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## Yet another stab at fixing skill challenges

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Josh_Kablack
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### Yet another stab at fixing skill challenges

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Post by Josh_Kablack » Thu Jul 16, 2009 4:31 am

This is kinda quick and dirty, at least for now it's intended to be a very rough framework adaptable on-the-fly to various skill challenges.
1. DCs need to be brought in line with actual skill bonuses - not the pre-errata "you fail" nor the post-errate "you win". For now, I'm going with 14.5 + ( Lvl * 0.6 ) as a rough approximation, but the failure of 4e to keep skills even close to the RNG is insurmountable here.
2. All skill challenges have 3 sections - henceforth A, B, and C.
3. Each section should involve 2-4 distinct skills
4. These skills should not overlap, so there are 6-12 different skills available for each challenge. It's also a good idea for most sections to have skills based on different attributes - this tends to allow more characters a chance to participate meaningfully in that section.
5. In arbitrary order (I recommend order by seating, but you could roll initiative or whatnot) each player makes one skill check per turn.
6. Section A progresses directly towards the overall goal; Section B extends the number of allowed attempts for the team, and Section C prevents damage.
The exact mechanisms for each will vary with any given skill challenge
Math to come later
6a. If at the end of each turn, there are no Section A successes, then the group has not progressed towards the goal.
6b. If at the end of each turn, there are no Section B successes, then time is running out.
6c. If at the end of each turn, there are no Section C successes, then roll an attack ( bonus of Lvl+3 against an appropriate N.A.D.) on a random character (maybe this should be all characters, but that seems harsh to me). If this "attack" hits, then the character loses a healing surge from the stress, exhaustion or outright physical hazards involved in the skill challenge. (If that character has no healing surges left they suffer HP damage equal to their surge value)
7. If at the end of any turn, there are multiple successes for any given Section, each success past the first one provides a +2 bonus to the next single skill check made to attain another success on that Section in the subsequent round. (this replaces the standard Aid Another rules for skill challenges)
Example Skill Challenges:
Chase the Fleeing Dark Elf Through a Maze of Catacombs
A Section Skills: Athletics, Acrobatics, Endurance
Successes: These use raw physical prowess to move faster. An A section success lets the party use their full running movement rate instead of their single move walking pace
B Section Skills: Arcana, Insight, Intimidate, Bluff
Successes: These use knowledge of Dark Elves to predict the direction the dark elf will run or tricks to juke the enemy into running back towards you. A B section success limits the Dark Elf to a single move
C Section Skills: Perception, Thievery, Streetwise
Successes: These use observation and knowledge of dirty tricks to avoid both natural and emplaced hazards. If no C section successes are made a character may twist their ankle on the cavern floor, ram their head into a stalactite or set of a booby-trap, taking an attack against Reflex.
Peace Talks with the Lizardmen
A Section Skills: Diplomacy, Nature, History
Successes: These use negotiation and knowledge of the tribes to win concessions from the chieftain. The first success convinces the chief to agree to a cease fire for a month, the second success convinces the chief to agree to spare the PC's and their immediate families/holdings; the third success convinces the chief to agree to spare the PCs extended families/hometowns; the fourth success convinces the chief to agree to spare the PC's country/kingdom and the fifth success convinces the chief to call of this entire war against the humans/elves/halflings/etc, achieving peace and completing the challenge.
B Section Skills: Athletics, Intimidate, Insight
Successes: These use displays of force and knowledge of aggression to subtly persuade the subchiefs jockeying for position that your group is not worth the effort to attack. If the party goes two subsequent rounds without a B Section success, one of the Lizardman hunters will challenge one of the PCs to a ritual duel (which may be postponed until after the negotiations). If the party goes three subsequent rounds without a B Section success, a hunting party attacks the PCs, effectively ending the negotiation - but the concessions won from the chief previously still stand.
C Section Skills: Endurance, Heal, Streetwise
Successes: These use physical stamina, knowledge of swamp diseases and information gleaned from the lizardmen themselves to stand the heat, parasites and diseases that fester in the swamp. If no C successes are made, a random character suffers an attack against Fortitude.
Sneak into the Impenetrable Fortress
this one left a bit more on the abstract side to make the framework clearer and illustrate how it's simple enough to use on-the-fly
A Skills: Stealth, Athletics, Acrobatics
A Section Successes: You sneak further in. You need X of these to win the skill challenge and enter the sanctum undetected
B Section Skills: Bluff, Religion, Insight
B Section Successes: You distract the sentries and avoid the patrols through clever ruses, knowledge of their methods and an occasional minor miracle. You are only allowed N failures here before you are discovered
C Section Skills: Thievery, Arcana, Streetwise
C Section Successes: You bypass the traps, magical wards and natural hazards. If nobody makes a C section success a random character suffers an attack vs Reflex
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Thu Jul 16, 2009 4:44 am, edited 2 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Sat Jul 18, 2009 7:27 pm

What this does:
1. Eliminates arguments over a skill's appropriateness. A skill is either on the list, or not on the list.
2. Gives very good odds that each character will have at least one meaningful way to contribute.
3. Allows players to make meaningful tactical decisions round-by-round. Yes. sometimes a PC will still end up spamming their best skill and winning a section each turn. Other times, the need for 3-out-of-group-size successes each round will mean that just winning one section is not enough and a PC will have to consider other skills in the group and balance risk potential.
4. Enforces participation. The party is penalized for lack of group success, not for rolling a failure individually. The worst an additional player does is not contribute to the win, situations where a rational player wants to avoid rolling entirely are gone.
5. Reduces binary. Using the A section as progress and the B section as continuation means that a group can make progress towards the goal of the challenge even if they do not successfully complete it.
What I would like it to do, but doesn't yet:
1. Allow for on the fly-skill challenge design. The "break it into three sections, assign two to four skills (try to use different base attributes) for each section; assign a NAD to the damage" part is quick and easy. The deciding what the first two sections mean and how many successes should be needed is not.
2. Allow for appropriate powers and abilities to substitute for skill checks. This has been an issue in early playtesting, where character wished to use an Ebony Fly and a Teleport power to substitute in for parts of a sneaky climbing challenge. As an ad-hoc ruling, I said that each such device could count for success on the appropriate section for one turn.
3. Have good odds of being resolved in enough die rolling to be interesting without becoming repetitive. Achieving this is going to take math.
What this does not, and cannot do.
1. Absolutely guarantee that every character will have an adequate bonus to be helpful or prevent any characters from having a bonus high enough to auto-succeed each round. Skill bonuses can still vary by more than 20. So if you set the DCs where low-bonus character have a chance of making it high bonus characters may not have a chance of failing. Conversely, if you set the DCs where high-bonus character have a chance of failing, then low-bonus characters may not have a chance of succeeding at all. Including a fairly broad range of skills over different attributes mitigates, but does not eliminate this.
2. Ensure verisimilitude in any way, shape or form. This system is inherently abstract, and spreading the attributes around mean that Athletics and Endurance are going to show up somewhere in most skill challenges. Ideally, the DM should be able to creatively justify their skill selection in-game.
3. Scale well for variant sized groups. So far I have been using this for a group with 6 players, 4 of whom always show up. I have not run the numbers thoroughly yet, but I suspect that three sections are only really workable for groups of 4-7 PCs.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Sat Jul 18, 2009 8:10 pm

> Josh wrote: Allows players to make meaningful tactical decisions round-by-round.

How?
Characters don't have their bonuses change during the challenge at all, so it seems that you could make all your meaningful decisions at the beginning of the challenge before any rolls are made.
Sure, sometimes you're going to have a character who has two or even three portions that they can contribute to roughly equally and then you'll have them switch what kind of roll they are making based on how the other players are doing - but n the majority of cases you'll have a player put themselves on Endurance duty and just ride the challenge out.
With four players at the table, you're basically looking at one guy on duty A, duty B, and duty C with a third character on switch if one of the other players bungled a roll. If you're really lucky you have a guy on Duty A, another character on A or B (who will do B unless the first character failed), a character on duty B or C (who will do C unless one of the other characters failed their task), and a character on duty C. But again, there really isn't much tactical choice in this. Certainly not enough to get me to want to roll dice a bunch of times.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Sun Jul 19, 2009 8:48 am

I fell asleep in the description.
How does this work again? No, I mean, how do you determine what the DCs are so the players can know they have a chance and attempt it?
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Mon Jul 20, 2009 4:55 am

Same basic method as default skill challenges, You look the DCs up in a table.
Of course, the official tables are dumb and in no way representative of the bonuses people will actually have, so I'm going to get verbose and boring again here
****Begin boring part****
A character's skill bonus will be:

- -1 to +5 from stat (up to +6 at 8th +7 at 14th, +9 at 21st and +10 at 28th)
- +0 or +5 from training
- +0 or +2 from race
- +0, +2 or +3 from feats
- +0,+1,+2 from backgrounds (if using)
- +0 to ~ 1 + 1/5 levels from items
- +0 to +4 (or more) from powers (+4 is common at 2nd level)
  + half level.

Thus for level L characters, most skill bonuses will fall into the broad range of from -1 + L/2 to to 22 + L/5 + L/2 (with that 22 becoming a 24 at paragon and a 27 at epic)
So for a check even an incompetent character has a chance succeeding at, the DC needs to be no *more* than 19 + L/2 and for a check that only the setting's greatest expert can do, you'll want no *lower* than 23 + 0.7L
Two things should become immediately apparent: Firstly, that system is already off the RNG at level 1; secondly that the divergence will grow as the level increases.
Now, making some assumptions to narrow things:
I'm going to assume that race, and feat bonuses don't exist. Really racial and feat bonuses are going to be fairly rare in most cases - people will tend to spend feats elsewhere or pick races for stats, flavor and power more than skill bonuses. People who are piling race and feat bonuses onto skills really really want to be good at that skill, why don't we let them? Furthermore, I am going to assume that background, item and power bonuses will usually total +1 per half tier.
this leaves us with

- -1 to +5 stat
- 0 to +5 training
- +1 per 5 levels
- half level

Which boils down to a range of -1+L/2 to 10+.7L for skill bonuses. Thus if you want folks to be rolling for a target number of 10, then DC should be set somewhere in the range of 9+L/2 to 20 + 0.7L
As a stopgap, I chose a mid range start point, and a slightly slower scaling by level as I didn't like some of the early breakpoints "I'm going with 14.5 + ( Lvl * 0.6 )
****Wake Back Up Now***
Which generates the following table for difficulty by level

- Lvl1 DC 15.1 = 15
- Lvl2 DC 15.7 = 16
- Lvl3 DC 16.3 = 16
- Lvl4 DC 16.9 = 17
- Lvl5 DC 17.5 = 17
- Lvl6 DC 18.1 = 18
- Lvl7 DC 18.7 = 18
- Lvl8 DC 19.3 = 19
- Lvl9 DC 19.9 = 20
- Lvl10 DC 20.5 =20
- Lvl11 DC 21.1 =21
- Lvl12 DC 21.7 =22
- Lvl13 DC 22.3 =22
- Lvl14 DC 22.9 =22
- Lvl15 DC 23.5 =23
- Lvl16 DC 24.1 =24
- Lvl17 DC 24.7 =25
- Lvl18 DC 25.3 =25
- Lvl19 DC 25.9 =26
- Lvl20 DC 26.5= 26
- Lvl21 DC 27.1 =27
- Lvl22 DC 27.7 =28
- Lvl24 DC 28.3 =29
- Lvl25 DC 28.9 =29
- Lvl26 DC 28.5 =29
- Lvl27 DC 29.1 =29
- Lvl28 DC 29.7 =30
- Lvl29 DC 30.3 =30
- Lvl30 DC 30.9= 31

But that is really an arbitrary assignment and the values can be altered to anywhere within the range dependent upon playtesting.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Mon Jul 20, 2009 5:10 am

And to address Frank's criticism, I'll admit that it does not involve intricacies of great tactical depth,
But it does force players to consider all of the following:

- What are my odds of success with skill X?
- What are my odds of success on each of the sections, *relative* to the odds of success of each other PC on that section.
- What priority should I assign to completion, extension or damage avoidance

Which compared to the decision tree of the basic skill challenge:

- What is my highest skill?
- How do I con the DM into letting me use it?
- Does this yield an acceptable target number when considering ratio of successes needed to failures allowed? If not then how do I best avoid participating in this challenge?

It's a more tactical and less disruptive/argumentative minigame.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Mon Jul 20, 2009 5:48 am

Okay, that was far more interesting as a solution.
-Crissa
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