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dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

Cthulhu Dreams posted:

We talking the big climatic fight?

That is a really well written adventure though - one of the things these guys are doing is talking about the themes they are trying for and that makes it a lot easier to run.

Yeah, I think an epic party could chew through him. But then again, maybe that's okay?

But yeah it's like a crazy neat hexcrawl. I can't wait for my players to remake the world

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Nomadic Scholar
Feb 6, 2013


Oh dear. So I've only ever run some free form one shot sessions for 4e, and my physical materials are MM3, PHB1 &3, DMG1, and Adventurers Vault 2. What should I look into next and how much errata do I need to sift through for full on campaign running?

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
You should look into getting the PHB 2, because the armors introduced there are essential to make sure defenses scale up properly for long-term play.

I wrote a post on the rest of the errata you need to keep in mind to keep things running smoothly.

Nomadic Scholar
Feb 6, 2013


Well I guess the worst of it will be reading some new material and restatting some of the relevant old monsters. Thanks!

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Nomadic Scholar posted:

Well I guess the worst of it will be reading some new material and restatting some of the relevant old monsters. Thanks!

If you want, you can get the Monster Vault, which has most (if not all) of the MM1 / traditional D&D monsters, but with MM3-compliant stats.

Nomadic Scholar
Feb 6, 2013


Well, that will save on shelf space and reading time. Sweet.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Also the Rules Compendium, which has all the basic rules with the errata already baked in. Specifically the DCs in the DMG are completely out of whack.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


As a public service announcement, I would like everyone to stop using skill challenges in 4E, at least in any way close to how modules have used them. The system is generally "Find big number on your skill list, roll that, done. Guy next to you does same until you have X successes." Failure basically means nothing in most cases, too. It is so dull and pointless that it's almost unbelievable.

Elfgames
Sep 11, 2011

Fun Shoe
hm would a better idea for skill challenges be something like: Roll your skills as necessary for a set amount of times. and like a success is a +1 and a failure is -1 and at the end you add up all the successes and failures and you get a trinary failure, success with a complication, success (maybe break it down into 4 or 5 categories) you're still rolling your big numbers but maybe in some challenges some skills could give an extra +1 success?

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea

OneThousandMonkeys posted:

As a public service announcement, I would like everyone to stop using skill challenges in 4E, at least in any way close to how modules have used them. The system is generally "Find big number on your skill list, roll that, done. Guy next to you does same until you have X successes." Failure basically means nothing in most cases, too. It is so dull and pointless that it's almost unbelievable.

Yeah, it was a laudable goal to try and make out-of-combat skills as worthwhile as combat stats, but it did just turn into a dice-rolling fest with no real choices.

I'd love to see a system where skill use scenes (picking locks, disarming traps, negotiations etc) had the same kind of in-depth, interesting treatment that combat does, but skill challenges aren't it.

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Gort posted:

I'd love to see a system where skill use scenes (picking locks, disarming traps, negotiations etc) had the same kind of in-depth, interesting treatment that combat does, but skill challenges aren't it.
We have those, and they're called puzzle games.

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea

Poison Mushroom posted:

We have those, and they're called puzzle games.

Yeah, let's put those in D&D. I saw a fun system for doing so in the boardgame Mansions of Madness where you did tile-sliding puzzles to unlock doors and fix broken things, and your intelligence modifier gave you extra tile slides per turn. That'd be pretty cool to integrate into D&D.

Charisma-based stuff is tougher, though, and might be better-off roleplayed through. I'm always of two minds whether charisma should even be a stat in D&D given that generally the goal is to have someone act out what they say to NPCs instead of saying, "I roll bluff, 17, does he give me the thing?"

Gort fucked around with this message at 12:39 on Feb 25, 2016

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!
For me, it largely comes down to a bigger question of "what's the goal?"

If the goal is to convince a guard to let you pass by the gate, just do a single roll, whatever, who give a poo poo.

If instead you're trying to impress a king or whoever to give you a weighty boon, don't put all the focus in the final conversation. Set up some requirements, and a few bonus objectives or things to clear out. Like, sure, ye olde warlord goes to convince the king to help you out, but the fighter meanwhile gets in good with the captain of the guard after some sparring and helping him train to spread the party's good name, the rogue does his footwork in advance to find out what sorta things the king is into (and what he hates so you know what to avoid), the ranger "coincidentally" runs into the king while he's out falconing and connects with him through the sport, etc, etc. The point is, "convince the king to aid you" doesn't have to be a single scene. This isn't even touching adding more detail and drama to it - maybe some nobles very much want you to fail, so now the rogue has to get some blackmail on them to keep them off your goddamn back, and the ranger has to play overwatch on the party and watch their trail to make sure nobody's coming at you from the back.

If it's not important, make it one roll in one scene. If it IS important, don't be afraid to expand it beyond that.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
Perhaps the flaw was that Skill Challenges were never really explained all that well, because in most every anecdote I've ever encountered with regards to bad skill challenges, the problem is that the DM presents a single obstacle, then asks the group to come up with an appropriate skill to get past it.

If there are ghosts guarding a hallway and the Cleric uses a successful Religion check to commune with the ghosts to let them pass, that's it - the whole party gets to pass and the DM shouldn't have the Fighter come up with a skill check to get past the ghosts, or for the Rogue to come up with a skill check to get past the ghosts.

Rather, the entire passage through the temple should be a skill challenge. You come to a hallway filled by ghosts - the Cleric Religion's you past it. You come to a tunnel blocked by rubble - the Fighter Athletic's the rocks out of the way. You come to a locked door - the Rogue Thievery's the keys out of the nearby guard. You end up at the evil, desecrated altar - the Wizard Arcana's the ritual to summon the unholy presence corrupting the temple ... and you all roll for initiative.
I mean, let's look at the example presented in 4e's DMG 1:

quote:

The PCs seek a temple in dense jungle. Achieving six successes means they find their way. Accruing three failures before achieving the successes, however, indicates that they get themselves hopelessly lost in the wilderness.

Or the one presented in DMG2:

quote:

A demonic creature called forth by a mysterious ritual has attacked the characters, and now they need to find out where it came from. In this skill challenge, the characters make use of their deductive powers (Perception and Insight), their ability to navigate the streets and denizens of the city (Streetwise, Diplomacy, and Intimidate), and their knowledge of or research about the demon itself (Arcana). The characters must assemble what clues they have into a coherent picture of the threat that faces them as they make their way down to the lowest levels of the city to find the source of that threat.

In both cases, the things to apply your skills against are never the same things over and over. The DM puts up a barrier, and asks someone in the group to try and get past it. Then he puts up another, different barrier, and asks someone in the group to try and get past it. And so on and so forth.

Putting up a single barrier then asking everyone to narratively twist their skills to all roll against that one obstacle feels bad and disjointed, but that was never how Skill Challenges were meant to be used.

Gort posted:

Charisma-based stuff is tougher, though, and might be better-off roleplayed through. I'm always of two minds whether charisma should even be a stat in D&D given that generally the goal is to have someone act out what they say to NPCs instead of saying, "I roll bluff, 17, does he give me the thing?"

It's important to remember that it's always within our power as the GM to say "yes, it succeeds, no need to roll".

It was a bit of an eye-opener to have recently read a game where the skill resolution mechanic was "we have a rudimentary roll vs target number system written up, but we really want to promote the aesthetic that character action trumps random rolls. If the player has a plan to deal with a problem, let them have the success", which I think jives well with preventing these situations where you can roleplay a big speech to the King, but then the GM asks for a Diplomacy check, the player ends up with a 1, and then the whole thing feels disconnected.

To connect this to Cirno's post, the skill challenge could be getting into the King's good graces enough to have that audience in the first place, whether by ingratiating yourselves into the Court by various means, or even by sneaking into the Court (analyzing when the King will be alone, scooting past patrols, etc.).

Jolyne Cujoh
Dec 7, 2012

It's not like I've got no worries...
But I'll be fine.

Gort posted:

I'm always of two minds whether charisma should even be a stat in D&D given that generally the goal is to have someone act out what they say to NPCs instead of saying, "I roll bluff, 17, does he give me the thing?"

Of course it should be a loving stat, because the shy person who doesn't talk much or the person who is bad at coming up with speeches or lies or being scary off the top of their heads has just as much of a right to be able to play and pretend to be someone who is charismatic as the most out-of-shape nerd has to play a fighter or the most clumsy motherfucker has to play a rogue.

There is literally no difference between someone saying "I'm going to roll thievery to pick the lock" and "I'm gonna roll bluff to lie to this guard about why I'm here." They both exist for the same reason, to be a simple way to have your character perform an action which they are good at, but the player may or may not be.

I don't understand how anyone can look at that (getting rid of charisma, having to act out all of your charisma related checks) and not realize that it means that you're saying "no one is allowed to play a character who is more charismatic than themselves" and not see how loving terrible a rule or idea that is. But I still see it all the time, and applied to the other mental stats as well, with DMs pulling gotchas about basic world information on players whose characters would definitely know (or be able to roll to find out) or characters with high wisdom not being able to know when something is a common-sense bad idea because their players don't realize it.

That poo poo needs to stop.

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea
I just got done talking about how I'd prefer lockpicking to be an involved minigame instead of "I roll lockpicking" so

Anyway, there's plenty of poo poo in the game you rely on the player for instead of the character. Nobody ever said, "My character's a tactical genius, GM, please pick the correct actions my character will take in this combat, I'll roll tactics for it". A game is just plain duller if all it is is a series of attack and skill rolls, and GMs and players alike should be encouraged to make the game more than that.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

gradenko_2000 posted:

It's important to remember that it's always within our power as the GM to say "yes, it succeeds, no need to roll".

It was a bit of an eye-opener to have recently read a game where the skill resolution mechanic was "we have a rudimentary roll vs target number system written up, but we really want to promote the aesthetic that character action trumps random rolls. If the player has a plan to deal with a problem, let them have the success", which I think jives well with preventing these situations where you can roleplay a big speech to the King, but then the GM asks for a Diplomacy check, the player ends up with a 1, and then the whole thing feels disconnected.
D&D has always been bad at this particular aspect, even though its perfectly allowable within the way the rules are written up.

To play off Jolyne Cujoh's point and gradenko's, there's nothing wrong with allowing mechanical aspects to represent a character who is smarter, stronger, faster, more perceptive, or more charismatic than the player. The issue that creates a feeling of disconnect is that binary success/failure where it doesn't seem to matter how good a character actually is at something. It's supremely frustrating for a player to have a character to have the stated quality of being a brilliant planner or a fast-talker and having that narrative repeatedly invalidated and undercut by a bad roll.

Ultimately this is an issue with how DM's present success and failure. There's too often a tendency to have failure be a hard stop, and to describe all failures as complete embarrassments or negations of ability.

There are a couple easy ways to get around this, even in a system like D&D. One is purely descriptive. In gradenko's example, a failed speech by a charismatic speaker shouldn't be described as a stammering disaster. Instead, it should be more like...

quote:

As your voice fills the king's hall, the courtiers and counselors listen in rapt attention, hanging on every word. Occasionally one or another nods at a salient point, while your stanchest opponents frown in concentration, trying to find holes in your argument. The king himself rubs his chin in thought.

But in the end no amount of rhetoric can undo decades of institutional inertia, years of esteemed advisers championing the other side of the issue. "You have given us much to think on. But in the current crisis, we must stay the course."

It's still a failure, but it doesn't put lie to the idea that the character has the quality of being charismatic, or their plan being well reasoned. Charisma and logic don't always win out. Acknowledging what a character is supposed to be while respecting the results of the check requires a little more work on the DM's part, but it helps a lot.

To build on the above example, failing to convince the king shouldn't be a hard stop to the adventure. A charismatic character might not have succeeded at their goal, but maybe their qualities give them a new opening.

quote:

As the meeting breaks up, you try and fail to think of another argument or flourish that might have changed the outcome. As you stand there, you suddenly spot the Duchess approaching. "The king may not have heard you, but some here were listening. If you'd like, I can arrange a meeting later this evening..."

Maybe the party is about to get sucked into a plot with revolutionaries. Maybe it's just chance to build a coalition to eventually change the king's opinion, but more slowly and with greater effort than the party had hoped for. But it's a way forward opened by the qualities of the character that doesn't invalidate the failure.

Jolyne Cujoh
Dec 7, 2012

It's not like I've got no worries...
But I'll be fine.

Gort posted:

I just got done talking about how I'd prefer lockpicking to be an involved minigame instead of "I roll lockpicking" so

Anyway, there's plenty of poo poo in the game you rely on the player for instead of the character. Nobody ever said, "My character's a tactical genius, GM, please pick the correct actions my character will take in this combat, I'll roll tactics for it". A game is just plain duller if all it is is a series of attack and skill rolls, and GMs and players alike should be encouraged to make the game more than that.

Fair enough on the first point, I should have stuck with my original example of "I roll athletics to bash the door down" instead of rewriting it to call back to the thing that remembered being discussed in the couple of posts before mine.

But still, I disagree about making lockpicking an involved minigame, because it has the same problem of disallowing someone who is bad at that minigame or who doesn't feel up to doing that minigame over and over from being able to play as someone who is good at picking locks. I also super disagree that no one has ever said "Hey, pick my character's actions for me," because they do, all the time. Every time someone asks "Hey should I use [encounter/daily power], does this fit with the rest of y'all's plans for the next round, or do you think we need it or whatever" or "hey, my original plan is hosed now, what should I do?" to the table, they're doing exactly that. They're gathering the information that their character should just be able to know so that they can use that information and make decisions about it, or they're calling to the rest of the group (which includes the GM) to help them make the decision that their character would make. And even if they don't do that stuff ,if someone is playing a character that is supposed to be a tactical genius and makes a huge tactical fuckup, the GM should say "Hey, are you sure you want to do that? It's a bad idea because of x," because the player wants to play a character who won't make a huge fuckup like that without good reason.

And hell, I agree that having the game be more involved than "roll dice to overcome obstacles" is fun and should be encouraged, but what you're suggesting isn't encouraging involvement, it's requiring it, which doesn't jive with "Fantasy Wish Fulfillment Simulator 4th (actually like 6th) Edition" where you're supposed to be whatever sort of character you want to be and be able to escape your shortcomings for a while. I love giving stupid speeches and being involved with roleplay and speaking in character for long stretches of time, but even then I sometimes have to say "gently caress, I really can't think of anything but George would be able to. Can I just roll Diplomacy?" and that's a good thing, and what the skill system was designed to handle. If your group is cool with being required to do speeches and minigames for their skills then, fine, whatever, but they shouldn't be a required part of a system which has the core attraction of "be someone you are not" where the primary function is escapism.

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!
It's also important to note RE: Skill Challenges that they most likely were completely untested and written on the cuff at the last minute. Remember, the entirety of 4e was pushed out somewhat early because they had a previous engine (codenamed "Orcus") that they ended up having to scrap in it's entirety.

starkebn
May 18, 2004

"Oooh, got a little too serious. You okay there, little buddy?"
This is from D&D 4e Rules Compendium, so the last revision of the rules:

D&D Rules Compendium 4e posted:

SKILL CHALLENGES

A skill challenge represents a series of tests that adventurers must face. Engaging in an audience with the duke, decoding a mysterious set of sigils in a hidden chamber, finding a safe path through a haunted forest—all of these situations present opportunities for skill challenges, because they take time and a variety of skills to overcome.

From disabling a complex trap to negotiating peace between warring nations, a skill challenge takes complex activities and structures them into a series of skill checks. A skill challenge should not replace the roleplaying, the puzzling, and the ingenuity that players put into handling those situations. Instead, it allows the Dungeon Master to define the adventurers’ efforts within the rules structure so that the players understand their options and the DM can more easily adjudicate the outcome.

A skill challenge can stand on its own as a noncombat encounter. For example, a group might have an encounter in which it tries to extract a secret from a stubborn cultist. In another episode of the story, the group might use Nature checks and Perception checks to track the cultists through a jungle, a Religion check to predict a likely spot for their hidden temple, and an Endurance check to fight off the effects of illness and exhaustion over the course of days in the jungle.

Alternatively, a skill challenge can be integrated into a combat encounter. While fighting the cult’s leader, some of the adventurers might use a series of Arcana and Religion checks to disrupt a dark ritual that is in progress.

The Basics

To deal with a typical skill challenge, a group of adventurers makes a series of skill checks, sometimes taking a few rounds and sometimes spread over days of game time. The DM either informs the players when the challenge begins or lets it begin quietly, when an adventurer makes a skill check that the DM counts as the first check of the challenge. As the challenge proceeds, the DM might prompt the players to make checks, let them choose when to make checks, or both. The DM can have the adventurers act in initiative order or in some other order of his or her choice. The DM might tell the players which skills to use, let them improvise which ones they use, or both.

The skill challenge is completed either when a specified number of successful skill checks is achieved or when three failures are reached.

If the adventurers complete the challenge through achieving a target number of successes, they succeed at the challenge. Otherwise, they fail the challenge. Whether the adventurers succeed or fail, they complete the challenge, face its consequences, and receive experience points for it.

For example, the adventurers seek a temple in the heart of a jungle—a skill challenge that might occupy them for hours. Achieving six successes means they find their way without too much trouble. Accumulating three failures before
achieving the successes, however, indicates that they get lost for part of the search, fight their way through quicksand, and arrive at the temple worn out, having lost some healing surges on the way.

Components of a Skill Challenge

A typical skill challenge includes five main components, whether the challenge is an encounter in its own right or part of another encounter.

1. Goal Each skill challenge has a goal. Completing a skill challenge almost always results in attaining that goal, regardless of success or failure. If the adventurers succeed at the challenge, they attain the goal more or less unscathed. If they fail the challenge, they typically attain the goal but pay some price for doing so (see “Consequences,” below).

Skill challenge goals take many forms: find the lost temple, escape the crumbling tower, disrupt the fiendish ritual, compete in a tournament, and so on. The best skill challenge goals can be achieved with degrees of success or failure, rather than total success or failure.

2. Level and DCs A skill challenge has a level, which helps determine the DCs of the skill checks involved. A typical skill challenge is of the same level as the adventurers, although the DM might choose to set the level higher or lower.

Most skill checks in a typical challenge are against the moderate DC of the challenge’s level (see the Difficulty Class by Level table, page 126). However, after a character has used a particular skill to achieve a success against the moderate DC, later uses of that skill in the challenge by the same character should be against the hard DC.

Group checks (page 128) work differently; they should typically use the easy DC of the challenge’s level. Also, in a high-complexity challenge (complexity 3 or higher), adventurers have ways of circumventing the DC guidelines through the use of special advantages. See the “Advantages” sidebar.

A challenge ideally includes at least four ways to gain a success against a moderate DC. Using too many hard DCs threatens to make a challenge too difficult, and using too many easy DCs (except in group checks) makes it trivial.

3. Complexity The complexity of a skill challenge determines the number of successful checks the adventurers must accumulate to succeed at the challenge.

The Skill Challenge Complexity table lists the five grades of complexity. A complexity 1 challenge requires four skill checks to be completed successfully. Each grade of complexity after the first requires two more successes.

Most challenges (complexity 2 or higher) should involve a mix of moderate and hard DCs. The table suggests a mix for each grade of complexity.

In a high-complexity challenge (complexity 3 or higher), adventurers usually have access to the number of advantages specified in the table. See the “Advantages” sidebar for how advantages work.

SKILL CHALLENGE COMPLEXITY

pre:
Complexity Successes Advantages Typical DCs

1          4         —          4 moderate

2          6         —          5 moderate, 1 hard

3          8         2          6 moderate, 2 hard

4          10        4          7 moderate, 3 hard

5          12        6          8 moderate, 4 hard
Succeeding at a complexity 1 challenge is roughly equivalent to defeating a single monster. Adding a grade of complexity is akin to adding a monster to a combat encounter. A complexity 5 challenge has the same weight in an adventure as a typical combat encounter and awards a comparable amount of experience points (see “Consequences,” below).

A skill challenge that is part of a combat encounter typically has a complexity of 1 or 2 and replaces one or two monsters of the challenge’s level.

4. Primary and Secondary Skills Each skill challenge has skills associated with it that adventurers can use during the challenge. A skill challenge typically includes a mix of social skills, such as Bluff and Diplomacy; knowledge skills, such as Arcana and Nature; and physical skills, such as Athletics and Acrobatics. Having a mix of skills rewards a group that has a variety of skill specialties.

Whatever skills the DM chooses for a skill challenge, he or she designates them as primary or secondary. A typical skill challenge has a number of associated skills equal to the number of adventurers plus two. Usually two or three of those skills are secondary, and the rest are primary.

Primary Skills: The use of certain skills naturally leads to the solution of the problem presented in a skill challenge. These skills serve as the primary skills in the challenge. The DM usually picks the primary skills before a challenge begins and often tells them to the players.

A primary skill can typically be used more than once in a challenge. The DM might limit the number of successes that a particular skill can contribute, up to a maximum that equals the complexity of the challenge. For instance, in a challenge that has a complexity of 2, the DM might decide that each primary skill can contribute no more than two successes.

Secondary Skills: A secondary skill is tangentially related to a skill challenge and can usually contribute only one success. When players improvise creative uses for skills that weren’t on the DM’s list of skills for the challenge, the DM typically treats them as secondary skills for the challenge.

The DM might decide that a particular secondary skill can’t contribute any successes to a challenge but instead provides some other benefit as a result of a successful check: a bonus to a check with a primary skill, a reroll of a different skill check, the addition of a skill to the list of primary skills, and so on.

quote:

ADVANTAGES

A skill challenge that has a complexity of 3 or higher is considered to have a high complexity. Such a challenge should include ways for the adventurers to gain an advantage of some kind, an edge that lets them remove a failure or gain successes more easily than normal. Without such advantages, the challenge risks becoming an unavoidable failure. For each success beyond six required in a challenge, one of the following advantages should be available.

✦ A success against a hard DC counts as two successes: a success against both a hard DC and a moderate DC.
✦ A success against a hard DC removes a failure that has already been accumulated in the challenge, instead of counting as a success.
✦ A success against an easy DC counts as a success against a moderate DC.
✦ A success against a moderate DC counts as a success even though the adventurer making the check has already used the same skill to gain a success against a moderate DC.

The DM can mix and match these advantages in a challenge and can use the same one more than once. If the DM prefers one or two of the advantages over the others, he or she can just use the preferred ones.

The DM either determines in advance which of these advantages are available or lets the players’ creative use of skills determine when an advantage comes into play. For example, a player might come up with an unusually innovative use for the Endurance skill in a challenge and then meet a hard DC with the skill check. The DM might reward the player’s creativity by allowing the success to remove a failure. Similarly, the DM might reward an adventurer for overshooting a DC. If the adventurer makes a skill check against a moderate DC but meets a hard DC, the DM could let that success count as two.

If a published skill challenge has a complexity of 3 or higher but does not include suggestions for granting advantages, the DM should grant an appropriate number of advantages in play. An easy rule of thumb is to count a few checks that meet a hard DC as double successes.

If a group of adventurers has members who can easily achieve the moderate and the hard DCs of a challenge, then fewer of these advantages are necessary in that challenge. In other words, a group of experts needs fewer tricks for avoiding failure.

5. Consequences Whether adventurers succeed or fail at a skill challenge, there are consequences. One way or another, the adventure goes on.
Success: When adventurers succeed at a skill challenge, they earn rewards specific to the challenge. The reward might boil down to the adventure simply continuing smoothly, or it could be one or more treasures, advantages in future encounters, or useful information.
Failure: Failing a challenge doesn’t bring the adventure to a halt. Instead, there is a price to pay. Penalties for failure might include the loss of healing surges or some other lingering penalty, making a later encounter more difficult.
Experience Points: Whether the adventurers succeed or fail, they receive experience points for completing a skill challenge. Generally the adventurers gain experience points as if they had defeated a number of monsters equal to the challenge’s complexity and as if the monsters were of the challenge’s level.
Example: If the adventurers complete a 7th-level challenge that has a complexity of 1, they receive 300 XP (the award for a single 7th-level monster). If they complete a 7th-level challenge with a complexity of 5, they receive 1,500 XP (the award for five such monsters).

Stages of Success In some skill challenges, each success moves the adventurers toward their goal. Then, even if the adventurers fail, they still achieve some degree of progress. For example, if the goal of a challenge is to extract information from a hostile or wary character, the adventurers get some tidbits of information with each success. The most valuable information comes last (when they achieve the target number of successes for the complexity of the challenge), but even one success followed by three failures gives the adventurers a few pieces of information that keep the adventure moving.

Perhaps the adventurers undertake a skill challenge to weaken a vampire lord before they finally face it in combat. Each success (or every three successes) removes some protective ward or special defense the vampire lord possesses. Thus, even if the adventurers fail the challenge—and are thrust into combat with the vampire—they have still weakened it a little, and the fight is measurably easier than if they had achieved no successes at all.

Stages of Failure One way that some skill challenges remain lively is by providing immediate consequences for each failed check in the challenge. Each time an adventurer fails, the consequences become gradually worse, climaxing in the termination of the skill challenge after three failures.

Here are some typical consequences that can occur in response to a failure:
✦ The adventurer who failed the check either loses a healing surge outside combat or takes damage in combat.
✦ The adventurers must spend time or money making up for the failure.
✦ For the rest of the challenge, no adventurer can achieve a success using the same skill that was used for the failed check.
✦ The next check using a specified skill takes a penalty. For instance, if an adventurer fails an Intimidate check in the midst of a complex negotiation, the next adventurer who attempts a Diplomacy check takes a –2 penalty.

Example of Play
This example shows a DM running a skill challenge for five adventurers: Valenae (an eladrin cleric), Dendric (a human fighter), Uldane (a halfling rogue), Kathra (a dwarf wizard), and Shara (a human fighter). After a battle with a demonic creature that attempted to slay their friend, the priest Pendergraf, the adventurers must determine where the monster came from to prevent another attack. This 1st-level challenge has a complexity of 1 and requires four successes against DC 12, the moderate DC for 1st level. The goal of the challenge is to find the spot where the adventurers’ enemy, a wizard named Garan, summoned the demon. Garan has hired some thugs to beat up anyone they spot snooping around. If the adventurers fail the challenge, the thugs find them and attack.

DM: You’re left with the last misty remnants of the strange creature’s corpse and a handful of frightened witnesses. “What was that thing?” Pendergraf asks. “And where did it come from?”
Kathra: Can I make an Arcana check to see if I know anything about it?
DM: Sure.
Kathra: I got a 14.
DM (marking down a success for the characters): Okay, you know that the creature was some sort of demon, not native to the world.
Uldane: Can I look around and see if I can tell which way it came from?
DM: Sure, make a Perception check.
Uldane: Ouch, a 9. Someone remind me to open my eyes the next time I try looking around.
DM (marking the first failure): It takes you quite a bit of work to uncover the tracks. It looks like they head to the east side of town.
Valenae: Let’s follow the tracks. If we want to protect Pendergraf and the other priests of Pelor, we need to find and destroy whoever summoned that thing.
DM: The tracks continue for a block or two before they twist and turn around. You realize that you confused the monster’s tracks with a horse’s, double back, and finally find the trail. It leads to the river quarter, the roughest part of town. The trail ends outside a rundown tavern. Three thuggish-looking men sit on a bench by the front door. They glare at you as you approach.

Notice how the failed check didn’t stop the action. The adventurers wasted some time, giving the thugs more time to find them, but eventually found the trail.

Kathra: I’d like to talk to the men to see if any of them saw the demon come by here. How about a Diplomacy check—an 11.
DM (marking the second failure): The thugs make a show of ignoring you as you approach. Then one of them snarls: “Around here, folks know better than to stick their noses where they’re not wanted.” He puts a hand on the hilt of his dagger.
Shara: I put a hand on my greatsword and growl back at them, “I’ll stick my sword where it’s not wanted if you keep up that attitude.” I got a 21 on my Intimidate check.
DM (marking the second success): The thug turns pale in fear as his friends bolt back into the tavern. He points at the building behind you before darting after them.
Dendric: What’s the place look like? Is it a shop, or a private residence?
DM: Someone make a Streetwise check.
Uldane: Using aid another, I try to assist Dendric, since he has the highest Street-wise. I got a 12, so Dendric gets a +2 bonus.
Dendric: Thanks, Uldane. Here’s my check . . . great, a natural 1. That’s a 10, even with Uldane’s assistance.
DM (marking the third and final failure): It looks like an old shop that’s been closed and boarded up. You heard something about this place before, but you can’t quite remember it. As you look the place over, the tavern door opens up behind you. A hulk of a half-orc lumbers out, followed by the thugs you talked to earlier. “I heard you thought you could push my crew around. Well, let’s see you talk tough through a set of broken teeth.” Roll for initiative!

Unfortunately for the adventurers, they failed the skill challenge. If they had succeeded on the last check, they would have remembered stories of a secret entrance into the building and had a chance to find the hidden laboratory where Garan summoned the demon. They can question the half-orc after combat and learn something about their foe, but not as much they would have learned from finding the laboratory. Perhaps they can still find the laboratory, but the delay caused by the fight gives Garan a head start in escaping.

fairly involved, but quite well explained I think. And it's more than just "everyone roll their best skill and wrap it up in three minutes". I think the biggest problem with skill challenges is just a failure of getting the concept across adequately initially.

starkebn fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Feb 25, 2016

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Well, the "best skill" thing is just the usual player approach to being asked to roll a skill, i.e. "hey we need to make an Arcana check, who's got the highest mod?"

It's funny how often it works out that when the fighter handles something that turns out to be magic, the wizard will have stood right next to him watching closely all along :v:

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!

My Lovely Horse posted:

Well, the "best skill" thing is just the usual player approach to being asked to roll a skill, i.e. "hey we need to make an Arcana check, who's got the highest mod?"

It's funny how often it works out that when the fighter handles something that turns out to be magic, the wizard will have stood right next to him watching closely all along :v:

I spent a lot of time when playing or running D&D seriously considering just making skills a group thing full stop. All skills are rolled with the highest mod the group possesses, and the group decides which characters do what and how in-world.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Gort posted:

I just got done talking about how I'd prefer lockpicking to be an involved minigame instead of "I roll lockpicking" so

This is awful because it restricts the "good at lockpicking" characters to those who are played by the people who are good at the minigame. This is also bad, because it means that anybody who is good at the minigame is also good at lockpicking regardless of skill investment.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

ProfessorCirno posted:

It's also important to note RE: Skill Challenges that they most likely were completely untested and written on the cuff at the last minute. Remember, the entirety of 4e was pushed out somewhat early because they had a previous engine (codenamed "Orcus") that they ended up having to scrap in it's entirety.

I strongly suspect that Skill Challenges were based off of Complex Skill Checks

thespaceinvader posted:

I spent a lot of time when playing or running D&D seriously considering just making skills a group thing full stop. All skills are rolled with the highest mod the group possesses, and the group decides which characters do what and how in-world.

That's practically what it ends up being anyway, and jives with the GUMSHOE idea of "adjust the number of skill points gained by any individual depending on the size of the party, and then explicitly tell the players that they should spread out their skills so that at least one person has one point in each skill, across the entire party"

KaoliniteMilkshake
Jul 9, 2010

gradenko_2000 posted:

I strongly suspect that Skill Challenges were based off of Complex Skill Checks


That's practically what it ends up being anyway, and jives with the GUMSHOE idea of "adjust the number of skill points gained by any individual depending on the size of the party, and then explicitly tell the players that they should spread out their skills so that at least one person has one point in each skill, across the entire party"


SW Saga edition's Galaxy of Intrigue book had an entire sideline on skill challenges - whether or not that's pre or post 4e, I'm not entirely sure, but really saga edition is proto-4e in a lot of ways, except for the continued multiclassing obsession.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

dwarf74 posted:

Yeah, I think an epic party could chew through him. But then again, maybe that's okay?

But yeah it's like a crazy neat hexcrawl. I can't wait for my players to remake the world

You're considerably ahead of me in the AP, so I'd appreciate if you could give us your thoughts on what you'd change/watch out for/cut/adapt in the adventures - my one beef with this AP is that there is a real shortage of that sort of input kicking around.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


SKILLS: A choice so ENRICHING that you may as well not even pick any or use the system at all.

dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

Cthulhu Dreams posted:

You're considerably ahead of me in the AP, so I'd appreciate if you could give us your thoughts on what you'd change/watch out for/cut/adapt in the adventures - my one beef with this AP is that there is a real shortage of that sort of input kicking around.

Well, we are into #8. My biggest advice is to read ahead a few adventures. Start positioning stuff like the Fey Titans and whatnot before they become imminent.

Oh, and naval combat is funky and rather weird/incongruous/broken. If your players are into it, good. Otherwise... Well...

Apart from some enemy stat tweaks here and there, I'm running by the book.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

And then there are folks like my one player who pumps one skill sky-high, as much as 4E allows, and then tries to find ways to use that skill for absolutely everything; and who makes that skill Endurance of all things.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Bluff for my money is the funniest skill, because they took a look at the 3E diplomancer and decided, "You know what, by epic, you should be able to do that with the right class and powers." So you can bluff people's memories away, use bluff for every social test, use bluff as your initiative, and probably more crap I'm not even thinking of at the moment.

isndl
May 2, 2012
I WON A CONTEST IN TG AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS CUSTOM TITLE
The best skill challenges I've seen so far have always been along the lines of "Something is going down soon, you have enough time to do X number of things. You get a unique bonus for every thing you succeed in doing." Depending on what the bonuses are, you start having characters roll off-skills because the bonus is more interesting. The bad skill challenges were always really rudimentary stuff along the lines of "So your party is traveling through the mountains and it's really loving cold, what do you do?" and the players just go whatever, roll Endurance or mark off a healing surge.

My Lovely Horse posted:

And then there are folks like my one player who pumps one skill sky-high, as much as 4E allows, and then tries to find ways to use that skill for absolutely everything; and who makes that skill Endurance of all things.

I'm surprised they aren't trying to min-max Streetwise. Endurance is at least plausibly useful most of the time it seems.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

isndl posted:

I'm surprised they aren't trying to min-max Streetwise. Endurance is at least plausibly useful most of the time it seems.

Really? Endurance is by far the least-used 4E skill in my experience simply because most things treat it as simply a "defense" of sorts, it's the least proactive skill on the list. It's equally redundant because, y'know, everyone's Fortitude is right there.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

I've had her try and win a debate by simply arguing on and on until the other guy lost his nerve. Actually not unlike her playstyle. In retrospect that's a lot funnier than it seemed at the time.

Or another thing that I thought was a legitimately original idea: lose a guy that was tailing her by picking a route through the city that took her up and down as many stairs as possible.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Endurance is either a really useful skill or totally useless, since it's basically impossible to use it in an active attempt to do something. Streetwise is "Why aren't we rolling Diplomacy, again?"

MatchaZed
Feb 14, 2010

We Can Do It!


ProfessorCirno posted:

It's also important to note RE: Skill Challenges that they most likely were completely untested and written on the cuff at the last minute. Remember, the entirety of 4e was pushed out somewhat early because they had a previous engine (codenamed "Orcus") that they ended up having to scrap in it's entirety.

I've never heard of this, what was the gist of what "Orcus" was?

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

WilliamAnderson posted:

I've never heard of this, what was the gist of what "Orcus" was?

There's a timeline in Wizards Presents: Races and Classes that gives us a brief glimpse of what it was:

1. Pre-design for 4th Edition begins in early 2005, with Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins and James Wyatt as the three key people

2. A design workshop is conducted in May 2005, and that's where the main designers agree on:
explicitly defined party roles
three tiers of play of ten levels each
"a system that provided powers for all classes"

3. From Jun to Sep 2005, the designers work on the broad design of what called "Orcus I". The output of this was a document that included eight classes, powers for all of them, monsters and rules

4. This next part is important, so I'll just lift an excerpt straight from the book:

quote:

First Development Team: October 2005 through February 2006

Team: Robert Gutschera (lead), Mike Donais, Rich Baker, Mike Mearls, and Rob Heinsoo.

Mission: Determine whether the Orcus I design (as we named it) was headed in the right direction. Make recommendations for the next step.

Outcome: The first development team tore everything down and then rebuilt it. In the end, it recommended that we continue in the new direction Orcus I had established. This recommendation accompanied a rather difficult stunt accomplished in the middle of the development process: Baker, Donais, and Mearls translated current versions of the Orcus I mechanics into a last-minute revision of Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords. It was a natural fit, since Rich Baker had already been treating the Book of Nine Swords as a “powers for fighters” project. The effort required to splice the mechanics into 3rd Edition were a bit extreme, but the experiment was worth it.

Now, we know that Tome of Battle was officially released in Aug 2006, so the timeline fits.

5. From Feb to Mar 2006, they work on Orcus Phase 2, but the most we get out of Heinsoo here is that after a bunch of playtesting, they thought that Orcus wasn't going in the direction that they wanted.

6. Another important development, and another excerpt:

quote:

One Development Week: Mid-April 2006

Team: Robert Gutschera, Mike Donais, Rich Baker, Mike Mearls, and Rob Heinsoo.

Mission: Recommend a way forward.

Outcome: In what I’d judge as the most productive week of the process to date, not that anyone would have guessed that beforehand, Mearls and Baker figured out what was going wrong with the design. We’d concentrated too much on the new approach without properly accounting for what 3.5 handled well. We’d provided player characters with constantly renewing powers, but hadn’t successfully parsed the necessary distinctions between powers that were always available and powers that had limited uses.

What this sequence of events tells us is that Tome of Battle wasn't quite a testbed for ideas that would immediately make their way to 4e, but rather an entirely different approach to powers that 4e at some point deliberately diverged from.

The next notch on the timeline is May 2006 to Sep 2006, when Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, Mike Mearls, David Noonan and Jesse Decker work on something they called Flywheel, which "move[s] closer to 3.5 by dealing properly with powers and resources that could be used at-will, once per encounter, or once per day". After that, the "Scramjet" team is formed to do the 4e D&D lore rework, and then focused design on the PHB 1 begins in Oct 2006, and it's an almost straight line to the 4e release from there on out.

So Orcus was this abandoned design, a sort of "what could have been" for 4e that we saw a bit of in Tome of Battle, but upon reflection is actually quite different from 4e because if you really try to compare the ability refresh mechanics, the Crusader/Swordsage/Warblade don't have anything like the AEDU model. It's not per-encounter and nothing's on a daily refresh either.




On a somewhat unrelated note, there's also this other small passage:

quote:

Mike [Mearls] was fresh from adapting Orcus II ideas for Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords. He contributed many innovative class concepts and designs during this stage. Mike probably shook things up the most when he designed a few classes that will be appearing in the 4th Edition Player’s Handbook II. I looked at Mike’s designs of the barbarian and the druid and thought, “Oh, geez, this is the cool we need to be getting from all our classes.”

If you think about how the 4e Barbarian's different Rage powers are actually adaptations of the "Stance" system from Tome of Battle? That's probably because Mearls worked on Tome of Battle, but not on the 4e PHB 1, but then did work on 4e PHB 2 and adapted Tome of Battles stances for that later book.

It also jives with Mearls taking over for Essentials and then having the Fighter subclasses (Slayer, Knight) and the Hunter subclass leverage Stances heavily. The designs were his baby, and he keeps leaning on them the same way he leaned on the Reserve Points mechanic for Iron Heroes and then brought it into D&D 5th Edition.

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea

Khizan posted:

This is awful because it restricts the "good at lockpicking" characters to those who are played by the people who are good at the minigame. This is also bad, because it means that anybody who is good at the minigame is also good at lockpicking regardless of skill investment.

Counterpoint: The combat system, which is an involved minigame.

And yet we don't hear people calling for the combat system to be boiled down to a single dice roll because they "aren't good at the combat minigame".

Iny
Jan 11, 2012

Gort posted:

Counterpoint: The combat system, which is an involved minigame.

And yet we don't hear people calling for the combat system to be boiled down to a single dice roll because they "aren't good at the combat minigame".

We... kind of do have that as an option, though. Simple classes with basically one verb, "I attack" or "I Twin Strike" or whatever, for players who really aren't into the complicated combat minigame so much. I wouldn't ever play one of those builds but I'm glad they exist.

EDIT and I think they should exist for more archetypes than the martial striker, obviously, that's a dumb restriction

Elfgames
Sep 11, 2011

Fun Shoe

Gort posted:

Counterpoint: The combat system, which is an involved minigame.

And yet we don't hear people calling for the combat system to be boiled down to a single dice roll because they "aren't good at the combat minigame".

because 1.) combat is the game and 2.) it involves everyone not just one dude trying to lockpick and being told to sit in the corner and play with a puzzle for 5 minutes while everyone else waits for them. skills as minigame disengages the player from the rest of the game

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Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea

Elfgames posted:

because 1.) combat is the game and 2.) it involves everyone not just one dude trying to lockpick and being told to sit in the corner and play with a puzzle for 5 minutes while everyone else waits for them. skills as minigame disengages the player from the rest of the game

Is "there's a door, it's locked, roll until you unlock it, no penalty for failing" actually a scenario anyone puts in their game, though? The minigame idea would be far better used in a combat scenario - the rogue is picking the lock, the fighter is keeping the kuo-toa at bay, and the wizard is trying to counterspell the magic trap filling the room with water. Each one is playing a minigame (rogue is playing the lockpicking minigame, fighter is playing the combat minigame, wizard is playing the magic puzzle minigame and they're all minigames of the same depth and interest) and they're all contributing to the scenario equally in different ways.

In the current system, only the fighter in that scenario actually has any interesting choices to make - he gets to choose what powers to use, where to stand to get flanking/terrain bonuses, what items to use, the whole combat minigame - whereas the rogue and wizard are reduced to "roll thievery/arcana a few times and maybe use a skill utility power if you happened to take one".

I think the game would be more interesting as a whole if more parts of it had the same level of detail that combat does. I don't think that goal is unreasonable - it's what they were trying to move towards with skill challenges in the first place.

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