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The skill checks of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (“4e“) were hated by many people, in part because they felt skill challenges were mixing skills into a system best suited for combat. I think it was Chris Perkins that analogized the criticism to people saying, “Keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate!” (and vice versa). While I don’t have a problem with the notion of a skill challenge, I do things a bit differently in my games, referring to them instead as “group checks.”
The Problems with Skill Challenges
In creating a model for group checks, Luddite Vic and I first had to identify what we didn’t like about skill challenges. First, they failed to discourage boring encounter design, which means most designs were boring. Second, the process itself became rote. Let’s deal with each separately.
Boring Writing
Let’s say the party is scaling a 100′ cliff. The fighter-type isn’t going to have much difficulty, and the wizard is going to be miserable, but we’ll deal with that later. In a skill challenge, you calculate how fast a character can climb (let’s say 15′ in a round), then divide that into the height of the cliff, and require a number of check equal to the quotient plus the remainder. That is, we divide 100′ by 15′ and get 6 and 2/3, which we round up to 7. The specific structures of skill challenges would give the DM two options: either “6 successes before 3 failures” or “8 successes before 4 failures.” Select one option and then select an appropriate set of skills a player can use to accomplish it. The obvious choices of skill are Acrobatics and Athletics. A character with poor bonuses for those will have to engage in some serious bullshit to convince the DM to allow a different skill instead. Even if the DM agrees, the target number the player will have to roll (the “DC”) using a less-than-relevant skill will be higher. But okay, that works. Everyone rolls.
However, consider conceptually what’s going on. They’re scaling a vertical cliff. That’s it, and that’s boring. Why not mix it up a bit? I’ll tell you why: There’s no motivation to do so. You can write this skill challenge as I have, and it does the intended job, just in a supremely boring way.
Boring Process
So, how does this play out? An experienced player knowing that they just need to roll, let’s say, 8 successful Athletics checks before rolling 4 failures will get out his d20 and just start rolling. “Success. Success. Failure. Success. Failure. Success. Success. Failure. Success. Success. Success. Yay. What did I win?” There’s no fun to this, and this is exactly how they all played out at tables on which I either played or ran. Everyone just wanted to get it done and move on to the fight at the top of the cliff.
Enter the Group Check
Let’s fix both of these, starting in reverse order. How about instead of rolling 8 successes before 4 failures, every character rolls just once regardless of the height of the cliff? This prevents that boring repetition. While you may agree that the repetition is boring, you may ask how a single roll by each player justifies the XP or story reward associated with the success. Well, first off, if it doesn’t justify the reward, don’t award it. Just view the success as moving the story forward. If that’s all that makes sense, don’t force the issue further than it should go. It’s a game, not a physics lesson. Second, leading to the second fix, write more interesting skill encounters. Sticking with our example, have the first part of the encounter scaling a vertical cliff face as suggested above. However, once you get beyond that, you then have a less steep climb through a sandy area where identifying strong-rooted bushes (a Nature check) is more important than sheer physicality (an Athletics or Acrobatics check). After that, you’ll obviously need to sneak up on the castle without being seen, which brings us to Stealth checks as the primary skill. Now the encounters are more interesting, and more players get their chance to shine and carry everyone on their shoulders (see Assists below). However, the important point is that each phase is a single roll for each player. If the majority of players are successful, the group is successful.
In other words, divide your encounter into multiple phases (until you run out of ideas), each of which feels very different both in terms of the description of the action and the skills being used. Do so regardless of whether the result is a skill encounter with 2, 5, or 25 phases. Obviously, there are plenty of instances where only one skill roll is needed (and few where 25 are needed 🙂 ), and there’s nothing wrong with that, but rather than succumb to boring processes to justify rewards, up your writing game to include more interesting encounters. Only where that occurs should you call it a skill challenge or group check and grant a reward.
I’m sure many games handle skill checks this way, but what 4e was trying to do with skill challenges was make an entire encounter out of skill checks in a cohesive way where the checks were related. That was a noble cause. The problem is that those checks were usually identical. The group check takes that idea and mixes it up a bit so that an experience point or story award is justified when based entirely on skill checks, yet keeps it interesting.
Assists
There’s another useful addition to this process. If the mathematical framework of the system supports it, a character’s remarkable success should allow assists as part of that process. If the DC for the Athletics check is 15, and the fighter scores a 20, then the fighter should be able to give a +2 bonus to the Wizard’s roll. For each 5 above the DC, the fighter will have another +2 bonus to grant to the Wizard or anyone else. This way, the fighter’s roll matters; he’s not trying to succeed, which is trivial, but instead to accumulate assists. Moreover, the wizard’s roll matters; he’s not trying to succeed, which is impossible, but instead to lose by a small enough margin to take advantage of the fighter’s success. Obviously, the amount of the bonus depends on the system’s mathematical framework, and there are such wide margins between the skill bonuses of 4e classes that it can be challenging (pun intended) to apply this in 4e, but it can be done if based on the specific players around the table. But make no mistake about it: This will work best if the game designer incorporates it into the framework ab initio.
Failure
I want to add one other thing that’s related. When players fail, there must be consequences. Failing while climbing a cliff shouldn’t mean a character falling to its death. That’s no way for a hero to die. So what do you do? To an extent, you can have mechanical consequences such lost healing surges, but often the most appropriate consequence is story based. For example, if you fail while climbing the cliff, you still make it to the top; it just takes too long. The result is that many of the people you’re trying to save are killed even if you successfully sneak in. They were scheduled for execution, and you didn’t get there on time.
Unfortunately, many players today don’t really care about story losses. If an NPC doesn’t have money or information to offer to PCs, the players often won’t prioritize the NPC’s health over their own. That’s not heroic, but that’s the way many people play. If they aren’t emotionally invested in the story, they aren’t going to care. So, sometimes failure can’t have consequences. In those situations, you need instead to reward successes beyond the obvious. On a success, you make it to the top of the cliff because that’s the entire point of the exercise, but if the characters aren’t fighting to prevent consequences, they can instead fight for an additional reward (without necessarily realizing it). In revisiting 4e sourcebooks I didn’t give proper attention in the day, I’m discovering some really interesting ideas that serve that purpose. Scrolls of power and dungeon companions from Into the Unknown: The Dungeon Survival Handbook (page 145), fey magic gifts from Heroes of the Feywild (page 140), intelligent items from Dragon 367 (page 22), and various alternative awards from the Dark Sun Campaign Setting (page 210) don’t significantly screw up a game’s balance, but they make for legitimate mechanical rewards and provide depth to the story. (Many items have levels, but they add a bit more flavor than an typical item of the same level.) On the other hand, as long as you don’t give away the surprise, dark rewards (i.e., cursed items and sinister items) from the Book of Vile Darkness (page 72) may serve as proper mechanical consequences.
This is why I said there’s still much more I have to do with 4th Edition.
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