What one thing would you take from 4E into a different game? [Archive]

ThePurple

2018-01-31, 01:37 PM

Am I only allowed to state just one thing? 4e made a *lot* of significant deviations from normal D&D (which is one of the reasons why so many people dislike it) that were massive improvements.

Healing surges, first on the list.

If I'm only allowed to say one thing, it's definitely this. The HS system creates a long resource management construct to compliment the HP system working as a quite effective short resource management construct. The advantages of this are numerous, but, for players, it basically amounts to being able to go through multiple encounters in a single day without having your combat effectiveness in any single combat dramatically penalized by poor performance in previous ones. If you allow for non-magical HS use (which you should), it also allows for parties that *don't* include a magic-using healer to actually work.

Other stuff that I'll refer to but won't discuss overmuch would be the elimination of class specific adventuring mechanics (like Rogue trapfinding) so that you aren't *forced* to have a Rogue just to deal with traps, the inclusion of mark and retribution mechanics for defenders (i.e. any class that is supposed to be designed with excellent defenses) to allow them to actually get some real use out of high defenses in a tactical situation, the generic rather than specific skill system (e.g. Thievery rather than Open Lock, Disable Device, Use Rope, and Sleight of Hand; Acrobatics rather than Balance, Escape Artist, and Tumble) so that you don't have to track a massive number of different skills that belong to the same complementary skill set.

There's other stuff I'd bring in but they require complete and total rebuilds of a system, like the removal of "linear-fighter quadratic-wizard" problems by actually balancing classes out across more than the first 5 levels of the game, getting rid of Vancian magic as a whole (which is a plague upon PnP gaming, imo, and one of the worst design decisions that Gygax and Arneson ever made), the robust encounter level system that gives a *much more accurate* view of how threatening a given entity actually is because it uses math rather than abstractions, etc.

MoutonRustique

2018-01-31, 02:16 PM

That could be ported to 3X...

HS (as has been said - not 5e HD : these do NOT offer the same effects)

marks - for characters that want to tank

active unit rolls (i.e. attacks vs saves) - already a proposed variant (in SRD?)

martial characters get nice things (ToB:BoNS covers this fairly well)

"one and done" skill proficiency : it's almost never a good idea to split your skill points anyway...

if you're playing on a grid - square fireballs : you may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Having shapes that match the actual game geography goes a long way in removing the "can I target that dude? can I exclude that dude?" etc.)

ThePurple

2018-01-31, 02:19 PM

if you're playing on a grid - square fireballs : you may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Having shapes that match the actual game geography goes a long way in removing the "can I target that dude? can I exclude that dude?" etc.)

The bigger idea here is to *simplify* tabletop measurement. It's not that big of a deal in an online tabletop with rapid calculations and templates that can be easily used to make these determinations, but, in a physical game, getting bogged down in measurements and conversions for diagonal movement kills the pace of combat.

Yakk

2018-01-31, 03:36 PM

Note that 5e took 4e's healing surges, renamed as "hit dice" for the traditionalists. (There is an important difference in that your 5e HD come to about half your max HP, while 4e healing surges come to 2-5x your HP).

You could beef up 5e's HD to match 4e HS sort of like this:

1) Whenever you are healed, you can roll half (round up) of your HD on top of the healing effect (half of your dice, you pick which kind).
2) When you roll a HD, if you roll a 3 or higher, it is not expended.

Now on average d4s get 2 uses, d6s get 3 uses, d8s get 4 uses, d10s get 5 uses and d12s get 6 uses.

If we also replace HP with "max" at each level, and this corresponds to 5 to 13 healing surges in 4e (depending on your HD size) at 10 con, and 6.64 to 16.24 at 20 con (in terms of full HP healed between long rests).

(And yes, in-combat healing becomes more powerful because it unlocks a HD roll, yet healing matters less because players carry with them HP recovery.)

(Can you tell I've been thinking about this one?)

A level 5 fighter with 16 con (65 HP) now has 212.5 HP in HD-based healing instead of 49 HP and 42.5 in HD-based healing.

The difference is that now, big tough characters don't need a healbot to fight more than a few times per day.

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4e encounter balance mathematics, while far from perfect, are not the complete trash 3e and 5es are. Learn from it.

At its core, it is about damage budget (threat) and toughness budget (timer) of foes. Threat*Timer is how many resources you require to defeat a foe. They then map it on a quadratic scale, so something worth 2x the XP is roughly as good as 2 of the smaller creature.

Balancing encounters then consists of following some rules and adding up the "XP value" of the creatures in the encounter.

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Affine advancement. 4e's HP and damage budget is roughly (3+Level)*K for a different K depending on what exactly you are talking about.

4e's accuracy and defences is rougly Level+X, where X varies by attack type and defence type.

Twice as many HP makes you twice as tough. Twice as high defence makes you unkillable. 4e understands the amazing power of target numbers and modifiers and keeps them under control. 4e's solution was to embrace the power curve of to-hit and defence scaling, 5e kept the power curve from getting too large.

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Scaling numbers of dice instead of modifiers. Instead of blurs of hits or huge static modifiers, 4e added multiples of your weapon damage dice. It didn't always succeed, but it worked very well.

The failure to control action budget (more "taps") and damage modifiers (per-hit extra damage) caused this to fail over time.

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It doesn't take magic to be awesome. 4e's "martial" classes have systems that let them simply break the assumptions of the base game. They are "fiat" abilities; they say you can do X, and you can do X. The X described is dramatic, and has significant mechanical impact.

They are powers that change the story.

Other versions of D&D grant "mundane" characters modest bonuses in terms of "swing count" or "+skill modifier" or "+damage". None of these fundamentally change the fiction. Getting +5 to Jump requires you negotiate what a +5 point higher Jump means (or, sometimes, the rules say what it means, and it means nothing dramatic); an ability saying you can jump 30' means you can jump 30'.

In 4e they are formatted "like spells" and are called powers; they need not be. The core lession here is to give characters *mechanical hooks* that *change the rules* and let them do awesome stuff. This means they can basically narrate "X happens". Spells do this in most games, as do 4e powers even those that are not spells.

An example of a non-power like example of this might be "I can unlock any lock in 6 seconds". Or "I can pickpocket anyone without them noticing". Or "I can jump as far as I can run in a turn from a standing start. By expending 1 unit of resources, I can double that".

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johnbragg

2018-01-31, 04:44 PM

Am I only allowed to state just one thing?

I'm the thread starter, not your mom.

4e made a *lot* of significant deviations from normal D&D (which is one of the reasons why so many people dislike it) that were massive improvements.

[quote] the inclusion of mark and retribution mechanics for defenders (i.e. any class that is supposed to be designed with excellent defenses) to allow them to actually get some real use out of high defenses in a tactical situation,

I'll research and ponder.

the generic rather than specific skill system (e.g. Thievery rather than Open Lock, Disable Device, Use Rope, and Sleight of Hand; Acrobatics rather than Balance, Escape Artist, and Tumble) so that you don't have to track a massive number of different skills that belong to the same complementary skill set.

Pathfinder moved in this direction, and 5th went whole-hog. (I already steal the PAthfinder Class Bonus instead of 4x skill points at first level.)

There's other stuff I'd bring in but they require complete and total rebuilds of a system, like the removal of "linear-fighter quadratic-wizard" problems by actually balancing classes out across more than the first 5 levels of the game,

Well, that's what E6 is for. :smallbiggrin:

getting rid of Vancian magic as a whole (which is a plague upon PnP gaming, imo, and one of the worst design decisions that Gygax and Arneson ever made), the robust encounter level system that gives a *much more accurate* view of how threatening a given entity actually is because it uses math rather than abstractions, etc.

johnbragg

2018-01-31, 04:50 PM

That could be ported to 3X...

If there's something else, go ahead. The thing about 3X is that you can bolt on new subsystems--whether they work with other subsystems, or work properly in the first place....

(DELETED) a bunch of me telling you why I don't mind those things. I'm not here to argue.

EDIT: Thank you, Yakk.

ThePurple

2018-01-31, 05:47 PM

Scaling numbers of dice instead of modifiers. Instead of blurs of hits or huge static modifiers, 4e added multiples of your weapon damage dice. It didn't always succeed, but it worked very well.

The failure to control action budget (more "taps") and damage modifiers (per-hit extra damage) caused this to fail over time.

One of the other advantages of scaling numbers of dice is that it really allows for more weapon diversity. If you don't scale the number of dice properly (which 4e didn't do) or at all (which 3.X did), accurate weapons become the only real viable options because (as you previously stated) accuracy is a proportionate increase in output while the size of your weapon damage die is basically static. If you actually cause powers to scale *properly*, with weapon damage die representing a majority of the damage dealt by a power (or, close to 50%) at all levels, weapons with lower accuracy and higher damage (like axes and hammers) become viable options without requiring overpowering feats/tactics/etc. (which generally just end up creating niche builds rather than true diversity).

Real diversity in options is important. One of the biggest problems I've got with the absolutely huge lists of equipment (both mundane and magical) is that a vast majority of them are explicitly suboptimal choices. You can talk about having millions of options all you want but, as long as there are only a handful that are explicitly better than all of the others, you don't *actually* have millions of options; you have that handful that are actually *good* and another option of "explicitly sub-par".

The core lession here is to give characters *mechanical hooks* that *change the rules* and let them do awesome stuff. This means they can basically narrate "X happens". Spells do this in most games, as do 4e powers even those that are not spells.

To me, rather than using the effects you describe, the takeaway is moreso about giving martial characters something special to make them something *other* than "a magical class without magic", and, most importantly, ensuring that this "something special" is actually strong enough to allow non-magical PCs actually compete with magical characters.

This also requires tacit recognition from whoever is running the game that PCs are *special*. Just as not every priest is a cleric, not every hedge mage is a wizard, and not every hermit is a druid, not every city guard is a fighter nor is not every pickpocket is a rogue. Adventurers are weird and special, which is why they're able to do the stuff they do.

This folds nicely into another awesome thing that 4e did: PCs and NPCs *do not use the same design rules*. In all versions of D&D, everything PCs do basically scales at the same rate: as a PC gets better at combat, they get better at non-combat too. This is good for adventurers for all kinds of reasons; this is bad for NPCs for a bunch of others (that I go into here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22775478&postcount=7)).

Another important distinction that will allow you to keep campaign worlds *sane* is that NPCs don't use the same advancement rules that PCs do. It doesn't matter how much most people practice/train/etc., they'll never be Olympic caliber fencers. Most real people hit plateaus in their skill levels for anything that they might do but the rules for 3.X don't state this anywhere because this isn't fun for PCs who want to constantly get better the more they do stuff because they're heroes in a game of escapist fantasy.

However, if you apply the same growth rates for NPCs that you give to PCs, you end up with a world like the Forgotten Realms, which is stocked to the brim with ridiculously high level NPCs that, in all logic, make it completely pointless for PCs to exist most of the time (since they could solve whatever low level problem might exist with the barest extension of their will). It's hard to explain why X low-level problem is around when you've got characters like Elminster sitting on their behinds doing nothing (unless you want to use the "well, he's giving low level people stuff to take care of so that they become stronger" excuse, which becomes difficult to marry with anyone with a Good alignment since they're basically allowing evil that they could easily stop triumph for an extended period of time until some random people they don't know appear and take care of it after the fact; I can see a Neutral character take that view but it's hard to see a Good character do so; it's as if Batman simply decided to give low level criminals free reign again because he needs to save his energy for the Joker).

If you recognize that NPCs *don't* progress like PCs, this becomes much simpler to explain since entities with extreme potential like the PCs are so rare that the few of them that exist are tied up with more threats than they can handle, so they are *forced* to prioritize and ignore the lesser evil in order to combat the greater one.

TL:DR don't insist that NPCs and PCs follow the same design rules for progression *or* for performance. NPCs should have the capabilities that the story necessitates, even if it makes no sense within the confines of the rules set down for PCs.

Duff

2018-01-31, 06:27 PM

The way the party roles are supported by the system - especially the use of defender marks, but also strikers and leaders

Yakk

2018-02-01, 09:10 AM

johnbragg

2018-02-01, 10:46 AM

So I'll be more clear about why healing surges are a game changer.

With healing surges, the big beefy warrior is a source of toughness.

Without healing surges, the HEALER is the source of toughness.

A fighter has X HP/level, per day. A cleric has a growing number of increasingly large healing spells per day. Throw in affordable wands...

.......

A reserve/healing surge system doesn't change the tactical situation, but enables fighters to fight in more than one challenging fight in a row without a healbot. This benefits fighters story-wise and strategically, not tactically.

Thank you. This is the sort of thing. 5E has this, but I don't think the books did a great job of explaining it in terms of fluff.

Porting into 3X--HP is a measure of how tough it is to drop you in a fight. "Healing surges" are a measure of how many times you can fight and go to your limits, and recover and keep going in a day. Spending a "healing surge" is a full-round action which restores (one-half? one-quarter?) of your HP. (Full round action--can't do anything else that round except defend yourself, you're spending the 6 seconds catching your breath and doing your best to have some "me time" in the middle of combat. Not optimal, but it shouldn't be.)

How many "healing surges" do you get? Off the top of my head, I'm thinking Base Attack Bonus plus Con modifier, and each "healing surge" gives you 1/4 max hp. (So 1st level beatstick with +2 con has 3, can get back 75%. 6th level squishy-caster with +1 Con has 4, so he can get back from near-zero to full once. 6th level beatstick with +2 Con has 8, so he can go from near-zero to full twice. That feels like a good spread.)

I don't exactly like the name "healing surge"--I've fluffed it pretty mundanely, in a guy-at-the-gym way. "TAke a breather" is TOO guy-at-the-gym. WIP. Maybe "quick rest"? EDIT: "Second Wind" is actually perfect here. It doesn't break the guy-at-the-gym paradigm, and it still feels badass-hero, something The Rock or Conan would do. The guy at the gym isn't the guy at YOUR gym, after all.

This also means I can cut down on the HP bloat for iconic monsters like dragons and fiends in 3X, keeping them E6-viable. And boss-monster actions mean I can dodge the action economy and use it to make BBEG fights Big and Bad. I'm looking forward to the players realizing that the BBEG just used a healing surge in the middle of combat while still doing stuff. So they might need to down him in one round before he does it again.

Yakk

2018-02-01, 11:29 AM

For 3e, consider the HD hack I did above.

Hit Points: Use the max value of all HD you earn to calculate your HP (plus con bonus).

Hit Dice: You keep track of your HD separate from your HP, both size and count. This is a dice pool.

You can "Roll your HD". When you roll your HD, you take some subset of your HD pool and roll it, adding up the value, and adding your con bonus to each die. Typically "Roll your HD" results in healing.

Any dice that land on a 1 or 2 are considered expended, and cannot be rolled again until you recover them.

You can roll up to half (rounded up) of your HD whenever you recieve non-regeneration based magical healing.

A break is a 1 minute period without combat or other strenuous activity. At the end of a break, you may choose to roll your HD.

In addition, when taking the total defence action, you can roll half (rounded up) your HD. You may not do this again until you take a break. This is known as "getting your second wind back".

Every night after a night's sleep in a safe spot roll your expended HD, but do not heal from it. Every 10 the roll results in is one expended HD that is recovered. If your roll under 10 and fail to recover any HD at all, keep track of the amount and add it to the next night's total.

(A character with 20+ con and d10 HD will basically fully heal from a night's rest: they have superhuman recovery. A character with 10 con and d4 HD will recover 1/4th of their expended HD every night.)

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This is a 3e-ish way to emulate 4e healing surges.

A roll of HD is 50%-80% of your HP back at a cost of some HD. A half-roll is 25%-40% of your HP, and corresponds to "spend a healing surge" in 4e.

The half-roll is intended to make your toughness matter as much, or more, than the cleric's healing spell size.

The average total amount of healing you have varies from 1.25x your total HP (uniform d4 HD character with 10 con) to 3.9x your total HP (uniform d12 HD character with 24 con). More con makes your HD rolls a larger % of your max HP, higher HD makes your HD less likely to get expended per roll.

Wasteomana

2018-02-04, 10:49 PM

If I'm allowed only 1 thing, it is the standardization of monster math and statblocks.

Seriously, do not give me a list that says "This NPC monster knows fireball and firebolt and etc etc" and then make me look those things up, then what levels they can cast them at and then... no.

Stat out things I'll use in an easy format so I don't have to hunt for crap to run a game. Your monster does this, the spell DCs are these, clean cup move down. One of the adventures for AL had an item in it that, if I recall, functioned like a power from the Monster Manual. Looking it up in the Monster Manual had me go to the DMG for an item which told me what I was looking for was in the PHB and when I found it in the PHB it referred me to a different page in the PHB. (If memory serves it was something to do with Enlarge or Entangle). It was a silly over-the-top example that made me go "wow... monster stat blocks and math that is completely transparent, I miss 4e"

Zardnaar

2018-02-05, 06:10 AM

Some of the weapon abilities (brutal etc), some of the starting class abilities, DDI, and some of the monster abilities.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-05, 07:54 AM

I'd say death saves.

So you don't have players saying "I'm only at -X so I won't die for Y more rounds, you don't need to heal me yet". When somebody is down and dying, the players should have a sense of urgency to help him before he bleeds out. Of course I mean the concept of death saves and not the implementation, because 4E's version is "I've only failed one death save so I won't die for Y more rounds, you don't need to heal me yet".

johnbragg

2018-02-05, 08:37 AM

If I'm allowed only 1 thing, it is the standardization of monster math and statblocks.

Seriously, do not give me a list that says "This NPC monster knows fireball and firebolt and etc etc" and then make me look those things up, then what levels they can cast them at and then... no.

Yeah, this is something I'd never thought about in terms of game design, but if I'm using a monster with an ability (like a wolf with trip), I go find those rules and put them in the same index card/powerpoint slide I use for the monster stats. I see how it would inflate the MM page count, but that's definitely something to consider.
OR at the very least have the entry read "Special Attacks: Brutal Grappling (page 123)"

Some of the weapon abilities (brutal etc), some of the starting class abilities, DDI, and some of the monster abilities.

I'll take a look at brutal. (Even if the 4E Brutal doesn't port to 3X, there should be a "Brutal Attack"/"Brutal Critical"/"Brutal Rage" somewhere in the game).

EDIT: Ok, I can't find Brutal in the index or table of contents of my 4E PHB. what is it?
EDIT: It's a weapon property. I don't see it as game-changing, but I obviously haven't had experience with it

obryn

2018-02-05, 10:18 AM

The #1 thing is self-contained monster/NPC stat blocks that are built specifically for in-game usage. They don't require reference to outside material, they don't need to interact with feats/spells/etc., and they are both easy to use and easy to balance.

Yeah, this is something I'd never thought about in terms of game design, but if I'm using a monster with an ability (like a wolf with trip), I go find those rules and put them in the same index card/powerpoint slide I use for the monster stats. I see how it would inflate the MM page count, but that's definitely something to consider.
You pare down ability counts, too. A good, solid enemy doesn't need more than a handful. I don't think anyone here would recommend "3e stat blocks, only more verbose." For the Wolf, you just give them an attack and then add the rider - for example - "Hit: If the wolf has combat advantage, the target falls prone."

Yakk

2018-02-05, 10:27 AM

Brutal X says "if you roll an X or under, reroll that die".

A dY brutal X has an average roll of (Y+1)/2 + X/2.

It also has a min roll size of X.

What it was used for in 4e was to create intermediate die sizes. So d6B1 has an average damage of 4, half way between d6 and d8.

In 4e this mattered because you sometimes roll multiple [W] and it adds up.

It was also used to create weapons with damage higher than 1d12 or 2d6: 2d6B1 (average 8) or 1d12B2 (average 7.5).

The min damage of a roll also goes up, preventing "wiffs" (especially when static bonuses are small).

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I personally find Brutal relatively boring. I've played with replacing it with "when you roll X or lower, treat it as the max value for the die".

Then dYB1 has an average value of (Y+1)/2 + (Y-1)/Y, and dYB2 (Y+1)/2 + (2Y-3)/Y.

It doesn't get you a die size half way between d6 and d8 anymore. On the other hand it gives you more fun when rolling, as you get to pick up those low dice and stick them on the max value.

I find this version ... more Brutal.

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The real lession here is to explore dice mini-games. Don't just roll dice and add them up.

Roll multiple and discard lowest or highest. Look for duplicates. Reroll on odd/even.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-05, 10:51 AM

I personally find Brutal relatively boring.
Well, yes. Brutal is a clever mechanic in that it gives players the sense of getting a meaningful bonus without actually giving them a meaningful bonus (2d6B1 + 20 sounds MUCH better than 2d6+20 but it's less than 4% difference). Changing player perception without affecting game balance; it appears that lots of people like those because 5E also implements a number of them. Of course that doesn't work on players that understand the math...

Yakk

2018-02-05, 10:54 AM

To be fair, 4e seemed to have been designed to assume static bonuses are usually <= die rolls.

And 6d6+20 vs 6d6B1+20 is a 15% damage increase.

That doesn't happen because 4e static damage was easier to stack than getting more dice is. And ease of stacking when you have 20-30 opportunities to pick things to stack together tends to dominate.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-05, 11:00 AM

To be fair, 4e seemed to have been designed to assume static bonuses are usually <= die rolls.

Based on just the PHB1 I find that hard to believe.

Yakk

2018-02-05, 11:25 AM

Re: 4e balance

Stat, Enhancement, Feat bonus is (very) roughly:
4+level/10 (stat) + Level/5 + Level/10
= 4 + 0.4* level

At-wills deal [W] increasing to 2[W] at level 21.
Baseline ncounter powers deal 2[W] increasing to 4[W] at level 30.

If [W] is about 5, then we get
5 + 5*Level/20 at-will damage = 5 + .25*L
10 + 10*Level/20 encounter attack damage = 10+.5*L

So on at-wills, static damage outpaces dice slightly. On encounter powers, damage dice outpaces static damage. But both of them are in the same zone.

At level 21, we get a 12.4 static bonus, a 10.25 at-will roll, and a 20.5 encounter roll.

4 encounters and 2 at-wills with 50% hit rate comes to 37.2 static and 51.25 rolled damage, totalling 88.45.

A level 21 monster has 192 HP; notice it is only 46% dead after 6 rounds of combat. A party of 5 kills 2.3 of them (well, more, because 2 strikers do more damage even unoptimized). So 6 rounds of combat and all encounter attacks exhasted, and there are 2-3 monsters left.

It now takes 2-3 rounds to kill *each* remaining monster, resulting in a combat length of 12 rounds.

And yes, this is unplayable. To make this playable you have to optimize your characters.

Up players to 1.5 taps each (a 2[W] at-will with a 2[W] encounter minor/off turn tap is a 4[W] encounter with 2 taps under this model). Find a source of extra +10 extra static damage. Up weapon die size by 1. Increase accuracy to 65%.

Then at level 21, we get a 22.4 static bonus, a 12.25 at-will roll, and a 24.5 encounter roll.

6 rounds is then 131.04 static 79.625 dice for 210.665 ; the level 21 monster is dead at or before round 6.

All from a slight increase in accuracy, static damage, and focusing on multi-tap.

The thing is, early epic play complains was that combat took 12 rounds and was boring as all heck. To pull off decent play speed you *had* to use a narrow set of "cheese" options.

I think epic 4e was poorly "balanced". They underbalanced it then assumed players would optimize moderately, then intended to patch over over-optimizations.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-05, 11:46 AM

At level 21, we get a 12.4 static bonus, a 10.25 at-will roll, and a 20.5 encounter roll.
The thing is that even with just the PHB1, any character with a bonus from his class, paragon path, daily power, or party leader (or more likely, several of those) is going to have substantially more bonuses than that. For instance, a rogue easily gets +10 more damage in heroic tier. So even without heavy optimization, a character that cares about damage is going to get much more from his bonuses than from his [W].

Probably not enough to make Epic tier playable without further splatbooks, but enough to marginalize the 'brutal' feature.

MwaO

2018-02-05, 01:30 PM

Wasteomana

2018-02-05, 05:16 PM

Re: 4e balance

I think epic 4e was poorly "balanced". They underbalanced it then assumed players would optimize moderately, then intended to patch over over-optimizations.

As someone who has run a lot of Epic 4e, is currently running Epic 4e and has written for Organized Play 4e, I disagree here.

The initial default epic monsters were very very underwhelming. The pendulum did swing back and forth between too far and not far enough, but there are very few monsters originally made for epic that were even moderately threatening unless the group was using the 'choose for me' option for every choice in the character builder. Even putting stat bumps in the right places, taking an ok paragon path and an ok ED with minimal investment in paying attention at the table made epic pretty easy.

That being said 4e, and really any edition of any game I've played that is D&D or D&Desque has the issue that the gap between low, middle and high optimization gets wider and wider as you level. By the time you are paragon, the ones that are higher op are clearly a good bit stronger than those who are medium op while those that are medium op are clearly a step up from those who are low op. In practice it means that the DM and the group have to keep an eye on optimization to make sure everyone is on the same page and then the DM can just adjust the slider. One of the things in LFR that I enjoyed and take over to the 4e community I run for on Roll20 is the "Glory" system. All the adventures are written for the low end of the spectrum and then there are adjustments made to scale up from there. In heroic there are only 'aggressive' modifiers as having a 'normal' and 'harder' is really all you need. Paragon adds a 'Glory' tier which means it normal/harder/hard. Epic adds a further Glory+ tier which lets the DM scale their encounters as normal/harder/hard/very hard. As long as the group is all roughly the same optimization level (You don't have a Dex 12 Sling Rogue in the same party with a Rebreather) it is pretty easy to challenge any group by just moving the slider one way or the other on the adventure.

The sad part is that the old DEFAULT for epic monster math put those adventures below standard with the 'powerful examples' being maybe usable in the lowest tier of play.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-05, 05:26 PM

As someone who has run a lot of Epic 4e, is currently running Epic 4e and has written for Organized Play 4e, I disagree here.

If I understand correctly, Yakk's point is that epic combat takes way too long, and your point is that it isn't threatening to the PCs. These two points aren't exclusive; in my experience they're both true.

Wasteomana

2018-02-05, 05:50 PM

If I understand correctly, Yakk's point is that epic combat takes way too long, and your point is that it isn't threatening to the PCs. These two points aren't exclusive; in my experience they're both true.

Entirely possible. The non-threatening nature of epic combat also meant the fact that the monsters had higher HP / Defenses normal was a contributing factor. A long, dynamic and threatening encounter is less of an issue than a long, static and trivial encounter.

I've found that the baseline assumptions for everything past Heroic should be that, without special mechanics Round 4 shouldn't usually exist. By Round 4 the dramatic question should be answered (even if all the monsters aren't dead or the skill challenge complete etc). If you are finding that your encounters are routinely lasting for 4-6 rounds there is likely to be either a ton of special mechanics involved (and if everyone is enjoying it, more power to you) or there is likely a mixup in the math/optimization/basic assumption in the game.

Yakk

2018-02-05, 10:47 PM

Yes; monsters where non-threatening large piles of HP at initial 4e release.

If you highly optimized for damage (even at 4e release), they became non-threatening small piles of HP.

MM3 helped; it increased monster damage and modestly reduced solo HP. Expertise feats helped; it generated higher baseline accuracy for players (which massively reduced optimization gap at high levels; the gap remained large, but before it was ridiculous).

There is still a problem; monster toughness at high levels relies far too heavily on HP (solo, elite) and on ATK/DEF (higher level); higher level monsters at epic have no significant increase in HP damage or HP. This is in constrast to low heroic, where higher level monsters gain *both* significant HP and damage *and* ATK/DEF.

I've tried to patch 4e/modify so the feeling you get at level 1-3 for higher level foes remains. Because when you do that, the range of monsters power scale you can engage with *grows* at epic. It is challenging.

One idea is to have HP go up super-linearly at higher levels. This results in problems; level 30 characters have 1000+ HP quite easily. And unless you go full exponential the gap remains.

From level 1 to level 5, monster HP doubles. If every 4 levels this happens, we get 7 doublings from level 1 to level 29. 2^7 is 128; so if a level 1 monster has 20 HP, a level 29 has to have 2560. And if monsters have HP similar to players, this gets cumbersome.

If we retract the level range back down to 20, level 21 monsters are 5 doublings or x32 HP. 32*20 is 640; closer to reasonable, but still really large.

An idea I have thought of is to make level X monsters *weaker* than players by default (HP-wise). So a level 1 monster has 5-10 HP. Then x128 is 160 to 320 HP at level 21.

Still, we run into the problem that players end up with 500 HP at level 20 if they start with 20.

---

Another approach I've considered is to make ATK/DEF bonuses logarithmically, and HP grow linearly. And maybe use HD instead of Level for monsters.

Then have players face up against 40-60 HD monsters. With logarithmic ATK/DEF increases (say, double HD means +1 ATK/DEF on average) they become harder to hit (on average), so they stay "in scope".

---

But this is off-topic. Other than the idea that you should ensure that d20s matter by keeping modifiers and target numbers under control.

3e gives up, and you quickly get auto-hit and auto-miss abilities. They try a bit harder for spells than attacks; but even there, casters reach auto-hit and auto-win pretty easily.

obryn

2018-02-06, 11:12 AM

I ended up switching to the First Level Damage Forever calcs in epic tier. We had 2 defenders and 2 leaders, so it worked pretty great.

Yakk

2018-02-06, 01:17 PM

This one?

https://dmg42.blogspot.ca/2012/02/boot-on-face-of-level-1-damage-forever.html

That isn't bad. But a problem remains:

In "vanilla" 4e, a "level +4" (aka level 5) monster at first level has twice the HP and deals 47% more damage per hit than a level 1 monster.

A level 34 monster, even with those calcs, will have 12% more HP and deal 9% more damage per hit than a level 30 monster.

So the 'steepness' of adding monster levels has less impact at higher levels.

Now if your Elites deal +50% (single target) damage and have +100% HP, that replicates the feel a bit. So use more elites/solos at higher levels instead of higher level foes?

---

This is getting seriously off-topic.

Back on topic, the solo/elite system may not be a bad one.

Monsters specifically crafted to be interesting to fight alone. You can see solo monsters in 5e. There isn't anything like an elite, however.

4e monsters are also designed to fight in packs -- so 5 players against about 5 monsters, give or take.

Minion mechanics let you fight up to 20-30 monsters without the system getting bogged down.

Now, part of this is because of the limited range of monsters to encounter.

tcrudisi

2018-02-06, 10:58 PM

4e did some amazing things... but if I can only take one, I'd choose the skill challenge system. It was freaking amazing.

ThePurple

2018-02-07, 12:26 AM

4e did some amazing things... but if I can only take one, I'd choose the skill challenge system. It was freaking amazing.

The SC System, as written, was absolutely *terrible*. The idea of an explicit set of rules for cooperative non-combat conflict resolution that is more than a single skill check was excellent but the implementation was done *very* poorly. SCs in published adventures are panned by players for good reason: if you write an SC using the guidelines in the book, it's not going to be fun.

Of course, this is why most of the long term GMs that I know of, including myself, that still use SCs have come up with a completely different design for them. If you could port the *updates*, then, yes, it's a good idea. If you just port the SC system as written, I doubt you'd have a lot of happy players.

It should, of course, be mentioned that 3.X already had something similar to SCs. In the Unearthed Arcana book, "complex skill checks" were referenced, and those are effectively skill challenges. It doesn't do the same comprehensive job (it doesn't really include decent rules for reward structures, since it's mostly about converting single skill checks into multiple stage ones), but it's definitely there (including the "X successes before Y failures" part).

CharonsHelper

2018-02-07, 12:39 AM

ThePurple

2018-02-07, 01:53 AM

I'm surprised that no one mentioned minions yet. They do a great job of letting the PCs feel like badasses while still being a threat, all without clogging down the fight and making each turn take an hour.

The problem with this is porting it to 3.X, which uses the same progression system for NPCs as it does PCs. To create enemies at the extreme high end of content that are able to reliably hit PCs while being low enough in health to be taken out in a single blow on the part of a PC basically requires GM fiat since HD is explicitly tied to BAB. And, of course, this gets into the classic 3.X balance problem of AC and saves not scaling in the same way as BAB and attack bonuses, which, at high levels, are so disparate (either it becomes impossible to succeed except on a nat 20 or impossible to fail except on a nat 1, depending upon whether you're built around that specific mechanic or not). To be able to bring minions (and elites and solo monsters, which are a great boon to encounter construction), you need to do both a math fix as well as a top-down rebuild of NPC construction and the CR system as a whole (at which point you might as well be making an entirely new system).

The OP's question specifically referred to mechanics that could be ported over to 3.X. To port minions over, you have to overturn fundamental design constructs that 3.X uses.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-07, 01:57 AM

The SC System, as written, was absolutely *terrible*. The idea of an explicit set of rules for cooperative non-combat conflict resolution that is more than a single skill check was excellent but the implementation was done *very* poorly. SCs in published adventures are panned by players for good reason: if you write an SC using the guidelines in the book, it's not going to be fun.

Yes. The only good part about SCs as written in the books is the name. Catchy name, that. Lots of people have homebrew a perfectly functional system that they call an SC but that has little or no resemblance to what the rulebooks write about SCs.

johnbragg

2018-02-07, 07:22 AM

Skill challenges sounded like a positive development in concept, but the 4E version was not well received. Logically, having a system where every party member is involved somewhat in resolving an encounter should be more engaging than one where one specialist speaks/rolls for everyone, or where LOLNOPE the party can't stealth or climb because of Plate Mail Guy. (3E hates Plate Mail Guy so, so much.)

Is there a particular Unearthed Arcana, or 3rd-party or homebrew alternate ruleset that got any traction? Porting a system or game concept requires re-writing it anyway. (Porting healing surges into 4E, it might end up looking like 4E Hit Dice.) and what exactly does "X successes before Y failures" look like in the story?

Minions was one of the things that people who reacted badly to 4E reacted most strongly to. I don't think it ports. (And since I'm putting in fighting styles that give "+1/2 BAB to AC" as a shield bonus or a dodge bonus, it's an even bigger hurdle.)

Solo monster hacks, on the other hand, ARE something I'm bringing over.

darkbard

2018-02-07, 09:41 AM

The SC System, as written, was absolutely *terrible*.

I used to feel this way. And I do think the initial presentation of SCs in the DMG obfuscated the actual process of framing and developing an SC. But with the advent of the DMG2 and RC, the SC system is clear and effective.

One of the problems is that, because an effective SC requires changing the fiction with each action declaration and die resolution by a PC, it is virtually impossible to prewrite a SC (i.e., attempt to anticipate any of a nearly infinite range of actions by PCs), and so, yes, the published iterations of SCs fall flat, almost without exception.

Here is a really great description of what SCs are and how to run them from a poster on EN World:

I don’t understand how after a million, in-depth posts on the subject there is still this fundamental disconnect on how 4e Skill Challenges work.

WHAT SKILL CHALLENGES ARE NOT:

* an exercise in dice rolling where the fiction doesn’t matter

* a bunch of tallied up dice rolls then the GM tells a story

WHAT SKILL CHALLENGES ARE:

1) Initially framed situation with something at stake and an approach on how to attain it or avoid it.

2) Player(s) action declaration on how to handle present obstacle.

3) Dice resolve that action declaration.

4) This micro success or failure LEADS TO A CHANGE IN THE GAMESTATE. The fictional situation evolves either positively (and a new complication emerges later emerges) or negatively (and the present situation snowballs either into something new and dire or the present situation escalated)

5) This continues until the conflict resolution framework says the scene is over (won or lost), at which time the gamestate changes dynamically based on (1) and the context of the aggregate fiction
of the SC.

6) The above should yield a dramatic arc.

johnbragg

2018-02-07, 10:16 AM

Here is a really great description of what SCs are and how to run them from a poster on EN World:

So the gameplay is kind of FATE-ish, where you start with a certain number of obstacles, successful checks remove obstacles, failed checks adding more obstacles, until either the task is cleared or collapses under the weight of narrative problems? ("This isn't working! Run away!")

I say "obstacles" there, meaning "things in the game world that the DM can describe to the players."

So if it's a 3-check lock, one check could be to figure out that it's not a Dwarven lock, it's a Duregar lock, with different patterns to look for.
Then the second check is to successfully open the mechanism to start fiddling with the bits around the bolt to get it to retract
Then the final check is to get the bolt to retract.

That general idea?

(Not a great example, because it's a single-character problem and not a very interesting one at that, but do I have the idea right?)

darkbard

2018-02-07, 11:07 AM

That general idea?

(Not a great example, because it's a single-character problem and not a very interesting one at that, but do I have the idea right?)

That's the general idea. The key to remember is that, regardless of success or failure on any specific check, the DM must reframe the fiction to present the PCs with a new situation after the action is resolved.

On a microfailure (in 4E, a SC has a complexity rating, which requires an escalating number of successes to complete the challenge, but all SCs, regardless of complexity, fail if 3 microfailures occur before the requisite number of successes are met), the DM introduces a real complication (damage to PCs, loss of wealth, additional foes in the subsequent combat encounter, etc.). But a success still presents the PCs with a new decision point based on the evolving fiction.

This is why it's impossible to preauthor an SC successfully (beyond, perhaps, rough notes).

EDIT: Also note that 4E operates under the "fail forward" principle, so that even if the PCs fail the overall skill challenge, this does not prevent the adventure from developing: it just introduces complications. (E.g., if the PCs fail the SC to find a map to get to their desired destination, this doesn't mean they cannot travel there. Instead, they find the map, but it brings them to a heavily fortified entrance guarded by alert warriors instead of the secret entrance they desired to use, etc.)

Dimers

2018-02-07, 11:10 AM

WHAT SKILL CHALLENGES ARE:

1) Initially framed situation with something at stake and an approach on how to attain it or avoid it.

2) Player(s) action declaration on how to handle present obstacle.

3) Dice resolve that action declaration.

4) This micro success or failure LEADS TO A CHANGE IN THE GAMESTATE. The fictional situation evolves either positively (and a new complication emerges later emerges) or negatively (and the present situation snowballs either into something new and dire or the present situation escalated)

5) This continues until the conflict resolution framework says the scene is over (won or lost), at which time the gamestate changes dynamically based on (1) and the context of the aggregate fiction
of the SC.

6) The above should yield a dramatic arc.

I'd add a step 2.5 -- the GM determines what skill and stat are used, with what bonus or penalty. This helps fix the problem of the Arcana person rolling Arcana to magic everything, the History person always remembering "this is how they used to address this", the Religion person praying for divine aid ... And it makes the play more grounded in the described situation.

(Not a great example, because it's a single-character problem and not a very interesting one at that, but do I have the idea right?)

I don't think so. First, as darkbard mentions, SCs are much better when generated and resolved on the fly, and what you're describing sounds like a predetermined list. (If you meant that the player drives those three actions, sure.) The other issue I see is that SCs need to be open-ended, not a yes/no like whether a lock is opened.

Yakk

2018-02-07, 11:21 AM

Core of skill challenge:

You know roughly how complex the challenge is, as a number from 1 to 5. You know what level it is (usually party level).

Complexity means "how many substantial sub-problems solved in order to solve this challenge". Level determines roughly what the DCs are.

During the challenge, players describe what they want to try narratively. The DM determines "is this a reasonable approach". Then a resolution mechanic is used (A DC) and mechanical and narrative consequences of failure are determined (default mechanical is a counter, after 3 accumulated failures the skill challenge cannot be solved, but extra consequences (like lost healing surges, damage, etc) are also ok).

The mechanical system is to ensure you keep the stakes of each skill check reasonable. For example, you shouldn't call for a stealth check every 5' when sneaking into a castle: and if you do, the players solve the entire problem after (Complexity*2+1) successes. For a C5 challenge, that is 55' of sneaking and all done. Similarly, the first failure shouldn't make the problem completely unsolvable; it can add narrative complications, but shouldn't be "well you are all screwed".

The success/failure informs what the new narrative. The mechanical progress informs how "big" the narrative change should be. Sometimes you should invent or reveal a new complication. Sometimes a success is "yes, but" and a failure might even be "yes, but", with the "but" being worse on a failure.

johnbragg

2018-02-07, 11:22 AM

I'd add a step 2.5 -- the GM determines what skill and stat are used, with what bonus or penalty. This helps fix the problem of the Arcana person rolling Arcana to magic everything, the History person always remembering "this is how they used to address this", the Religion person praying for divine aid ... And it makes the play more grounded in the described situation.

I don't think so. First, as darkbard mentions, SCs are much better when generated and resolved on the fly, and what you're describing sounds like a predetermined list. (If you meant that the player drives those three actions, sure.) The other issue I see is that SCs need to be open-ended, not a yes/no like whether a lock is opened.

So, with skill challenges, the game flips from a finely tuned tactical combat game of conditions and positions and shifts and specials and counter-specials (which I think is a fair, non-edition-warring description of 4E's strengths, a distant cousin of MTG on a battlemat) to almost free-form theater-of-the-mind roleplaying?

That may have been a factor in skill challenges being widely panned--the players and tables that gravitated towards 4E's nuanced, balanced, rules-heavy combat system aren't necessarily the ones who would enjoy TOTM improv-roleplaying.

ThePurple

2018-02-07, 11:50 AM

That may have been a factor in skill challenges being widely panned--the players and tables that gravitated towards 4E's nuanced, balanced, rules-heavy combat system aren't necessarily the ones who would enjoy TOTM improv-roleplaying.

The biggest problem, in my experience, with SCs (as written) was that the SC ends after 3 failures, regardless of the number of successes you've gotten before then and there weren't any rules for limiting the number of rounds available. As such, SCs ended up penalizing failure rather than rewarding success, which causes players to become *incredibly* risk averse. The most effective strategy for a 4e default SC is to have the player with the best chance of success (highest skill check against lowest DC) roll each round with the *entire rest of the party* just rolling to assist (or, if assists are limited, just skipping their turn) because assisting (or skipping your action) will not generate a failure.

This is completely unlike combat, which treats a failed attack roll the same way that a skipped turn is treated. Combat *rewards* success and punishes duration; properly made SCs should *also* do this (either by limiting the number of rounds for the entire party or causing some level of threat/damage to the party each round). The goal of an SC, just like a combat, should be to end the combat as quickly as possible, even if it means taking a few risks.

It's important to note that I use SCs *prolifically* in my campaigns; I just don't use SCs as written. Over the years, I've created several different basic SC schema with inspiration drawn from various sources that allow me to tackle all kinds of different problems. The idea that there's a single way to design an SC to accommodate *all* types of non-combat conflicts (exploration, negotiation, research, ritual magic, investigation, etc.) is farcical because they're so profoundly different.

Something I'm currently working on is a system by which you can design SCs in the exact way that you set up combat encounters: "types" of hazards/obstacles with different ranks. I'm also completely rebuilding the entire skill system so that the math and mechanics map onto attack rolls and damage rolls (success and quality checks for skills), but that's besides the point.

Something else I also think is important to move towards that 4e *definitely* didn't do is separating ability modifier from skill check (or, at least, provide significantly more options for using a non-standard ability score for a skill check, like STR for Intimidate or WIS for Religion) and having players use narrative descriptions of actions with DM adjudicating what the skill (and ability) that need to be rolled will be rather than explicit statement of the intended skill on the part of the player. The latter (which 4e written adventures basically defaulted to) discourages players from thinking outside the box and, in order to be inclusive, caused many adventures to end up with religion, stealth, and acrobatics becoming useful in situations that they had *no* right to be.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-07, 11:55 AM

Here is a really great description of what SCs are and how to run them from a poster on EN World:
That's precisely the point. This is SCs as designed by Manbearcat, and not SCs as printed in the manuals.

So, with skill challenges, the game flips from a finely tuned tactical combat game of conditions and positions and shifts and specials and counter-specials (which I think is a fair, non-edition-warring description of 4E's strengths, a distant cousin of MTG on a battlemat) to almost free-form theater-of-the-mind roleplaying?
Yes, but also a free-form TOTM where everybody must participate, must do so in initiative order, and must use a skill (and not an item or power or something else). The DMG also specifies that characters must be penalized for trying something that the DM didn't anticipate, although later books retracted that.

A later book (that players tend to ignore) also specifies that a SC should have one of precisely two outcomes, i.e. go to the next scene on the linear plot, or go to the same scene with a minor complication (like losing a healing surge or a penalty to initiative). But players tend to ignore this part, and rightfully so :)

Point is, there is a WIDE difference between what the rulebooks say about SCs, and what players actually do. In fact the only thing in common appears to be the name "SC". Catchy name, that.

johnbragg

2018-02-07, 12:21 PM

So, to summarize, the thing about Skill Challenges to take from 4E (4E as written, rather than 4E houserules) is the idea of an encounter that uses Skills (or ability checks if the players don't have relevant skills), that uses them in a more granular way than a single die roll.

At the very least, my 3-stage, "choose your own adventure"-style Complex Locked Door above. At the very least, you break down "I roll--what happens" into 3 parts.
Maybe allow one failure before total task failure, maybe successes and failures add or subtract from DC until you hit a success point or failure point.
Pick a rule of thumb range of percentages--more successes required should allow a greater margin for failed checks before total task failure. 10-40%?

obryn

2018-02-07, 01:31 PM

That's precisely the point. This is SCs as designed by Manbearcat, and not SCs as printed in the manuals.

Yes, but also a free-form TOTM where everybody must participate, must do so in initiative order, and must use a skill (and not an item or power or something else). The DMG also specifies that characters must be penalized for trying something that the DM didn't anticipate, although later books retracted that.

A later book (that players tend to ignore) also specifies that a SC should have one of precisely two outcomes, i.e. go to the next scene on the linear plot, or go to the same scene with a minor complication (like losing a healing surge or a penalty to initiative). But players tend to ignore this part, and rightfully so :)

Point is, there is a WIDE difference between what the rulebooks say about SCs, and what players actually do. In fact the only thing in common appears to be the name "SC". Catchy name, that.
Which manuals are we talking here? Nobody should use skill challenges as they appear in the DMG for anything. Those rules have been errata'd into oblivion, thank goodness - and that's where all the jacked-up stuff like forced checks and acting in initiative order comes from. None of that made any sense when it was published, and none of it makes sense now.

It took WotC until the Rules Compendium to actually get skill challenges 'right' - and a good part of that was turning them into a collection of options, rather than a single ugly structure. But as mentioned above, they are best used as an improv tool to break down a complex task. The structure is only as rigid as it needs to be; 3 failures = challenge failure is a rule of thumb that may not always make sense. Sometimes a failure state isn't necessary, and you might have consequences for micro-failures.

So, to summarize, the thing about Skill Challenges to take from 4E (4E as written, rather than 4E houserules) is the idea of an encounter that uses Skills (or ability checks if the players don't have relevant skills), that uses them in a more granular way than a single die roll.

At the very least, my 3-stage, "choose your own adventure"-style Complex Locked Door above. At the very least, you break down "I roll--what happens" into 3 parts.
Maybe allow one failure before total task failure, maybe successes and failures add or subtract from DC until you hit a success point or failure point.
Pick a rule of thumb range of percentages--more successes required should allow a greater margin for failed checks before total task failure. 10-40%?
It wouldn't usually be complicated door locks - but a complex task that you might be tempted to just narrate through or resolve with a single roll. For example, I used one in my Dark Sun 4e campaign for 'traversing the silt reef' - this is the walls of an ancient city, now buried underneath the silt, but high enough that one can walk along them with caution. Each check began with a Nature or Perception check; I can't remember which. Success lowered the DC for everyone, who then made group Athletics or Acrobatics checks depending on the section of wall. Individual failures would cost the character a healing surge as they slipped off the edge, got attacked by silt eels, etc. - unless they could be 'saved' by one of their companions who succeeded. A group failure simply meant there was no real progress made towards their destination tower. In this challenge, there was no ultimate failure state needed; resource attrition as they traversed the reef was sufficient to drive the tension. A skill challenge worked perfectly to provide structure to what would otherwise be a rather loosey-goosey affair.

I've also successfully used skill challenges as part of a larger combat encounter - and here, their basic structure works particularly well, IMO. One of the most successful was a battle against a sorcerer-queen, who was protected by basically the mother of all rituals. She was invincible until her wards could be taken down, which required the focused attention of characters skilled with Arcana or Religion (or armed with the right kinds of equipment - in this case, a special weapon dedicated to her destruction). At the same time as this was happening, her minions were occupying the rest of the party and trying to get at the counterspellers. Again, no ultimate failure state was needed; the longer the challenge took, the longer she could threaten the party with impunity. But in this case, failures caused a feedback loop of magical damage.

Other things I've used or planned include 'finding your way through a new town,' 'investigating leads on a crime,' 'navigating a labyrinth,' 'working a room to try and gain favor among the nobility,' 'invading the duke's keep without being seen,' and so on.

2D8HP

2018-02-07, 01:41 PM

I just don't know 4e that well, but there's a spell-less Ranger that looked AWESOME!, a lot of info on the Feywild, and the Nentir Vale setting looks AMAZING!

obryn

2018-02-07, 02:09 PM

I just don't know 4e that well, but there's a spell-less Ranger that looked AWESOME!, a lot of info on the Feywild, and the Nentir Vale setting looks AMAZING!
Yeah, the Nentir Vale setting (aka PoLand) is a well-thought-out setting designed from the top down specifically for D&D. The basics are pretty solid - and then more and more detail (that you can keep or ignore) gets dribbled out in later supplements.

I kinda love it, and wish there'd been a short sourcebook dedicated to it. (Not a 256-page hardback; more like a 64-pager with just enough info to riff off of without information overload or excessive detail.)

Speaking of, Conquest of Nerath - a board game that's best described as D&D meets Axis & Allies - has about as much setting information beyond the Nentir Vale as you're going to find anywhere. and the first 'world map' of the setting. It's also a pretty solid game, IMO.

Wasteomana

2018-02-07, 02:14 PM

I just don't know 4e that well, but there's a spell-less Ranger that looked AWESOME!, a lot of info on the Feywild, and the Nentir Vale setting looks AMAZING!

Well, I'll give my psuedo-mandatory "You are welcome to join us and play some if you ever want to try it out". We love having new players over in the guild.

johnbragg

2018-02-07, 02:38 PM

It wouldn't usually be complicated door locks - but a complex task that you might be tempted to just narrate through or resolve with a single roll.

That was a quick example, and even then a bad one because it's one PC doing everything. Things like stealth, or crossing a hostile environment, or a social encounter (where the objective is to have the low-CHA beatstick NOT get the party in trouble) is more the thing.

For example, I used one in my Dark Sun 4e campaign for 'traversing the silt reef' -
Yeah, if failures attrit some valuable resource--hit points, time, etc then you don't need to separately count failures.

I've also successfully used skill challenges as part of a larger combat encounter - and here, their basic structure works particularly well, IMO. One of the most successful was a battle against a sorcerer-queen, who was protected by basically the mother of all rituals. She was invincible until her wards could be taken down, which required the focused attention of characters skilled with Arcana or Religion (or armed with the right kinds of equipment - in this case, a special weapon dedicated to her destruction). At the same time as this was happening, her minions were occupying the rest of the party and trying to get at the counterspellers. Again, no ultimate failure state was needed; the longer the challenge took, the longer she could threaten the party with impunity. But in this case, failures caused a feedback loop of magical damage.

So the structure here was something like, skill checks to disable the 4 glyph-covered pillars in her sanctum, which would remove 1) her immunity to weapon damage, 2) her fast healing, 3) her immunity to elemental damage types, 4) some boss-monster ability like action-economy hacks?

Other things I've used or planned include 'finding your way through a new town,' 'investigating leads on a crime,' 'navigating a labyrinth,' 'working a room to try and gain favor among the nobility,' 'invading the duke's keep without being seen,' and so on.[/QUOTE]

obryn

2018-02-07, 02:54 PM

That was a quick example, and even then a bad one because it's one PC doing everything. Things like stealth, or crossing a hostile environment, or a social encounter (where the objective is to have the low-CHA beatstick NOT get the party in trouble) is more the thing.
Yeah, 'group checks' are one way to make sure Clunky McClunkerson, the heavily-armored warforged, won't single-handedly tank the entire party's chance of sneaking anywhere ever. For my own challenges, I think it's fine if the people who are best at <thing> basically take point on <thing>; you just give other party members some ways to help out that may not directly contribute to the number of successes or failures.

So the structure here was something like, skill checks to disable the 4 glyph-covered pillars in her sanctum, which would remove 1) her immunity to weapon damage, 2) her fast healing, 3) her immunity to elemental damage types, 4) some boss-monster ability like action-economy hacks?
You could do that, but this was a more straightforward "No, really, she's entirely invulnerable right now because she's a freaking sorcerer-queen who's been laying this groundwork for years, and if you want a chance to get that Sword up to her which has the specific purpose of killing her, you really need to deal with it through a bunch of checks and/or smacking the barrier with said sword a bunch of times."

Another example might be a trap-filled room, with swinging pendulums, logs, sawblades, etc. The traps could be an all-at-once or a piece-at-a-time sort of skill challenge, and all the while the ghosts of those slain by them are attacking.

MoutonRustique

2018-02-07, 03:19 PM

Something I'm currently working on is a system by which you can design SCs in the exact way that you set up combat encounters: "types" of hazards/obstacles with different ranks. I'm also completely rebuilding the entire skill system so that the math and mechanics map onto attack rolls and damage rolls (success and quality checks for skills), but that's besides the point.
I would really like to see the result (or progress) of this endeavor.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-07, 03:23 PM

a social encounter (where the objective is to have the low-CHA beatstick NOT get the party in trouble) is more the thing.
From an in-character perspective, the logical thing for said beatstick is to just stay quiet and let the other party members handle this one. Which should be fine in any RPG as long as every character gets a chance to shine in their own specialty.

Only by arbitrarily forbidding this (and let's face it, the original SC rules explicitly do that) do you get all kind of nonsense like "I use acrobatics to make the duke swoon over my physical prowess to convince him" or "I'll use religion to pray to my deity to convince the duke" or "I use stealth to pretend I'm not here, which will keep me from distracting the duke and counts towards convincing him".

Wasteomana

2018-02-07, 03:37 PM

From an in-character perspective, the logical thing for said beatstick is to just stay quiet and let the other party members handle this one. Which should be fine in any RPG as long as every character gets a chance to shine in their own specialty.

Only by arbitrarily forbidding this (and let's face it, the original SC rules explicitly do that) do you get all kind of nonsense like "I use acrobatics to make the duke swoon over my physical prowess to convince him" or "I'll use religion to pray to my deity to convince the duke" or "I use stealth to pretend I'm not here, which will keep me from distracting the duke and counts towards convincing him".

I mean, depending on what you are convincing the duke of, all of those could make sense.

"The duke doesn't think we can use only the rooftops of the city to move around, so I make my away across his feast hall without touching the floor as the bard keeps talking." - Acrobatics

"The duke may or may not be a religious man, but I will use my knowledge of religious texts to explain to the duke why this course of action will be looked upon very favorably or unfavorably by the church. If he goes through with his plan / does not agree with our plan he might have a religious uprising on his hands." - Religion

"You might think you are safe behind your guards and castle walls, but I would ask you Sir Duke, what exactly happens should someone make their way past your defenses? My associate whose hand is now on your shoulders is an expert in the art of course, but someone in the hobgoblin camp down below might be equally powerful. It would behoove you to pay to have us deal with the threat before the threat deals with you" - Stealth

Sure there is also a way to justify bluff, intimidate or diplomacy in any of those as well. But I think the issue is more often the previous point of "I magic at it" or I "Diplomacy at them" being the culprit rather than not being able to find a good way to work in skills.

Granted I say this as someone who uses the Scene based skill challenges that were popularized in LFR as my go-to for skill challenges and I don't generally use required or recommended checks (with some notable exceptions), but the point remains.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-07, 03:45 PM

Sure there is also a way to justify bluff, intimidate or diplomacy in any of those as well. But I think the issue is more often the previous point of "I magic at it" or I "Diplomacy at them" being the culprit rather than not being able to find a good way to work in skills.
Of course. The issue is in players always using their best skill for everything, on the flimsiest excuses. LFR popularized this, as numerous LFR adventures did shoehorn in poorly fitting skills under the flimsiest excuses, too.

Whatever mechanic people design for SCs needs to take this into account, either by having nonsensical actions auto-fail (which, you know, every single other RPG does except for 4E :smallbiggrin: ) or by making the bonus for good RP/clever ideas/fitting skills substantially bigger than the difference between a character's best skill and his average.

johnbragg

2018-02-07, 03:53 PM

From an in-character perspective, the logical thing for said beatstick is to just stay quiet and let the other party members handle this one. Which should be fine in any RPG as long as every character gets a chance to shine in their own specialty.

It's probably not the way a 4E skill challenge would do it, but I think the "Skill Challenge" as a series of skill checks, each of which has some impact on future checks, that cumulatively resolve the encounter, is a Big Idea that's worth stealing from 4E.

A very 3X way to do it would be to make the entire party--including Beatstick McFootinmouth make DC 10 diplomacy checks, and each success helps the party face's check a little bit and each failure makes his job harder. And then each PC ends up chatting with a counterpart--your beatstick talks weapons and war-stories with one of their beatsticks, your wizard talks arcana with one of theirs, etc etc. Those checks help or hurt the next round of face checks.

Only by arbitrarily forbidding this (and let's face it, the original SC rules explicitly do that) do you get all kind of nonsense like "I use acrobatics to make the duke swoon over my physical prowess to convince him" or "I'll use religion to pray to my deity to convince the duke" or "I use stealth to pretend I'm not here, which will keep me from distracting the duke and counts towards convincing him".

Well, not everyone has to talk to the Duke. It's a party--two Rogues could definitely get into a hide-and-seek contest, with the loser having to pay a forfeit.

ThePurple

2018-02-07, 04:01 PM

From an in-character perspective, the logical thing for said beatstick is to just stay quiet and let the other party members handle this one. Which should be fine in any RPG as long as every character gets a chance to shine in their own specialty.

While it might make sense for said beatstick to just stay quiet from a simulationist perspective, it doesn't really make sense from a gamist perspective. In the purely simulationist model, "muscle" would be a distinct character; not *everyone* gets to be a combat badass, because that's when the muscle gets to shine, just like talking is when the face character gets to shine, and the one hacking montage is when the hacker gets to shine, etc. If we're going to have a game where everyone gets to shine in *combat*, then everyone should also be able to shine in non-combat scenarios.

When you're playing a game, sitting back and watching one character do everything for an entire encounter is boring since you're turning a cooperative event into a single player game (for at least that short duration). This is why I think it was a good idea for SCs to be designed so that *everyone* is encouraged to contribute. Everyone attempting to contribute only becomes a bad thing when failure avoidance became a more important strategy than chasing successes because it discouraged anyone who wasn't optimized around that specific function to do nothing rather than risk failure.

Of course, this isn't just a problem with SC design. A lot of old-school players end up hyper-focusing their trained skills on a very small range of skills: high CHA characters will take all of the CHA skills and ignore physical skills, though, more often than not, they'll only ever use 1-2 of their CHA skills in any given SC and they'll have nothing to use in physical skill challenges (other than attempting to use Diplomacy to improve the morale of the team, which is just the CHA version of "praying for assistance"). A lot of classes tend to focus on this design as well, with highly restricted skill lists.

To me, the solution is just as much to change how SCs are designed as it is to change what skills players get and how they get access to them through their classes. The way 4e works, players should be encouraged to take a broad swathe of skills so as to ensure that they're able to do *something* in a wide variety of scenarios and classes should be set up to encourage it. Rather than creating extremely limited skill lists and then allowing players to pick a specific number of any from that list, it would work much better if there were simply broad categories that skills fit into (mental, physical, social) and then each class gets at least 1 from each (so fighters get 2 physical, 1 mental, 1 social, and 1 from any; wizards get 3 mental, 1 social, 1 physical; bards get 1 mental, 2 social, 1 physical, 1 mental or social, and 1 from any; etc.). This also ensures that classes don't have *nearly* the same hyperspecific conceptuality that prevents them from being globalized as much as they should be able to (Weaponmaster Fighter was supposed to encompass a *vast* plethora of concepts but its class skills provide only a minute interpretation of the concept; having to resort to backgrounds and themes to counteract this is just a cheap and ineffective hack to counteract a fundamental design flaw, imo).

Skills should also be set up so that you can use different attributes for different skills: a thuggish barbarian trained in Intimidate should be able to use their physicality to scare their opponents (i.e. roll STR + Intimidate) since I have a hard time believing that a trained killer is going to be less intimidating than his bardic companion (they should be roughly similar). We've got no problem allowing classes to use ability scores other than STR for melee attacks; so why is there all of this hang up on classes using ability scores other than CHA for Intimidate?

Also, while it might not make sense for the beatstick fighter to try and scare the baron during the negotiation, it makes perfect sense for the beatstick fighter to scare away some of the baron's more hostile advisors (since anyone like that would be bound to have advisors around and at least *some* of them are going to be overtly hostile to the PCs attempting to use the baron for their own purposes). Mayhaps the stealthy rogue is sneaking around the castle in order to get some dirt that can be used or to find out what childhood memories the baron happens to treasure in order to provide the face with a decent lever. "Taking part in the skill challenge" does not mean that the character needs to be *right there*, front and center. Everyone should be *contributing* towards success, which doesn't always *require* that the PC in question be butting heads with their opponent.

This last bit is, of course, something of an experiential thing. Players need to learn how skills can be used to support (in a way that isn't just "assisting") without directly attacking the situation, and GMs need to learn to roll with the ideas that players come up with (and find a way to surreptitiously give out hints to players when they're feeling stymied).

obryn

2018-02-07, 04:14 PM

Only by arbitrarily forbidding this (and let's face it, the original SC rules explicitly do that) do you get all kind of nonsense like "I use acrobatics to make the duke swoon over my physical prowess to convince him" or "I'll use religion to pray to my deity to convince the duke" or "I use stealth to pretend I'm not here, which will keep me from distracting the duke and counts towards convincing him".

Of course. The issue is in players always using their best skill for everything, on the flimsiest excuses. LFR popularized this, as numerous LFR adventures did shoehorn in poorly fitting skills under the flimsiest excuses, too.

Whatever mechanic people design for SCs needs to take this into account, either by having nonsensical actions auto-fail (which, you know, every single other RPG does except for 4E :smallbiggrin: ) or by making the bonus for good RP/clever ideas/fitting skills substantially bigger than the difference between a character's best skill and his average.
The original rules were not good. That is why they are no longer the rules. What you describe above have not been the rules for at least 4x longer than they were ever the rules in the first place. You might as well complain about how the number of successes vs. failures make longer challenges easier, or about how the DCs are way off.

If you want to bag on the problems with early 4e releases, okay - they needed to settle on a game philosophy and needed at least 6 more months of rigorous design and testing, particularly on the DMG and MM sides - but I dunno what any of this is supposed to say about skill challenges today.

ThePurple

2018-02-07, 04:25 PM

I would really like to see the result (or progress) of this endeavor.

The basics of it boil down to changing what being "trained" in a skill means from a mechanical perspective. Untrained means you don't get a proficiency bonus to your skill check (the equivalent of an attack) and you only get to roll a d4 (and half-abil mod) for your success roll (the equivalent of a damage roll) while trained means you get to add a +2 proficiency bonus to your skill check and roll a d8 for your success roll. Skill checks are d20 + enh + abil + half-level + prof; success checks are [S] + abil + enh. When you consider the broad spectrum of skills that my class tweaks give players, no longer tying a specific ability score to each skill, and assuming 3 high ability scores spread across different NADs, a player should be able to find *some* way to contribute to some extent in pretty much any situation.

(if you can't tell, untrained is basically "attacking" unarmed while trained is "attacking" with a +2/d8 weapon)

The main advantage is that it closes the gap on the question of *whether* an untrained character can actually contribute to a skill challenge (their success chance is simply ~55% rather than ~65%) while still allowing trained characters to contribute noticeably more (about 50% more average success points per check, iirc), which is what being trained in a skill was supposed to represent anyways.

Skill Focus would provide a +3 proficiency bonus and a d10 success die. I'm not sure whether I want it to be with *all* trained skills, all of a specific category (physical, mental, social), or a choice of 3 trained skills. My current thinking is that the best would be to have "all of a specific category", regardless of whether you're trained or not (though that would probably require a chance of verbiage to "+1 feat bonus to skill checks and an increased size of skill die") so that you can have some bleed over.

My main problem now is setting up the "hazard" types (I'm thinking about making them much more "general" and focused upon how many players are supposed to tackle them, with a "focused" hazard applying a penalty to all players after the first each round, a "rotating" hazard applying a penalty to a player if they attempt a check against it multiple turns in a row, a "complex" hazard that has a higher than normal DC but gets lower for each additional attempt after the first each round, etc.) and figuring out exactly how many success points each should have (since, unlike in combat, I'm actually planning on a fair amount of untrained attacks, which are generating success points at roughly 66% of what they *should* be, the equivalent of hp should be lower, but I'm not sure how much lower; also, there won't be encounter and daily powers being used like crazy because there's already plenty of tactical options provided by having different skills trained, which will change the math as well).

I also plan on adding skill powers to the set up (that will be highly generic) whose sole purpose is to provide tactical options to SCs, which I think is sorely lacking.

Yakk

2018-02-07, 08:32 PM

Any skill challenge best solved by a single expert should be a skill check. Having more people help should help.

All skill challenges need active hazards; failing to advance should hurt. Not doing something means you fail to advance.

If either of these fail to hold, just make it a skill check, resolve consequences, and end the scene.

Note that "a combat is going on while you need to solve it" satisfied both criteria, because the combat is part of the scene.

A cross country survival can qualify; doing nothing is failing to contribute. Note that here, complexity can increase with number of people being transported. The result of 1 person alone is only one makes it; 5 people require more successes, but the result is 5 people end at the destination.

"Passive hazards" -- hazards that only strike back -- are not a replacement for active hazards. As you can quickly notice, the result is that you should only have the best person at a check making the roll. There is no penalty for doing nothing.

You can have passive hazards in a skill challenge, but they shouldn't be the only hazards.

It can help to think about combat. Imagine monsters in combat that don't do anything, except when you attack them and miss.

Or, when you hit them and fail to do at least X damage.

You'll quickly realize that the right thing to happen is that 4/5 of your party should sit on their bum and let the most optimal character repeatedly make checks.

It is the active hazard of the enemy *attacking the party* that means that, even if your accuracy and damage is low, your contribution is still helpful.

Monsters with powers that "strike back" work, but only *on top* of the basic active hazard of "monsters that attack you".

Kurald Galain

2018-02-08, 06:45 AM

If we're going to have a game where everyone gets to shine in *combat*, then everyone should also be able to shine in non-combat scenarios.
The key here is realizing that if everybody has the same chance at helping at literally everything, that doesn't mean that everybody is shining: it means that nobody is shining.

When you're playing a game, sitting back and watching one character do everything for an entire encounter is boring since you're turning a cooperative event into a single player game (for at least that short duration).
There's a difference between forcing players to not participate, and giving players the option to not participate. Practically speaking, if you want everybody to participate in convincing the duke, then you're either forcing certain characters to fail a lot, or you're forcing them to do nonsensical things and just handwaving that this contributes somehow.

Of course the actual problem is that "talking to the duke" is way too narrow for a non-combat encounter. That's basically what you describe already. Unfortunately many printed WOTC adventures do contain nonsensical non-combat encounters as an SC, with random skills shoehorned in (the worst example I've seen is that a pile of rubble needs to be cleared, and this is somehow an SC that includes mental and social checks...). And unfortunately many new DMs learn from these adventures because they assume that's how you're supposed to do it.

Any skill challenge best solved by a single expert should be a skill check.
Yeah, basically that. Finding a magical tome in a library is better modeled with a single arcana check, than with an SC with e.g. the barbarian making an endurance check to move bookshelves around because that'll help with the organization somehow.

ThePurple

2018-02-08, 12:34 PM

The key here is realizing that if everybody has the same chance at helping at literally everything, that doesn't mean that everybody is shining: it means that nobody is shining.

There's an important distinction that you gloss over here.

There is a *massive* difference between "everyone has the same chance at helping at literally everything" and "everyone has a chance of contributing at literally everything". A high CHA character *should* be better at progressing the party through a social skill challenge, but that doesn't mean that the brainless beatstick should be utterly incapable (or have such a slim chance of providing a benefit with failures being explicitly penalized moreso than inaction) that they're actively *discouraged* from trying to contribute. This is one of the major ideas behind my change to skills: close the gap between trained and untrained for whether they're capable of succeeded and grade successes so that trained individuals preserve an advantage without rendering untrained individuals irrelevant.

Yakk

2018-02-08, 01:07 PM

As a really simple example, imagine if every skill check should have a normal and a critical result (a natural 20).

The effects of being skilled is that your normal result is the critical result.

Or maybe everyone rolls 2d20 on skill checks. Natural 20s are critical successes. If you are skilled, a double-success is also a critical success.

Lock: DC 15, 5 minutes to unlock. Critical: 1 action to unlock.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-08, 04:24 PM

This is one of the major ideas behind my change to skills: close the gap between trained and untrained for whether they're capable of succeeded and grade successes so that trained individuals preserve an advantage without rendering untrained individuals irrelevant.

That sounds like 5E's bounded accuracy. The downside of such systems is that untrained characters will commonly (randomly) do better than trained experts.

Beoric

2018-02-08, 04:50 PM

The issue can be mitigated with a more flexible approach to adjudicating actions.

Lets say the Duke is bright enough to be convinced by what is being said, and who is saying it, as opposed to how well it is being said. And the party has a Taclord with not a particularly high charisma. But the Taclord's thing is tactics, so he lays out the plan, and I let the player make an Intelligence check and give him a +5 bonus as though he was trained because tactics is what Taclords do.

Or there is a fighter with a decent Wisdom. He doesn't know tactics like a Taclord, but he knows fighting men. He has seen the enemy troops, and he can give an honest assessment of their ability. So I let him make a Wisdom check to correctly assess the enemy strength and explain it to the Duke, with maybe a +2 ad hoc bonus. Or maybe +5 if he has an Enlisted Soldier or Grizzled Sergeant background, or something similar.

And the Duke buys this because the Duke is used to consulting experts and recognizes competence when he sees it. If the Duke is a fool, then it is an entirely different encounter.

Not that I'm advocating for Skill Challenges. Because like I said, I believe in a more flexible approach to adjudicating actions.

ThePurple

2018-02-08, 11:20 PM

That sounds like 5E's bounded accuracy. The downside of such systems is that untrained characters will commonly (randomly) do better than trained experts.

Did you actually read the post I put in this very thread detailing my changes to the skill system? Because, if you did, I'm kinda curious as to how you can see an untrained character doing better than a trained character on anything approaching a "common" basis.

ThePurple

2018-02-09, 01:36 AM

Lets say the Duke is bright enough to be convinced by what is being said, and who is saying it, as opposed to how well it is being said. And the party has a Taclord with not a particularly high charisma. But the Taclord's thing is tactics, so he lays out the plan, and I let the player make an Intelligence check and give him a +5 bonus as though he was trained because tactics is what Taclords do.

Or there is a fighter with a decent Wisdom. He doesn't know tactics like a Taclord, but he knows fighting men. He has seen the enemy troops, and he can give an honest assessment of their ability. So I let him make a Wisdom check to correctly assess the enemy strength and explain it to the Duke, with maybe a +2 ad hoc bonus. Or maybe +5 if he has an Enlisted Soldier or Grizzled Sergeant background, or something similar.

Both of these are perfect examples of why I *hate* the current way that skills are tied to ability scores and that classes have a cripplingly limited number of trained skills on their lists.

In that first example, I see that more as an INT + Diplomacy check: Diplomacy is the suite of skills that are being used but the way they are being applied is in the logical application of them rather than the force of personality. Forcibly tying all skill checks to a single ability score limits them all on what they're capable of doing. Why should a Sorcerer be a better diplomat than a Wizard? The entire point of realpolitik is that it's based off of logic rather than emotional appeals. Explaining your position in a clear way with the benefits that both sides are able to respond to is a lot more important than your force of personality or how likeable you are. Diplomacy + INT is for realpolitik types; Diplomacy + CHA is for trying to make friends.

The second is a case for why the Fighter skill list is just terrible. Why should the only social skills that Fighters have access to be Streetwise and Intimidate? Being able to read your opponent's actions is part of the Fighter's *class concept*, so it makes no sense for them to not be able to be trained in Insight, which is basically defined as being able to read people based off of their body language rather than what they're actually saying. The Background system allows you to work around this somewhat, but that's just throwing a band-aid on the broken arm: rather than fixing the broken system, they added a new one that takes care of the problem a little bit and only if you provide a billion different options. If they just fixed *Fighter* as a whole, they wouldn't *need* all of the multitudinous backgrounds because Fighter would be able to accommodate them by default (themes are a completely different matter; those are actually a good system that works alongside classes rather than simply attempting to fix problems with the classes themselves).

Not that I'm advocating for Skill Challenges. Because like I said, I believe in a more flexible approach to adjudicating actions.

I have a hard time believing that you don't believe in Skill Challenges to *some* extent. You may not like the rigidity of form that they can be applied in, but the math they provide (setting the number of successes and rewards) is extremely useful even if you don't like forcing a turn order. From our previous discussions, I've to the conclusion that you already basically run what most of us would consider to be Skill Challenges and you simply refuse to call them as such because you have a strong emotional reaction to the term because of how it was initially used in 4e to represent such a terrible and abhorrent system.

"Skill Challenge" just means "system of rules for adjudicating the mechanical requirements of non-combat conflict resolution".

Kurald Galain

2018-02-09, 09:10 AM

"Skill Challenge" just means "system of rules for adjudicating the mechanical requirements of non-combat conflict resolution".

To many people, SC just means "the specific system printed in the 4E rulebooks for adjudicating non-combat scenes".

4E is hardly the first RPG to have non-combat scenes. 4E is the first RPG that uses this exact system with that exact name. If you use the term "SC" to refer to something else, why not use a clearer term? One of the reasons SC discussions tend to go nowhere is because there's always people that proclaim they love 4E's SC system, and upon questioning turn out to use either their own homebrew or 3E's out-of-combat system, and they just use the term SC for that even though it's completely different from what's in the 4E rulebooks.

Catchy name, that.

johnbragg

2018-02-09, 09:30 AM

To many people, SC just means "the specific system printed in the 4E rulebooks for adjudicating non-combat scenes".

4E is hardly the first RPG to have non-combat scenes. 4E is the first RPG that uses this exact system with that exact name. If you use the term "SC" to refer to something else, why not use a clearer term? One of the reasons SC discussions tend to go nowhere is because there's always people that proclaim they love 4E's SC system, and upon questioning turn out to use either their own homebrew or 3E's out-of-combat system, and they just use the term SC for that even though it's completely different from what's in the 4E rulebooks.

Catchy name, that.

Well, for my purposes (OP), the name "Skill Challenge" and the elements of "more than one roll" and "everybody/almost everybody participates" counts for the list. It's a 4E innovation (at least in D&D terms), and a worthy effort, whether or not 4E accomplished that goal.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-09, 09:55 AM

Well, for my purposes (OP), the name "Skill Challenge" and the elements of "more than one roll" and "everybody/almost everybody participates" counts for the list. It's a 4E innovation (at least in D&D terms), and a worthy effort, whether or not 4E accomplished that goal.

Right. So your list should contain "something named skill challenge regardless of what it actually is, as long as it's not the SC rules in the 4E rulebooks".

Because many people love naming anything skill-related a "skill challenge" and absolutely nobody likes the SC rules as first printed. Interestingly, WOTC is on record stating that these rules should "die in a fire".

Morty

2018-02-09, 10:29 AM

Both of these are perfect examples of why I *hate* the current way that skills are tied to ability scores and that classes have a cripplingly limited number of trained skills on their lists.

In that first example, I see that more as an INT + Diplomacy check: Diplomacy is the suite of skills that are being used but the way they are being applied is in the logical application of them rather than the force of personality. Forcibly tying all skill checks to a single ability score limits them all on what they're capable of doing. Why should a Sorcerer be a better diplomat than a Wizard? The entire point of realpolitik is that it's based off of logic rather than emotional appeals. Explaining your position in a clear way with the benefits that both sides are able to respond to is a lot more important than your force of personality or how likeable you are. Diplomacy + INT is for realpolitik types; Diplomacy + CHA is for trying to make friends.

The second is a case for why the Fighter skill list is just terrible. Why should the only social skills that Fighters have access to be Streetwise and Intimidate? Being able to read your opponent's actions is part of the Fighter's *class concept*, so it makes no sense for them to not be able to be trained in Insight, which is basically defined as being able to read people based off of their body language rather than what they're actually saying. The Background system allows you to work around this somewhat, but that's just throwing a band-aid on the broken arm: rather than fixing the broken system, they added a new one that takes care of the problem a little bit and only if you provide a billion different options. If they just fixed *Fighter* as a whole, they wouldn't *need* all of the multitudinous backgrounds because Fighter would be able to accommodate them by default (themes are a completely different matter; those are actually a good system that works alongside classes rather than simply attempting to fix problems with the classes themselves).

Seems to me like 4E doesn't really need class skills at all. There's no class whose identity is "skill specialist", since combat and non-combat aptitude is generally tracked separately.

johnbragg

2018-02-09, 01:01 PM

Right. So your list should contain "something named skill challenge regardless of what it actually is, as long as it's not the SC rules in the 4E rulebooks".

Because many people love naming anything skill-related a "skill challenge" and absolutely nobody likes the SC rules as first printed. Interestingly, WOTC is on record stating that these rules should "die in a fire".

My point is that "Skill Challenge" is a 4E idea, much like "healing surges" are a 4E idea. Even if I call them Recovery Points, they give you half your max HP and you get 1+(1/2 BAB) per day. (Since I'm planning on doing all this with E6 I don't have to worry about how that scales). Exact mechanics don't transfer, but concepts do. The idea of self-healing being a thing all PCs or all characters can do is something that comes into the game in 4th edition. (It may have been in some splatbook or UA article somewhere.)

Similarly, the *idea* of an encounter where all or most of the party rolled based on their "skills" to overcome a "challenge" is not a thing before 4E. It's a 4E concept, much like your race and class being separate is an AD&D concept.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-09, 01:05 PM

My point is that "Skill Challenge" is a 4E idea, much like "healing surges" are a 4E idea. Even if I call them Recovery Points, they give you half your max HP and you get 1+(1/2 BAB) per day.
That's precisely the opposite.

For "recovery points", you're using the exact same mechanic under a different term.
For "skill challenge", you're using the exact same term for a different mechanic.

Similarly, the *idea* of an encounter where all or most of the party rolled based on their "skills" to overcome a "challenge" is not a thing before 4E.
Not particularly, no. Practically any RPG with skills has non-combat encounters where all or most of the party rolled based on their "skills" to overcome a "challenge".

The name is 4E. The idea that everybody must participate in initiative order, and must use a skill (and not an item or power or something else) is also 4E. The idea that characters must be penalized for trying something that the DM didn't anticipate is also 4E. The concept of resolving an encounter by rolling skills? Yeah, that's way older.

Yakk

2018-02-09, 01:33 PM

The core of skill challenge system, to me, is:

You have a task. You ask players how they solve subproblems of the task.

There is a success track.

Successful attempts to solve subproblems advance you a measured amount along the success track. Failed attempts to solve subproblems set you back a measured amount.

Only ask for checks if the success and failure has a modest bounded impact on the success or failure of the overall task.

The intial rules used (Complexity*2+1) successes and complexity failures (if I remember right), and was later changed to (Complexity*2+1) successes and 3 failures.

What makes this different than "use skills to solve a problem" is the idea of enforcing "you don't fail the entire problem due to a single die roll, and after a bounded number of checks the problem must be solved so the DM shouldn't ask for a stealth check 20 times in a row."

4e changes to skill challenges kept that core intact, and fiddled with the numbers. Most "skill challenge" systems keep that core intact (sometimes they talk about "if the players narratively solve the challenge, just go with it", but that tends to be an exception)

Beoric

2018-02-10, 09:20 PM

I have a hard time believing that you don't believe in Skill Challenges to *some* extent. You may not like the rigidity of form that they can be applied in, but the math they provide (setting the number of successes and rewards) is extremely useful even if you don't like forcing a turn order. From our previous discussions, I've to the conclusion that you already basically run what most of us would consider to be Skill Challenges and you simply refuse to call them as such because you have a strong emotional reaction to the term because of how it was initially used in 4e to represent such a terrible and abhorrent system.

"Skill Challenge" just means "system of rules for adjudicating the mechanical requirements of non-combat conflict resolution".

My objection to skill challenges in general is that they are systemized at all, which I think is rarely appropriate. You can have a robust ruleset for combat because combat in general has a limited number of actions associated with it, and a limited number of likely objectives. I mean, there are still a lot, but nowhere near as many types of actions or approaches or objectives as there are for everything else in the world that is not combat, which is what the skill system adjudicates. There are just too many variables for out of combat situations to systemize them.

Whether you follow the original rules or the more flexible approaches that have arisen since, skill challenges are still treated as mini-games. In my games, as a rule, I set up the situation, but I don't establish in advance the character's approaches, the choice of skills, which characters will act, how many successes are required to succeed, how many failures are required to fail completely, or what the consequences are of individual failures.

If that's a skill challenge, then okay, I run skill challenges.

My players are way too unpredictable to waste my time designing a structure which will soon become irrelevant. And when I'm a player I'm as bad as they are. You know how I would approach persuading the Duke if I was a player? I would ask around and try to identify the Duke's (and Duchess') servants, guards and confidents, try to use that to find their interests, strengths, weaknesses, anything that could be leveraged. I would find out which advisors (and servants etc.) had influence and do the same with them. And then I would decide on an approach, and go into the meeting with the support of his advisors, or a plan to discredit any whose support I could not get. Because all of those underlings are easier to get to than the Duke.

I would already know what ancient generals he likes to read, so no need for the wizard to do a history check to remember military history (because wizards are big on that stuff). My fighter is chummy with the captain of the guard, who can vouch for his athletic prowess, so no need to do push-ups in the throne room. I know the Duchess is a patron of the local orphanage, and play up the impact of the depredations of the approaching orc hordes on the families outside the city. I walk in with a map I have purchased, showing the positions of the orc hordes and the Duke's defences so I have a visual aid for the discussion. For that matter, the wizard can use prestidigitation to change the positions of the marks on the map to show different scenarios; I doubt anyone else brought a powerpoint.

By this time, if the party face is accurate and credible and doesn't screw anything up, and if nobody else has any bright ideas, should he even have to make a Diplomacy roll?

ThePurple

2018-02-10, 10:53 PM

You know how I would approach persuading the Duke if I was a player? I would ask around and try to identify the Duke's (and Duchess') servants, guards and confidents, try to use that to find their interests, strengths, weaknesses, anything that could be leveraged. I would find out which advisors (and servants etc.) had influence and do the same with them. And then I would decide on an approach, and go into the meeting with the support of his advisors, or a plan to discredit any whose support I could not get. Because all of those underlings are easier to get to than the Duke.

In my game, *all of those things* would be actions taken as part of the skill challenge.

The skill challenge begins when you decide that you need to convince the Duke, not when you immediately start talking to the Duke. And just because one player is talking to the Duke doesn't mean that the rest of the party can't be doing other stuff that still contributes. Hell, I think that Skill Challenges are a great time to include the old cinematic devices of the cut-away and the flashback. 4e is a very cinematic game (which is why HSs make so much sense), so it makes sense to use these, as I see it.

It's important to remember that PCs in 4e aren't just schmucks. They're supposed to be highly capable. I've got no problem sometimes representing this capability by allowing a player to say "what if I did X a few days previously?" and then allowing them to roll for success at that venture right then and there (if it makes sense, of course).

Beoric

2018-02-11, 01:07 AM

In my game, *all of those things* would be actions taken as part of the skill challenge.

The skill challenge begins when you decide that you need to convince the Duke, not when you immediately start talking to the Duke. And just because one player is talking to the Duke doesn't mean that the rest of the party can't be doing other stuff that still contributes. Hell, I think that Skill Challenges are a great time to include the old cinematic devices of the cut-away and the flashback. 4e is a very cinematic game (which is why HSs make so much sense), so it makes sense to use these, as I see it.

It's important to remember that PCs in 4e aren't just schmucks. They're supposed to be highly capable. I've got no problem sometimes representing this capability by allowing a player to say "what if I did X a few days previously?" and then allowing them to roll for success at that venture right then and there (if it makes sense, of course).

1. I don't think you can possibly know in advance the structure necessary to adjudicate all that.

2. If you arbitrarily impose a structure, that structure will get in the way of the organic flow of the game. For example, if three failures make the PCs fail the challenge, but the third strike is on a check which, if viewed purely as a consequence to failing the stated action, should not have the impact of causing the failure of the whole challenge. In general, checks are going to come up randomly in response to PC actions. You don't know how often, so how can you say in advance how many checks are enough?

3. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting the players state actions they took in the past. This structure prevents them from actually playing those events in order and seeing where they lead. What if they lead to a place where the meeting with the Duke never takes place? That's a bit awkward if you are running the flashback at the same time you are running the meeting.

Most situations are not well served by anything resembling the skill challenge structure, updated or not. This is no exception. This would work much better if it was run as a social adventure, with a bunch of NPCs that have relationships with each other, personality traits and goals that can be leveraged, and a list of places where they can be found. The actual structure, ad hoc or not, is probably node based.

ThePurple

2018-02-11, 01:43 AM

1. I don't think you can possibly know in advance the structure necessary to adjudicate all that.

Structure is not a binary element. It's a gradient. The only "structure" you need is one in which you know the absolute requirements and necessary mechanical results of the situation in question (e.g. how many successes are required to succeed and how much xp should be rewarded). The rest of the "planning" is simply shorthand for likely potential options with room for the players to operate outside the box.

2. If you arbitrarily impose a structure, that structure will get in the way of the organic flow of the game. For example, if three failures make the PCs fail the challenge, but the third strike is on a check which, if viewed purely as a consequence to failing the stated action, should not have the impact of causing the failure of the whole challenge. In general, checks are going to come up randomly in response to PC actions. You don't know how often, so how can you say in advance how many checks are enough?

The 3 failures part of skill challenges is, point of fact, one of the things that has been universally derided as a terrible idea. If you want to talk about the inability of a system to properly accommodate player actions, you need to bring up something that *hasn't* been soundly removed from pretty much every iteration since the first. It's like complaining about something from 1st ed when talking about 3.X systems.

As to however many successes are required to complete a given challenge, that's entirely within the scope of the system. Just as it's appropriate to assess difficulty with DCs, it's appropriate to assess difficulty by the number of successful actions that must take place.

3. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting the players state actions they took in the past. This structure prevents them from actually playing those events in order and seeing where they lead. What if they lead to a place where the meeting with the Duke never takes place? That's a bit awkward if you are running the flashback at the same time you are running the meeting.

I'm talking about general actions that would have logically occurred in the past, like the fighter saying "What about if I impressed upon his advisors earlier on?"; not things like "What if I went on a cold-blooded murder spree and killed *absolutely everyone the duke listens to that disagrees with us*?" It's not "running a flashback" any more than, in a heist movie, when they talk about this secret thing they did and it shows a 5 second clip of that occurring. Not *every* action has an entire scene devoted to it, especially if the point of the SC is to serve a longer running adventure with plenty of traditional combat rather than acting *purely* as a social adventure.

Kurald Galain

2018-02-11, 02:36 AM

The 3 failures part of skill challenges is, point of fact, one of the things that has been universally derided as a terrible idea. If you want to talk about the inability of a system to properly accommodate player actions, you need to bring up something that *hasn't* been soundly removed from pretty much every iteration since the first.

Later iterations of WOTC work off two failures or four failures, not three; but it's still a fixed value decided in advance regardless of what the PCs are actually doing.

It's an entirely valid point that any structure for non-combat encounters runs the risk of either indicating the encounter is "won" when the PC actions suggest that it's not, or vice versa. You can tweak the math to make it less likely, but it's still there. To math-savvy players, that makes the goal of the scene not so much "convince the duke", but "convince your DM that you can use your best skill a couple times".

Yakk

2018-02-11, 02:52 PM

There are certain things that aren't fun in a 5-6 player game.

For example, watching while 1 person solves a complex puzzle while doing nothing

To that end, some kinds of "skill challenges" shouldn't be used. Like "make 15 lockpick checks, and if you fail 3 times the device destroys itself".

You could imagine a device that had 15 locks etc, but the fiction should serve the gameplay to some extent.

---

Hence the general rule. If the player is using a resource there is no shortage of (time, or whatever), and there is no consequence for failing the check, then don't roll the check. Make up some fiction asto what happens. No dice need be involved. You don't get a point on the skill challenge success chart, but you don't risk a failure.

Only make a check when there is something on the line. Zero opportunity cost, zero downside checks don't add to the difficulty or complexity of the skill challenge.

They are going off and researching the military general that the duke admires? If there is no time pressure, just tell them they got some information.

If there is time pressure, then explain that this research will use up X units of it. And when they run out of time they have a meeting.

Suppose you have 5 players in a C5 skill challenge (11S before 3 failures) and you have 2 days. In those 2 days, say you have time to do one piece of background research from each player. Every piece less than 5 you get counts as a failure.

Then during the discussion itself you need 11 successes before 3 failures (including the prepared successes/failures). But you only have 3 minutes to convince the duke, and in each minute each player can make a check if they can find a justification for doing so.

Rolling this back, when the players seek an audience with the duke, they are told "I can get you 3 minutes in 2 days".

natiels

2018-02-19, 10:29 AM

Targeting the OP question here. I would say the power system. Its the part of the game that drew me to 4E. I had spent time with 3e and pathfinder and was contemplating going to 5e when I decided to actually read the rules for 4e instead of just going based off of all the bad internest press. The way it spices up tactical combat and gives non casters interesting things to do as well as giving casters themselves options (other than hiding or using a crossbow) right out of the gate is really fun.

Yakk

2018-02-19, 03:33 PM

I'd hold that the power system isn't the important part there.

There are two things there. First, it has mechanics that are tactically interesting; it doesn't *just* rely on situations. Each character *by themselves* has tactical hooks, the party entire has tactical hooks, and monsters all have tactical hooks. All of this happens regardless of the terrain and combat situation.

That is great.

The second thing is that it gives non-casters exception based design elements. Spells are exception based design elements. You have the base rules of the game, and then you have spells which say "despite what the rest of the rules of the game say, you get to make a fireball appear. This fireball deals Xd6 damage. Booyah."

4e gives abilities like that to non-spellcasters. "Despite what the rest of the rules say, you get to move 30', ignore being threatened, move through opponents space, and attack everyone you move through with advantage".

That exception based design *need not be structured like powers* for it to work. But in 4e, it starts from level 1, and it keeps on happening pretty much every single level. You get a new way you get to rewrite the rules of the game you are playing.

What more, they get increasingly awesome and scale with level. Take 3e ranger; imagine if they got camoflauge at level 1 and hide in plain sight at level 2. And kept on getting more significant exception based abilities at every level.

The monk is a poor example of this, partly because the abilities the monk gets rapidly stop being significant; 17th level monks get at-will 2nd level bard magic.

natiels

2018-02-20, 10:34 AM

That exception based design *need not be structured like powers* for it to work.
I love how you expound on these things and bring the underlying mechanics to light, you seem to have a real knack for it. The way you say it makes me think of MTG. Despite what the rules of the game are at a high level you get to do what this card says you can do.

Morty

2018-02-20, 11:48 AM

I'd add to it that 4e powers introduce resource management for everyone. In other editions, non-magical abilities need be at-will or close to it, which limits them severely. They need to be something that won't threaten the game if it's used repeatedly, or random. Being able to make a particular ability only usable a number of times in an encounter/day/whatever opens it up.

neonchameleon

2018-03-02, 01:09 PM

Not sure which one thing - there are quite a lot I'd definitely look at.

Monsters given a combat role to make character design easy.
Monsters given an effective "weight" (Cannon Fodder/Minion, Standard, Named/Elite, Fight to themselves/Solo (e.g. a dragon)) and a combat stat block with the weight to represent it. They also need levels if you're going to have a level system in the game.
Monster stat blocks that can easily fit on an index card and creation rules simple enough to fit on a business card (http://blogofholding.com/?p=512). (Of course solos need more guidance than that).
Monsters with unique gimmicks that make them stand out as a race (e.g. kobolds getting a free five foot step every turn, gnomes turning invisible, or orcs getting one final hit) or as a thing (golems pushing everyone out of their way). The gimmick will do more to differentiate your monsters and make them memorable than 2 points of AC, a handful of hit points and a high FORT save ever will.
Monsters with reactive abilities. It's boring for fire elementals to be immune to heat (and makes little more sense than for flesh golems to be immune to punches). It's much more interesting and memorable for it to be a bad idea to throw fire at a fire elemental because it makes them burn hotter for a round or it makes them flare.
Characters that have all their abilities beyond the game's basic rules on their character sheets, with no looking anything up in the index to slow you down.
Scene resolution mechanics that can handle utterly ridiculous PC plans - this is certainly how I have used skill challenges ever since I started DMing 4e (https://docs.google.com/document/d/18t-lWABpQoNnT_HbV97HjHYko-2MSxIXKBeAe9d5ADM/edit). The only other RPG I'm aware of with this sort of tool is Blades in the Dark.
A split between stun (hit points) and long term stamina (healing surges) - which allows inspirational characters to get people back to their feet the way they can in the real world without it being magic, and makes actual magical (surgeless) healing rare and magical. Note 5e hit dice utterly fail here.
A fighter who might not hit as hard as the raging barbarian - but gets up in the face of the enemy and will take advantage of small gaps in concentration (whether to 5 foot step or attack someone else) to eviscerate the enemy. He's not the overmuscled brute that the Barbarian is - but rather a killer who you don't dare turn your back on even if he doesn't hit as hard - for some reason this qualifies as a Defender in 4e.
The warlord class. The inspirational part, the "wielding the barbarian" part (a warlord frequently gives their attacks to the other members of the party), and the
Simple to play spellcasters (Elementalists) and complex and tactical fighters (PHB fighters).
Forced movement coming as a matter of course. If combat is going to take a while it's a lot more interesting and engaging if you're teaming up to throw monsters into their own pit traps as well as kill them.
Magic being largely split into combat-magic and rituals. And it being entirely possible to make a ritual caster who reaches for his sword when there's combat.
Exception based design for the fighter-types. (Yakk's just illustrated that nicely)
Non-casters getting visible and inspiring stuff that makes them different from a cloned human from first level onwards just as spellcasters get to wield flashy magics from first level onwards.
Hit points being recovered on the same schedule as spells. (This part of healing surges works with the part mentioned earlier to make sure that clerics are useful to any party but not necessary - and that fighters really do bring toughness rather than their endurance being a function of how long healing magic lasts)

Beoric

2018-03-02, 09:29 PM

Practiced maneuvers for martial classes. They don't have to be so over the top, but they do have to exist.

Inigo Montoya: “you are using Bonetti’s defence against me, huh?”

Man in Black: “I thought it fitting considering the rocky terrain.”

Inigo: “Naturally, you must expect me to attack with Capoferro!”

MIB: “Naturally. But I find that Thibault cancels out Capoferro.”

Inigo: “Unless your enemy has studied his Agrippa!” [somersault] “Which I have!”

johnbragg

2018-03-03, 03:50 PM

Not sure which one thing - there are quite a lot I'd definitely look at.

[list]
Monsters given a combat role to make character design easy.
Monsters given an effective "weight" (Cannon Fodder/Minion, Standard, Named/Elite, Fight to themselves/Solo (e.g. a dragon)) and a combat stat block with the weight to represent it. They also need levels if you're going to have a level system in the game.
Monster stat blocks that can easily fit on an index card and creation rules simple enough to fit on a business card (http://blogofholding.com/?p=512). (Of course solos need more guidance than that).

I haven't had a big problem with this in 3X--I can get the vital stats on a powerpoint slide in 24 point type, print them 6 to a page and have no problems, or handwrite it on an index card. 5th is a little more challenging, because I don't have the same system mastery so I have to write out how everything works.

Monsters with unique gimmicks that make them stand out as a race (e.g. kobolds getting a free five foot step every turn, gnomes turning invisible, or orcs getting one final hit) or as a thing (golems pushing everyone out of their way). The gimmick will do more to differentiate your monsters and make them memorable than 2 points of AC, a handful of hit points and a high FORT save ever will.

This is good. Doing this in 3X means that your templated Fire Ogres, Ice Ogres, Half-Fiendish Ogres are all still ogre-y. Pick 5-10-20 monsters you know are going to be campaign mainstays and give them each a gimmick.

Monsters with reactive abilities. It's boring for fire elementals to be immune to heat (and makes little more sense than for flesh golems to be immune to punches). It's much more interesting and memorable for it to be a bad idea to throw fire at a fire elemental because it makes them burn hotter for a round or it makes them flare.

Right, immunity is boring. And "Surprise!! Damage type X actually *heals* monster Y" can be punishing to new players in unfun ways. But "damage type X gives monster Y extra abilities for a round" is a good balance.

Characters that have all their abilities beyond the game's basic rules on their character sheets, with no looking anything up in the index to slow you down.

Agreed. One page in old-people big type for character basics, maybe a second page for yuour special tricks-- spells and summons and combat tricks and things. More than that slows the game down and feels like homework.

Thanks for the response.