Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
So, I've been thinking about this skill challenge, and how poorly it modeled in-game reality.

You're on a sinking ship. By default, the condition track should not sit still - it should degrade every "turn"/action phase/whatever.

Character actions should almost never make the ship sink faster. It should almost never be optimal for someone to say, "nah, you guys have got this, I would just be underfoot, I'll sit this out", as was the case for Talakeal's character. This was quite literally an "all hands on deck" situation. More hands should have made the work lighter.

So, at the simplest, I might try… every "turn", the ship degrades 2 steps. Every turn, every character (and zombie!) can attempt a relevant ship check to improve the ship 1 step.

A more advanced system might allow really good rolls / more critical actions to increase the maximum number of steps gained (or even change the rate of progress lost!), or to limit the maximum number of gains from certain repeated actions (you can bail water infinitely, but there are only 3 patchable holes, for example). And to better model how long different actions take.

Thoughts?
Mathematically, this won't really fix the fundamental problem that this kind of 'roll to move along a track' mechanic amounts to waiting for a random walk to reach a boundary. Which means it takes time proportional to distance squared (e.g. if the skill challenge is on a track with 10 states, it takes ~25 steps rather than ~5 steps to get to either end from the middle if it's balanced around a 50% success rate).

I'd tend to do something more like, stage the failing ship issue relatively close to an island or other nautical feature, and you have a fixed number of intervals during which you can either try to accumulate enough successes to stabilize the ship outright (at a fairly high difficulty), spend successes to secure cargo (so if the ship ends up sinking, you have supplies wherever you end up), save or help crewmembers who are in peril due to capsizing/etc events, put out a fire that is causing cumulative damage/increases in difficulties over time (with a risk that if it goes totally unaddressed, it hits the powder room), or change the ship's heading in the hope that you can e.g. beach it before it sinks entirely. These different actions would depend on different methods of contribution - not just skills, but spells/etc could give automatic successes if they're appropriate to the specific sub-situation (say, you get to add your skill check to the total pool needed to repair the ship, but a Repair spell grants a fixed +5 per spell level)

So in 5 rounds, the situation will be definitively resolved one way or another. But the players have to basically make judgement calls - is it feasible for us to go all-in and try to salvage the ship entirely? Or do we need to go for the lower-risk goal of directing the ship to the nearby island? In that case, how should we prioritize the various things that are going wrong along the way?