All right so last night I sat down to prep for my game as I planned it here and here. My goal of the night was to be done with the first half of the adventure: Getting on the Fey Airship and reaching the player’s destination.
I got out all the battle maps (I have two featuring ships, so I’m good for Airships) and I started planning a rather complex Skill Challenge that encompassed all the dealings the PCs would do with the Fey, from negotiating the favor, convincing the fey to be helpful and trying to avoid being ‘tricked’ as the kind of Fey I like to play are wont to do.
All in one massive skill challenge (or several sub challenges linked thematically) stretched over the whole evening if necessary…
As I was crafting primary skills and consequences for successes and failures and as I was discussing it with Dave the Game over on Gtalk, it dawned on me that I was possibly making a D&D 4e rookie mistake. I was likely letting the games’ rules, in this instance the not so well defined rules for skill challenges, dictate the way I wanted to play the scene.
Skill challenges are an excellent way of putting a party to work together on a large non-combat problem. However, they should not be designed as a replacement for some old fashioned Role Playing.
I blame my affinity to all things crunchy. When rules are made for a situation, I feel compelled to use them… Yet I complicate things because I still want to achieve exactly what I have in mind in terms of story… yeah, I’m insane like that.
Keeping it simple, I need to do this more often… its surprising how seldom I manage to pull it off.
I have a specific feeling I want to convey in the scenes with the Fey Airship and I can likely achieve this without any die rolls.
So I greatly simplified the skill challenge I had originally planned. I’ll focus it on the PCs getting exactly what they want from the Fey and I’ll leave the rest to roleplaying based on how involved the players are in interacting with the ship’s crew.
To that effect, I fleshed out the crew by giving names, descriptions and personality traits to the ship’s officers and I made the crew ‘special’. There should be enough hooks to entice the storytellers of the group to latch on and go wild.
So now I’m done with the 1st half of the adventure, I just need to add Treasure Parcels and that part is done. Tonight I’ll focus on the Pirate Airship and the last scene’s ‘denoument’. Thursday night will be about preparing my gaming room and setting up the battlemaps, minis and get the whole place ready for the game.
Can’t wait!
I’ve found turning skill challenges into almost little decision tree stories that you progress through by cycling through the table (allowing players to pass if they want to wait to assist another player) and talking through the results really makes skill challenges more enjoyable.
Not to say you shouldn’t map out what you think should work and what shouldn’t work, but keeping all that under the hood is probably best.
-Ben.
Bens last blog post..My Spawn of Dajobas
I take credit for everything. My brilliance is infectious!
In all seriousness, I think the rigid skill challenge rules are great for new DMs, but once you’re experienced at thinking on your feet, it becomes less important to map them out. Then you can reward good ideas and roleplaying instead of relying on dice rolls.
Dave T. Games last blog post..Winter is Coming (to HBO)
I’m still not sure I understand how skill challenged are “supposed” to work. 😐 The basic rules make sense, but their implementation seems tricky.
I’m jotting down the idea of doing an ‘Introduction to skill challenges’ post in the near future.
Gah, I had responses to Dave and Ben lined up but never posted! Well here goes.
Good idea Ben.
I think I’ll try to freeform it more. With a smaller group than usual (4 players) whom I all trust implicitly it should go well.
@Dave: The credit is all yours to take… I sometime (nah often) need a good slap behind the head to return to simpler stuff. I need to trust my players more to create the complexity of plot I seek.
Funny… I just posted about this on my blog!
You seem to have the same struggles I have with skill challenges (with less newbyism).
That’s why I’m having a hard time figuring them out – are they a role playing tool or a role playing killer?
Do they just turn standard role playing into another combat-like die-roll fest?
I suppose that there lies the difference between a good skill challenge and a bad one.
In my post, I’m reflecting on a scene in the game I’ve DMed that I feel would make a good skill challenge.
The one thing that bugs me is that I has scene played twice through “standard roleplaying” and it was excellent as it was.
Still, I think I’m afflicted with craziness similar to yours (we really should meet!) and am drawn to the rules like an obsessive vampire to untying knots.
I’ll have to skill-challengize the scene and have people play through it to know.
I wonder why I never found any vampire in literature that was into macramé.
Eric Maziades last blog post..Roleplaying and skill challenges
I’ve always just been like “This is a skill challenge. You need 8 successes before 4 failures” or something of the sort.
I give them the primary skills (Maybe History, ARcana, Blah) and then tell them “For each roll, you must tell me what you are doing for that roll” to make it a valid challenge.
Simply having them roll the dice 8 times just kind of sucks. So essentially I’m forcing them to come up with an 8 step plan of attack, or an 8 point dialogue against an NPC.
Generally this works, and helps me come up with descriptions to flesh out the skill check.
Been there, done that. 😉
In my last session, a player wanted to parlay with the Elder Council. I said “we’re gonna make this a skill challenge” and I saw my wife roll her eyes and shake her head. I realized what she was getting at. I wanted so badly to use the skill challenge rules that I was throwing away an opportunity to allow for some RP. So, in the end, I had the player roll one Diplomacy check, total, as we simply RPed the scene. It worked out better for everyone. 🙂
Tony Laws last blog post..Picture this: In search of the perfect character portrait
We’ll I find that skill challenge are not good for social interaction as it deprive us of an interesting RP occasion.
That being said it can easily be used to simulate things that are not easily represented or fun in a RPG.
A pursuit done with a skill challenge is a good use of it, while a discussion with the guard to get in, not so good.
my 2cents
@Yan: Quite agree. Some of my most vivid RP moments are social interactions with NPCs. A PC disguised as an orc escorting the rest of the party as prisoners. He was questioned by another orc and threw a fit of rage saying that the “Orc shaman told me to bring them here” and that it wasn’t my place to challenge the Orc shaman and that if the guard wanted to challenge the orc shaman, let him go and challenge the orc shaman and let me go and do what the orc shaman said. That was very cool RPing and no rolls were made – it just had to work.
I have a feeling a good DM can make both methods (pure RPing and skill challenge) coexist, though.
Eric Maziades last blog post..Roleplaying and skill challenges
@Eric: Quite true, but then again why would the “good DM” go through the extra work to formalize something that already works fine. 😉
My perception is that skill challenge should be used if it enhance the experience and not otherwise.
I used it only once so far in my campaign and it was to simulate the player tracking their quarry and determine a time frame of when they caught up with it. It served it’s purpose and helped simulate an aspect that was not easily represented in a RPG.
@Yan: Yeah, that’s what I was asking myself while writing my own post – I played through it both times and it worked fine. Do I really need an extra mechanic?
I don’t think its needed. I’m just too curious not to try it once 😛
So I’m basically back to wondering if and when I should ever even use skill challenges. Role play and basic skill checks have always been sufficient…
Eric Maziades last blog post..Roleplaying and skill challenges
I agree that Skill challenges are great tools for new DMs. However if one is not going to use them formally, the DM must compensate with story/RP based XPs.
They’re great tools for experienced GMs too; they encourage the GM to sit back and think how they can make the rules work for them, and how they can be an intrinsic part of the action. I love ’em.
And I agree – a Beginner’s Guide to Skill Challenges needs to be written, and I know just the Canadian to do it 😀
I personally have no problem in giving XP to my player. If I had planned an encounter the player will get the XP for it however they resolve it.
They bypass the encounter completely by sneaking past, full XP. You talk your way out of it, full XP. You beat the crap out of them, full XP. You make them flee by making them believe a dragon was comming, guess what… 😉
Each time the player are presented with a choice with consequences they get something.
It really encourage thinking outside the box and is more a player progression metric then anything else. 😉
@ChattyDM – Well I would hope people had been doing that prior to 4E. I’ve always given out RP awards. 🙂
Tony Laws last blog post..Picture This: In search of the perfect character portrait
*Warning, gigantic comment ahead*
I’ve been making weird skill challenges lately myself, and I have totally disregarded much of the structure of skill challenges, as I like them better when there is not a lot of it. Mostly because when the first iteration came out I did what I usually do when an RPG keeps telling me what die I should roll to talk to people – I tell it to sod off. Since then I’ve been using the skill challenges thing to quirky effect.
For example, one of the latest challenges I’ve begun (it’s a PBP, so I don’t run these things, I “begin” them >_>) has the party (in a present-day American city, but with magic D&D abilities gained from contact with an alternate universe governed by loose anthropomorphizations of lovecraftian deities, usually into very pretty women…is that the sound of my dignity floating away?) has the party being guided towards a Were-Rat they have to find by a prophetic little girl. The party takes turns between “Storytellers”, “Guards” and there’s on person designated as “Helper” because her skills aren’t fitting with the rest of the challenge.
The Storytellers have to interpret the little girl’s visions and mutterings, as she’s in a prophetic trance and is mumbling incoherently. They use the knowledge skills, and then perception/streetwise, to find out where the girl is guiding them. The Storytellers get to narrate where they go and what they find as long as they roll me a skill and give me a good interpretation of the prophecy, and it fits with their original goal. The storytellers need 3 successes.
Guards have to keep the little girl safe, as she’s in a prophetic trance and wandering around where she could be hit by a truck, or smash into a light post or something. They use Athletics and Acrobatics for this purpose, and don’t narrate anything. They need 2 successes.
The kicker is that once you’ve been a Storyteller for one set of successes, you shift your role the next time (by narrative coincidence – maybe the guy who was a storyteller before is the one who noticed the girl quickest this time and guarded her). This way everyone gets to be narrator for a while and craft the part of the setting they got into, everyone gets to try to use their weak skills and their good skills (so they don’t put all the beefy people on guard duty and win assuredly). The Helper gets to Aid Another, or to use Bluff/Diplomacy to get NPCs nearby to help them (like calling for help if the little girl is about to run into a car). The Helper’s already pretty much volunteered to it and doesn’t mind not being part of the narration group.
Losing in the challenge means they’re exhausted (all party loses a healing surge), and they find the mark but late at night (they have a time constraint to meet, or one of the character’s boyfriend is getting his soul drained).
In another game, I had the players do a Wushu style combat sequence using skills against a horde of kobolds, because it’s a satirical game, and the NPC who draws their combat maps was stabbed in the gut and knocked unconscious, so grid-based movement became impossible.
I love skill challenges. I didn’t like the first iteration where players took turns and stuff. The post-errata version that loses some of that structure, I like better. Even if I barely read the section and probably am not using it to the letter.
Wyatts last blog post..Wyatt’s Guide To Making A Balanced 4e Class
That’s like 16 types of awesome Wyatt!
I think that the designers of Skill challenges always wanted them to be something more akin to the way you play them. Fast and loose and easy to adjudicate on the go… then that was changed when it got in the book… my personal favorite conspiracy about it is that it was too ‘indie’ to be written as is and it was totally borked when a version finally made it into the book.
Funny thing is, challenges aren’t just for new DMs. They can really help new players, too. If you’ve got a few minutes (like 30), check out a video from TED over at Geeks Are Sexy, http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/11/12/the-powerful-link-between-creativity-and-play/. It is a keynote at some designers conference, and the speaker makes some great points.
When you are asked to be creative, it can sometimes be overwhelming. As adults (or teens), we are very aware of peer pressure and are concerned with others’ perceptions of us. That leads us to self edit what we’ll put out before the group.
Likewise, without some boundaries, the sheer number of choices available can be overwhelming.
That’s the good side of skill challenges. The ratio of successes to failures gives a good idea just how hard it is, and the favored skills gives players some idea of how best to approach the problem. Not the only ways, but the most efficient and direct and, yes, easiest.
These can help guide new players. If you don’t have storytellers, it helps them add a bit of that. If you have all storytellers, it helps them work in the crunch of skills.
Later, once everyone gets comfy with the rules and the storytelling, you can pull back on the challenges. That might be relaxing the favored skills, that might just be mentally ticking off successes and failures for the actual RP, without ever rolling dice. But there are still a target of successes and failures sitting the the DMs mind, which helps keep it a bit more fair and objective.
So, I think the Skill Challenge System has a lot of benefit for new DMs and players, but still offers something to experienced groups to keep things even.
@Dean: Thanks for the link and the insight. I totally agree about the give boundaries to your creativity to foster it.
I’ll see how inspired I get tomorrow and how I can use them in a more loosey gooey way.
@Dean: Right on! While I am both intrigued and skeptical about skill challenges, my current attempts at turning a standard role played event into a skill challenge has so far actually helped me prep the scene better.
Thinking about the base skills helps me prep for various approaches. Thinking about success and failure will also help prevent stalling the action.
Not only do I now have the option of having the players fail the tracking scene (or challenge), I have an idea of what to do if they fail.
The tracking challenge is also made a bit more deep by considering various skills.
I’m getting won over by this.
Eric Maziades last blog post..Roleplaying and skill challenges