success, because from a shared storytelling standpoint (which is what a skill challenge is), you want to encourage the PCs to work together (Aid Another) and to use their environment to their benefit (Asset). So if they are dealing with a Vast Chasm, then a player might suggest there is an immense fallen tree and take a +2 bonus to the check by working that into the action. It costs them nothing to do this, so encourage them to take advantage of it. It simply adds more details to the shared story.
And that's basically it - punctuate it with planned encounters as you like, transition/interaction scenes, or whatever else. Let me know what you think. I'm trying to refine this skill challenge design so I'd appreciate any input.
Hey Isereth... one question... when will this skill challenge example be in an issue of Dungeon/Dragon? This is great man. There is a lot here that I can adapt. I'll tell you the things that really called out to me.
1. I really like the gradient skill challenge DCs application (easy, med, hard), that each success or failure has degrees of success or failure and that aid another can do more than just give the player rolling a static success or a failure, but can enhance a success.
2. "Write it all down, use some of it for your Complications and Consequences list. No answer is wrong that doesn't contradict what someone else has already said or what is known to be true in your game." We do this regularly anyway. We call that our "Blue Sky Sessions" (from the Disney Imagineers folks). It means that no idea is a bad idea, you're just throwing things out there.
3. I like the mechanical application of the categories Asset and Complications and what they mean in the challenge as far as enhancing or complicating rolls. The Yin and the Yang.
I will probably jot down a few ideas to take to the table to "prime the pump" and then let the players have an opportunity to show their proficient knowledge of All Things Fey that the party might encounter (Thanks too for the list of possible complications!) As the DM, I am always trying to balance our game between the "you couldn't see this coming" and the "what do you guys think should happen?" style of play. But there is a lot of solid gameplay here.
I would love to hear your ideas about the "Protect the Thralls" skill challenge. That sounds like it might be a great challenge to run concurrent with a combat encounter. Too, do you have any thoughts about a resource management of the thralls/slaves throughout the journey. I just thought that in their failures, if the slaves were either losing from some pool of HP/losing morale/ beginning the change into mind-flayerville or whatever that a sense of urgency and tension could be created that time is running out.
Hey Isereth... one question... when will this skill challenge example be in an issue of Dungeon/Dragon? This is great man. There is a lot here that I can adapt. I'll tell you the things that really called out to me.
Thanks. How much do they pay? I'll probably break that post out of this thread and start a new one with it to elicit further comments/critiques.
1. I really like the gradient skill challenge DCs application (easy, med, hard), that each success or failure has degrees of success or failure and that aid another can do more than just give the player rolling a static success or a failure, but can enhance a success.
Yes, same basic range of success, but it's less binary and thus potentially adds more to the shared story. I took this concept from Dungeon World (which is based on Apocalypse World). I do this for all skill checks in our 4e games. I also collaborate with the players on what the setbacks are.
2. "Write it all down, use some of it for your Complications and Consequences list. No answer is wrong that doesn't contradict what someone else has already said or what is known to be true in your game." We do this regularly anyway. We call that our "Blue Sky Sessions" (from the Disney Imagineers folks). It means that no idea is a bad idea, you're just throwing things out there.
Glad to see you already do this! Normally when I suggest something as radical as, you know, asking players to establish some details on their own, I get labeled an apostate and burned at the stake. "Ask your players?! What are you, crazy?! The whole game will just come apart!" So many benefits come out of this very simple approach.
3. I like the mechanical application of the categories Asset and Complications and what they mean in the challenge as far as enhancing or complicating rolls. The Yin and the Yang.
Yes, one of the things I noticed about WotC skill challenges is that they'd describe an activity, but they'd kind of leave it open as to the specific complications. I don't think many DMs "got" that they were supposed to stick something in their players' faces to react to. Rather, they'd just say, "Okay, here's the activity. So, uh, yeah, do it." Then players had no context or fiction to work with outside of a vague end goal, leaving them in the wilderness of totally freeform storytelling which can be very challenging. It then become easier for them to constrain their descriptions in the context of their trained skills rather than consider the whole scene and do things that aren't necessarily checks, but might be. Complications give them something specific to deal with in the context of the larger challenge, providing useful creative constraint to their available approaches.
The basic idea for Assets I took from Marvel Heroic RPG which is based on Cortex+ rules. Offer an optional bonus in exchange for establishing new fiction and everybody's happy.
I will probably jot down a few ideas to take to the table to "prime the pump" and then let the players have an opportunity to show their proficient knowledge of All Things Fey that the party might encounter (Thanks too for the list of possible complications!) As the DM, I am always trying to balance our game between the "you couldn't see this coming" and the "what do you guys think should happen?" style of play. But there is a lot of solid gameplay here.
Yes, good idea. I prefer to build my Complication list from player ideas, but I always write up some of my own just so I have something. A two- or three-word descriptor ("fictional tag") is all you really need to get the pump primed as you say. It's also fun brainstorming them as a group. Lots of "Oh, that's a good one!"
I would love to hear your ideas about the "Protect the Thralls" skill challenge. That sounds like it might be a great challenge to run concurrent with a combat encounter. Too, do you have any thoughts about a resource management of the thralls/slaves throughout the journey. I just thought that in their failures, if the slaves were either losing from some pool of HP/losing morale/ beginning the change into mind-flayerville or whatever that a sense of urgency and tension could be created that time is running out.
I'll try to come up with something today for "Protect the Thralls." I feel that's probably something that's very encounter specific though. I'm not sure what kind of encounters you're planning. The more I think about it, the more I am leaning toward no skill challenge for protecting the thralls in combat. I'd probably make them a terrain power as I described above. After all, you should already be having the focus of the complications in shared storytelling focused on how those things threaten the PCs' goal of keeping the thralls alive. For example, Vast Chasm probably isn't much of a concern for the PCs... but it becomes one when they have 25 thralls to get across it. Boiling it down to the encounter level seems redundant. Maybe you can tell me about your planned encounters and I'll have some inspiration. What level is the party?
Re: resource management, I'm not a fan of it. To make it a thing in the game though, it would be as simple as adding Spoiled Food or Tainted Water to the Complications list. Keeping track of resources isn't as important as what sort of drama or action they generate in the context of the shared story. "After a couple weeks of traveling through the Feywild, you realize that the food your brought to feed yourself and the thralls is spoiling rapidly. What's causing it? How do you deal with the Spoiled Food?"
I was thinking how I might structure this particular game. If I were running it, I'd have the overarching "travel" skill challenge above certainly. Then I would punctuate it with 2 big nasty set-piece encounters where the thralls were definitely being threatened (alternative goal), probably after the 3rd and 6th check on the overarching skill challenge. (Or three encounters after 2nd, 4th, and 6th checks). I would also prep some difficult but less elaborate encounters for the Attacked! results, in case the players choose those as options should they accrue failures. Then I'd prep the thrall combat just in case they are defeated in the skill challenge. That'd basically be it. Pretty easy prep that produces 2 to 3 four-hour gaming sessions loaded with both tactical play and plenty of engaging shared storytelling.
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
Statistically, this skill challenge will almost always result in a failure.
12 medium successes before 3 failures almost never works. And in this case you are saying that a medium dc means a penalty to your next roll, and the only real way to success is a hard dc.
It wouldn't take much to tweak this tho. So to keep everything a little more tuned and in the flavor of traveling on a clock, i'd suggest something like this: Say the players have exactly 14 days to get to where they need to go, and the journey takes 12 days of solid travel. Make one check every day using all of the methods Iserith describes. A failure means that the players spent too much time doing something and actually lost time (adding a day to their travel time). An overly successful one means they were able to shave some time off the clock. This should ratchet up the tension as you get to the last few days...
This is quick and dirty, but i'd set the dc's somewhere closer to this: Lower than Low DC: failure (a day gets added to their travel time) Low DC -> Medium DC: Players lose a little time. Nothing major, but these can add up to cost them. Setback Medium DC->high DC: Success High DC (maybe high dc+1 or 2 depending on the level): Players succeed, and they are able to make up some of the time they lost (counts as 2 successes, or removes 1 failure at the player's option).
This still has the odds stacked against the players, but it is much more possible now...
FWIW [4e designer] baseline assumption was that roughly 70% of your feats would be put towards combat effectiveness, parties would coordinate, and strikers would do 20/40/60 at-will damage+novas. If your party isn't doing that... well, you are below baseline, so yes, you need to optimize slightly to meet baseline. -Alcestis
Are you taking into account the bonus from Asset and from Aid Another? The DCs are set purposefully high to encourage the players to use those options. From a shared storytelling perspective, that's additional fiction being added with each attempt at giving a bonus to the person rolling the "primary" check. On average in a party of 5, I'd bet that's around a +6 bonus plus three new elements to add to the scene.
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
I'm not. For 2 reasons: Hard dc's DC's get really high in paragon tier to the point where the difference between a med and high dc is easily more than 10 points. If you allow all the players to assist, and they all succeed you will get +8. That still requires a roll 2 points higher than the medium one would have. Which means you'll still get overall failure (unless you have some lucky players). Granted an asset will balance this, but you end up with +10. And even with all of that: statistically they will lose if they have to make 12 (adjusted even) 'medium' dc's before 3 failures. So in essence you aren't encouraging group cooperation, you are forcing it. And the final reward for them? Statistically it's failures.
But let's look at a more likely scenerio: if a player attempts to assist and fails, it actually provides a -1 penalty. So in the average party of 5, with 4 people assisting, assuming 3 succeed and one fails, you only get a +5 bonus. So it still takes a roll 5 points better than the medium roll. The odds of failure keep climbing...
All in all, your players would have a better chance if you just stuck to medium dc's and didn't allow assists.
FWIW [4e designer] baseline assumption was that roughly 70% of your feats would be put towards combat effectiveness, parties would coordinate, and strikers would do 20/40/60 at-will damage+novas. If your party isn't doing that... well, you are below baseline, so yes, you need to optimize slightly to meet baseline. -Alcestis
Thank you for the feedback, very helpful. Disclaimer: I'm not much of a math guy, so I'm going to have to take your word on any of that stuff.
Anecdotally, I haven't seen many failures with this approach. I couldn't exactly say why that would be the case. Perhaps it's because I don't use many 12 success skill challenges? Could you tell me at which point it becomes "fairer" as far as successes against failure? My skill challenges run 6 or 8 successes, usually.
EDIT: Also, as far as chance of success, what are we assuming as far as the skill investment in this example? Is it low like in that other thread or are you using some other value?
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
To avoid a lot of math, let's jsut break it down into simplistics...
Let's assume we are riding the default math curve of 4e, so players will typically succeed on a roll of 8. This means either it's sort of an average guy with training, or someone who has that stat as their primary, but doesn't have training. Or some combination where it is a secndary stat but he has a few bonuses from a race or item of something...
So if i fail on a roll of 1-7, it's close enough for estimation to say i fail 1/3 of the time, and succeed 2/3 of the time. So if i roll 3 times, i'll typically fail once, and succeed twice. If i roll 6 times, i'll typically fail twice, and suceed 4 times If i roll 9 times, i'll typically fail 3x and succeed 6x.
So statistically, getting to 6 provides the most even chances of success and failure, it could literally come down to that last roll. Getting to 8 is a bit tougher, but it kinda works out since you'll probably have at least a few pc's that have higher bonuses since they may have trained their primary stat, or got a +2 from a background or theme or something. Overall these are probably the most balanced 2 types of skill challenges and the most likely for most groups to pass reasonably often; regardless of tier or Op level Getting to 10 and 12 successes isn't even possible most of the time unless the skill challenge has been specifically desinged to allow it....
Naturally these things can get harder depending on the dm's adherance to the rulesset. For example, if you use the rules in DM Kit/RC, every time you succeed on a skill, it's dc increases by 4. This is to basically stop the players from using the same skill over and over, but it becomes kinda silly when you need to have 12 successes and can't realistically reuse skills... Again, it only works if the challenge was designed to allow it. And we do that by allowing other types of boons: like letting high dc's count twice or remove a failure, or having one skill come in at a low dc, and success grants a bonus to a subsequent roll....
But yeah all in all, in heroic/low paragon your challenge would probably work fine since the dc's are close enough together that a +5 is actually significant. Also, this would work perfectly fine in almost any tier as a 6 or 8 success challenge. It's jsut the 10's and 12's that really take a lot of work on the dm's part to actually challenge the pc's while giving them a chance...
FWIW [4e designer] baseline assumption was that roughly 70% of your feats would be put towards combat effectiveness, parties would coordinate, and strikers would do 20/40/60 at-will damage+novas. If your party isn't doing that... well, you are below baseline, so yes, you need to optimize slightly to meet baseline. -Alcestis
Cool, thanks. It's interesting to see it broken down like that. I guess I stumbled upon that "sweet spot" intuitively. 10's and 12's are a blindspot for me because I just don't seem to do them for whatever reason.
Ideally, I'd like to revise my skill challenge above to account for this realization. Given the setup I propose, where would you put the DCs for this 12 success skill challenge? My goal in setting those DCs (if that goes into your calculation) is to encourage but not force Aid Another/Asset.
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
Cool, thanks. It's interesting to see it broken down like that. I guess I stumbled upon that "sweet spot" intuitively. 10's and 12's are a blindspot for me because I just don't seem to do them for whatever reason.
Ideally, I'd like to revise my skill challenge above to account for this realization. Given the setup I propose, where would you put the DCs for this 12 success skill challenge? My goal in setting those DCs (if that goes into your calculation) is to encourage but not force Aid Another/Asset.
The first step is figuring out what level/tier you want it... And i'm wondering if we should continue this in another thread?
FWIW [4e designer] baseline assumption was that roughly 70% of your feats would be put towards combat effectiveness, parties would coordinate, and strikers would do 20/40/60 at-will damage+novas. If your party isn't doing that... well, you are below baseline, so yes, you need to optimize slightly to meet baseline. -Alcestis
