D&D4 Skill Challenges
Nov. 29th, 2010 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mneme posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
labcatsThis is a repost of a long post I just made on enworld, talking about whether 4e skill challenges should be obvious or inobvious. Since I took about half an hour to write it, stream of conciousness style, I figure it's worth dropping on my blog for comment as well.
I don't really care whether skill challenges are hidden or not. I'll generally never state "you are in a skill challenge, and need X successes before Y failures with Z primary skills" -- but I'll answer in the affirmative if asked, and generally give transparent-ish answers even if I never use the key words (and make it clear that actions have weight). OTOH, I can generally always tell when I'm in a skill challenge as a player.
Skill challenges, at their root, are a reframe of the conflict resolution concept (from narrative games like Prime Time Adventure, Dogs in the Vineyard, Mouse Guard/Burning Wheel, and Fate/Dresden) into D&D. You've got a defined goal -- prevent war from breaking out, find out who the murderer is before they kill again, get the king to let you into his dungeon -- with both a defined success criteria and a defined failure criteria, and the skill challenge mechanic's purpose is to keep track of how close you are to both sides; to frame your success and failure rather than making them completely arbitary on the whim of the GM. The GM can still make judgements on whim--but even so, putting things into a framework helps her be fairer and puts her on a sounder footing when doing so, just like running combat by the book means that when you try to drop the curtains over the beholder you're facing, the GM has a better idea of what the parameters are.
As such:
The advantage of stating that you're in a skill challenge is that it makes the weight of what people are doing obvious, and puts players on an even footing regarding knowing they're progressing towards a goal. Yes, there are challenges that have multiple possible goals where the players have to pick one (or more) sometime during the challenge, multiple parallel challenges where the players have to decide which goals are the most important (actually, that sounds kinda fun) but can accomplish multiple goals, etc--but that's the basics.
The disadvantage is that it breaks immersion, and can risk players with bad habits going into "skill challenge mode" when that's not necessary the way you're running the challenge (eg, you're running things properly, rather than sticking to your planning sheet, and letting plausible things work regardless of whether you (or the encoutner designer) thought of them in advance.
The advantage of never actually stating you're in a skill challenge is that, again, it keeps you in story mode--and that frankly, it's not really necessary; what's important is accurately representing the amount of urgency and risk involved in a situation; as long as you do that -either- via the mechanics or via story-level description, you're being fair, but since the story is the point (particularly in skill challenges), you're better off sticking to story as much as you can just because it's more fun.
The disadvantage is that it can make challenges that are intended to be short considerably longer, as players fumble around in the dark not realizing there are easy or plain answers to things; the more "skill challenge" signals you bring to bear (either in the story or explicitly), the clearer to the players this is that 1. There is a goal, they're not just free roleplaying, but there is Stuff going on, and that 2. This isn't just a game of "read the GM's mind"; instead there are things the characters can do that will help (or possibly, nearly anything the characters try could help). Moreover, there's a big risk in keeping things under the surface -- illusionism.
To avoid the question -- illusionism is the GMly practice of presenting an illusion of player choice when the truth is that there's nothing of the sort. Present 3 doors, make it seem like which the players choose is important, but in truth whichever door they go through will result in the same answer. When the players kill your "main villain" in the first encounter and he was supposed to get away, decide he wasn't the main villain after all to keep the story on track. When the players refuse the first quest you hand them and decide to make their own way, decide they end up in the same dungeon you were trying to lead them to, even though it's in the opposite direction. That kind of thing.
The problem with illusionism, fundamentally, is that it means that what the players choose doesn't matter. It's easy to think it doesn't matter--that it's just "keeping the story on track", but that means that there's "a story" that the GM controls--and whether they know it or not, if the players ever find out the whole truth they may find themselves asking (quite reasonably) why they were bothering to show up at all and being presented the -illusion- of helping create a story, wheras the truth was that the GM was following a script and they were just being lied to.
Getting back to skill challenges, the risk of not exposing that they're going on (just as it's the risk of making GM rolls behind a screen) is falling into illusionism and having the PC/player actions not actually affect what's going. It's much harder to do this when at least some of the mechanics and frame of a skill challenge is exposed, as they players are aware that they are in a matter of some import, and aware of how close they are to failure (where the story swings one way) or success (where it swings another). But it's far to easy, when hiding the fact that they're in a skill challenge at all, to not merely keep immersion going but also remove the whole point of being in one -- or at least of the players being able to make intelligent decisions in that context.
I don't really care whether skill challenges are hidden or not. I'll generally never state "you are in a skill challenge, and need X successes before Y failures with Z primary skills" -- but I'll answer in the affirmative if asked, and generally give transparent-ish answers even if I never use the key words (and make it clear that actions have weight). OTOH, I can generally always tell when I'm in a skill challenge as a player.
Skill challenges, at their root, are a reframe of the conflict resolution concept (from narrative games like Prime Time Adventure, Dogs in the Vineyard, Mouse Guard/Burning Wheel, and Fate/Dresden) into D&D. You've got a defined goal -- prevent war from breaking out, find out who the murderer is before they kill again, get the king to let you into his dungeon -- with both a defined success criteria and a defined failure criteria, and the skill challenge mechanic's purpose is to keep track of how close you are to both sides; to frame your success and failure rather than making them completely arbitary on the whim of the GM. The GM can still make judgements on whim--but even so, putting things into a framework helps her be fairer and puts her on a sounder footing when doing so, just like running combat by the book means that when you try to drop the curtains over the beholder you're facing, the GM has a better idea of what the parameters are.
As such:
The advantage of stating that you're in a skill challenge is that it makes the weight of what people are doing obvious, and puts players on an even footing regarding knowing they're progressing towards a goal. Yes, there are challenges that have multiple possible goals where the players have to pick one (or more) sometime during the challenge, multiple parallel challenges where the players have to decide which goals are the most important (actually, that sounds kinda fun) but can accomplish multiple goals, etc--but that's the basics.
The disadvantage is that it breaks immersion, and can risk players with bad habits going into "skill challenge mode" when that's not necessary the way you're running the challenge (eg, you're running things properly, rather than sticking to your planning sheet, and letting plausible things work regardless of whether you (or the encoutner designer) thought of them in advance.
The advantage of never actually stating you're in a skill challenge is that, again, it keeps you in story mode--and that frankly, it's not really necessary; what's important is accurately representing the amount of urgency and risk involved in a situation; as long as you do that -either- via the mechanics or via story-level description, you're being fair, but since the story is the point (particularly in skill challenges), you're better off sticking to story as much as you can just because it's more fun.
The disadvantage is that it can make challenges that are intended to be short considerably longer, as players fumble around in the dark not realizing there are easy or plain answers to things; the more "skill challenge" signals you bring to bear (either in the story or explicitly), the clearer to the players this is that 1. There is a goal, they're not just free roleplaying, but there is Stuff going on, and that 2. This isn't just a game of "read the GM's mind"; instead there are things the characters can do that will help (or possibly, nearly anything the characters try could help). Moreover, there's a big risk in keeping things under the surface -- illusionism.
To avoid the question -- illusionism is the GMly practice of presenting an illusion of player choice when the truth is that there's nothing of the sort. Present 3 doors, make it seem like which the players choose is important, but in truth whichever door they go through will result in the same answer. When the players kill your "main villain" in the first encounter and he was supposed to get away, decide he wasn't the main villain after all to keep the story on track. When the players refuse the first quest you hand them and decide to make their own way, decide they end up in the same dungeon you were trying to lead them to, even though it's in the opposite direction. That kind of thing.
The problem with illusionism, fundamentally, is that it means that what the players choose doesn't matter. It's easy to think it doesn't matter--that it's just "keeping the story on track", but that means that there's "a story" that the GM controls--and whether they know it or not, if the players ever find out the whole truth they may find themselves asking (quite reasonably) why they were bothering to show up at all and being presented the -illusion- of helping create a story, wheras the truth was that the GM was following a script and they were just being lied to.
Getting back to skill challenges, the risk of not exposing that they're going on (just as it's the risk of making GM rolls behind a screen) is falling into illusionism and having the PC/player actions not actually affect what's going. It's much harder to do this when at least some of the mechanics and frame of a skill challenge is exposed, as they players are aware that they are in a matter of some import, and aware of how close they are to failure (where the story swings one way) or success (where it swings another). But it's far to easy, when hiding the fact that they're in a skill challenge at all, to not merely keep immersion going but also remove the whole point of being in one -- or at least of the players being able to make intelligent decisions in that context.
