I've gone on the record saying I don't hate 4e, but it is my least favorite incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons.  Were I grumpy today, I might even go so far to say it doesn't count as D&D.  I might even like the game if it wasn't trying to be D&D, but that's not the point of this post.  I have played it and decided it wasn't for me or my group at the time.

However, two of my groups threw me a curveball.  One plays 4e with coworkers and feels about the same way I do: Doesn't hate the system, but doesn't like it as a version of D&D.  Another has no experience with 4e but is eager to try anything that is RPGs.  They both think they'll like it if I was the one to DM it.  So I'll do it, I'm a fair person.  I'm DM 95 percent of the time so maybe me experiencing 4e as a player wasn't a fair test.  But if I do, I want it to run good to excellent, so we can all have a just experiment.

So, I pose these questions to the audience:

a) I am annoyed by errata.  Especially the fact that the conspicuous Page 42 supposedly needs it.  It's my problem, I guess, that I don't like having to cross reference or mark on pages.  Anyway...

Using the first 3 books, how much of errata do you consider must use? A good deal of it seems to be related to curbing abuse, and my players (as a whole) don't try to exploit loopholes.  However, I don't know enough about the game crunch to know which bits of the errata are essential.  Suggestions appreciated.

b) A more specific question: How do you do the maths for skill challenges? That shit is awkward enough to understand even before you start fiddling with the rules.  The RAW look like they are too difficult for PCs, the errata makes it look far too easy.  My instinct is to leave Page 42 as-is, but drop the footnote suggesting you raise Skill DCs by 5.  Does that sound reasonable?

I'm taking my girl out for the day, but I'll be back this evening to check in.  You're welcome to flame the thread to ashes at some point, but I'd like to hear some feedback from 4e'ers before then

Quote from: winkingbishop;374256b) A more specific question: How do you do the maths for skill challenges? That shit is awkward enough to understand even before you start fiddling with the rules.  The RAW look like they are too difficult for PCs, the errata makes it look far too easy.  My instinct is to leave Page 42 as-is, but drop the footnote suggesting you raise Skill DCs by 5.  Does that sound reasonable?

For me, the biggest thing about skill challenges is that they aren't really supposed to be challenges. They're roleplaying opportunities. Failure is going to happen sometimes, but it's not like a combat where players should be worried all the time -- it's just an uncommon happenstance.

So yeah, I drop the DCs as per the errata and things work out fine. Players get to show off the cool things about their PCs, which for me always increases immersion. You know the problem where you've imagined your PC as this debonaire charmer and you go to it and you roll the dice and you fail miserably the first time and the second time and people start snickering? I like the errata because they avoid that problem.

How I run skill challenges: I take a situation/problem. Say, breaking into the noble's house. I figure, OK, I can see a few obvious things the PCs might do, and maybe I write those down. More likely I don't. I think it's a pretty well-guarded house, so I set the difficulty at whatever it would be for 6 successes. Then I describe the situation to the players. I don't flag it as a skill challenge, necessarily.

Then the PCs do crap. Mostly it's crap I don't expect. If it's smart and makes sense, I set the DC at the medium difficulty. If it's way smart, I set the DC at the low difficulty. If they're stretching ("I want to use my knowledge of history to tell me about the secret entrance to this noble's house"), it's hard. If they're really stretching ("Even though I've never visited this city before and it's on a continent I'd never heard of"), I say no.

Awesome ideas may be worth two successes, which is one way to scale the difficulty in the middle of the thing. But it's not like anyone is going to come take away my GM badge if I go from requiring six successes to four successes in the middle of the skill challenge.

For errata, I don't sweat it. Since I use DDI, if its a character or monster issue, I don't notice it. If it's a rule, I try and stay aware, but as you said, most of it was curbing abuses (for example 'Dominate's errata actually is the only one I can think of where I had to be aware of it..and all that said was that a dominated character can't take free actions.) And this is just common sense, because (for example) a dominated character can't shout for help (which is a free action) if he's actually mentally controlled. This came up in my Vault of Xammux adventure once.

For Skill Challenges, keep in mind a rule of thumb: All they are meant to do is provide an encounter-like XP reward for a non-combat situation.

• Not every skill check has to be a challenge.
• If you don't feel comfortable running them, don't use them.

Ok, ready to run a skill challenge? Here's the technique I use.

It amounts to this:

Set a baseline DC. At 1st level, this number is 11 for a moderate task. "Hard" is +5 from that (about 16). "impossible" is +10 from that, so 21. "Never tell me the odds" shouldn't be used, but it would be another +5. (26).

For every two levels you just bump this by one. Nevermind that this number might seem low. The secret is, YOU (the DM) determine the skill that will be used, and if the player has an idea to try a different skill, you allow it, but at the harder difficulty.

So level 2, the baseline is 12.
At level 4, the baseline is 13.
etc.

At the low DC, there WILL be automatic succes for some characters. Every once in a while the rogue with +12 in thievery gets a DC 12 lockpicking task. Hey, thats fine.

Example: SO If there's a dungeon passage where characters have to jump from rune-tile to rune-tile and you set the DC at 11.. the rogue and the fighter are fine. But the wizard says "I want to use my arcana to suppress some of the magic to make it across.."  allow it, but instead of DC 11 it will be a 16. This gives players agency, and every once in a while, the fighter in plate mail really is going to have to make a hilariously unlikely stealth check or the wimpy wizard will have to try and use athletics to force a door open. Thats ok. You want that.

Understand a group check- that's when you make everyone do the check, and only at least half the people have to be successful. Or you might determine that "more than half" have to be successful.

Have the goal in mind (like... "disarm the trap") before you start:
This can be short term (disarm the trap) -- 4 successes
long term (explore the entire dungeon level) -- 8+ successes
very long term (overland travel between cities) -- Maybe 12 or even 14 successes.

For long term challenges, don't do them all at once. Maybe run a few skill checks, roleplaying stuff (as Thanlis says above) and then an encounter, then continue with the challenge, and perhaps another encounter, and then complete it.

So for a longterm overland journey? You could even do 2 or 3 encounters in between skill challenge checks.

For certain failed skill checks, there should be a consequence: For a failed lockpick check, perhaps break the lockpicks, or reduce their bonus from +2 to +1. For a failed climb check, perhaps lose a healing surge due to twisted ankle. Be creative and improvise.

Know what the consequences for failure (of the entire skill challenge) are. For a disarm, the trap goes off and damages everyone. For an explore check, extra monsters are alerted, encounters beefed up, valuable treasures taken away and moved to different parts of the dungeon. For overland travel, the players might end up spending an extra week in the wilderness and arrive exhausted (just take away half their surges  and have them only regenerate surges over the course of the next week of rest).

Here's a non traditional one I ran a couple of months ago: Assassination as a skill challenge.

Stalker0 has been working on this for a while now, I would assume it is pretty thoroughly tested and works well:

Stalker0's Alternate Core Skill Challenge System: FINAL VERSION 1.8!

Follow up question(s): Are skill challenges still supposed to be done in initiative order?  Must everyone participate each round as per the RAW?  How does that affect order if someone chooses to assist instead of use a skill?

Quote from: winkingbishop;374325Follow up question(s): Are skill challenges still supposed to be done in initiative order?  Must everyone participate each round as per the RAW?  How does that affect order if someone chooses to assist instead of use a skill?

God no. Initiative order and making people participate is for the birds, and was removed as part of the errata. But even if it wasn't, you should ignore it. Let the skill challenges be organic.

Skill Challenges never seemed to me to be a fundamentally bad idea. Keeping it 'organic' would seem to be the challenge - Mearls has commented that he often doesn't tell the PCs they're in a skill challenge, in fact.
Maw's idea of the assassination is interesting - given that they're meant to add tension, with the right scenario you could probably design a 'skill challenge' that actually runs it in the background as an adventure progresses, with other encounters going on in the middle? (Say, a Survival/Endurance challenge to find the lost temple in the jungle with monster encounters in between, or an extended Arcana challenge to figure out what the artifact does while the party continues toward the site of the ritual they'll need it at).

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;374368Maw's idea of the assassination is interesting - given that they're meant to add tension, with the right scenario you could probably design a 'skill challenge' that actually runs it in the background as an adventure progresses, with other encounters going on in the middle? (Say, a Survival/Endurance challenge to find the lost temple in the jungle with monster encounters in between, or an extended Arcana challenge to figure out what the artifact does while the party continues toward the site of the ritual they'll need it at).

This is correct: in the real game example, the group was spotted just before the assassination was due to take place, and so they decided to go ahead and kill the witnesses.. once that encounter was over, they went back into the skill challenge mode.

Skill challenges do not work. Full stop. They fail at all of their design goals, top to bottom, beginning to end. You are better off not using them.

Even if you fiddle with the DCs until they aren't auto-fail or auto-pass like they are before/after errata, the fact is that they are still boring as hell and the optimum solution is for everyone except one player to just pass (or "aid another," if allowed) round after round while one player with a good skill check does the same thing 12 times in a row and rolls 12 twenty sided dice one after another and still only generates two possible results.

They don't encourage creativity, they don't encourage cooperation, they don't encourage everyone to participate, they don't generate more possible results than a coin flip, they aren't fast, they aren't simple, and they are almost completely deterministic. There is no advantage to the system. At all.

Skill Challenges are like some kind of game design epic trolling. Every single detail about them is wrong. Every time someone plays a skill challenge, Mike Mearles pops into their basement and says "Ha Ha!" like on the Simpsons.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;374400Skill challenges do not work. Full stop. They fail at all of their design goals, top to bottom, beginning to end. You are better off not using them.

Even if you fiddle with the DCs until they aren't auto-fail or auto-pass like they are before/after errata, the fact is that they are still boring as hell and the optimum solution is for everyone except one player to just pass (or "aid another," if allowed) round after round while one player with a good skill check does the same thing 12 times in a row and rolls 12 twenty sided dice one after another and still only generates two possible results.

They don't encourage creativity, they don't encourage cooperation, they don't encourage everyone to participate, they don't generate more possible results than a coin flip, they aren't fast, they aren't simple, and they are almost completely deterministic. There is no advantage to the system. At all.

Skill Challenges are like some kind of game design epic trolling. Every single detail about them is wrong. Every time someone plays a skill challenge, Mike Mearles pops into their basement and says "Ha Ha!" like on the Simpsons.

-Frank

Hey, Frank!  Do Stalker0's modifications fall under the 'fiddling DCs' category?

Quote from: StormBringer;374403Hey, Frank!  Do Stalker0's modifications fall under the 'fiddling DCs' category?

Yes. Stalker0's modifications are an example of someone wasting my time and yours by fiddling with all of the inputs that don't make any difference.

Here are the failure points of Skill Challenges:

• Counting Party Failures. If failing a die roll counts towards the parties allowed failures, then every single player's actions reduce the number of actions your character with the best skill can take during the challenge on a one to one basis. That is, if the Barbarian tries to make a diplomancy test, that reduces the number of diplomancy tests that the bard can make before the challenge is over by 1. Thus, the "correct" solution is to have everyone but the guy with the best skill leave the room and go pound sand.
  
  
• Terminating Upon Success/Failure. If the challenge ends when one of the two end points (success or failure) is achieved, then by definition your challenge can only generate two end points. For goodness sakes, a straight skill test can generate four! (success, failure, critical success, critical failure).
  
  
• Skill Reuse. If your challenge involves rolling the same skill test over and over again, all you're really doing is making likely results more likely and less likely results less likely. Rolling identical dice over and over again isn't inherently interesting, it's just a method to generate curved results. Results that therefore show a larger statistical shift in the face of bonuses than rolling only once. In short, rolling 3 diplomacy tests in a row just makes a +1 bonus to diplomacy more noticeable, which in turn benefits min/maxxers and punishes players who don't maximize their bonuses more.

If your skill challenge overhaul doesn't change those three things, it's a waste of time, because no matter how you fiddle with the numeric inputs to try to make the success/failure percentages come out the right way, the fact remains that the behavior you are encouraging is incredibly uninteresting and the results your subsysten generates will be underwhelming for the amount of table work you put into it.

-Frank

Quote from: winkingbishop;374256I've gone on the record saying I don't hate 4e, but it is my least favorite incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons.  Were I grumpy today, I might even go so far to say it doesn't count as D&D.  I might even like the game if it wasn't trying to be D&D, but that's not the point of this post.  I have played it and decided it wasn't for me or my group at the time.

My sole feedback is don't play 4e. You won't like it and your players won't enjoy the experience. If they're interested in playing 4e, find someone who has at least neutral feelings about the game to run it.

Seanchai

Quote from: FrankTrollman;374407Here are the failure points of Skill Challenges:

• Counting Party Failures. If failing a die roll counts towards the parties allowed failures, then every single player's actions reduce the number of actions your character with the best skill can take during the challenge on a one to one basis. That is, if the Barbarian tries to make a diplomancy test, that reduces the number of diplomancy tests that the bard can make before the challenge is over by 1. Thus, the "correct" solution is to have everyone but the guy with the best skill leave the room and go pound sand.
  
  
• Terminating Upon Success/Failure. If the challenge ends when one of the two end points (success or failure) is achieved, then by definition your challenge can only generate two end points. For goodness sakes, a straight skill test can generate four! (success, failure, critical success, critical failure).
  
  
• Skill Reuse. If your challenge involves rolling the same skill test over and over again, all you're really doing is making likely results more likely and less likely results less likely. Rolling identical dice over and over again isn't inherently interesting, it's just a method to generate curved results. Results that therefore show a larger statistical shift in the face of bonuses than rolling only once. In short, rolling 3 diplomacy tests in a row just makes a +1 bonus to diplomacy more noticeable, which in turn benefits min/maxxers and punishes players who don't maximize their bonuses more.

True.  Though, to play Devil's Advocate, I think point 1 is supposed to be mitigated by the errata wherein they eliminated the process of initiative order and 'everyone gets a turn.'

Point 2 - totally, but it's even worse than Frank describes.  RAW, there are not critical successes and failures for any skill checks, in a challenge or not.  They are introduced as an optional house rule in DMG.

Point 3 - also feels true.  I think this is why previous posters in this thread have made a point of describing the different techniques they've used to basically put Skill Challenges in the background, basically turning it into score keeping that takes place behind the natural flow of the game.

See, I think I get why they tried to write up these things called Skill Challenges. They were trying to codify non-combat encounters in a way that novices wouldn't be overwhelmed by the sticky grey bits of roleplaying that veterans have been very comfortable with.  And that would be fine if it was written up correctly.

I think, cover-to-cover, 4e was written as training wheels (to others, a noose).  Balanced powers, treasure parcels, encounter blocks and especially Skill Challenges.  That's fine if it makes an otherwise novice DM run a pretty decent game.  The risk is that an otherwise great DM gets stuck only running pretty decent by keeping the wheels on.

That just about everyone has to modify the system demonstrates that it was poorly constructed and the previous posters are anything but novice DMs, they took the training wheels off and turned them into tank treads.  I think I would too, and just run the game and use skills the way I have in previous editions.  But I can imagine a couple of reasons to use something like Skill Challenges:

• When the group is working towards a goal as a whole
• When I want to build tension
• A check on DM fiat

Like Frank pointed out, there are some real issues with counting failures against the whole party.  I can imagine plenty of cases where this makes sense, and just as many where it doesn't.

I actually do like the idea of putting the "beans" in front of the group for certain situations.  Like watching your hit points tick down, keeping the score can be used to good dramatic effect.

I'm a good DM, but not perfect.  Maybe my party does get into a situation that I hadn't planned for and I don't want to just make a ruling on an important encounter.  Say they do decide to ask the Duke for help and I forgot to detail him, don't care to, or didn't realize I should have.  Maybe using the numbers is better than me saying "No, he's busy" or role playing badly if I'm off my game that day.

I guess I can say I don't like Skill Challenges as written.  But that doesn't mean I can't take a lesson from them.

Quote from: winkingbishop;374489I guess I can say I don't like Skill Challenges as written.  But that doesn't mean I can't take a lesson from them.

I think that's the perfect way to use 'em.

With endpoints - its true that there's two end states (success and failure), but note that at least allowing some form of resource use -increasing numbers of powers or letting players use healing surges (Stalker's system) or action points - means there are 'side effects' that makes it more complex than that. That is, characters might pass easily, struggle to pass and burn some surges, fail without trying particularly, or fail hard with some resource burnout.

Counting party failures is the biggest hole in the system, though I'd imagine this is mitigated slightly by 'mandatory participation' for characters, or allowing skills altering as the challenge progresses - since that may at least change which character has the biggest bonus. Leaving the stinky barbarian at home so the bard can negotiate becomes less optimal if a barbarian skill suddenly becomes useful.