Previously in Chatty’s Game:
Our heroes successfully infiltrated the hideout of a local goblinoid slavers gang and cleaned it out with ease. However, the slaves they were looking for had just been delivered to a duergar clan. Following a trail of (somewhat flimsy) clues, our heroes posed as slavers and got hired to escort a duergar food caravan in order to meet with the duergar leader
As I was reading deeper into Thunderspire Labyrinth, I couldn’t shake a feeling that my players would tire rapidly of wading through multiple combat encounters in this very linear quest to free some slaves that keep being shipped away before they get to their objective.
The next part of the adventure consists of the party raiding a duergar fortress made up of 8 combat encounters spread over about 30 rooms divided in 3 sub-dungeons. I ended up deciding to go with one scene I created based on the developments of the last session. Then I chose to go with the adventure as written. Since we usually manage to have 2 combat encounters and some roleplaying/problem solving in one session, I wasn’t worried that anyone would get bored, yet.
Still, I was getting ready to hack the duergar dungeon if needed and remove some rooms and encounters.
All players were here this week, so we were back with 6 PCs.
I rapidly noticed how tired some of us were around the table. It took us a bit longer than usual to dissipate the social energies so I waited out a bit longer than usual for all players to be ready to start.
When challenge fosters opportunity
When we did get around to start playing, all players agreed to go with the ‘let’s escort this food caravan to the duergar, knowing full well we’ll get screwed’ plan. The PCs got a map from their ‘client’ showing how to, supposedly, go to the duergar’s hold. They were to drive 4 wagons accompanied by 2 duergar guards.
Of course, this was a setup, the so called client had decided to send the PCs to their death by sending the caravan into an ambush.
Interestingly enough, just before we decided to start the scene, Franky, who was perusing the Adventurer’s Vault manual, said “Hey, why don’t we get a battle standard?”
When the rest of the group agreed. I was faced with a challenge. I mean the party is in a small ‘civilized’ area at the interface between the Underdark and the surface, there aren’t any ‘magic stores’ in there. Saying “I’m sorry you don’t find any” would have been the easy response. I insted decided to apply the “Say Yes and…” rule.
Perusing the shops and NPCs found in the Seven-Pillared Hall (the home base of the adventure), I took the Drow merchant that bought and sold relics and curios recovered from the Labyrinth. In the adventure, that NPC serves as a hook for a minor quest that can send the players to the Duergar hold… this gave me an idea…
Masaru (Eladrin Feypact Warlock): “Hi, we’re looking for some magical battle standards that you might have acquired from these ruins.”
Drow (Rummages in the store): “Sure I have a few. Two are dedicated to the god of Minotaurs and the third one is an old relic from a forgotten empire”
Naquist ( Cleric of Bahamut and soon to be standard-bearer): “We take the 3rd one!”
Drow (Selling the standard at 120% base price): “So… I hear you guys are going to escort a food caravan for the duergar in the horned hold”
Masary: “Yeah we are. Gee that standard sure is expensive!”
Drow: “Well I could give you a rebate if you were willing to recover a McGuffin for me that those duergar stole from me”
Group: “Sure!”
Drow:”Do you know the way there?”
Masaru: “Sure we do, look we have a map”
Drow (looking at the map): “Ho ho ho! That’s not where the hold is…” (He draws where it is on the map)
All players “HA! We knew it!”
Listen to your inner DM voice
They closed the deal and then the whole group went into planning mode. I’ll spare you the details but here’s what happened.
The party left with the caravan as if they knew nothing of the duergar’s nefarious plans. Rocco went ahead of the group along the ‘false’ path. Soon after Rocco left, the rest of the party decided to subdue the 2 durgars.
I was faced with my second DMing challenege of the night.
Should I start a fight that will likely last at least 20-30 minutes and lead to an easy PC victory while making Rocco’s player wait it out? Do I automatically say that PCs win and restrain the story outcomes?
Could I find something in between.
That’s when my little “Trust the game” voice that was awoken at Gen Con by a certain Jim Wyatt said “hey Phil, why don’t make the fight into a Skill Challenge? You’ve been sitting on that idea since last August”
So I explained it to the players:
“Here’s what we’ll do. Let’s make your plan of subduing the 2 duergars into an easy skill challenge: 4 successes against 3 failures. You describe to me what you do with any of your skills or attack powers, we decide if that roll would apply to winning the challenge or helping one of your allies to achieve a success. 4 successes mean you have knocked the duergars out, 3 failures mean they run away. Finally, each failure from a primary skill makes the player lose a healing surge, representing wounds he gets in the fight.”
Players agreed; here’s how it went:
Naquist: “It’s the time of the day where we must stop and offer a service to Bahamut. Join us brother duergars!” Rolls diplomacy to distract the guards so that the next PC gets a bonus. Success! +2 bonus to next roll.
Masaru: Teleports beside a Duergar to suprise him and attack him. Failure #1 . Duergar sees warlock coming and impales him with one of its poisoned Beard spikes (don’t ask).
Takeo (Dragoborn Warlord) : I tackle the Duerfar attacking Masaru to make it lose its balance and allow Bjerm to clobber it good. Rolls vs Athletics, succeeds, gives a +2 bonus to Bjerm’s next roll.
Bjerm (Elf Fighter): I time myself so that I strike the falling duergar for maximum effect. Rolls an attack vs an increased DC (to account for the increased bonus granted by the Weapon’s profeciency bonus). Success #1
Fizban (Eladrin Wizards): I aim an Icy Burst on both of them to freeze them in place and make them easier to hit. Success #2, gives a +2 to next attack.
Takeo: I attack one of the frozen durgar, straight up. Success #3
Masaru: I invoke Witchfire on one. Failure #2! (Franky starts cursing his own dice and decries that failures in a Skill challenge are harder to take than missing an attack in a fight)
DM: Okay guys, you’re one success and one failure away from the end of the challenge, plan accordingly.
Naquist: I use my Divine Glow power to blind the duergars and give Bjerm all the help this prayer can muster. A Success = a bonus to next role relative to degree of success. High Success!
Bjerm: Guided by Naquist’s prayer, I use my power (I forgot which) that lets me attack 2 targets to take both down! Success #3, Challenge won!
Total time: 10 minutes, including creating and explaining the challenge.
I absolutely loved it! This is exactly how I perceived skill challenges before I read the Dungeon Master Guide (and got really confused) and it worked beautifully!
Oh yeah, what happened to the Rogue?
DM: Okay Rocco, you follow the false path on the map and you arrive in a lighted area. A large cavern, showing signs of mining and burrowing opens up before you. A huge chasm divides the cave in two and a stone bridge, flanked by numerous torches spans it. Before you can enter very far into it, you feel the earth shake underneath you… It opens up and you fall into a swarm of chittering mandibles and claws…
Rocco: Oh Shi…!
End of Part 1
Anyone has other stories of improvised skill challenges to share? How did it go?
Excellent stuff!
I’m loving skill challenges too. I like being able to zoom with them, having one over-arching skill challenge acting as the framework for the adventure (succeed at 4 “scenes” before failing in 3), with each individual scene being a potential skill challenge in it’s own right, each part of which might be a combat or a regular role-play and roll the dice setup.
As my group are primarily superhero gamers they’re used to the idea of acceptable failure where a setback could potentially further the story. That’s a genre where it’s common for the hero to be captured only to beat the villain on his home ground. With 4e D&D, we’ve just mapped those concepts across.
For example in one D&D session they failed to bypass the guards (a missed Bluff roll) at the gate, so found a representative of the local Taker’s Guild who agreed to lead them through the underways in return for a future, unspecified service (a Streetwise success). Once they made it into into the Inner City and found their contact (a Dorwinion spy) that counted as a successful challenge, and a success toward the meta-challenge that guided the scenario.
I’ve said it before: Forget Powers – Skill Challenges are the single best thing to hit D&D as a concept.
greywulfs last blog post..Four-armed is fore-warned
I don’t know if I agree. They seem like a nice mechanic but it looks like they take alot of the flavor of roleplaying out of the game.
Viriathas last blog post..Game Masters and Leadership Skills: Part 4
Quite the opposite – at least, in our group. Skill Challenges provide a meaningful rules hook for the role-playing to hang off. The player describes what they’re doing in role-playing terms (either in character, or not), and the GM suggests an applicable skill to check against, granting bonuses and penalties as the action dictates.
In other words, Skill Challenges act much like combat – just as a player could keep saying “I roll to hit” each round, they could just say “I roll Diplomacy”, but that’s not in the spirit of the game, and a lot (for my money) less fun. I’d much rather the player gets into the role-playing first and foremost, then (if required) we make a roll to see if it succeeds. I tend to give pretty good bonuses for quality role-playing 😀
All of that is nothing new. What the Skill Challenge system does is provide a framework so it’s possible to quantify how many successes/failures are required to achieve an objective. In a way it’s a storytelling device which helps the GM to decide when the players have done enough to move the story along.
greywulfs last blog post..Four-armed is fore-warned
Greywulf, dude! My kids are in bed and my gal just turned in and I’m 6 timezones west of you!
@Viri: Like Loup Gris says, Skill challenges, at least when improvised, actually feel like Role-Playing/description driven mini-games. I mean, I could have hand waived they subduing the duergar, but it came out more fun like that.
That being said, if you play skill challenges as written in most adventures so far, then yes, it does feel like robotically rolling skills to replace roleplaying.. but that’s something that pervades in 4e… when you play it. you get back what you put in it.
Great post! Improvised skill challenges, that’s a real mean skill to have.
Questing GMs last blog post..Word of Wizards – 31/1/09
@Viriatha: They do if you let them. Like any other aspect of any RPG, crunch and roleplaying are not mutually exclusive. In the case of this particular skill challenge, it allowed Chatty to operate an encounter without it eating up a chunk of his game time.
That’s a very Burning Wheel idea. Glad it worked out!!
Rafes last blog post..The Three "R"s of Session Planning
Great write up Phil! This is exactly the kind of session report that I like. Along with providing a recap of events you provided several excellent DM tips.
My experience running skill challenges so far matches yours and Greywulf’s, when run correctly. Of course, at first I wasn’t running them right and they did end up feeling like how Viriatha described them. As far as mechanics go, they take some practice and open mindedness on the part of the DM and players.
The first skill challenge I ran sucked. And my players agreed. So the next one that came up we stopped and all got the books out. We also got the errata sheet out because there were some significant changes made to the system post publication. Going through the challenge step by step and discussing the mechanic along the way gave us all a much better understanding of how it worked and more importantly, how it worked for our group.
Craters last blog post..Finding my voice
Here’s the thing… I’ve known about the errata for Skill challenges for quite some time now. Hell I used it when I designed the one in my adventure to be published.
Yet, at the game table, when I decided to make the encounter into a skill challenge, I forgot all about it and used the high DCs… It still worked all right and I maintain that the whole 3 failures max of harder challenges is a bit iffy. I’ll discuss this in more details when i playtest my adventure.
While the “3 failures max” may sound iffy, realise that in some cases, 12 successes before 6 failures was easier than 4 before 2.
To quote the guy who did the math:
3) Increasing complexity can actually make a challenge easier depending on the skills of your party. This one isn’t necessarily a “problem” as much as it is unintuitive. For example, if your party on average will succeed on each individual skill check of a challenge 70% or more of time, you will actually increase the party’s win rate by increasing the complexity. However, if the party has only a 65% chance, then their win rate will drop by increasingly complexity.
By setting a specific value as a failure point, they removed this problem.
Good post, Chatty!
I think I like your take on an improvised skill challenge better than any designed skill challenge I ever read!
It actually makes even more sense to me that way.
It feels simpler and more organic… and helps cut down on the overthinking seem to like doing.
Sweetness.
Eric Maziades last blog post..What We Learned – Because Every Game Session Yields Questions.
Everyone is saying that the amount of roleplaying involved in a given skill challenge depends on the players but everything I’m actually reading is all very mechanical. I grant this might be due to the constraints of time and effort in writing about it.
Perhaps someone should make a podcast/video/other medium recording an actual play session where it’s demonstrated that there is indeed more roleplaying than many of us are getting to see?
@Graham: I stand corrected. Probably not for the first time on that very subject.
@Eric: It was very organic. In fact when analyzed post game I find that some holes were in it (like why did I make the warlock’s teleport into a real failure if he mostly just wanted to setup a surprise)… Anyway, as everything there are occasions to make it better and I bet that with more practice these improv skill challenges will become more fun.
@Viri: Its true that as written, 4e presents very little roleplaying enhecement mechanics. This was decried extensively by some readers here shortly after the game was published.
In our particular case that skill challenge was not a Roleplaying scene, but rather an abstracted combat with a bit more description than what was our habit. I’m sure that in the hands of a group far more versed in storytelling than mine, the challenge could have been much more descriptive.
Regardless, I’m happy to have found a mechanic that met my needs of simulating a combat without actually going through the effort and time needed to do it.
I’m looking forward to trying it again.
@Viriatha
Honestly, it’s about the same as 3.Xe skill checks. If you felt that rolling Diplomacy to see how convincing you were detracted from roleplaying, you’ll hate (social) skill challenges. If you did not, it’s pretty much the same thing.
All skill challenges do over skill checks is allow the GM to specify a “win condition” rather than having to wing it. They don’t make you roleplay any more or less.
In any case, non-social skill challenges (physical ones, or abstractions like ChattyDM used) are pretty generally accepted, as there isn’t a lot of roleplaying used to climb a cliff anyways, and this abstraction in the post above probably resulted in more roleplaying than a straight combat would have.
I did somethin’ like this in the beginning of my current campaign. The encounter was between a human army (Purple Dragons/Cormyr/FR) and an Orc army. My group was getting stuck in the middle of the two army. I wanted to check on the reaction of the group, since they were pretty much neutral aligned, weither they would help or not the human army who was against impossible odds.
I did not wanted to actually make them fight all night, so I did a skill challenge for many aspect of the fight. Exemple: For the fighter of the group, he had to make sereval constitution rolls to see if he would maintain the pace through the fight which lasted all day.
The whole segment took 30 minutes to complete. And even if I did not made them fight for real (init and all), they did felt like they actually survived somethin’ big.
I did not check one time in the rules if there was somethin’ already created, a mechanic for this. I did what I thought was right. I’ve been a DM for 21 years and all the best game I did when I was more focused on the story and the pace of the game then on the rules. So I guess I’ve always been a fan of skills or stats challenge.
Hey D_Luck. Welcome to the blog! Always nice to see a Montreal face come up. Skill challenges have been around for a long time. They have had names like Extended skill checks and such.
What I found to be new was how it is encouraged to implement them with numerous skills, to stretch them over whatever period of time you need them to and to augment them with role playing or description if your group is into that.
Its a good mechanic, that needs all the love the internet is giving it., because the core books are rather sparse on them.
This is a great little skill challenge anecdote. In my games at higher levels PCs often end up in those kind of “throw away” fight situations where it’s a waste of time to run it, but it certainly would be contested…
TheMainEvents last blog post..Critical Bits for the week ending 2009-01-31
The first thing that inspired the idea was all those scenes where the DM hopes to have a roleplaying ‘denoument’ and then the instigator player says “I slug the bastard”
It then occurred to me that punching someone, or cutting them with a sword is a sort of Intimidation check.
The rest of the idea followed its normal course.
I’ll try to make a blog post about this soon.
I like the idea of giving more effect, or more weight to their actions with roleplay and vivid description. And you know what, if a player takes the reigns and do it himself and not wait for the DM to describe it, either by suggesting what would be the result of the roll they make or by reacting to the score they produce, I usually take it into account for their xp reward at the end of the game. And to make sure they get that it was worth it, I give the extra xp separetly. That way they get the idea and do it more often. It’s especially effective to get new player out of their shell when they start playing RPG’s for the first time.
In this campaign I’m DMing, only 1 player out of 4 is really experienced. They’ve improved quite a lot since.
And thx ChattyDM for welcoming me on your blog! I think it’s awesome to have a place to chat about DMing and playing of course.
Great site!
Bjerm (Elf Fighter): I time myself so that I strike the falling duergar for maximum effect. Rolls an attack vs an increased DC (to account for the increased bonus granted by the Weapon’s profeciency bonus). Success #1
I have a question about that: why is the DC increased in this check?
I learned quite a bit from this, but there are still some decisions made I cant get my head around.
This conflict was a narrative only endeavor.
The description given is only a description that we where giving as we made the skill challenge rolls. The increase DC came from the fact that I used an attack (which as a +2/3 built in) instead of a skill, it was ruled on the moment.
Would we to redo something like it I would suggest that all attacks DCs be the usual target defenses +/- 2 depending on the challenge’s wanted difficulty. This way the weapon proficiency is already factored in.
Like Yan said, since attack bonuses and weapons proficiencies generally add up to a higher bonus than skill levels, at the time I thought I should increase DCs accordingly.
I agree with Yan’s suggestion that should we do this some other time, we’d use creature defenses as challenge targets.
While attack bonuses have the +2/+3, skills have a +5 (trained) bonus. There are also a number of +2 racial, feat, or other bonuses for skills, giving it an even higher bonus. Other than bonuses, the formula is identical.
I’m not sure this should have been increased, myself.
(Using the AC/defense is my method, too, with a +2/-2 to account for difficulty.)
Good point, I’ll remember that and adopt that formula.
Thanks man.