# Forum > Gaming > Roleplaying Games > D&D 4e >  What am I forgetting about 4e D&D?

## Grod_The_Giant

I've spent a probably unhealthy amount of time thinking about roleplaying systems and "fixes" and "overhauls" of various Dungeons and Dragons editions.  And the more I do, the more I find myself admiring things I remember from 4e and thinking that a hypothetical 4.5e could have been really, really good.  But it's been a long, long time since I read anything from 4e, much less played it, and I _also_ remember finding a lot of things about it frustrating at the time.

So, uh... what am I getting wrong?  My rapidly-self-destructing brain insists that:
The basic framework of Powers was great.  The _specific_ powers usually wound up being bland and hyperfixated on combat, but it meant that every character was getting options at every level.  That most of the design work was going into _active_ abilities, not passive class features.  That you could easily compare apples to oranges, that you didn't have to repeat basic rules about targeting and partial effects over and over again, that you had a template for easily creating any sort of new magic item or weird ability and slotting it neatly into place alongside the others... you could have used a bit more variability between classes in the distribution of At-Will/Encounter/Daily options and a hell of a lot more (read: any) noncombat abilities, but still.Skill challenges!  They didn't quite work and were all too easy to reduce to just rolling dice over and over again, but they were a step towards more nuanced interaction rules that 5e took a sharp turn away from.Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies were more than a way to differentiate characters--they were an "excuse" for bigger, better, and weirder abilities at higher levels.  People may gripe about the basic Fighter getting superhuman strength, but not so much when he's getting that strength because he's descended from giants, or has a trademark magic item, or covered himself with runes, or... you get the idea.  If half your powers come from your class and half from your Race/PP/ED, you wind up with a huge variety of character options.The tightly bound system math is honestly good--predictable numbers make it way easier to improvise and homebrew things.The obsession with forced movement and area effects in combat meant that battles naturally encouraged dynamic positioning, without demanding that the GM constantly come up with new ways to keep the combat from devolving into two sides standing still and hacking at each other.Keywords make abilities easier to read, and reduce the potential of weird broken edge cases.

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## animorte

The more Ive been reading and discussing, I have also been seeking something simpler (even been working on my own basic system). I never played 4e, but Ive heard mention enough awful things *and* good things about it that inspired 5e, One, and several other modern TTRPGs. I do kind of want to see for myself.

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## Actana

The biggest frustration in my memory is simply tracking all the various effects in combat. There eventually just ends up being too many of them, and tracking which durations happen when is a pain in larger combats.

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## PhoenixPhyre

> The biggest frustration in my memory is simply tracking all the various effects in combat. There eventually just ends up being too many of them, and tracking which durations happen when is a pain in larger combats.


Yeah. Conditional stacking modifiers are horrible. Especially in a "tightly balanced" game because those end up really mattering.

The other issue with the tight balance is that it was quite fragile--easy to fall behind the curve and be utterly useless. This was due to needing numbers coming from magic items and feats, which pretended to be "choose what works" but really were "you need these specific options to meet system expectations".

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## Tanarii

You've nailed a few of the upsides, but here were the downsides:
- powers etc were overly focused on combat. And you can't just swap out a combat power vs a non-combat power without some notes on equivalence.
- combat required a battlemat to play.  This was a huge problem because battlemats slow down combat, which ruins pacing.
- required constant referencing of powers on a card or in the books or online, both character and magic items, during combat.  Also slowed down combat, ruining pacing.
- Many modifiers and conditions, again slowing down combat.
- bonuses exceeded the range of the die at high levels.
- tightly bound math meant only a very narrow level range could adventure together, and content had to be designed for a party's level.  Unlike 5e, you couldn't have characters 5 levels apart effectively adventuring together.

Replacing 5e spells with 4e-ish layout would be fine.  Spell cards are already a necessity for a 5e full caster.  And very common keywords referring core terms would be fine.  As long as it didn't break things again by changing bonuses to exceed the die, narrowing the range of characters that could adventure together, require a battlemat, or otherwise ruin 5e's blazing fast combat (for WotC D&D combat speeds).

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## Grod_The_Giant

> The more Ive been reading and discussing, I have also been seeking something simpler (even been working on my own basic system). I never played 4e, but Ive heard mention enough awful things *and* good things about it that inspired 5e, One, and several other modern TTRPGs. I do kind of want to see for myself.


For whatever it's worth, one of my most recent insane giant homebrew projects (a d20 adaptation of Exalted) ended up looking kind of 4e-like, if you squint-- straightjacket-tight math based almost entirely on your level, lots of forced movement, and 90% of abilities coming in the form of semi-standardized Charms powers picked off a big list.  But with waaaayyyy more noncombat stuff.




> The other issue with the tight balance is that it was quite fragile--easy to fall behind the curve and be utterly useless. This was due to needing numbers coming from magic items and feats, which pretended to be "choose what works" but really were "you need these specific options to meet system expectations".


Yeah, that's a good point to remember.  If you're relying on characters to have certain numbers, you better be _damn_ sure they're getting them.  You certainly shouldn't rely on them emerging as the sum of five completely separate features  :Small Sigh: .

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## Kurald Galain

Well, my best advice for you is to use the archive function of this very forum and look through your own posts in the 4E forum from years ago.

That said, from my own memory (having not played 4E for years now),
(1) the basic framework was great, and templates are great, and they should have templated a bit more. For instance, it doesn't help the game that there are easily a dozen "fireball"-type effects, some bigger than others, and some targeting fort instead of ref, or dealing some status condition or whatnot. What 4E does very right is that, if you describe enemies as (e.g.) "eladrin", the players will immediately expect them to teleport all over the place (and they do). What 4E does very wrong is that, if you yell "fireball!", the players will wait for you to explain what _this_ particular fireball does (as opposed to yesterday's fireball).
(2) the biggest issue with skill challenges is probably that they have no way of dealing with items or power usage, and in some situations an item or power is just the best solution.
(3) there are all kinds of issues with items, from option paralysis, to the fact that 90% are vendor trash, to the reuse of "daily" powers by buying copies of cheap low-level stuff, to the christmas tree effect. My experience at least is that 4E plays better and smoother without items (using inherent bonuses).
(4) PPs are great, EDs not so much (well, the _fluff_ is great). This is largely because of what you describe: PPs grant more (and more visible) powers than EDs do.
(5) forced movement is fun! What's also fun is crowd control magic. Or both: use forced movement to bunch enemies together, action point to cast massive crowd control.

HTH.

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## PhoenixPhyre

> Yeah, that's a good point to remember.  If you're relying on characters to have certain numbers, you better be _damn_ sure they're getting them.  You certainly shouldn't rely on them emerging as the sum of five completely separate features .


Agreed. Hard (meaning "things fall apart if not met") system expectations should not be optional.

Personally, I'd be much happier if
* Every "number" (core capability) that a particular class was supposed to have was baked into the class itself. You can have choices within that, but you shouldn't need anything else just to hit the expected bar.
* Everything else (such as feats and magic items) gives horizontal progression, not vertical progression. No feats that make you better at what you're already good at, but feats that let you do things _not_ baked into the class.
* Multiclassing (if it had to exist) is an extreme example of this and is "baked in" so you either get deeper/faster goodies (above system baseline expectations) in your "main" class OR you get horizontal growth, getting specific capabilities from other classes.

--------

In general, 4e had a lot of great ideas...and executed them poorly.
* regularized system (especially monster) math? Great idea. Implementation was rough and often tended toward very interchangeable monsters
* Everyone on the same basic system of powers? Great idea, in principle. In practice, not so much.
* Keywords? They can be great, but they actually add _more_ loopholes. Or they homogenize everything.
* skill challenges? The idea of "this isn't just one roll and done" is good, but the implementation sucked. It should have been a guideline for DMs to make engaging non-combat scenes, where each choice moves the narrative along and it's not just "roll lots of dice at the problem."
* Etc.

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## Telok

> The biggest frustration in my memory is simply tracking all the various effects in combat. There eventually just ends up being too many of them, and tracking which durations happen when is a pain in larger combats.


This was big for us. Having four or five effects with that 50/50 save ends each turn on a piece was murder for keeping stuff straight and smooth play. Payed merry hob with stuff that gave/got off turn saves too. A lot of it could have easily been cut to "until the end of your/target's next turn", and would have massively improved some stuff. One of our group started getting pissed because the DM was running support monsters granting off turn saves and all that pc has was save-ends effects. Half the time their power's good effect got stripped off before it made a difference on any important monsters.

The mounted combat rules and mounts were pure bad jank to us.

OAs were awful if you weren't a str based character or didn't have a power to use for them.

Hp bloat was an issue because you expected to blow your main useful powers in the first 4 or 5 turns, but if people missed a bit then you could assume like 3+ turns of at-wills to make up for one missed daily power. So (butt pull some potential example numbers) the seemed to assume around 75% hit rate, at-will being 2x basic attack, encounter being 2x to 3x at-will, and daily being 2x to 3x encounter. If you slammed out your 3 encounters & a daily but instead of missing any one you missed your two best you'd need roughly 3 to 6 turns of at-will to replace your extra miss. If 2 of 4 players have that happen you're generally looking at like two or three extra turns of the whole party doing just at-will spam to get even with where they were supposed to be at the end of turn 4. And that was assuming good decisions on the players side all the time & effective clumping of monsters for the AoEs.

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## Tanarii

> (1) the basic framework was great, and templates are great, and they should have templated a bit more. For instance, it doesn't help the game that there are easily a dozen "fireball"-type effects, some bigger than others, and some targeting fort instead of ref, or dealing some status condition or whatnot. What 4E does very right is that, if you describe enemies as (e.g.) "eladrin", the players will immediately expect them to teleport all over the place (and they do). What 4E does very wrong is that, if you yell "fireball!", the players will wait for you to explain what _this_ particular fireball does (as opposed to yesterday's fireball).


Heinsoo (mostly) fixed this in 13th Age.  Instead of having a close to identical version with bigger numbers or slightly boosted effects at higher levels, with a new name, many lower level powers could just be selected at the higher level for greater effect.  The upgrade was directly in the original power.  This saved a lot of space.  But it does mean paging back and forth a bit when selecting powers at higher levels, instead of just seeing your 4 possible options right next to each other.




> * skill challenges? The idea of "this isn't just one roll and done" is good, but the implementation sucked. It should have been a guideline for DMs to make engaging non-combat scenes, where each choice moves the narrative along and it's not just "roll lots of dice at the problem."


Having imported them to 5e, the biggest issue remains the same: Instead of the players engaging challenges and the DM calling for checks when there is a question of resolution, the DM has to figure out problems with possible approaches ahead of time that are 1 check each, then string together sufficient problems to total the maximum success + failure before the skill challenge fails, but also build in a break out of the skill challenge to continue the game after the minimum successes is reached.  And think about how failure won't be a blocker.

It kinda works for something like "our spaceship engine is failing and we need to get it working again" single problems and the players try whatever they can think of to analyze it then fix it.  But it's much harder to design a good one for something like "traverse the swamp to the enemy cave" wrapped around several encounters.

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## RandomPeasant

> So, uh... what am I getting wrong?  My rapidly-self-destructing brain insists that:


Basically, that the implementation sucked. And it extra sucked at the beginning, when people formed their opinions on the edition. RAW Core 4e _sucks_. It offers an "Epic" progression that steals space from everything else, but isn't fleshed out enough to be worthwhile. Skill Challenges are absolutely miserable (IIRC the problem in that iteration was that the DCs were so high you always failed, but I can't keep the versions straight). A bunch of classes and races were cut, meaning that people couldn't translate characters well. Combat is grindy, and becomes more grindy in boss fights and at high levels. Some classes don't have the abilities they need to make their expected builds work. Some classes don't have races that work with them. Some races don't have classes that work with them. Some of that improves over the course of the edition, but it's never really enough to get it to good (especially because there are some fundamental tensions it's saddled with, like being a stripped-down game with thirty levels of progression).

But, yes, 4e has several good ideas for how to make D&D better, and it is unfortunate that the quality of the implementation has soured people on a lot of them. One thing you don't mention is 4e's monster classes, which while far from perfect are way better than anything else D&D has proposed for that. Saying that a monster is a "Lurker" or a "Brute" conveys more than saying it is a "Dragon" or a "Fey", and the things the latter classifications to convey can be handled more than adequately by subtypes.




> The basic framework of Powers was great.


I think this depends a lot on what you mean by "basic framework of Powers". Consistent progression is certainly good, but the obsessive focus on AEDU absolutely was not. I think the absolute commitment to a single progression was also too much, as different ways for class abilities to work naturally push towards different progressions. The Wizard (who has a big book of spells they prepare out of) and the Warlock (who has a pact that grants them specific powers) want to get different amounts of powers and get them in different ways. I think the sweet spot is probably to pick a progression at which people get new levels of powers, and let individual classes set things within that (I'm partial to 1/4/7/10/13/16, vacillating on whether you need the additional level of powers at 19).




> Skill challenges!  They didn't quite work and were all too easy to reduce to just rolling dice over and over again, but they were a step towards more nuanced interaction rules that 5e took a sharp turn away from.


Skill Challenges are quite close to working. You just need to flip it from "the challenge ends after X failures" to "the challenge ends after X rounds of rolling", and then you have a robust and extensible system for "non-combat stuff". But in all the iterations I paid attention to, they messed with every damn nob but that one.




> Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies were more than a way to differentiate characters--they were an "excuse" for bigger, better, and weirder abilities at higher levels.


4e's Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies were the single best way D&D has ever had to deal with the Fighter Problem, and it's not close. By far the worst outcome of 4e's failure is that the well's been poisoned on that.




> (2) the biggest issue with skill challenges is probably that they have no way of dealing with items or power usage, and in some situations an item or power is just the best solution.


The biggest issue with skill challenges is that the math doesn't work and the incentives are wrong. Once you fix that, fitting in items and powers isn't too bad. You just let people cash them in for auto-successes (or just to bypass the challenge).




> (4) PPs are great, EDs not so much (well, the _fluff_ is great). This is largely because of what you describe: PPs grant more (and more visible) powers than EDs do.


EDs and PPs really have opposite problems. EDs nail the flavor, upgrading everyone into Heroes of Ragnarok and Demigods and whatnot. But they're mechanically lackluster. Whereas PPs have the mechanics, but a bunch of them are things like upgrading your "Fighter" into a "Pit Fighter" (feel the paragon power!). Doesn't help that the game has thirty levels of progression when D&D has never needed more than twenty.




> This was big for us. Having four or five effects with that 50/50 save ends each turn on a piece was murder for keeping stuff straight and smooth play. Payed merry hob with stuff that gave/got off turn saves too.


Didn't help that 4e wasn't great at standardizing durations. I think "things end on a save" is fine if you're willing to commit to it, as it sidesteps the problem of things ending without the relevant party noticing, but you need to commit to it. And, yes, that includes standardizing when people get saves (and any "make a new save" effect should fire saves for everything at once).

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## PhoenixPhyre

> Having imported them to 5e, the biggest issue remains the same: Instead of the players engaging challenges and the DM calling for checks when there is a question of resolution, the DM has to figure out problems with possible approaches ahead of time that are 1 check each, then string together sufficient problems to total the maximum success + failure before the skill challenge fails, but also build in a break out of the skill challenge to continue the game after the minimum successes is reached.  And think about how failure won't be a blocker.
> 
> It kinda works for something like "our spaceship engine is failing and we need to get it working again" single problems and the players try whatever they can think of to analyze it then fix it.  But it's much harder to design a good one for something like "traverse the swamp to the enemy cave" wrapped around several encounters.


As I said, the concept is good. The idea that a good non-combat scene should involve multiple people doing multiple different things that all advance the narrative/situation toward one of many possible outcomes[1] is good. Necessary, in fact, to make non-combat scenes as engaging as combat scenes...which do that exact thing.

But the implementation as "succeed at X before failing at Y checks" is fraught with fundamental issues. It focuses on pressing buttons (another issue with 4e, which was very hard in the "must have a properly-labeled button to do <thing>" camp) instead of engaging in the fiction. Especially with the emphasis on "reskinning" a keyword-driven core. Instead of acting at a narrative level most of the time, players were expected to act at the game level, playing the rules, not the game. And each individual check didn't actually move the narrative much, making it an exercise in "make good gauge go up before bad gauge goes up too far", like a bad quick-time (in slow motion) event. I'd say that if, instead of "skill check succeeded/skill-check failed", each success and each failure would leave the situation in different states.

*Spoiler: A stupid example*
Show


Situation--party is convincing the king and his advisors to send aid to a village. Four advisors (economic, military, religious, and magical) + the king. Each one has a small list of things that will convince them (with various DCs) and another small list of things that will make them unpersuadable (with various thresholds for failure). Other things just don't have any effect. Scene ends when there isn't anyone left to change their opinion (or after a certain number of "turns" of no progress in either direction to prevent deadlocks). The magical guy might be more convinced by intellectual arguments (Intelligence (Persuasion)), the economic guy might be vulnerable to blackmail, the military guy might want hard evidence of the threat and the party's capabilities (more martial avenues), the religious guy might want omens (etc) and the king might be weak to having his womenfolk nag him. Or whatever.

Perfect success, then, is convincing everyone to help. Perfect failure is locking all of them into unpersuadable. Depending on who exactly is in what state when the scene ends, the help they send differs. Convince just the king and he'll help, but the help he can send is limited because all the other powers slow-walk things. Convince all the advisors but not the king and you might get no official help, but conveniently a few hundred gold and some mercenary groups, plus some free-lancing wizards and clerics might show up to help, paid for out of personal funds. Etc.



[1] effectively, their actions start filtering out some of the myriad of possible end states and possibly introduce new ones. These aren't pre-determined "must use X to do <X>, Y to do <Y>, etc" steps, these are individual micro outcomes that are all (or at least mostly) interesting in their own right.

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## Grod_The_Giant

> Agreed. Hard (meaning "things fall apart if not met") system expectations should not be optional.
> 
> Personally, I'd be much happier if
> * Every "number" (core capability) that a particular class was supposed to have was baked into the class itself. You can have choices within that, but you shouldn't need anything else just to hit the expected bar.
> * Everything else (such as feats and magic items) gives horizontal progression, not vertical progression. No feats that make you better at what you're already good at, but feats that let you do things _not_ baked into the class.
> * Multiclassing (if it had to exist) is an extreme example of this and is "baked in" so you either get deeper/faster goodies (above system baseline expectations) in your "main" class OR you get horizontal growth, getting specific capabilities from other classes.


Entirely on the same page here.  Numbers are the least interesting thing thing on a character sheet, and tend to be the most confusing part of character building.  I'm a fan of using "low/medium/high" proficiency as the only thing to keep track of-- three tiers of bonus is enough to let you differentiate between dabbler, professional, and master, and that's really all you need to do.  




> As I said, the concept is good. The idea that a good non-combat scene should involve multiple people doing multiple different things that all advance the narrative/situation toward one of many possible outcomes[1] is good. Necessary, in fact, to make non-combat scenes as engaging as combat scenes...which do that exact thing.


The best way I've come up with to handle such things is to structure skill challenges like combat scenes.  "Goals" instead of monsters, skill checks instead of attack rolls, environmental hazards and ticking clocks instead of enemy attacks, at least a rough turn order, that sort of thing.  The key is to make sure there's a back-and-forth element to the scene.

This tends to be easier in games with less focus on limited-use abilities and damage rolls that aren't completely different than everything else in the system.

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## animorte

> For whatever it's worth, one of my most recent insane giant homebrew projects (a d20 adaptation of Exalted)


I appreciate that and Im giving it a look through just now (might take a couple days).  :Small Tongue: 
Excellent introduction, by the way.




> The best way I've come up with to handle such things is to structure skill challenges like combat scenes.  "Goals" instead of monsters, skill checks instead of attack rolls, environmental hazards and ticking clocks instead of enemy attacks, at least a rough turn order, that sort of thing.  The key is to make sure there's a back-and-forth element to the scene.


I recently discovered Worlds Without Number that Ive been looking through and started a thread on. It directly refers to any type of encounter as a scene and a lot of things _seem_ to key off once-per-scene. I dont have much experience with it yet, but it looks promising.

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## Kurald Galain

> One of our group started getting pissed because the DM was running support monsters granting off turn saves and all that pc has was save-ends effects. Half the time their power's good effect got stripped off before it made a difference on any important monsters.


This is important. The rules are built on the idea that save-ends effects are more powerful than EONT (that's why dailies tend to be save-ends and encounter powers tend to be EONT), but in practice it's the opposite (because of support abilities granting extra saves).
And yes, for smoother gameplay it would be better to have one of them but not both. I'd suggest effects that last until the end of their victim's turn, so that you don't have to remember which character created the effect.




> The mounted combat rules and mounts were pure bad jank to us.


I concur. Any time there was a mounted battle (for plot reasons), on the first turn every player would immediately dismount so they wouldn't have to deal with mounted combat rules.




> the biggest issue remains the same: Instead of the players engaging challenges and the DM calling for checks when there is a question of resolution, the DM has to figure out problems with possible approaches ahead of time that are 1 check each, then string together sufficient problems to total the maximum success + failure before the skill challenge fails, but also build in a break out of the skill challenge to continue the game after the minimum successes is reached.  And think about how failure won't be a blocker.


My question is, why would you want this in the first place? Instead of engaging the players it creates more work for the DM... I'm not seeing the benefit here?




> The biggest issue with skill challenges is that the math doesn't work and the incentives are wrong. Once you fix that, fitting in items and powers isn't too bad. You just let people cash them in for auto-successes (or just to bypass the challenge).


Thank you for mentioning _incentives_ here. Basically every purported fix I've seen just tweaks the math without considering the incentives.




> EDs and PPs really have opposite problems. EDs nail the flavor, upgrading everyone into Heroes of Ragnarok and Demigods and whatnot. But they're mechanically lackluster. Whereas PPs have the mechanics, but a bunch of them are things like upgrading your "Fighter" into a "Pit Fighter" (feel the paragon power!). Doesn't help that the game has thirty levels of progression when D&D has never needed more than twenty.


I concur.

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## Cluedrew

I don't have much to add about the flaws of 4e, but I will applaud its ability to change things that are broken. The fact the things that it changed to were... well you have plenty of other posts to read about that. But if they had taken the "spirit" of what became 5e and used 4e's structure, the result would have been pretty good.

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## Sneak Dog

4e was great. Awesome design philosophies. The execution was found a little lacking by me though. Most importantly I think the mechanics and fluff were disconnected.

Combat could feel like picking which daily to use, then spending your turns using encounter powers and maybe some at-wills to clean up.
Power bloat. Powers were added not for niches, but for the sake of having more powers?
Non-combat was barely supported. Utility powers turned out to be (mostly) combat utility. I never 'got' skill checks either, and they seem weird. More mechanics than fluff at a type of encounter where I want the reverse.
Skill DCs had a table detailing a DC for every level, implying you should scale DC exactly by PC level. Rather than say having a table for each tier or half-tier to indicate challenges becoming higher tier and warranting higher DCs. (E.g. kicking down a nice wooden door is for your basic chump level 1~5 barbarian, kicking down a proper iron door for a level 11~15 barbarian. And a wooden door is an appropriate challenge for a character of level 2 and one of level 5.)

Monsters were great. Easy overview, no need for cross-referencing. Non-AC defences were awesome. Clear secondary defences to target, by mage and martial alike.
Most importantly though: Paragon paths and epic destinies. A clear indicator that your character goes up a tier, a customisation point to make a character your own. I love them. It's akin to getting a 3e/PF prestige class on top of your own class.

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## Quertus

So, I think Ill address the math just works, Skill challenges, Arangee, and my signature closing.

(Its mostly already been said, Im just saying it again)

*The Math Just Works*

On the one hand, you have tight requirements for exact math.

On the other hand, you have choice wrt your stats, feats, and items that can change those numbers. Theres also buffs, debuffs (I assume), situational bonuses, and probably more.

Pick one.

*Skill Challenges*

Its hard for me to not call 4e Skill Challenges an idiots guide to failing. Lets break that down.

Yes, sure, maybe the 4e devs _eventually_ got Skill Challenges right (for the definition of right that means a) the math actually works; b) it actually achieves their stated goal of getting everyone involved) if you squint hard enough, but when they first came out (ie, when I played 4e), X successes before Y failures painfully obviously translates to only your best character should ever roll, and youre either an idiot or guilty of PvP levels of sabotaging the party if you even look at the dice when you dont have the highest bonus in the group.

But eventually they fixed that, to where youre a liability just by existing. The 4 person party only needs X successes in Y rounds, but if they add The Load, they now need X+Z successes in those same Y rounds. Or is that 5e?

But, worst of all (IMO), theyve mistaken rolling the dice for playing the game. The key is making meaningful decisions, which Skill Challenges decidedly lack.

And the worst part of _that_ is (and Im going to word this more poorly than its already been said) its focused on playing the system rather than roleplaying the character.

If your goal was to kill the fiction and the narrative, theres few better tools than 4e Skill Challenges.

*Arrange*




> downsides:
> - bonuses exceeded the range of the die at high levels.



Heres what I just heard: gradeschool math whiz _could_ out-punch gradeschool bully, but Bruce Banner cannot out-punch Hulk; gradeschool bully _could_ out-think gradeschool math whiz, but Hulk cannot out-think Bruce Banner.

Is that what you meant? If so, why is that a problem? If not, what is the _problem_ inherent in what you meant?

*Closing Comment*

Ive heard people complain that 4e wasnt D&D. A lot. I think that theyre wrong. I think that 4e was D&D, but it wasnt an RPG. (If I didnt say it, youd think I was an imposter).

The big difference between a war game and an RPG is that everything in a war game exists inside the box, as discrete buttons with defined in-game effects; in an RPG, you have access to outside the box thinking. The extent to which the system discourages the GM from accepting non-button, outside the box actions is the extent to which the system is unsuited to being an RPG. The extent to which the players are encouraged to play the system rather than roleplay their characters (EDIT: for the outcome of their actions being possible to adjudicate, rather than merely being suboptimal) is the extent to which the game is unsuited to being played as an RPG.

RPG or war game; inside the box & outside the box or buttons only. Pick one. And describe what you produce accordingly.

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## Slipjig

Going to the non-mechanics side for a moment, one thing that I thought was really cool about 4e was that different classes were viable to perform different roles in a party.  This meant that you could have a viable party composed entirely of arcane characters.  Or a viable party made of only divine characters.  Or a viable party made up of non-magical characters.

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## CarpeGuitarrem

Also keep in mind that as time passes, the light that you view older games through changes. As you spend time with a game, you learn to accept or work around things that initially irritated you, and it becomes a lot easier to have fun with it, without being bothered by the negatives. And, since there isn't an edition war raging any more, it becomes easier to distinguish your own opinions from the RPG hivemind. So that's another likely factor. Now that 5E is out, there's not really any reason to view 4E as a competitor against the old guard, so you can approach it on its own terms.

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## RandomPeasant

> And yes, for smoother gameplay it would be better to have one of them but not both. I'd suggest effects that last until the end of their victim's turn, so that you don't have to remember which character created the effect.


I think save ends is better. You want stuff to last multiple rounds, but still be able to end without someone spending resources. IMO your durations should be "save ends" (most status conditions) or "doesn't end on its own" (for out-of-the-fight conditions like "dead", but also easy-to-remove ones like "prone"). But, again, I broadly agree that you want to minimize the number of types of duration.




> Combat could feel like picking which daily to use, then spending your turns using encounter powers and maybe some at-wills to clean up.


To expand on this, fights tended to be long enough that you would use all your Encounter powers in each one, meaning that the only real agency you had was "what daily do I use" and "how do I sequence my encounter powers". And neither of these were really engaging questions. As a result, you had very long fights with very few real decision points, which is a pretty miserable combination.




> Skill DCs had a table detailing a DC for every level, implying you should scale DC exactly by PC level.


Stripping out the one layer of abstraction between "level" and "DC" ended up being really hard for people to swallow.




> Easy overview, no need for cross-referencing.


But also very little consistency between entries, and a great deal of difficulty doing customizations. It was easier to understand one 4e monster than one 3e monster, but the scaling was awful because so much was unnecessarily bespoke.




> but when they first came out (ie, when I played 4e), X successes before Y failures painfully obviously translates to only your best character should ever roll, and youre either an idiot or guilty of PvP levels of sabotaging the party if you even look at the dice when you dont have the highest bonus in the group.


This is exactly the incentive issue I was alluding to. I genuinely do not understand how a professional game designer approved that set of mechanics for that design goal. It's the closest thing I'm aware of to an objective failure in the subjective realm of game design, because they told us what they were trying to do and then _did not do it_.




> But, worst of all (IMO), theyve mistaken rolling the dice for playing the game. The key is making meaningful decisions, which Skill Challenges decidedly lack.


I actually think that's somewhat unfair, as you're looking at the basic engine and complaining that it doesn't have choices in it, when that's true of the basic engine of most parts of most games. If you strip it down to the very basics, combat is "roll attack, roll damage, see who falls over first", and that doesn't have any agency to it either. The problem was that, because the core of Skill Challenges didn't work, they spent all their time iterating on it instead of adding flourishes that could be used to make individual skill challenges more interesting.

Suppose, for a moment, we had a "you roll for X rounds, then you count up the successes over those rounds" framework for skill challenges. What are some ways you can add complexity on top of that? An obvious one would be to add rounds of something else between skill challenge rounds. Maybe you are navigating a jungle, and you do a combat encounter between rounds of skill challenge, allowing you to decide how you prioritize your resources between those components. Another option would be to change the expected value of rolling specific skills. Maybe one skill counts for two successes, but can only be tried once. Maybe one skill counts for the normal +1 on success, but counts for -1 on failure. Or you could allow people to cash in limited resources for successes. Or you could give people abilities that interact with skill challenges directly. There's plenty of stuff you can add once the basic framework works.




> Going to the non-mechanics side for a moment, one thing that I thought was really cool about 4e was that different classes were viable to perform different roles in a party.  This meant that you could have a viable party composed entirely of arcane characters.  Or a viable party made of only divine characters.  Or a viable party made up of non-magical characters.


That wasn't really unique to 4e. Well, the all-martial party largely was, but that's because 3e gave martials the short end of the stick. But your all-arcanist party was just fine once they printed the Beguiler for an arcane trapfinder (healing was a bit of a pain, but could be handled through items, PrCs, or a Bard). The all-divine party was similarly fine once they printed that trapfinding Domain (or just if you played a Rogue dip, but you could reasonably call that cheating). I actually think, while 4e's monster roles were good, 4e's player roles largely were not. People should be allowed to play the class they want, fitting that into whatever specific framework of "roles" you've devised almost never makes them happier.

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## Telok

> Heres what I just heard: gradeschool math whiz _could_ out-punch gradeschool bully, but Bruce Banner cannot out-punch Hulk; gradeschool bully _could_ out-think gradeschool math whiz, but Hulk cannot out-think Bruce Banner.
> 
> Is that what you meant? If so, why is that a problem? If not, what is the _problem_ inherent in what you meant?


Here's what I think was meant, taken from my group's actual game. By 12th level we hsd a druid character with a +10 perception bonus over the next highest perception bonus in the party, and a rogue with a stealth bonus more than +10 over the next highest stealth bonus in the party.

Since 4e's skills was basically 5e's skills & bounded accuracy, just with the +1/2 level on top, it has/had effectively all the same issues if the DM followed the suggested DC chart. Sure the description of the door you kicked in or the lock getting picked changed, but in practice since you never went back to repeat old tasks it was a Red Queen's Race... unless you hit on a few bonuses that stacked. 3e intended stacking bonuses and made efforts at keeping game play formed around that, 4e just assumed you were always on the d20 RNG.

So we had a rogue for whom the take-10 option was equal to anyone else's nat-20 roll, and a druid with similar perception. The DM had problems with that. Especially with the stealth & perception numbers hard coded into the monsters. You can sort of do similar in 5e, because the monsters are all basically hard coded DCs to hit, but they did manage to reduce the number of stacking bonuses plus remove the player's option to take 10 and how generally useful the checks are.

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## Grod_The_Giant

> On the other hand, you have choice wrt your stats, feats, and items that can change those numbers. Theres also buffs, debuffs (I assume), situational bonuses, and probably more.


Though it's important to note that you can still have choice, it'll just have to manifest in ways other than "+2 attack."  




> Ive heard people complain that 4e wasnt D&D. A lot. I think that theyre wrong. I think that 4e was D&D, but it wasnt an RPG. (If I didnt say it, youd think I was an imposter).
> 
> The big difference between a war game and an RPG is that everything in a war game exists inside the box, as discrete buttons with defined in-game effects; in an RPG, you have access to outside the box thinking. The extent to which the system discourages the GM from accepting non-button, outside the box actions is the extent to which the system is unsuited to being an RPG. The extent to which the players are encouraged to play the system rather than roleplay their characters (EDIT: for the outcome of their actions being possible to adjudicate, rather than merely being suboptimal) is the extent to which the game is unsuited to being played as an RPG.
> 
> RPG or war game; inside the box & outside the box or buttons only. Pick one. And describe what you produce accordingly.


Was 4e really that much worse than, say, 5e in that regard?   In both editions, noncombat interaction rules boil down to skill checks and a subset of utility spells-- 4e botched the execution in a lot of ways, but fixes are pretty easy to come up with.

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## Kurald Galain

> So we had a rogue for whom the take-10 option was equal to anyone else's nat-20 roll, and a druid with similar perception. The DM had problems with that.


The solution to that strikes me as obvious: don't allow taking 10. In fact, IIRC "take 10" was never a part of the 4E rules in the first place.

Other than that, there's no difference _in practice_ between "the rogue automatically makes his stealth checks against most enemies" and "the wizard can cast Invisibility". In principle I have no problem with either of those.

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## Kurald Galain

> Was 4e really that much worse than, say, 5e in that regard?   In both editions, noncombat interaction rules boil down to skill checks and a subset of utility spells-- 4e botched the execution in a lot of ways, but fixes are pretty easy to come up with.


No, 5E is largely the same. For all its talk of "three pillars", 5E largely lacks rules for out-of-combat situations (other than "roll a skill and make something up"). Personally I think that's a loss for both 4E and 5E.

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## Tanarii

> My question is, why would you want this in the first place? Instead of engaging the players it creates more work for the DM... I'm not seeing the benefit here?


1) It helps keep me focused on the idea that everything that is a challenge is an encounter.  Doesn't matter if it's a tricks/traps challenge, a social challenge, or an exploration challenge wrapped around several combat / tricks&traps encounters, etc.
2) It allows me to determine the difficulty of the challenge (similar to using the combat encounter difficulty guidelines), and if I'm creating for a specific level design non-combat encounters to a specific difficulty by judging the number of component challenges or decent DCs to pick.  Also resource usage to bypass skill checks for an automatic success can be built in, meaning I'll think about "expected" resource usage for non-combat challenges, which is a requirement in 5e for encounter difficulties above Easy.  (Even if they use skills to avoid spending resources.)
3) Knowing the difficulty means I can accurately award XP for non-combat encounters, since that's what the award is based on.

It's a useful game structure in many ways. But that usefulness breaks rapidly, as with any game structure, if the players stop playing their characters and start playing pieces, or if they have to start pixel bitching to guess the right path forward.  (The "playing pieces" thing is problem that the D&D combat game structure already suffers from in many ways.)

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## PhoenixPhyre

> Here's what I think was meant, taken from my group's actual game. By 12th level we hsd a druid character with a +10 perception bonus over the next highest perception bonus in the party, and a rogue with a stealth bonus more than +10 over the next highest stealth bonus in the party.
> 
> Since 4e's skills was basically 5e's skills & bounded accuracy, just with the +1/2 level on top, it has/had effectively all the same issues if the DM followed the suggested DC chart. Sure the description of the door you kicked in or the lock getting picked changed, but in practice since you never went back to repeat old tasks it was a Red Queen's Race... unless you hit on a few bonuses that stacked. 3e intended stacking bonuses and made efforts at keeping game play formed around that, 4e just assumed you were always on the d20 RNG.
> 
> So we had a rogue for whom the take-10 option was equal to anyone else's nat-20 roll, and a druid with similar perception. The DM had problems with that. Especially with the stealth & perception numbers hard coded into the monsters. You can sort of do similar in 5e, because the monsters are all basically hard coded DCs to hit, but they did manage to reduce the number of stacking bonuses plus remove the player's option to take 10 and how generally useful the checks are.


Except that 4e also had
- Bear lore making a hash out of the world
- nothing like bounded accuracy--in fact, it had the opposite. If you weren't specialized in <skill>, you had no real chance of making an on-level skill check. And if you were specialized, below-level skill checks were trivialized. This meant that you had to carefully plan out as a party who was going to specialize in what, and then those people (and _only_ those people) got to make checks using that skill. Which meant skill challenges didn't work unless you had a wide range of "levels" (DCs) involved or you contrived it to hit everyone's specialized skill. At which point you might as well just say "ok, each of you roll your highest skill. If more than X succeed, you succeed."

It also had severe issues with ludo-narrative dissonance due to overuse of generic keywords. Proning an ooze, for example.

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## kieza

> 4e was great. Awesome design philosophies. The execution was found a little lacking by me though. Most importantly I think the mechanics and fluff were disconnected.


This is exactly how I've felt about it for years. I hated the proliferation of subsystems and progression rates in 3.5e, and I loved that 4e made:
Martial classes get cool things like magical classes.All powers work the same (attackers roll to hit).Attacks, defenses, skills, etc. nominally improve at the same rate.

But I feel like there were three massive, far-reaching flaws:
Having all classes get cool things (powers) doesn't mean they all have to get the same kind, or at the same rates.A lot of powers felt like they were designed by picking effects out of a hat and writing fluff around them. (Consider, e.g., the Sorcerer power Acid Typhoon: "Okay, the hat says we have to write an area power with a non-standard area of effect, that targets Fortitude, deals acid and thunder damage and causes ongoing damage as a side effect.") End result: lots of random powers that are super-powerful because they got the right combination of effects, but have outright weird fluff that makes them hard to fit into a character's theme. And lots of powers that are "lower-level power upgraded for high-level play."The math didn't work out as well as it was supposed to. Maybe the designers just couldn't do math, but I read some convincing speculation early on that the reason PC attacks and defenses didn't increase as rapidly as monster attacks and defenses might be that the designers assumed at high levels PCs would have near-constant boosts from a leader-type character that made up for the difference, which...didn't necessarily happen. When it did, the fiddly little bonuses were a pain to track, too.

I have a system I've been writing for a while that started out as a 4e retroclone, and those are the major flaws I set out to avoid replicating.

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## Kurald Galain

> 1) It helps keep me focused on the idea that everything that is a challenge is an encounter.  Doesn't matter if it's a tricks/traps challenge, a social challenge, or an exploration challenge wrapped around several combat / tricks&traps encounters, etc.
> 2) It allows me to determine the difficulty of the challenge (similar to using the combat encounter difficulty guidelines), and if I'm creating for a specific level design non-combat encounters to a specific difficulty by judging the number of component challenges or decent DCs to pick.  Also resource usage to bypass skill checks for an automatic success can be built in, meaning I'll think about "expected" resource usage for non-combat challenges, which is a requirement in 5e for encounter difficulties above Easy.  (Even if they use skills to avoid spending resources.)
> 3) Knowing the difficulty means I can accurately award XP for non-combat encounters, since that's what the award is based on.


I'm curious if we, as the playground, can make rules that meet those goals without requiring the DM (as you mentioned earlier) "to figure out problems with possible approaches ahead of time that are 1 check each".

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## PhoenixPhyre

> I'm curious if we, as the playground, can make rules that meet those goals without requiring the DM (as you mentioned earlier) "to figure out problems with possible approaches ahead of time that are 1 check each".


I really don't think you can create generalized rules, at least if you want to have any kind of level of detail/granularity. There's just way too many possible (and incompatible) situations.

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## Kurald Galain

> If you weren't specialized in <skill>, you had no real chance of making an on-level skill check. And if you were specialized, below-level skill checks were trivialized. This meant


This often meant in practice that players would roll their highest skill and make up a vague justification for why this skill would be appropriate to the situation. This way, you do have bounded accuracy (as every PC has more-or-less the same chance of success at everything) but at a substantial cost to world building.

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## PhoenixPhyre

> This often meant in practice that players would roll their highest skill and make up a vague justification for why this skill would be appropriate to the situation. This way, you do have bounded accuracy (as every PC has more-or-less the same chance of success at everything) but at a substantial cost to world building.


That's not bounded accuracy. That's the opposite of bounded accuracy. Bounded accuracy means that the target numbers don't necessarily grow with level, not that the chance of success for on-level effects stays constant. Because with bounded accuracy, "on level" doesn't mean very much. Bounded accuracy means that the set of "acceptable challenges[1]" grows over time, where in 4e it's static (on-level means X% chance of success, level - 2 or more = trivial, level + 2 means impossible). Except 4e's system was fallible--if you didn't specialize (by picking up the right pieces at the right levels), you were just useless _everywhere_ and couldn't contribute to anything meaningful.</pet-peeve>

You could have the same effect by just saying that you get a "do skill thing" button. No labels, just "push button to do skill things" with free-form description. Which is in keeping with the rest of 4e's strong fluff/crunch distinction. And with lots less jank.

[1] things that are neither trivial nor impossible

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## animorte

> I really don't think you can create generalized rules, at least if you want to have any kind of level of detail/granularity. There's just way too many possible (and incompatible) situations.


I have been learning this the hard way, making my own base system and play testing. Its difficult to find a balance with detail.

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## Kurald Galain

> with bounded accuracy, "on level" doesn't mean very much. Bounded accuracy means that the set of "acceptable challenges[1]" grows over time, where in 4e it's static (on-level means X% chance of success, level - 2 or more = trivial, level + 2 means impossible).


I don't think your math is accurate on either of these. But that's probably a topic for another thread.

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## OACSNY97

> I've spent a probably unhealthy amount of time thinking about roleplaying systems and "fixes" and "overhauls" of various Dungeons and Dragons editions.  And the more I do, the more I find myself admiring things I remember from 4e and thinking that a hypothetical 4.5e could have been really, really good.  But it's been a long, long time since I read anything from 4e, much less played it, and I _also_ remember finding a lot of things about it frustrating at the time.
> 
> So, uh... what am I getting wrong?  My rapidly-self-destructing brain insists that:
> LIST OF THINGS GROD THOUGHT WORKED/COULD HAVE WORKED IN 4e


My retrospective take-away on 4e after trying to play 5e is the PHB layout matters.  
I seriously got into the hobby early in 4e and as a new player, I found the 4e books rather uninspiring for coming up with a character with a personality that connected to the game world.  

I'd previously looked at some stuff around the time Eberron came out in 3.5 but never played and was more inspired by the 3.5 era's artwork and sidebars that I was by 4e PHB.  I felt the same way when, years later, I was looking through the 5e PHB prior to trying to play it for the first time.

What I discovered was that it took playing 5e to really appreciate 4e's PHB.
I like 5e's class and race intro paragraphs better than 4e's as well as it's bonds, flaws, and subclass system.  BUT trying to look something up in 5e's PHB during play is _so_ much harder than in 4e's.  I like having powers organized so you don't have to keep flipping between multiple parts of the book.

To me, 4e's PHB is a during play how-to manual.  What you need during play is right there, well organized and color coded (though could have been better indexed), with minimal fuss to get in the way when you need to look something up right away.  
What 4e PHB wasn't, was fun to read outside of play- I followed a two year 4e campaign with a nearly three year Changeling: The Lost campaign.  The nWOD books, like 3.5/5e books, are interesting to look at and read parts of outside of the game to daydream about the setting and the imaginary people, but when trying to look something up or to understand how something works without reading a column and a half, forget it.

My ideal gaming manual would include the setting/character building inspiration I get from nWOD and the 3.5 Draconomicon or even 5e's PHB coupled with 4e's PHB's ease of use layout.

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## Grod_The_Giant

> I'm curious if we, as the playground, can make rules that meet those goals without requiring the DM (as you mentioned earlier) "to figure out problems with possible approaches ahead of time that are 1 check each".


Like I mentioned earlier, set it up like a combat encounter:



*Goals*
Skill Challenges break scenes down into smaller objectives called Goals, just as a combat scene uses multiple independent monsters.  A simple challenge might only have a single Goal, such as escape the fire.  A more complex challenge, on the other hand, can have many: patch the holes in the side of the boat, rig the sails for a storm, rescue the sailors swept overboard, and steer around the reefs.  Think of Goals as monsters in a combat sceneyou have to defeat them all to succeed, or there will be consequences.

Reaching a Goal probably requires more than a single check, just as monsters usually take more than one attack roll to defeat.  Instead, the whole party will need to work together, with each successful attempt making steady progress at achieving the Goal.

Each Goal has an associated DC, just like a normal ability check.  When a player attempts to reach it, they must make an ability check if they fail, they make no progress.  Ultimately reaching a Goal requires a certain number of successful checks be made, a value referred to as the Goals Target.

There should be multiple paths to achieving a goal.  Dungeon Masters should allow players to use any sort of ability or skill that makes sense in context, rather than specifying that, say, only Charisma (Persuasion) checks will work here.

*Dangers*
Skill Challenges exist to bring excitement and tension to the game; without some sort of risk, the whole thing ultimately devolves to roll this die until I say youre done.  And so, each Goal has an associated Dangera consequence that triggers every round it remains unresolved.  Possible Dangers include
*Damage*.  There are plenty of situations where failing to act results in direct harm to the players, such as lost hit points, negative conditions, or even a level of exhaustion, if the situation is truly dire.  Players should be allowed to make a defensive ability check, with success resulting in half damage or a less serious condition.  The DC of such a check is the same as the goals normal DC.*Disadvantage*.  Failing to resist a danger such as high winds or choking smoke might result in a character suffering disadvantage on their checks in the next round, or even losing their chance to interact with the hazard altogether.  As with Damage, players should get a chance to resist the effect.*Forced Movement*.  Not every challenge will take place in an arena where physical position matters, but in those*Ticking Clocks*.  Many challenges have a time limitrescue the sailors before they drown, escape the building before the roof caves in, reach civilization before you run out of rations, and so on.  In cases like this, the Danger merely advances the countdown by one.  Theyre a useful too, but be cautious.  In isolation, time limits are boring.  Theres no back-and-forth, no twists, no strategy, just roll the same check five times and hope for the best.  Always pair clocks with at least one active danger.

Goals act in turn order, just like characters do, as though they had rolled Initiative results equal to their DC.  On their turn, their associated Danger triggers, and players will have to deal with falling debris, storm-tossed lightning, or another tick of an inexorable countdown.

*Example Skill Challenge*
A villain has set the Stuttering Pony Inn ablaze to cover their tracks, and several customers are still trapped inside!

*Goal*
*DC*
*Target*
*Danger*

*Rescue the Three Trapped Victims*
15
3
Roll a d6.  On a roll of 5 or 6, one of the victims dies from smoke and fire.  Reduce the target by 1.

*Pull down the burning thatch*
10
1
All characters within 30ft of the inn, or on the top floor, take 1d6 fire damage.

*Seal the cellar before the liquor ignites*
10
2
Clockin six rounds, fire will reach the booze and cause an explosion, dealing 10d6 to anyone inside and 5d6 to onlookers within 20ft.

*Extinguish the Flames*
10
5
All characters inside the inn take 2d6 fire damage

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## Kurald Galain

> Like I mentioned earlier, set it up like a combat encounter:


That's pretty good, but how does it deal with actions that aren't skills (such as using items, spells, or class special abilities)?

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## Telok

> Except that 4e also had
> - Bear lore making a hash out of the world
> - nothing like bounded accuracy--in fact, it had the opposite. If you weren't specialized in <skill>, you had no real chance of making an on-level skill check.


Honestly nobody's saying their bear lore **** wasn't stupid as all get out. It just wasn't the basic skill system numbers, it was an implementation of them. People do the same thing in 5e, making knowing higher cr monsters harder dcs and giving more info for higher rolls.

I think you and I have different interpretations of what "bounded accuracy" means. I really don't care about the specific numbers, just that the bounds are always supposed to be within the d20 range. Effectively the same result as your "the numbers never change and stay on the d20". 4e was entirely intended to have that same functionality, being at its base the old stat+prof+half level vs base difficulty+half level. There were just some extra +2s you could pick up from race and similar, plus your stats went up more, that could add up to cause issues. The intent was the same, just the implementation was 4e. Now, _not having the stat+prof_ was a bad idea to roll, but that's true in 5e with your +0 vs dc 15 average task too. Sticking a +half level mod on both sides of the equation changes nothing.

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## PhoenixPhyre

> Honestly nobody's saying their bear lore **** wasn't stupid as all get out. It just wasn't the basic skill system numbers, it was an implementation of them. People do the same thing in 5e, making knowing higher cr monsters harder dcs and giving more info for higher rolls.
> 
> I think you and I have different interpretations of what "bounded accuracy" means. I really don't care about the specific numbers, just that the bounds are always supposed to be within the d20 range. Effectively the same result as your "the numbers never change and stay on the d20". 4e was entirely intended to have that same functionality, being at its base the old stat+prof+half level vs base difficulty+half level. There were just some extra +2s you could pick up from race and similar, plus your stats went up more, that could add up to cause issues. The intent was the same, just the implementation was 4e. Now, _not having the stat+prof_ was a bad idea to roll, but that's true in 5e with your +0 vs dc 15 average task too. Sticking a +half level mod on both sides of the equation changes nothing.


Bounded accuracy, as used by its creators, was _exactly_ that the system could assume that target numbers didn't scale much with level. So that a level 1 character could succeed (hit, pass the save, or succeed at the ability check) and a level 20 character could fail. 4e's system assumed just the opposite--that a character of level X could succeed at things in range [X-N, X+N], with not being able to meaningfully fail at x < X - N and not being able to meaningfully succeed at x > X + N. Thus, the scope of acceptable challenges moved with the characters. Whereas in 5e, being able to succeed at challenges is more about durability and damage output (for combat); that non-combat challenges shouldn't be leveled at all. So the range of acceptable _combat_ encounters increases over time, with lower-power combatants still posing a challenge in numbers and higher-power combatants being beatable with good tactics, planning, and yes, luck. Instead of having to rebuild the lower-power monsters as minions (ie higher-power combatants artificially limited in HP) and having higher-power enemies being hard walls because you just can't hit them. And for non-combat things, a low-level 4e party can't even attempt the higher-level stuff--it's just hard walled off because 20+mod < DC. And can't meaningfully fail at the lower-level stuff (given specialization), because 1 + mod > DC. That's categorically different than 5e, where you can run an entire 1-20 campaign only using 10, 15, and 20 DCs. And can hit DC 20 at level 1 and can fail (often) at DC 10 checks at 20 (unless you're specialized in that one thing).

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## Grod_The_Giant

> That's pretty good, but how does it deal with actions that aren't skills (such as using items, spells, or class


The fairest way to handle it is probably just to give a bonus based on how often the feature can be used. It's pretty abstract, but it kind of would have to be if you don't want the GM to have to adjudicate every individual ability.



*Skill Challenges and Class Features*
At this point, you might be wondering how spells play into things.  And since theres no reason that spellcasters should have _all_ the fun, what about class features?  Surely a Monks ability to dash up walls or a Wizards divination spell should have some sort of bonus?

Indeed they shouldrelevant spells and abilities can certainly be used to justify adding your proficiency bonus to an ability check that you might not have otherwise been proficient in.  More importantly, they can provide a bonus to an ability check.  When using a relevant feature, you gain a bonus on your d20 roll as shown on the chart below.

*Ability Type*
*Bonus*

Abilities useable an unlimited number of times
+1

Abilities usable more than two times per short rest
+1d4

Abilities usable two times or less per short rest
+1d6

Abilities usable more than two times per long rest
+1d6

Abilities usable two times or less per long rest
+1d8

Cantrips
+1

Spells of 1st and 2nd level
+1d4

Spells of 3rd through 5th level
+1d6

Spells of 6th level or higher
+1d8




(For what it's worth, this is just me reposting stuff I worked on a while ago while writing my Grimoire.  Original thread on skill challenge stuff: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?619028-Skill-Challenges-for-5th-Edition)

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## Anymage

> Bounded accuracy, as used by its creators, was _exactly_ that the system could assume that target numbers didn't scale much with level. So that a level 1 character could succeed (hit, pass the save, or succeed at the ability check) and a level 20 character could fail. 4e's system assumed just the opposite--that a character of level X could succeed at things in range [X-N, X+N], with not being able to meaningfully fail at x < X - N and not being able to meaningfully succeed at x > X + N. Thus, the scope of acceptable challenges moved with the characters.


Parties with appreciable level differences are one of those things you don't really see in practice.  A look at the first pages for 3.x/5e/the general roleplaying forum shows nothing about building a character of a different level from the general party and I'd be surprised to see someone pulling up one remotely current, so I'm not going to think that cross-tier parties are really a relevant concern.

The heart of the idea behind BA is that you don't have situations where one party member cannot succeed while another cannot fail, because the bonuses outweigh the dice by that much.  Whether or not a character on the cusp of divine ascension can trivialize tasks designed for a character just out on their first rat hunting adventure is a lot less germane.  What's important is their ability in level appropriate encounters, especially when compared to a PC who chose to focus on that area.

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## Composer99

> I've spent a probably unhealthy amount of time thinking about roleplaying systems and "fixes" and "overhauls" of various Dungeons and Dragons editions.  And the more I do, the more I find myself admiring things I remember from 4e and thinking that a hypothetical 4.5e could have been really, really good.  But it's been a long, long time since I read anything from 4e, much less played it, and I _also_ remember finding a lot of things about it frustrating at the time.
> 
> So, uh... what am I getting wrong?  My rapidly-self-destructing brain insists that:
> The basic framework of Powers was great.  The _specific_ powers usually wound up being bland and hyperfixated on combat, but it meant that every character was getting options at every level.  That most of the design work was going into _active_ abilities, not passive class features.  That you could easily compare apples to oranges, that you didn't have to repeat basic rules about targeting and partial effects over and over again, that you had a template for easily creating any sort of new magic item or weird ability and slotting it neatly into place alongside the others... you could have used a bit more variability between classes in the distribution of At-Will/Encounter/Daily options and a hell of a lot more (read: any) noncombat abilities, but still.Skill challenges!  They didn't quite work and were all too easy to reduce to just rolling dice over and over again, but they were a step towards more nuanced interaction rules that 5e took a sharp turn away from.Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies were more than a way to differentiate characters--they were an "excuse" for bigger, better, and weirder abilities at higher levels.  People may gripe about the basic Fighter getting superhuman strength, but not so much when he's getting that strength because he's descended from giants, or has a trademark magic item, or covered himself with runes, or... you get the idea.  If half your powers come from your class and half from your Race/PP/ED, you wind up with a huge variety of character options.The tightly bound system math is honestly good--predictable numbers make it way easier to improvise and homebrew things.The obsession with forced movement and area effects in combat meant that battles naturally encouraged dynamic positioning, without demanding that the GM constantly come up with new ways to keep the combat from devolving into two sides standing still and hacking at each other.Keywords make abilities easier to read, and reduce the potential of weird broken edge cases.


I'm playing in a 4e campaign at the moment. So here's my insights for what they're worth:

*Powers:* I like the concept of powers; the implementation in 4e is lacking to my mind.
- Formatting is okay, though I think something more in between 4e and 5e would be just about the sweet spot.
- There are too many of them!
- I actually think the game could have done without daily powers. Perhaps something more in between 4e and 5e again would hit a sweet spot, with different classes having different resource methods for accessing powers ("power slots" versus point pools versus Superiority Dice or what-have-you). (Here I have to say one implementation I really like is the way 4e handles psionic classes.)

I don't think it's terrible that they don't usually have a noncombat focus, since you'd run into the problem of combat and noncombat features competing for the same resource. I think later releases provided more nonmagical noncombat features to use alongside rituals?

*Feats:* Too many of them, and too many of them are garbage with a few "feat taxes".

*Combat:* We play on a VTT with all the bells and whistles - everyone uses power macros, Roll20 condition tracking, etc. It's a lot of fun if you like the in-depth tactical play (which I do). But I think it'd be just about unmanageable live, especially getting into paragon+ level play.

*Magic Items:* Same problem as feats.

*System Math:* I like the consistent system math, but there are just too many numbers to crunch, especially once conditional numbers start flying around (+2 for flanking, +2 for the cleric's lance of faith, -2 for cover).

*Keywords:* Are fantastic.

*Short Short Rests and Healing Surges:* As a way of managing daily attrition, I have to say I vastly prefer the 4e 5-minute short rest and healing surges over the 5e 1-hour short rest and Hit Dice. The magnitude of healing surges and the action economy of in-combat healing also means that you can play the in-combat healing game while still actively contributing to ending the combat by defeating the enemy.

*Noncombat:* In play it doesn't feel much different than 5e, although I'm sure from the DM side the skill challenge structure feels really restrictive.

*Monsters:* I haven't DMed yet so I couldn't say how it feels to run monsters in play, but at least reading the monsters is a cinch, and if you use the MM3 and post-MM3 it's my understanding that the maths are better. The combination of monster roles, with set expectations of how they can be used in an encounter, including how different types of monsters work together, a stat block that is fully functional in itself, and little flourishes or powers that distinguish different types of monster from each other, is to my mind a very solid design paradigm. Little wonder that 5e not only mostly aped the formatting of 4e monsters in the original MM but is also slyly trending back towards 4e monster design writ large.

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## Kurald Galain

> The fairest way to handle it is probably just to give a bonus based on how often the feature can be used. It's pretty abstract, but it kind of would have to be if you don't want the GM to have to adjudicate every individual ability.


Ok, that's a hard pass for me. It uses nicer wording than the 4E books, but has all the same problems that are mentioned earlier in this thread.

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## Kurald Galain

> *Monsters:* I haven't DMed yet so I couldn't say how it feels to run monsters in play, but at least reading the monsters is a cinch


Your post reminded me of an issue I had after the first few months of playing. Because of the whole "refluffing" paradigm, there's not much of a relation between how a monster is described and what its mechanics are (except for a few broad iconic groups, e.g. dwarves heal as minor action, dragons have a breath weapon). The result is that most of the time, the players don't really know (or care) what exactly they're fighting.

On the other hand, the _battlefield_ often matters, with nasty effects to stay away from and push monsters into. This is basically the opposite of 3E/PF, where the type of monster has a _major_ impact on tactics, but the battlefield almost never makes a difference. Ideally we'd have a game that does both.




> I think later releases provided more nonmagical noncombat features to use alongside rituals?


Not really. They released a mechanic that was exactly like rituals but labeled "not magic"; that didn't make a difference; and they quietly dropped it.




> Too many of them, and too many of them are garbage with a few "feat taxes".


It's a major failing of 4E (and for that matter, PF2) that the overwhelming majority of feats and items are utter trash. And there are _so_ many of them. I think it's because they're too narrow in the effects they can have; feats/items in 3E/PF can have much broader effects, and as a result they have a much larger percentage of usable ones.




> you can play the in-combat healing game while still actively contributing to ending the combat by defeating the enemy.


Yep, that's a strong point.

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## Grod_The_Giant

> Ok, that's a hard pass for me. It uses nicer wording than the 4E books, but has all the same problems that are mentioned earlier in this thread.


...yeah, I can see that.

I don't know how much you can avoid something like that in 5e, is the thing.  I probably went a bit too far trying to make sure martial characters could contribute equally, but... while there are abilities that can clearly solve a challenge in one shot (ie, casting Control Water on the pond behind the burning inn to instantly snuff out the fire) or translate very easily to a skill-check-based framework (ie, Action Surge lets you roll two checks on the same turn), there are going to be plenty where the impact is unclear.  Like, having resistance to fire damage should be worth _something_ when dealing with a burning building, but how much?  If I cast Enlarge Person on myself to make clearing off the burning thatch easier, what impact does that have?

I dunno.  I guess you could point to a guideline like "if you're unsure, an ability might grant advantage, give the character an automatic success, or instantly accomplish the goal; when deciding, take into account how many resources the player is investing?"

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## Tanarii

> Parties with appreciable level differences are one of those things you don't really see in practice.


Saw it multiple times a week for several years.  I did have to put in a restriction early on that Tier 1 (1-4) and Tier 2 (5-10) required different groups, given the huge jump in power in 5e at level 5.  But 5e handles characters within the same Tier just fine.  It can even handle cross-Tier as long as the higher level characters don't mind carrying a bit more of the load.  But they don't have to carry all of it.

4e couldn't handle a party spread of more than about 3 total levels.

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## Kurald Galain

> I did have to put in a restriction early on that Tier 1 (1-4) and Tier 2 (5-10) required different groups, given the huge jump in power in 5e at level 5  ... 4e couldn't handle a party spread of more than about 3 total levels.


So that's pretty much the same, then. And actually, the same as in 3E/PF as well. You can have a L6 and L9 in the same group just fine, but don't try L2 and L9, obviously.

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## Hytheter

Level disparity is uncommon in stable groups but it happens all the time in open table games and the like.

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## PhoenixPhyre

> Parties with appreciable level differences are one of those things you don't really see in practice.  A look at the first pages for 3.x/5e/the general roleplaying forum shows nothing about building a character of a different level from the general party and I'd be surprised to see someone pulling up one remotely current, so I'm not going to think that cross-tier parties are really a relevant concern.
> 
> The heart of the idea behind BA is that you don't have situations where one party member cannot succeed while another cannot fail, because the bonuses outweigh the dice by that much.  Whether or not a character on the cusp of divine ascension can trivialize tasks designed for a character just out on their first rat hunting adventure is a lot less germane.  What's important is their ability in level appropriate encounters, especially when compared to a PC who chose to focus on that area.


That's not what I meant (or what they meant by Bounded Accuracy).

It's not about having characters with appreciable level differences. It's about _challenges_ that have "levels" that are different from the party's level. In 3e, the aggregate CR of the encounter was compared to the APL of the party, where CR = APL was considered "Challenging". In 4e, the "acceptable" levels for encounters ranged from "CR"[1] = level + 2 to CR = level - 2, with anything outside that a very rare occurrence (the first being nearly impossible, the second being mostly trivial). Thus, both editions had a _static_ relative range of "useful challenges". A party of APL X could be expected to almost always encounter things in range CR = [X - N, X + N]. Every time APL went up, challenges slid off the back and new ones joined at the front. Whether they were monsters (with well-defined CRs/levels in both editions) or non-combat challenges (where 4e had defined level -> DC mappings). Sure, you might encounter a level 1 locked door at 30th level in 4e...but it was presumed to be not a challenge. So the only things you actually brought on camera as an actual challenge were within a narrow range of APL.

5e with bounded accuracy _doesn't work like that_. Instead, the set of useful challenges _expands_ over time. Things fall off the back end much slower than they enter at the front--a level 20 party can be challenged by a bunch of CR 5-ish mooks. And a level 1 party will only find CR 20 monsters too much to handle because they can't deal enough damage to kill it before it kills them. Unlike 4e (in particular) where a level 1 party _just won't hit (except on a crit)_ a level 30 monster. And the level 30 monster won't miss them except on a 1.

The core of Bounded Accuracy is that the system does not assume that target numbers (AC and DCs, specifically) scale strongly with level. They can scale however they want, _just not (strongly) with level_.

The original quote that introduced the term:



> The basic premise behind the bounded accuracy system is simple: we make no assumptions on the DMs side of the game that the players attack and spell accuracy, or their defenses, increase as a result of gaining levels. *Instead, we represent the difference in characters of various levels primarily through their hit points, the amount of damage they deal, and the various new abilities they have gained. Characters can fight tougher monsters not because they can finally hit them, but because their damage is sufficient to take a significant chunk out of the monsters hit points; likewise, the character can now stand up to a few hits from that monster without being killed easily, thanks to the characters increased hit points.* Furthermore, gaining levels grants the characters new capabilities, which go much farther toward making your character feel different than simple numerical increases.
> 
> Now, note that I said that we make no assumptions on the DMs side of the game about increased accuracy and defenses. This does not mean that the players do not gain bonuses to accuracy and defenses. It does mean, however, that we do not need to make sure that characters advance on a set schedule, and we can let each class advance at its own appropriate pace. Thus, wizards dont have to gain a +10 bonus to weapon attack rolls just for reaching a higher level in order to keep participating; if wizards never gain an accuracy bonus, they can still contribute just fine to the ongoing play experience.
> 
> This extends beyond simple attacks and damage. We also make the same assumptions about character ability modifiers and skill bonuses. Thus, our expected DCs do not scale automatically with level, and instead a DC is left to represent the fixed value of the difficulty of some task, not the difficulty of the task relative to level.


[1] in another stupid move, they overloaded the word "level" even more, saying that monsters had levels and so did things like traps instead of using CR. I'm using CR here to standardize terminology.

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## RandomPeasant

> The solution to that strikes me as obvious: don't allow taking 10. In fact, IIRC "take 10" was never a part of the 4E rules in the first place.


I have no idea why you would want to remove taking 10. It doesn't solve the problem of "Aaron cannot fail and Beth cannot succeed", because you can always just take _1_, so you get there eventually. Having experts reliably succeed at sub-expert tasks is good, and the fact that Bounded Accuracy (as implemented in 5e) makes it hard to do that is a big reason it's not a good design choice.




> nothing like bounded accuracy--in fact, it had the opposite. If you weren't specialized in <skill>, you had no real chance of making an on-level skill check. And if you were specialized, below-level skill checks were trivialized. This meant that you had to carefully plan out as a party who was going to specialize in what, and then those people (and _only_ those people) got to make checks using that skill. Which meant skill challenges didn't work unless you had a wide range of "levels" (DCs) involved or you contrived it to hit everyone's specialized skill. At which point you might as well just say "ok, each of you roll your highest skill. If more than X succeed, you succeed."


A significant chunk of what you are describing here is _good_. If I, as a player, invest a bunch in Stealth and the result is that many Stealth challenges are easy for me, the game is working as intended. I have made a decision about my character (they are good at sneaking around) and the result is that I have an easy time solving challenges by sneaking around. Skill Challenges that require skills the players don't have _should_ be hard, because otherwise what does it mean for the players to invest in skills? If you don't have a capability, you should have to work around the capability you don't have, not simply roll slightly higher.




> Martial classes get cool things like magical classes.


I don't think 4e martials really got cooler things than 3e ToB martials. Conversely, 4e no one gets stuff as cool as the peak of what 3e casters got. I don't think 4e really batted much above replacement in this particular department.




> And lots of powers that are "lower-level power upgraded for high-level play."


I think this is one of the things that can be laid at the feat of 4e stretching out the power progression so long. Twenty levels is really a _lot_ of levels, and if you're smart about it you can fit all the progression you need in there.




> Maybe the designers just couldn't do math, but I read some convincing speculation early on that the reason PC attacks and defenses didn't increase as rapidly as monster attacks and defenses might be that the designers assumed at high levels PCs would have near-constant boosts from a leader-type character that made up for the difference, which...didn't necessarily happen.


That's "couldn't do the math" too. Part of "the math" in a system of tightly defined numbers is making sure there aren't bonuses people can just not have.




> It's a major failing of 4E (and for that matter, PF2) that the overwhelming majority of feats and items are utter trash. And there are _so_ many of them. I think it's because they're too narrow in the effects they can have; feats/items in 3E/PF can have much broader effects, and as a result they have a much larger percentage of usable ones.


Honestly it's all (even 3e/PF1) symptoms of the same problem: nobody agrees what a feat is supposed to be worth.




> I dunno.  I guess you could point to a guideline like "if you're unsure, an ability might grant advantage, give the character an automatic success, or instantly accomplish the goal; when deciding, take into account how many resources the player is investing?"


You have to design it in. No one has any difficulty understanding how _enlarge person_ interacts with the combat rules, because the combat rules and _enlarge person_ tell you how they interact. You just have to do that in a way that extends to Skill Challenges. For a subsystem to work properly, it has to be integrated from the ground up (this, for the record, is why the idea of "infinite customization" is always to some degree a fugazi).




> The core of Bounded Accuracy is that the system does not assume that target numbers (AC and DCs, specifically) scale strongly with level. They can scale however they want, _just not (strongly) with level_.


That just sounds like an unleveled system with extra steps. Which, sure, that's a fine way to play, Shadowrun is a fine game. But the edifice of _levels_ isn't worth anything if you aren't going to scale with them.

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## Tanarii

> So that's pretty much the same, then. And actually, the same as in 3E/PF as well. You can have a L6 and L9 in the same group just fine, but don't try L2 and L9, obviously.


Not the same. Level 5 and 10 work fine in 5e. Level 11 and 16 work fine.  Even Level 3 and level 9 can actually adventure together, the level 3 will just need to be treated like a Wizard and hide in the back using ranged attacks and eat up lots of healing words. But at least they can do _something_.

Whereas 4e was more like be L5-L8, or L8-L10, or L11-L13, etc.

The difference of automatically scaling level bonus in 4e vs proficiency bonus in 5e is very noticeable.

Edit: and as PhoenixPhyre points out above, it's noticeable in terms of what challenges (and components of challenges, such as monsters) a same level party can handle.

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## Duff

> * regularized system (especially monster) math? Great idea. Implementation was rough and often tended toward very interchangeable monsters


Very much this.  



> * Everyone on the same basic system of powers? Great idea, in principle. In practice, not so much.


This created issues when we had a big range of skill in battle.  One player has no concept of optimization.  His numeracy is so limited that after 30 odd years of roleplaying and boardgames, he want aware of the probabilities of results on 2d6.
Another has chronic illness so his tactics get worse when his health is poor. 
You want simple characters for such people.  The rangers shoots 2 people per turn?  Perfect, tell them what they can see, they roll the dice and we're done

.  



> * Keywords? They can be great, but they actually add _more_ loopholes. Or they homogenize everything.


  This is definitely a "poor execution"  If you use keywords, you have to use it as a key word every time it appears, or indicate when it's general English and when its a keyword.  And then use it consistantly.  My vote for the worst of these is "move"
Is that "My character starts in one place and ends in another, regardless of how"?
Or "My character takes the move action to go from one place to another"?
or ""My character walks, runs, crawls or in some other way, propels himself from one place to another, whether of his own choice or under some compulsion"?




> * skill challenges? The idea of "this isn't just one roll and done" is good, but the implementation sucked. It should have been a guideline for DMs to make engaging non-combat scenes, where each choice moves the narrative along and it's not just "roll lots of dice at the problem."


Again, Very much this.

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## Kurald Galain

Thinking about SCs some more, I believe the fundamental issue is that it focuses too much on _making skill checks_ instead of on the narrative.

I'd say there should be five degrees of results based on what the player tries to do,Standard: the player describes what he does, the DM asks for a skill roll based on that. To encourage players to experiment, a failed skill check counts as "neutral" (so not marking off a failure).Irrelevant: the player does something that just doesn't affect the situation at hand. If he tries to shoehorn his best skill into every situation, that goes here. Or he can choose to pass his turn. Either way, nothing happens; no success, no failure. And it's _really ok_ if players try something that doesn't work, just move on to the next player and they can try again next turn.Bad idea: rarely, a player has an idea that's actively detrimental to their goals; and this counts as an automatic failure (getting one "fail" mark, not failing the entire encounter). E.g. Living Forgotten Realms counts intimidate as auto-fail in _certain_ social encounters, and they have a point there. Since this is a team game, a player that tries something that directly goes _against_ what another player just did can also get an automatic failure.Good idea: sometimes, a player has such a good plan that it gives an automatic success mark. Having just the right spell available counts, but so does a sizeable cash bribe (where relevant), or maybe the player has paid attention to an NPC background and has _just_ the right argument to make. Anyway, give the players their chance to shine; good ideas get a reward, and should not be downplayed as "yeah, nice idea but roll a skill check anyway".Encounter-winner: this is actually pretty rare, but allow for the possibility that PCs do something that just wins the encounter instantly. Perhaps the DM misjudged something to be a challenge when it's actually not (e.g. the challenge is to cross a river but a PC has jut learned Teleport). That's ok, that happens sometimes. Just eat your loss and move on, and find something more challenging for the PCs next time.

So yeah. Players can experiment, good ideas are an auto-success, just spamming your best skill is an auto-"nothing happens", and the deciding factor is _player choice_. I think this would be a good basis for SCs in any system.

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## OACSNY97

> This is exactly how I've felt about it for years. *I hated the proliferation of subsystems and progression rates in 3.5e*, and I loved that 4e made:
> Martial classes get cool things like magical classes.All powers work the same (attackers roll to hit).Attacks, defenses, skills, etc. nominally improve at the same rate.
> 
> But I feel like there were three massive, far-reaching flaws:
> *Having all classes get cool things (powers) doesn't mean they all have to get the same kind, or at the same rates.*SNIP


 (bold emphasis added)

Responding to kieza, but I'm hoping to hear from other people as well, as many people seem to want martials to have nice things (even if magnitude an ongoing debate) and at least some people don't love too many subsystems, which leaves me confused- what's so distasteful/irritating about the standardized AEDU system?

Granted 4e did a lousy job defining what utility powers were and moved many, but not all, out of combat utility spells from other editions to ritual land, but _what's wrong with AED on the same schedule_?

In my opinion it solves the following issues:
 5-minute adventuring day problem - even if someone spams all their dailies in the first encounter, they still have something better to do than plinking away with basic attacks/a light crossbow if the group doesn't/can't long rest. The 5e issue of long rest vs. short rest characters, which seems to force the GM to follow the recommended number of encounters of expected difficulties if they want to even out the attrition/let the short rest characters have a chance to shine. If level by level multiclassing is a thing, it would be easy swap a power of the same kind and same level without loosing functionality.  (i.e. 3rd level encounter power of class A with a 3rd level encounter power of class B when you choose class B at level-up) All classes get the same number of nice things, which evens the power disparity (aka Quadratic Wizard vs. Linear Fighter) Arguably makes it easier to define what a quantized level means across multiple classes.
Would a little bit of disguising AED be enough like what 4e did with psionics or does it have to be separate progressions with different recharge rates that are much, much harder to balance in anything other than a long dungeon crawl?




> The math didn't work out as well as it was supposed to. Maybe the designers just couldn't do math, but I read some convincing speculation early on that the reason PC attacks and defenses didn't increase as rapidly as monster attacks and defenses might be that the designers assumed at high levels PCs would have near-constant boosts from a leader-type character that made up for the difference, which...didn't necessarily happen. When it did, the fiddly little bonuses were a pain to track, too.
> 
> I have a system I've been writing for a while that started out as a 4e retroclone, and those are the major flaws I set out to avoid replicating.


I'm also working on something that started out as a 4e retroclone where the big fix is not locking individual classes into single party roles and fixing the attack math.  

The attack math turns out to be pretty easy- a friend good with math and spreadsheets figured out that 4e monster defenses grew with level and 4e characters had the equivalent of 1/2 BAB, which was evidently supposed to be compensated for by a buffing leader and/or equipment.  However, it turns out that if you give characters the equivalent of *3/4 BAB* and use the inherent bonus system about halfway through a tier, you can keep the number needed on the dice roll to hit remarkably constant.

Can move to the homebrew subforum if you want to talk about more details.

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## RandomPeasant

> I'd say there should be five degrees of results based on what the player tries to do,


Honestly, this just sounds like "count rounds, not failures" with some extra cruft that restricts what the system does. "This technique is risky, and might backfire if it fails" is a reasonable thing for a skill challenge system to do (imagine making an attempt to intimidate a prideful character, or starting a firebreak to deal with a wildfire). So is allowing individual skills to have high upside, while still being variable in their outcomes.




> what's so distasteful/irritating about the standardized AEDU system?


It's too few subsystems. I think you can argue over how many subsystems there should be (I, personally, am a maximalist on this, but not everyone is), but I think "more than one" is a pretty reasonable answer. Forcing everyone into Daily powers (and to a degree Encounter powers) also tends to cause problems for verisimilitude. A sword technique you can do once per day is a hard sell, especially if that's supposed to be a "mundane" Fighter.




> 5-minute adventuring day problem - even if someone spams all their dailies in the first encounter, they still have something better to do than plinking away with basic attacks/a light crossbow if the group doesn't/can't long rest.


It doesn't solve this at all. The 5-minute adventuring day is a result of having Daily resources at all. Once you do that, incentives _always_ point towards one fight a day. The fixes for it are "give everyone an encounter-based power system" and "encourage DMs to create adventures that are adaptive enough that resting for a day is a real cost".




> The 5e issue of long rest vs. short rest characters, which seems to force the GM to follow the recommended number of encounters of expected difficulties if they want to even out the attrition/let the short rest characters have a chance to shine.


I would say that this is the wrong way of framing it. Having characters who perform differently with different encounter/adventure compositions is a _good_ thing. Sometimes you will have players with different levels of skill, and it is to the benefit of DMs if they have levers (well-documented levers) that allow them to change which characters naturally perform better or worse.




> If level by level multiclassing is a thing, it would be easy swap a power of the same kind and same level without loosing functionality.  (i.e. 3rd level encounter power of class A with a 3rd level encounter power of class B when you choose class B at level-up)


This is just asking for a classless system. Which, sure, those have merits, but I think that's a no-go for D&D.




> All classes get the same number of nice things, which evens the power disparity (aka Quadratic Wizard vs. Linear Fighter)


AEDU unification is not remotely required for this. You want Fighters to get nice things? Give them nice things. That's all you need to do, and that's the only way to solve it.




> does it have to be separate progressions with different recharge rates that are much, much harder to balance in anything other than a long dungeon crawl?


Depends what you mean by "different recharge rates". Long Rest/Short Rest is hard to balance, but Drain/Spell Slots can be balanced at the level of a single encounter, and that scales up down and sideways however you want it to. The disadvantage is that you lose the decision-making around adventuring days and enemy responses, but I'm not sure how many DMs want to do the work to make that meaningful.

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## Xervous

By far the biggest issue with AED was how rigid and obvious the combat flowchart presented as. Do you need the daily? Drop it first thing. Then burn your encounter powers because theyre better than at-will and youll get them all back. Then finally whittle away at stuff with the at-will. The most dynamic feature was the daily, though most were the sort of thing you launched ASAP if it was to have the biggest impact in a fight. Select few powers worked off of interesting conditionals or had other mechanics that broke from this usual pattern

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## Kurald Galain

> Honestly, this just sounds like "count rounds, not failures" with some extra cruft that restricts what the system does.


Indeed. But people _are_ looking for extra cruft that restricts what the system does (as opposed to freeforming it entirely, which is what I usually do myself).




> "This technique is risky, and might backfire if it fails" is a reasonable thing for a skill challenge system to do


I agree. But as far as I've seen, every SC mechanic either has _everything_ risky (adding failure marks on a failed skill checks, as in early 4E), or _nothing_ is risky (as in late 4E).

Come to think of it, in 3E/PF some skills have level-dependent DCs and some don't; but people (for some reason) insist that either _everything_ must be level-dependent (as in 4E), or _nothing_ must be level-dependent (as in 5E), whereas the mixture is actually better for world building.




> It doesn't solve this at all. The 5-minute adventuring day is a result of having Daily resources at all. Once you do that, incentives _always_ point towards one fight a day.


This matches my experience: the _intended_ result is that if someone spams all their dailies in the first encounter, they still have encounter powers; but the _actual_ result is that if someone spams all their dailies in the first encounter, they want an extended rest now.
Likewise, the _intended_ result is that if someone runs out of encounter powers, they at least still have at-wills (instead of basic attacks or crossbow plinking); but the _actual_ result is that if someone runs out of encounter powers, they get bored and want the encounter to end.




> By far the biggest issue with AED was how rigid and obvious the combat flowchart presented as. Do you need the daily? Drop it first thing. Then burn your encounter powers because theyre better than at-will and youll get them all back. Then finally whittle away at stuff with the at-will.


That also matches my experience.

----------


## falconflicker

> I would say that this is the wrong way of framing it. Having characters who perform differently with different encounter/adventure compositions is a _good_ thing. Sometimes you will have players with different levels of skill, and it is to the benefit of DMs if they have levers (well-documented levers) that allow them to change which characters naturally perform better or worse.


Could you elaborate further?
This position seem incomprehensible to me, as it puts an impossible onus on the DM to tune the adventure in multiple incompatible ways simultaneously, and if the DM is less than skillful at this, it causes a massive appearance of favoritism, either from the DM or from the game itself.




> Depends what you mean by "different recharge rates". Long Rest/Short Rest is hard to balance, but Drain/Spell Slots can be balanced at the level of a single encounter, and that scales up down and sideways however you want it to. The disadvantage is that you lose the decision-making around adventuring days and enemy responses, but I'm not sure how many DMs want to do the work to make that meaningful.


Again, I would appreciate more elaboration, as I really don't understand what you're trying to say here.

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## RandomPeasant

> By far the biggest issue with AED was how rigid and obvious the combat flowchart presented as. Do you need the daily? Drop it first thing. Then burn your encounter powers because theyre better than at-will and youll get them all back. Then finally whittle away at stuff with the at-will. The most dynamic feature was the daily, though most were the sort of thing you launched ASAP if it was to have the biggest impact in a fight. Select few powers worked off of interesting conditionals or had other mechanics that broke from this usual pattern


The system also had other problems that amplified these ones. You got, by default, two At-Will powers. That meant you had no real decision-making to do once you'd burned your Daily and Encounter powers, especially since most characters would end up with one At-Will better than the other. Plus, combat in 4e tended to run long, so you didn't have the chance to make a decision about _which_ Encounter powers to use, just which order to use them in. People complain, and not unreasonably, about Rocket Launcher Tag in 3e, but at least it had the advantage of moving you along to a new fight with new enemies long before you got to the point where a fight felt like a drag.




> Indeed. But people _are_ looking for extra cruft that restricts what the system does (as opposed to freeforming it entirely, which is what I usually do myself).


I think what people are looking for is an extensible system. And that means your core system should be as simple as possible. We don't try to make the rules for Hit Points or Saving Throws individually interesting, we make them simple, and then we provide ways to use those rules to create interesting combat encounters. That, IMO, is what Skill Challenges should look to do. Have a simple core framework, and provide things that can be used to create interesting encounters with that framework. If you want to make positioning interesting in combat, the best way to do it is by adding terrain features with interesting effects to specific encounters, not by introducing a bunch of "partially flanked" statuses.




> I agree. But as far as I've seen, every SC mechanic either has _everything_ risky (adding failure marks on a failed skill checks, as in early 4E), or _nothing_ is risky (as in late 4E).


Oh, I won't defend 4e's specific mechanics for Skill Challenges. All the versions I've seen are bad, and they all miss the central change you need to align incentives (count rounds, not failures). But I think once you do that, a relatively simple core framework of "a skill challenge runs for a number of rounds, after those rounds count up successes and generate a result based on that" is all you need. I don't think you need specific guidance to the effect of "sometimes a player has an ability that bypasses a skill challenge", because I don't think that belongs at the level of skill challenges. Players might have abilities that bypass all sorts of things, sticking specific guidance into individual systems about it will just lead to duplication.




> This position seem incomprehensible to me, as it puts an impossible onus on the DM to tune the adventure in multiple incompatible ways simultaneously, and if the DM is less than skillful at this, it causes a massive appearance of favoritism, either from the DM or from the game itself.





> Again, I would appreciate more elaboration, as I really don't understand what you're trying to say here.


I think I can answer both of these at once. Consider a very simple toy model of class balance. You've got a Wizard, who has spell slots. You've got a Warlock, who has invocations that are usable at-will. As a simplifying assumption, let's imagine that the only spell is _fireball_ and the only invocation is Eldritch Blast, and they are both straightforward damage-dealing effects. Suppose the Wizards spell slots are daily abilities. Balancing is hard, because you have to make sure that characters have a certain number of combat rounds per day, and the natural incentive (which people will tend to follow, because D&D is cooperative) is to rest after spell slots are expended.

But suppose instead that spell slots refresh after each encounter. And, to simplify things further, that _fireball_ does 10 damage and Eldritch Blast 5. Now all you need to do to balance things is tune combats to last twice as long as the Wizard has spell slots. And that makes combat balanced whether the party has one encounter per day or forty. And it means that, if it turns out that the Wizard has managed to optimize his _fireball_ up to 15 damage, the DM can restore the appearance of balance by designing encounters that take longer, so the Warlock can make up the extra damage with more EBs.

And, yes, balancing an actual game is much more complicated than that. But the principles that it's good to have nobs that DMs can turn separately to effect the power of individual characters, and that it's easier to balance within an encounter than between encounters, are pretty general.

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## Kurald Galain

> I don't think you need specific guidance to the effect of "sometimes a player has an ability that bypasses a skill challenge", because I don't think that belongs at the level of skill challenges.


I'd say this needs explicit mentioning, because I've had several DMs make rulings like "you can't use powers now, you're in a SC". I find the whole idea that there are different "game modes" and you cannot use options from "mode A" while you're in "mode B" to be very immersion breaking; and I don't think it belongs in an RPG.

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## Yakk

> [*]The basic framework of Powers was great.  The _specific_ powers usually wound up being bland and hyperfixated on combat, but it meant that every character was getting options at every level.  That most of the design work was going into _active_ abilities, not passive class features.  That you could easily compare apples to oranges, that you didn't have to repeat basic rules about targeting and partial effects over and over again, that you had a template for easily creating any sort of new magic item or weird ability and slotting it neatly into place alongside the others... you could have used a bit more variability between classes in the distribution of At-Will/Encounter/Daily options and a hell of a lot more (read: any) noncombat abilities, but still.


The AEDU framework had a few issues.

First, it was uniform.

Second, optimal play often was based off of getting a set of abilities that comboed well together.  Then using them in every fight.

Third, the budget on the powers was bad enough that a relatively narrow subset of powers where good, and the rest not very.  I'd see the same abilities over and over again.

Forth, due to structure abilities ended up being overly similar.  The structure of powers impacts what kind of abilities they can represent.

Class features that are NOT power based can have a very different feel.  Compare Druid's animal form in 4e to 5e.

In 4e, it was a utility power.  It interacted with certain other powers with keywords.

In 5e, it was a mechanic.  It interacted with other mechanics (spellcasting, HP) and attributes.

You could in theory make a 4e power that did what 5e does, but *the 4e power structure would work against you if you did*.

You can also see the difference between powers and feats in 4e.  Feats that didn't create powers had a very different feel than feats the did.  In 5e, because you aren't AEDU based classes, adding features that aren't powers instead of powers isn't working against the grain.

Compare Improved Smite to stuff in 4e.  It adds +1d8 radiant damage to melee weapon attacks; it is the kind of ability you wouldn't find in 4e.  Instead, there might be a utility power that produces a stance with that effect, or an at-will power that adds radiant damage, or the like.

4e also overrode all other mechanical subsystems with powers.  Spells where just the name of arcane powers.  In theory they could have keywords covering that kind of thing, but the only keywords that really worked in 4e where the damage types (and those where implicit in the damage type of the power, hence not requiring much editorial oversight).

Attempts to use stuff like the "Invigorating" keyword honestly fell flat; keywords either had too big of a mechanical impact to be in the corner out of view of the power, or where irrelevant and forgotten.

...

If you wanted to take the lessons learned from 5e and apply it to 4e, what I'd do is the following:

* Return spells to being a thing.  Spells can use a power-like format (in fact in 5e they do).

* Add other "power like" things that *aren't* spells.  Cleric abilities can be prayers.  Make them different in some fundamental way from spells.

The layouts/form of each of these should be distinct.  Resist the urge to unify them.

If you have 4 power sources (arcane, divine, primal and martial) in the game, each of the power source systems should be different mechanically.

You can still use some kind of power budget for each class, but players who have only played one *should be* confused when they switch to another.




> [*]Skill challenges!  They didn't quite work and were all too easy to reduce to just rolling dice over and over again, but they were a step towards more nuanced interaction rules that 5e took a sharp turn away from.


They where published without playtesting.  It was really bad.

Then they where iterated.

Every version only worked if you took a group and either had them not understand the mechanics, OR asked them to not try to interact with the mechanics.

The advice to DMs wasn't very good either.

And they presumed, by design, that your ability to interact with the situation was based on skill checks, not powers.  The lack of non-combat powers enhanced this.

A serious rotation of it was needed in my opinion, where instead of Skill Challenges you talk about Situations.

A Situation has Problems and Perils.  Problems are barriers to overcome, and Perils are problems if things go wrong.

This is a game of action, so generally Perils should happen if the players do nothing.  We want to encourage action.  Sometimes Situations are sleeping until players choose to interact with it; but once poked, they shouldn't be passive.

As players seek to overcome a Situation, they can do it through a number of different ways.  They can use their abilities to do it, they can attempt to use skills, etc.  If the players come up with a plan that would clearly overcome a Problem, just eliminate it.

In general, before you ask for a skill roll, you should ensure that what the player is trying to would be enough to overcome a Problem.  This avoids rolls that mean nothing of consequence.

Sometimes failing to overcome a Problem will trigger a Peril.  Other times, not being fast enough will trigger a Peril.

Now, insert some example Situations, and ways in which they aren't *passive* -- often this will involve timers.

The point is this is aimed at fiction first, then at mechanics.  It isn't a _skill_ challenge, it is a framework for a situation.  Most of this is just rewording of the skill challenge rules with different keywords.  But, frameworks *matter*.




> [*]Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies were more than a way to differentiate characters--they were an "excuse" for bigger, better, and weirder abilities at higher levels.  People may gripe about the basic Fighter getting superhuman strength, but not so much when he's getting that strength because he's descended from giants, or has a trademark magic item, or covered himself with runes, or... you get the idea.  If half your powers come from your class and half from your Race/PP/ED, you wind up with a huge variety of character options.


Yes, they did good here.

I've played with the idea of introducing this in 5e.

The idea is that you have Power Sources.  Each Power Source acts a bit like an attuned magic item that gains abilities as you invest in it.

Power Sources have a max capacity.  If you have a Power Source(5), your max level is 5, and you need another Power Source to gain more levels.

All classes need such Power Sources; nobody becomes a level 20 wizard in 2 months by killing orcs.




> [*]The tightly bound system math is honestly good--predictable numbers make it way easier to improvise and homebrew things.


5e's math is honestly tighter.

4e's +1 per level made level dominate everything else to an insane degree.  And when it failed to pan out, the math fell apart (compare skills vs defences, or even ATK modifiers without expertise, or high level PCs losing their magic gear).

Monsters had a bit of this problem.  They messed up the damage of players vs monster HPs past Heroic, which means you either had to optimize PCs to keep fights from extending really long or had boring snoozefests of a fight.

While ATK/DEF and HP was kept under control, damage for PCs really wasn't.  And the implicit optimization ran into serious problems if a player didn't optimize.

The large number of customization points accumulated.  A non-optimizing L 1 PC was 75% as good as an optimized one; by level 11, it was 50%, and by level 21, it was 25%.  The game didn't do a good job of teaching you this, leading to a lot of very disappointed players in my actual play.  And it wasn't just against PCs, it was against monsters as well.

Your non-optimized level 1 barbarian felt beefy; the non-optimized level 13 felt like it was using a wiffle bat.




> [*]The obsession with forced movement and area effects in combat meant that battles naturally encouraged dynamic positioning, without demanding that the GM constantly come up with new ways to keep the combat from devolving into two sides standing still and hacking at each other.


It broke theater of the mind completely.

Exact tactical positioning mattered too much, and made combat slow down.




> [*]Keywords make abilities easier to read, and reduce the potential of weird broken edge cases.


Oh god no, 4e keywords where a complete mess.  Inconsistently applied, had impact from "zero" to "completely changes ability".

It has the MtG problem as well -- a new splat book introduces a new keyword, and it interacts with other stuff in that splat book.  And then ... well, the keyword dies of neglect.  Invigorating is the classic example.

The keywords with almost no mechanical hooks - Zones for example - where better.

The "close burst 5, target 1 creature" bit was a hack to avoid "range 5" abilities provoking.  It was confusing and rules-lawyery; nothing about the ability was actually a "burst", it was only a burst for meta-mechanical reasons.

----------


## falconflicker

> I think I can answer both of these at once. Consider a very simple toy model of class balance. You've got a Wizard, who has spell slots. You've got a Warlock, who has invocations that are usable at-will. As a simplifying assumption, let's imagine that the only spell is _fireball_ and the only invocation is Eldritch Blast, and they are both straightforward damage-dealing effects. Suppose the Wizards spell slots are daily abilities. Balancing is hard, because you have to make sure that characters have a certain number of combat rounds per day, and the natural incentive (which people will tend to follow, because D&D is cooperative) is to rest after spell slots are expended.
> 
> But suppose instead that spell slots refresh after each encounter. And, to simplify things further, that _fireball_ does 10 damage and Eldritch Blast 5. Now all you need to do to balance things is tune combats to last twice as long as the Wizard has spell slots. And that makes combat balanced whether the party has one encounter per day or forty. And it means that, if it turns out that the Wizard has managed to optimize his _fireball_ up to 15 damage, the DM can restore the appearance of balance by designing encounters that take longer, so the Warlock can make up the extra damage with more EBs.
> 
> And, yes, balancing an actual game is much more complicated than that. But the principles that it's good to have nobs that DMs can turn separately to effect the power of individual characters, and that it's easier to balance within an encounter than between encounters, are pretty general.


Sorry, that doesn't answer my question, because I think your abstraction is wrong in a way that changes the parameters. My big problem with it is the assumption that the knobs are independent, which they very much are not, and that everyone's structure will be different, which would only happen in the rarest cases.

In your specific example, how do you tune encounter length without affecting anything else, like enemy damage output, health or number?

If you just increase the number of enemies to lengthen the encounter, you're increasing the damage they do to you, favoring characters with powerful at-will abilities, more health/survivability and with more AOE.
If you just increase the health of enemies to lengthen the encounter, you're still increasing the damage they do, again favoring characters with powerful at-will abilities and more health/survivability.
If you do either of the above and reduce the damage to maintain a consistent rate of difficulty, then you're making the encounter less threatening, due to decreased damage.

It's that dance that I'm trying to point out, as it takes a deft and experienced hand to be capable of (even in this simplified case) balancing all of the above on the fly to compensate for an under-performing character, when giving each class a similar amount of resources to use abilities that make their effective output similar over all time scales seems like game design that would make the DM's work easier in all cases.

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## Quertus

> This is exactly the incentive issue I was alluding to. I genuinely do not understand how a professional game designer approved that set of mechanics for that design goal. It's the closest thing I'm aware of to an objective failure in the subjective realm of game design, because they told us what they were trying to do and then _did not do it_.
> 
> 
> 
> I actually think that's somewhat unfair, as you're looking at the basic engine and complaining that it doesn't have choices in it, when that's true of the basic engine of most parts of most games. If you strip it down to the very basics, combat is "roll attack, roll damage, see who falls over first", and that doesn't have any agency to it either. The problem was that, because the core of Skill Challenges didn't work, they spent all their time iterating on it instead of adding flourishes that could be used to make individual skill challenges more interesting.
> 
> Suppose, for a moment, we had a "you roll for X rounds, then you count up the successes over those rounds" framework for skill challenges. What are some ways you can add complexity on top of that? An obvious one would be to add rounds of something else between skill challenge rounds. Maybe you are navigating a jungle, and you do a combat encounter between rounds of skill challenge, allowing you to decide how you prioritize your resources between those components. Another option would be to change the expected value of rolling specific skills. Maybe one skill counts for two successes, but can only be tried once. Maybe one skill counts for the normal +1 on success, but counts for -1 on failure. Or you could allow people to cash in limited resources for successes. Or you could give people abilities that interact with skill challenges directly. There's plenty of stuff you can add once the basic framework works.


You think its fair to say that the devs failed by discouraging rolls, but not with and here I struggle to say something that doesnt also apply to the first part, like the mechanics chosen. The iterative nature of the rolls, perhaps?

Theres a lot of ways I could try to explain my concerns let me put it the silliest way. Lets say that the challenge is crossing a River, from later in this thread.

One character braves the River, and makes Athletics rolls; another drives the wagon, and makes Ride rolls. A third calms / encourages the horses, and makes Handle Animal rolls, while a forth prays to the River god, and makes Diplomacy rolls. The fifth just teleported across (along with lightening the wagon of excess goods that they teleported with them), and makes Perception / Command rolls to oversee the process.

In 4e, they all make the same number of rolls, and its simply adding up the successes and failures to determine whether crossing succeeded or failed. In 4e, you can figure that they all found excuses to roll the highest rolls they could. It starts with the system, and _maybe_ gets translate back to the fiction.

And, as far as I know, all the rolls are made at the same DC, the crossing the River DC. Even things like lightening the load dont change the DC. But I may be mistaken.

Whereas, in a different system, it might well start with the fiction (Youre at a River you need to cross. What do you do?), where every character attempts to make themselves useful (I can swim, so I can scout ahead to find a good place to cross) (or not - roleplaying a lazy or non-Determinator can take priority over pure Determinator optimization), and most actions working as modifiers to / advantage on / reduce frequency of / reduce consequences of failures on more important rolls.

In 4e, if someones running an optimized Diplomancer with the highest skill bonus in the party (dont know if thats a 4e thing, but pretend the players are new, and only one of them optimized well or something), and theyve convinced the GM to let pray to the River spirit be a valid action, we all know that theyre contributing the most, like they do in most every scene. Whereas, in many fictions, it may well be unknown if pray to the River spirit has any effect whatsoever.

Does that help understand what I meant by that comment about disconnect from the fiction?




> Here's what I think was meant, taken from my group's actual game. By 12th level we hsd a druid character with a +10 perception bonus over the next highest perception bonus in the party, and a rogue with a stealth bonus more than +10 over the next highest stealth bonus in the party.
> 
> Since 4e's skills was basically 5e's skills & bounded accuracy, just with the +1/2 level on top, it has/had effectively all the same issues if the DM followed the suggested DC chart. Sure the description of the door you kicked in or the lock getting picked changed, but in practice since you never went back to repeat old tasks it was a Red Queen's Race... unless you hit on a few bonuses that stacked. 3e intended stacking bonuses and made efforts at keeping game play formed around that, 4e just assumed you were always on the d20 RNG.
> 
> So we had a rogue for whom the take-10 option was equal to anyone else's nat-20 roll, and a druid with similar perception. The DM had problems with that. Especially with the stealth & perception numbers hard coded into the monsters. You can sort of do similar in 5e, because the monsters are all basically hard coded DCs to hit, but they did manage to reduce the number of stacking bonuses plus remove the player's option to take 10 and how generally useful the checks are.


Heres what I heard: there were numbers, and math, and those numbers and math did what they logically should, and that gave the GM problems.

_What_ were those problems? Thats what I dont understand.




> Though it's important to note that you can still have choice, it'll just have to manifest in ways other than "+2 attack."


Yes, to be sure. You can have non-math choices. But my comment was either the numbers are tight, or the numbers are mutable - pick one.

Technically, theres arguably a bit of a spectrum, arguably its a false dichotomy. So pick what range of numbers is valid, and stick to that. 1d20+X to 1d20+X+Y is the valid range? Then make certain that nothing - no set of options, buffs, circumstances, etc - can ever change the math by more than Y.

Now, I have a personal preference for Y to be at least 3 digits, where Superman punches Batman for orders of magnitude more damage than his mortal frame can withstand, where Quertus has no chance of using muggle means to solve a muggle investigation that has stumped Batman, etc, but, so long as one makes the fiction match, theres no problem with making Y small to nonexistent.

But it means that, at the fiction layer, there cant be items that are better suited to tasks. Magic swords cant be more likely to hit, lock picks dont come in different qualities, armor cant  penalize swimming, binoculars dont help you spot things, etc., otherwise, the math doesnt just work. Its a tough row to hoe, trying to make a fiction that works with 4e math.




> Was 4e really that much worse than, say, 5e in that regard?   In both editions, noncombat interaction rules boil down to skill checks and a subset of utility spells-- 4e botched the execution in a lot of ways, but fixes are pretty easy to come up with.


Truth be told, 5e might not be an RPG, either. I wouldnt know, Ive never played it (I played a 1-shot of something I was _told_ was 5e, but my experiences didnt match how others described 5e). So I dont really care about 5e either way. I just have a running gag of saying 4e isnt an RPG, ever since I evaluated claims that 4e wasnt D&D.

But, sure: if I dont have a button on my character sheet that says pull rug out from under orcs, and use it to barricade the door to slow down reinforcements, how much am I discouraged from taking that action in 4e vs 5e? How much is the GM encouraged to say, cmon, cant you just push a button on your character sheets like everyone else??

How strongly are we encouraged to think system first, to play the mechanics rather than the character? Not how likely is it to succeed, or even be useful, but how onerous is it to adjudicate outside the box actions chosen on the fly? How suited to being an RPG are 4e and 5e?




> I have no idea why you would want to remove taking 10. It doesn't solve the problem of "Aaron cannot fail and Beth cannot succeed", because you can always just take _1_, so you get there eventually. Having experts reliably succeed at sub-expert tasks is good, and the fact that Bounded Accuracy (as implemented in 5e) makes it hard to do that is a big reason it's not a good design choice.
> 
> A significant chunk of what you are describing here is _good_. If I, as a player, invest a bunch in Stealth and the result is that many Stealth challenges are easy for me, the game is working as intended. I have made a decision about my character (they are good at sneaking around) and the result is that I have an easy time solving challenges by sneaking around. Skill Challenges that require skills the players don't have _should_ be hard, because otherwise what does it mean for the players to invest in skills? If you don't have a capability, you should have to work around the capability you don't have, not simply roll slightly higher.


Nothing to add, just wanted to agree with these.




> Thinking about SCs some more, I believe the fundamental issue is that it focuses too much on _making skill checks_ instead of on the narrative.


Couldnt agree more.




> I'd say there should be five degrees of results based on what the player tries to do,Standard: the player describes what he does, the DM asks for a skill roll based on that. To encourage players to experiment, a failed skill check counts as "neutral" (so not marking off a failure).Irrelevant: the player does something that just doesn't affect the situation at hand. If he tries to shoehorn his best skill into every situation, that goes here. Or he can choose to pass his turn. Either way, nothing happens; no success, no failure. And it's _really ok_ if players try something that doesn't work, just move on to the next player and they can try again next turn.Bad idea: rarely, a player has an idea that's actively detrimental to their goals; and this counts as an automatic failure (getting one "fail" mark, not failing the entire encounter). E.g. Living Forgotten Realms counts intimidate as auto-fail in _certain_ social encounters, and they have a point there. Since this is a team game, a player that tries something that directly goes _against_ what another player just did can also get an automatic failure.Good idea: sometimes, a player has such a good plan that it gives an automatic success mark. Having just the right spell available counts, but so does a sizeable cash bribe (where relevant), or maybe the player has paid attention to an NPC background and has _just_ the right argument to make. Anyway, give the players their chance to shine; good ideas get a reward, and should not be downplayed as "yeah, nice idea but roll a skill check anyway".Encounter-winner: this is actually pretty rare, but allow for the possibility that PCs do something that just wins the encounter instantly. Perhaps the DM misjudged something to be a challenge when it's actually not (e.g. the challenge is to cross a river but a PC has jut learned Teleport). That's ok, that happens sometimes. Just eat your loss and move on, and find something more challenging for the PCs next time.
> 
> So yeah. Players can experiment, good ideas are an auto-success, just spamming your best skill is an auto-"nothing happens", and the deciding factor is _player choice_. I think this would be a good basis for SCs in any system.


Just gotta start by saying I disagree with find something more challenging for the PCs next time, as thats indicative of a Challenge focus, GM-driven game - neither of which are something I care for.

That said, I like what youve done. Id expand it slightly: success or failure on a given roll could each be defined as one of these categories.

Say were trying to cross a River / chasm. I could try to chop down a tree to span the distance. It might be the case that if I succeed, its an encounter winner, whereas if I fail, its irrelevant. Or the chasn could be so wide, its irrelevant if I succeed. Or the tree could be holding things together, and its a bad idea if I fail (or maybe even if I succeed).

So I think I would expand that to mapping at a minimum both success and failure with those ratings.

IMO, some actions can change what result a success or failure will have. For example, tie on a rope is a classic way to make climbing / swimming / jumping failures not be disastrous. Praying to the River spirit might have a similar effect or might make them really angry when you then drop a tree on them.

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## JNAProductions

What definition of RPG excludes 4E, but not 3.P?

More on topic, I had a good time with 4E. Never got to higher tiers in my home games, which is where I believe the math starts to get wonky. But I saw some creative power usages, and generally had a good time for me and players. Id love to see a Grod attempt on 4E. :)

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## Quertus

> By far the biggest issue with AED was how rigid and obvious the combat flowchart presented as. Do you need the daily? Drop it first thing. Then burn your encounter powers because theyre better than at-will and youll get them all back. Then finally whittle away at stuff with the at-will. The most dynamic feature was the daily, though most were the sort of thing you launched ASAP if it was to have the biggest impact in a fight. Select few powers worked off of interesting conditionals or had other mechanics that broke from this usual pattern





> That also matches my experience.





> The system also had other problems that amplified these ones. You got, by default, two At-Will powers. That meant you had no real decision-making to do once you'd burned your Daily and Encounter powers, especially since most characters would end up with one At-Will better than the other. Plus, combat in 4e tended to run long, so you didn't have the chance to make a decision about _which_ Encounter powers to use, just which order to use them in. People complain, and not unreasonably, about Rocket Launcher Tag in 3e, but at least it had the advantage of moving you along to a new fight with new enemies long before you got to the point where a fight felt like a drag.


So, how would we fix that? I mean, back before it became a running gag for me to say that 4e wasnt an RPG, I was complaining that it felt boring and samey for not _entirely_ dissimilar reasons.

3e & earlier Wizards had dozens of daily powers. Everyone had access to a toolkit of at-will abilities like trip or disarm or toss flask of oil. 2e Clerics had a situational Encounter Power of Turn Undead; for 3e Clerics, it was X/day.

So, blindly following this, one might think that adding lots more daily and at will powers, making daily powers into X/day powers, and making encounter powers niche, would be the solution. Yet Warblades and Crusaders were chock full of Encounter powers, and Ive never heard people complain about them.

So, what am I missing? Why does 4e seem so less interesting in comparison to other editions of D&D? What would it take to make a sufficient portion of rounds of 4e combat involve meaningful decisions, rather than being so boring that your turns are all pre-scripted? Why do previous editions not have this problem, despite trying so many different recipes? What did 4e do wrong? And how would one fix it?




> What definition of RPG excludes 4E, but not 3.P?


Mine, obviously.  :Small Big Grin:  That, in an RPG, you play the character, rather than the system - and Ive never heard anyone talk about playing 4e in any terms other than playing the system. In both system and mindset, it just isnt conducive for taking and adjudication outside the box actions, for doing anything other than pressing pre-established buttons. Unlike 3e, and other RPGs Ive played.

4e is much better suited to being a war game than an RPG.

Sure, its a spectrum, with choose your own adventure books sitting at the far end of not an RPG, but I draw the line of how well the system facilitates choosing your actions by playing the character vs how much it hinders that with 4e decidedly on the not an RPG side of that line. 3e has no such problems, as Ive had players play just fine with (nearly*) 0 Knowledge of the rules, simply roleplaying their characters.

* they knew it was turn-based, they had a HP bar - things they couldnt help but notice from playing video games.

----------


## JNAProductions

You really find people dont Play the mechanics of 3.5?
Stuff like planning builds from level one, Magic marts, and all the weird mechanical stuff thats stronger than thematic things?

I dont disagree that 4E is a better skirmish game than 3.5 was, but that doesnt make it less of a roleplaying game.

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## Kurald Galain

> So, what am I missing? Why does 4e seem so less interesting in comparison to other editions of D&D? What would it take to make a sufficient portion of rounds of 4e combat involve meaningful decisions, rather than being so boring that your turns are all pre-scripted?


That's an intriguing question, and I'll tentatively say there's not enough situational abilities.

Consider as an example the L3 fighter encounter power Dance of Steel, a weapon attack that immobilizes on a hit. This is better than your at-wills, and immobilizing works on (pretty much) everything, so every encounter you're going to try to immobilize precisely one enemy.

Now consider the 3E/PF monk ability Stunning Fist. On the one hand, it has a number of uses per day; so you can use one in each fight, or save them all for a big fight, or some combination thereof. On the other hand, you'll frequently meet enemies that cannot be stunned, such as undead. Or sometimes you _don't know_, so you can either try it blindly and hope for the best, or wait for a knowledge check. So this leads to more variation: you don't just use the same move every combat.

It's not hard to find other examples. Playing a fire blaster in 3E/PF, enemies with fire resistance are pretty common (and then there's Evasion, and _then_ there's underwater combat), so you'd better have some backup abilities that _aren't_ fire. But in 4E? Fire resistance is rare to the point where _fire elementals_ don't even resist fire. Against fire resistance, your best option is to... use fire anyway, because for a fire-specced mage it's better than your other options. Likewise, if you're under water, just... use the same fire spells again. So again, the former leads to more variation.

So yeah. Situational abilities lead to more diverse combats.

----------


## Grod_The_Giant

> But, sure: if I dont have a button on my character sheet that says pull rug out from under orcs, and use it to barricade the door to slow down reinforcements, how much am I discouraged from taking that action in 4e vs 5e? How much is the GM encouraged to say, cmon, cant you just push a button on your character sheets like everyone else??
> 
> How strongly are we encouraged to think system first, to play the mechanics rather than the character? Not how likely is it to succeed, or even be useful, but how onerous is it to adjudicate outside the box actions chosen on the fly? How suited to being an RPG are 4e and 5e?


I mean... both cases would be some variation on "make a strength/athletics/whatever check."  At least 4e had that table of level-appropriate improvised damage.




> More on topic, I had a good time with 4E. Never got to higher tiers in my home games, which is where I believe the math starts to get wonky. But I saw some creative power usages, and generally had a good time for me and players. Id love to see a Grod attempt on 4E. :)


Part of me does too, but I really don't need to sink a ton of time into a full-system rework that, like, three people will ever read  :Small Sigh:  I need a renaissance-style patron.

That said, it would probably wind up looking something like my d20 Exalted adaptation, which I feel like I keep mentioning way too often but I can't help it I'm just so happy with how it turned out.  Like I mentioned farther up-thread, despite having no 4e in its DNA did it did wind up hitting a lot of the good points being raised in this threat.
*Basic framework of powers*: This one I can't take any credit for, since Exalted has always defined a character mostly by their list of Charms.  Everyone picks powers from big lists, which I'm pretty sure are heavily weighted towards noncombat stuff.  There's not really a resource management element attached to them, though; I ditched spell points motes pretty early in the design.  They're written more like traditional D&D spells or class features than 4e powers, though, and there's a hero-point type resource (Willpower) you can use to justify players using their Charms in weird ways.*Skill Challenges*: I didn't include general skill challenge rules, which kind of feels like an oversight at this point, but there are systems in place for social influence and realm management.*Tightly bound numbers*: The underlying engine is based on 3e Mutants and Masterminds, so your numbers at any given level _must_ be within a certain range.  It's partially obscured in M&M by the point-buy system, but I gave up and made your attack, damage, AC, toughness, and save bonuses depend only on your level essence and what kind of equipment you're using.  Skill bonuses are allowed to go insane, but there are no external bonuses to combat numbers to deal with.*Movement*: I like movement, so there are plenty of ways to knock people around, but without opportunity attacks or square-based ranges it's a lot looser than 4e.*Keywords*: I used keywords on Charms to replace language like "make a new save at the end of each round," make interactions between effects easier to keep track of, that sort of thing.
It wouldn't be _hard_ to use the same framework for D&D, exactly, but you'd have to redo most (if not all) of the existing Charms.

----------


## Mark Hall

A few big notes for me:

1) Healing Surges. Making healing a function of your maximum hit points, not just a number unrelated to the healed, was a big step.

2) Ritual Magic. Decoupling magic use from class, and moving a lot of the utility magic to rituals was a big, helpful, step, IMO.

3) Roles and Power Sources. Man, I loved how they looked at the roles and tried to match versions to power sources, and wish they'd just put out 12 classes in the first book, one for each. Fighter? Martial Defender. Warlord? Martial Leader. Rogue? Martial Striker. Ranger? Make them a martial controller. Make them archers who pin people to the ground, or stop them from moving. While two leaders might be very similar across power sources, the way the power sources used those traits could have been wonderful and unique.

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## RandomPeasant

> I'd say this needs explicit mentioning, because I've had several DMs make rulings like "you can't use powers now, you're in a SC". I find the whole idea that there are different "game modes" and you cannot use options from "mode A" while you're in "mode B" to be very immersion breaking; and I don't think it belongs in an RPG.


I think, on some level, that's a system design problem. 4e intentionally segregated Powers from Skill Challenges, which naturally suggest that these things _should_ be separate, and as a DM you _should_ tell players no when they try to use one in the other. If you had powers like an _invisibility_ that boosted Stealth or an Action Surge that explicitly let you roll twice in Skill Challenges, "what can I get for cashing in _control water_" here would be much more likely to lead to "I think that just wins" or "a free success", rather than "you can't do that".




> Second, optimal play often was based off of getting a set of abilities that comboed well together.  Then using them in every fight.


I don't know that it's really fair to put that at the feat of AEDU. I struggle to think of a set of mechanics where "make sure your abilities work together" would be bad advice. 




> The idea is that you have Power Sources.  Each Power Source acts a bit like an attuned magic item that gains abilities as you invest in it.
> 
> Power Sources have a max capacity.  If you have a Power Source(5), your max level is 5, and you need another Power Source to gain more levels.
> 
> All classes need such Power Sources; nobody becomes a level 20 wizard in 2 months by killing orcs.


It sounds extremely confusing and at best marginally beneficial to layer this on top of a system that already has classes.




> It has the MtG problem as well -- a new splat book introduces a new keyword, and it interacts with other stuff in that splat book.  And then ... well, the keyword dies of neglect.  Invigorating is the classic example.


MtG has a more nuanced view on this than you give credit for. In MtG terms you have "parasitic" mechanics (which interact only with themselves) and "modular" mechanics (which are capable of interacting with a wide variety of other things). An example of this in (3e) D&D terms would be the difference between adding a class like the Incarnate (which has a bunch of Incarnate-specific mechanics that can at best be grafted half-heartedly onto other characters) and adding a casting-progressing PrC like the Mindbender (which is backwards, forwards, and sideways compatible with classes ranging from the Sorcerer to the Dragonfire Adept).




> The "close burst 5, target 1 creature" bit was a hack to avoid "range 5" abilities provoking.  It was confusing and rules-lawyery; nothing about the ability was actually a "burst", it was only a burst for meta-mechanical reasons.


This strikes me as a result of not hammering out your mechanical framework well enough before sending things to print.




> It's that dance that I'm trying to point out, as it takes a deft and experienced hand to be capable of (even in this simplified case) balancing all of the above on the fly to compensate for an under-performing character, when giving each class a similar amount of resources to use abilities that make their effective output similar over all time scales seems like game design that would make the DM's work easier in all cases.


I do not understand how you think that would address a situation where characters were imbalanced in practice. It is true that tuning things to balance the game _ad hoc_ is difficult. But unless you expect to perfectly balance your game across all levels of player skill, you _need_ a mechanism for DMs to tune things. Yes, some DMs won't use it. But that doesn't make not having the mechanism somehow better.




> It starts with the system, and _maybe_ gets translate back to the fiction.


I reject the distinction you're making here. The character's capabilities are _part_ of the fiction. Imagine you were confronted with the problem of crossing a river. Wouldn't you look for an approach that played to whatever strengths you happen to have?




> Whereas, in many fictions, it may well be unknown if pray to the River spirit has any effect whatsoever.


But that can be true of many mechanics as well. Suppose the DM _can't_ be persuaded to apply Diplomacy to the problem. What does the player do then? Alternatively, if you have a "fiction-focused" approach, what stops that player from convincing the DM that Diplomacy _does_ work in the fiction?




> So, what am I missing? Why does 4e seem so less interesting in comparison to other editions of D&D?


Individual 4e encounters outlast the number of interesting decisions players have to make. It's really that simple. The Warblade isn't boring in 3e because you aren't going to have enough combat rounds to run out your maneuvers. You _can't_ run out your maneuvers because you have the ability (and it presents a fairly interesting tactical choice) that refreshes them. A 4e Warlord or Fighter or Ranger... is not like that.




> Stuff like planning builds from level one, Magic marts, and all the weird mechanical stuff thats stronger than thematic things?


I think "your build is heavily scripted" is a really weird problem to have with 3e _in comparison to 4e_. Yeah, there's some scripting that goes on, especially in really highly optimized builds, but you have way more flexibility than anyone in 4e does.

Magic marts strike me as something where people _love_ to "play the fiction" rather than the mechanics. Every discussion of magic marts I've seen is full of people looking for excuses not to use the mechanics, or talking about games that don't follow the mechanics, or providing alternative mechanics that work better for their desired fiction.

"weird mechanical stuff thats stronger than thematic things" seems like textbook Stormwind Fallacy. The mechanics are a starting point for roleplaying, and I think again all the threads about Fighters show that people do not, in fact, purely follow mechanical incentives.

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## Psyren

> Ranger? Make them a martial controller. Make them archers who pin people to the ground, or stop them from moving.


Don't forget traps and snares  :Small Smile: 

And they could even have some nature magic. Entangle, Fog Cloud, Faerie Fire...

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## Actana

I've toyed several times with the ideas of a retroclone 4e, but inevitably every single time I start putting concepts on paper it drifts more and more away from D&D 4e as a basis and instead starts looking like other systems entirely.

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## Kurald Galain

> This strikes me as a result of not hammering out your mechanical framework well enough before sending things to print.


Oh yes. "Spellcasting provokes an OA" is clear design. "Some spells provoke but others arbitrarily don't" is not.




> I reject the distinction you're making here. The character's capabilities are _part_ of the fiction. Imagine you were confronted with the problem of crossing a river. Wouldn't you look for an approach that played to whatever strengths you happen to have?


The problem is not so much "applying your strength", but players who always try to use their best skill for everything (because let's face it, that's mechanically speaking the optimal solution). Once you allow for refluffing skills, it becomes hard for the DM to justify why a skill _cannot_ be refluffed to apply to every skill encounter.




> Individual 4e encounters outlast the number of interesting decisions players have to make. It's really that simple.


Yes, but also, some character builds just don't have interesting decisions in combat. Where a wizard does have very varied encounter powers, for (say) a rogue build the tactics may boil down to "use the highest-level encounter power I have available". And that's not much of a _decision_, it's just following a simple script.

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## falconflicker

> I do not understand how you think that would address a situation where characters were imbalanced in practice. It is true that tuning things to balance the game _ad hoc_ is difficult. But unless you expect to perfectly balance your game across all levels of player skill, you _need_ a mechanism for DMs to tune things. Yes, some DMs won't use it. But that doesn't make not having the mechanism somehow better.


I think my problem is that, as far as I can tell, imbalance in practice could, with a solid foundation, be fixed by granting additional magic items or boons, but tuning the adventuring day would, only in rare cases, be capable of actually influencing the issue, and has more of a chance of accidentally making things worse for other characters, and starts the characters off on an uneven playing field, as some classes will be inherently more suited to the campaign at the moment, and if your campaign doesn't have room for major schedule shifts without seriously impacting the narrative, you have an inherent problem that wouldn't exist with classes all existing on basically the same schedule.

TL;DR, classes with different schedules/outputs require DMs to balance them as the default assumption, while classes with the same schedules/outputs do not, and thus any active DM correction can be more precisely targeted to where they think the problem lies.

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## Quertus

> You really find people dont Play the mechanics of 3.5?


Sigh. Wrong question. Let me try again: a war game consists entirely of inside the box; an RPG has both inside the box and outside the box as valid options.

So _of course_ people _can_ play inside the box in an RPG. In fact, IMO, in a good RPG, one can play all the core game loops entirely inside the box, should one so desire. The question is, how much does the game facilitate or hinder playing all the core gameplay loops entirely _outside_ the box? Could you play 4e combat while never touching your AEDs? Could someone who only knows Iron Kingdoms roleplay their Iron Kingdoms character, tell you their actions from RP stance in ignorance of 4e rules, and you adjudicate that? Or (since I dont know Iron Kingdoms), could you adjudicate for a player who never reads their sheet, who never touches their AEDs, and who only interacts narratively with the environment, pulling rugs and jamming doors and banging heads together and dropping bags of flour and setting things on fire?

How much of a chore would that be? How much would it break the game?

In 4e, all Ive ever heard is inside the box, whereas Ive seen 3e played all but exclusively outside the box.

The question isnt have you seen people play in the box, the question is, have you seen people play _outside_ the box. And, even then, my question is, where in the spectrum of facilitate to hinder does the game stand on the spectrum of how it handles going outside the box. Thats how suitable it is to being an RPG.




> I mean... both cases would be some variation on "make a strength/athletics/whatever check."  At least 4e had that table of level-appropriate improvised damage.


So, in your experience, 4e is better suited to adjudicate being played by roleplaying the character than 5e? Thats sad. Id hoped RPGs were getting better at facilitating roleplaying, and 4e was just a black sheep anomaly.




> I reject the distinction you're making here. The character's capabilities are _part_ of the fiction. Imagine you were confronted with the problem of crossing a river. Wouldn't you look for an approach that played to whatever strengths you happen to have?


 no? I would look for every possible approach I can imagine, and evaluate them in light of comparison between the capabilities and the expected difficulty of the approach, and the cost and morality and range of outcomes and side-effects possible from the attempt? In an RPG, factor in roleplaying and metagame considerations, as well as potential for drawing upon NPCs. So, despite being a programmer, I might choose ask to come in over hack security. Similarly, I might plead my case before attempting to rewrite time.  :Small Wink: 




> That's an intriguing question, and I'll tentatively say there's not enough situational abilities.





> Individual 4e encounters outlast the number of interesting decisions players have to make. It's really that simple.


So, to make 4e interesting to play, wed need to give PCs more abilities to choose from, including X/day uses, and ones that offer situational benefits?

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## Actana

You absolutely can play 4e "outside the box". Out of combat that happens all the time as frequently as in other editions. In combat... You also can, but why would you? Requiring interaction with game mechanics for the best experience isn't a sin, nor is the ability to not interact with the mechanics a requirement of being a roleplaying game.

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## RandomPeasant

> TL;DR, classes with different schedules/outputs require DMs to balance them as the default assumption, while classes with the same schedules/outputs do not, and thus any active DM correction can be more precisely targeted to where they think the problem lies.


The default assumptions of the game should balance classes. Giving everyone the same outputs makes that easier, but it also makes all the classes the same, which sucks. That was one of the parts of 4e people _hated_.




> no? I would look for every possible approach I can imagine, and evaluate them in light of comparison between the capabilities and the expected difficulty of the approach, and the cost and morality and range of outcomes and side-effects possible from the attempt?


Which includes approaches that play to your strengths. Your issue here is "the DM allows the player to fast talk them into using their best skill", which is not a problem unique to Skill Challenges. In fact, Skill Challenges make the problem less bad, as they supply the default assumption that specific skills should not be used in particular challenges.




> So, to make 4e interesting to play, wed need to give PCs more abilities to choose from, including X/day uses, and ones that offer situational benefits?


I think the primary thing I would look to do is reduce the number of combat rounds per encounter. More abilities helps too, but 4e fights drag more than they should.

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## Kurald Galain

> Which includes approaches that play to your strengths. Your issue here is "the DM allows the player to fast talk them into using their best skill", which is not a problem unique to Skill Challenges.


Indeed, but SCs make the problem worse, as SCs strongly encourage people to use their best skill always, and rulebooks and printed adventures strongly support the idea that everybody should be able to participate regardless of which skills they have trained.




> I think the primary thing I would look to do is reduce the number of combat rounds per encounter. More abilities helps too, but 4e fights drag more than they should.


Oddly, 4E combat takes only very few _rounds_ (3-4 rounds in heroic, less at paragon) but still take up a high amount of _time_.

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## RandomPeasant

> Indeed, but SCs make the problem worse, as SCs strongly encourage people to use their best skill always, and rulebooks and printed adventures strongly support the idea that everybody should be able to participate regardless of which skills they have trained.


Worse compared to what? Using your best skill _always_ makes you more likely to succeed, and so you are always more incentivized to do that, regardless of whether you are doing a "Skill Challenge" or simply rolling some number of skill checks. Insofar as there's a problem specific to Skill Challenges, it's the counting failures thing, but as far as it goes I consider the level where it encourages individual players to roll their best individual skill the least worrisome part of that. Lots of natural fixes there, ranging from "be serious about allowed skills" to "put skills at different DCs" to "cap rolls per skill" (though that last is a bit of a hack in my view).

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## Xervous

> So, how would we fix that?
> 
> ...
> 
> So, what am I missing? Why does 4e seem so less interesting in comparison to other editions of D&D? What would it take to make a sufficient portion of rounds of 4e combat involve meaningful decisions, rather than being so boring that your turns are all pre-scripted? Why do previous editions not have this problem, despite trying so many different recipes? What did 4e do wrong? And how would one fix it?


When it comes to combat and what AED failed to do its a marrying of options of variable throughput to any manner of structure that has incentives for not running your combat actions off a script. 

AED are definitely choices you can dish out each round, but theres the clear priority for use. Most dailies are either single shot offensive abilities that will do the most good when used early, or effects with durations that you want to get the most out of and will also use early. Encounter abilities may be used in slightly different orders, but you are always going to dump them before getting to your at-wills because theres generally few downsides to doing so as they are mostly just damage. 

ToB 3.5 (and path of war) characters have what are effectively Encounter powers. However they each have ways to refresh these maneuvers which are either entertainingly unique or obvious tempo breaks which require in the moment value judgments. Notably their at will options are not quite so far behind these encounter options, so the maneuvers more truly express as options rather than a battle flowchart mandate. 

A Psion has enough potential for throughput that they can waste their power points, just like most other daily structured characters. Uncertainty over the course of the day will present what-ifs that moderate their PP usage, or otherwise serve them appropriate consequences for bad gambles. I am a big fan of using FOMO to drive daily resource conservation. Presenting a combination of limited time availability and more points of interest than the party can effectively engage with, the players budget their resources for the events that they value most. Greed invites them to spread it thin, things they deem more important tempt a narrower clustering of resources to better ensure success. Simply getting players to understand they may miss out on cool extra stuff because they went nuclear on two encounters will get them thinking would no extra fiddly things cheer me up after we failed to do X? Could some risk in X be worth it if it means we can also do Y?

Rogues with their conditional sneak attack and varying frailty invite interaction with the battlefield and the arrangement of participants. Even if its the same question, the variety of answers to how do I get sneak attack without getting myself eviscerated? Or if I cant get it what else should I do? does not necessarily invite monotony.

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## Kurald Galain

> Worse compared to what?


Worse compared to any system that does _not_ allow arbitrarily refluffing any mechanic.

It's the design philosophy. What happens when the mechanics contradict the fiction, for example you're trying to trip an ooze? In pretty much every RPG, fiction comes first; and the contradiction is resolved by not allowing you to trip an ooze. In 4E, the rules come first, you can trip an ooze just fine, and you just change the description to "yeah, I didn't really _trip_ it but I did something unspecifiable that _just so happens_ to have the same mechanics as having tripped the ooze". Or some players just skip the description part, that works too.

This is how the system gets attacks described as "mental" that are mechanically "constitution vs fortitude"; the description doesn't have to be related to the mechanics. There are plenty of systems where you can find a handful of _examples_ of mismatches, but 4E is (to my knowledge) the only RPG that embraces it as a design philosophy.

And that works with skills too. If you want to use a skill for something the skill doesn't do (e.g. Religion to pray for help, Arcana to cast spells, History to perform any task the way it was traditionally done, etc) then in pretty much RPG, it just has no effect. In 4E, you just change the description and roll the skill anyway, as the system encourages refluffing like that. Now I'm sure some players will now exclaim "you can't do _that_, that's stupid!" but official printed adventures have plenty of examples like this.

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## Quertus

> nor is the ability to not interact with the mechanics a requirement of being a roleplaying game.


Its my definition of an RPG, of what distinguishes an RPG from a war game, created when I evaluated claims that 4e wasnt D&D, concluded that it wasnt an RPG, and was asked what I meant by that. Granted, it took me a _long_ time to find a good way to express it.  :Small Red Face: 

*Spoiler: In short*
Show

In short, to be a roleplaying game, it should have game and roleplaying. Roleplaying is making decisions for the character, as the character. Not really terribly contentious stuff so far.

Where people start responding with ? is when I put playing the character (roleplaying) and playing the system (gaming) in opposition; and, more to the point, claim that the more the game incentivizes playing the system, and the more it discourages playing the character - or, more importantly, the _harder_ it makes it comparatively, the less suited it is to be played by roleplaying, the less suited it is to being an RPG.

My go to example is a choose your own adventure book. Youre fighting orcs in a small room, orc reinforcements are on the way. If you cast Fireball, turn to page 60; if you fight in melee, turn to page 111.

In that scenario, if whats in character is to cast Invisibility, or flee, or something other than those two options, I can no more do so than I can write more pages. You cant answer WWQD, only would you rather. It is impossible to move forward in a choose your own adventure book until you drop roleplaying and play the game.

My metric for the suitability of a game to be played by roleplaying, my metric of how well a game qualifies as an RPG, is based on how much harder it is to evaluate character-driven actions than system-driven button presses.


Anyway, thats the background and history of my running gag that 4e isnt an RPG. And I dont know what one would do to fix that, either.

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## dgnslyr

> Its my definition of an RPG, of what distinguishes an RPG from a war game, created when I evaluated claims that 4e wasnt D&D, concluded that it wasnt an RPG, and was asked what I meant by that. Granted, it took me a _long_ time to find a good way to express it. 
> 
> *Spoiler: In short*
> Show
> 
> In short, to be a roleplaying game, it should have game and roleplaying. Roleplaying is making decisions for the character, as the character. Not really terribly contentious stuff so far.
> 
> Where people start responding with ? is when I put playing the character (roleplaying) and playing the system (gaming) in opposition; and, more to the point, claim that the more the game incentivizes playing the system, and the more it discourages playing the character - or, more importantly, the _harder_ it makes it comparatively, the less suited it is to be played by roleplaying, the less suited it is to being an RPG.
> 
> ...


You... can still do all that, though? Unless I'm misunderstanding your point terribly, 4e has exactly as much support as 3.5 for doing things outside the game rules, which is exactly zero, by definition. If anything, there's _more_ support for it, since the game's default response for doing stuff outside the defined ruleset is "roll a skill you think is relevant, against a level-appropriate DC." 

Like, for someone playing a tier 5 bottom-feeder class like barbarian, how much do you actually _lose_ in the move over to 4e, coming from 3.5? You can still basic attack and charge every turn, if you'd like, and no one is forcing you to push those scary Encounter Power buttons if you don't want to. Your tools for interacting with the world outside of combat, namely your skill list and not much else, are still basically intact, and still all work in basically the same way. A tier 1 full caster like Wizard loses a lot of their I-win buttons, of course, but tiering discourse would also imply that the existence of wizard isn't exactly desirable for the health of the game in the first place. So if 4e lacks the tools to support roleplaying, then neither does 3.5, because the fighter or barbarian is hardly _worse_ off than they were before.

My thought experiment, I guess, is if you were a barbarian player that never looked at their character sheet in any game of any edition, how long would it take before you noticed a difference in your own personal capabilities?

----------


## JNAProductions

I'd also point out that 3rd and 4th *both fail* at allowing something pretty basic, at least in combat.

Poke out from behind cover.
Launch an attack (whether that's a crossbow, bow, spell, sling, whatever).
Step back behind cover.

That's something that I personally can do-I could be behind a wall, duck out from it, throw a rock, and duck back behind it. I wouldn't be as accurate as an adventurer, yet I can do that! But neither 3rd nor 4th allows that in basic rules. 3rd edition requires a feat chain or something like Travel Devotion to manage it, and 4th edition would require a power that lets you move after attacking.

----------


## PhoenixPhyre

> I'd also point out that 3rd and 4th *both fail* at allowing something pretty basic, at least in combat.
> 
> Poke out from behind cover.
> Launch an attack (whether that's a crossbow, bow, spell, sling, whatever).
> Step back behind cover.
> 
> That's something that I personally can do-I could be behind a wall, duck out from it, throw a rock, and duck back behind it. I wouldn't be as accurate as an adventurer, yet I can do that! But neither 3rd nor 4th allows that in basic rules. 3rd edition requires a feat chain or something like Travel Devotion to manage it, and 4th edition would require a power that lets you move after attacking.


I'd put "movement is not an action and can be broken up" as one of the top 10 things that 5e did right. Not only is it smoother to run, it removes a lot of the "necessary workarounds" that 3e and 4e had to do to allow it. And the worst part about those workarounds is that they were _optional_--the difference between someone who could break up his overall movement with other actions and those that couldn't/didn't pick up the power/ability to is huge.

----------


## Yakk

And 5e makes "poke out behind cover, make an attack, duck behind cover" require enemies to expend possibly insane resources to respond to it.

For example, suppose it is an enemy spellcaster.  They have to ready a spell for you to poke out from cover.  This spell is wasted if you don't do it on that turn.

Similarly, for any archer, they have to not do anything besides ready to attack you.  Depending on how flexible "ready" is this can be easily exploited.

----------


## dgnslyr

> I'd also point out that 3rd and 4th *both fail* at allowing something pretty basic, at least in combat.
> 
> Poke out from behind cover.
> Launch an attack (whether that's a crossbow, bow, spell, sling, whatever).
> Step back behind cover.
> 
> That's something that I personally can do-I could be behind a wall, duck out from it, throw a rock, and duck back behind it. I wouldn't be as accurate as an adventurer, yet I can do that! But neither 3rd nor 4th allows that in basic rules. 3rd edition requires a feat chain or something like Travel Devotion to manage it, and 4th edition would require a power that lets you move after attacking.


Technically, you CAN shoot from cover without penalty in 4e, without even leaving it, if you stand behind an ally. Friendly units obstruct enemy attacks, but not friendly ones, so you can use a friendly Fighter as living cover against pesky goblin sharpshooters, and then ask them to kindly duck out of the way when you return fire. 

Besides that, movement and mobility are definitely considered an important part of tactics that can and should be solved through build choices. One extremely straightforward answer, for example, is the ranger's Fading Strike at-will power that lets them shift a couple squares after making the attack, and Rogues have a similar power as well. Of course, even free options aren't free, since it comes at the opportunity cost of using a different and possibly better power, but the option is still there. More generally, there are also utility powers to move and/or shift as a minor action, and those are naturally very powerful. But I do think it's a success of 4e that a strategy like stepping out, shooting, and stepping back into cover is both reasonably doable and also not trivially easy.

----------


## OACSNY97

> SNIP
> 
> This matches my experience: the _intended_ result is that if someone spams all their dailies in the first encounter, they still have encounter powers; but the _actual_ result is that if someone spams all their dailies in the first encounter, they want an extended rest now.
> Likewise, the _intended_ result is that if someone runs out of encounter powers, they at least still have at-wills (instead of basic attacks or crossbow plinking); but the _actual_ result is that if someone runs out of encounter powers, they get bored and want the encounter to end.
> 
> 
> That also matches my experience.


Responding to all the answers to my question regarding power usage order of operations together.

Opening an encounter by spamming a daily wasn't something I really noticed in my small, local gaming group, so I'll trust your experience.  In my experience, about half of us were too concerned that the next encounter might be the "big one" and horded dailies, so unless something was obviously the boss fight, we usually opened up with an at-will or encounter to get a read on the enemies' defenses/stats before wasting a daily.

I will agree that encounters did tend to drag, partly due to play inexperience and partly due choices and positioning, but my understanding was MM1 was by far the worst for the HP bloat.  I remember a hack from the MM1 days of double the enemy damage output and halve the HP to make for quicker more interesting combat encounters.  

I still don't get the "samey" argument.  Yes, the powers presentation left everything looking similar on the surface (and I personally wish the fluff text hadn't seemed as divorced from the rules text), but my charisma paladin (defender) played differently than my wisdom cleric (leader, played (willingly) as healbot).  It was cool the times when the GM forgot that the enemy was marked by the paladin and retributive pain rained from the sky.  The roles, leader, defender, striker, controller, were what mattered the most in the different classes' play styles.

----------


## MwaO

> You think its fair to say that the devs failed by discouraging rolls, but not with and here I struggle to say something that doesnt also apply to the first part, like the mechanics chosen. The iterative nature of the rolls, perhaps?
> 
> Theres a lot of ways I could try to explain my concerns let me put it the silliest way. Lets say that the challenge is crossing a River, from later in this thread.
> 
> One character braves the River, and makes Athletics rolls; another drives the wagon, and makes Ride rolls. A third calms / encourages the horses, and makes Handle Animal rolls, while a forth prays to the River god, and makes Diplomacy rolls. The fifth just teleported across (along with lightening the wagon of excess goods that they teleported with them), and makes Perception / Command rolls to oversee the process.
> 
> In 4e, they all make the same number of rolls, and its simply adding up the successes and failures to determine whether crossing succeeded or failed. In 4e, you can figure that they all found excuses to roll the highest rolls they could. It starts with the system, and _maybe_ gets translate back to the fiction.


This is a relatively common misconception about how 4e works. Basically...

All D&D systems, including 4e, spell out some straightforward DCs for you. Do you want to cross a river as described above? Sure, go for it in 4e in basically the exact same way you'd do it in 3.5 or 5e, with static level-independent DCs.

Then, in addition, 4e has the option that crossing the river is important to the narrative. The PCs don't just need to cross the river; they need to cross it_ fast._ And if they don't, there are going to be some sort of consequences. They're chasing after an opponent who is escaping with a kidnapped noble and they'll get away, there's a rock slide about to crush them, a monster way out of their league is about to slaughter them all, etc...there's a variety of other things happening that day on some sort of timer, so if they do poorly, their strategic resources of healing surges or daily powers might get drained saving them. And those DCs will be level-dependent DCs, because this is in a sense a 'combat' and worth XP.

One of the problems with the early adventures, especially the early LFR adventures, is the people writing them were working pre-DMG, and did stupid concepts such as every adventure had to have a skill challenge, when the writers weren't even 100% clear what the final version would be. But that's not how they actually work as described in DMG, or DMG2/Rules Compendium where the errata'd skill challenges to remove init and a couple of other things were changed.

----------


## RandomPeasant

> ToB 3.5 (and path of war) characters have what are effectively Encounter powers. However they each have ways to refresh these maneuvers which are either entertainingly unique or obvious tempo breaks which require in the moment value judgments. Notably their at will options are not quite so far behind these encounter options, so the maneuvers more truly express as options rather than a battle flowchart mandate.


You also have a pretty wide range of options to choose from in selecting those abilities, and can build characters that play in different ways by making different choices. A Warblade who focuses on Counters and Boosts plays differently than one who focuses on Strikes. It's not quite as deep as it could be, but even with just the one book, you get more ways of building a character than 4e classes do (especially at release).




> Worse compared to any system that does _not_ allow arbitrarily refluffing any mechanic.


I fail to see how this is a _Skill Challenge_ problem. I agree that arbitrary refluffing causes the problem you're describing, but it causes it whether the thing you're arbitrarily refluffing in is "a single skill check" or "a sequence of individual skill checks" or "a skill challenge".




> In pretty much every RPG, fiction comes first; and the contradiction is resolved by not allowing you to trip an ooze. In 4E, the rules come first, you can trip an ooze just fine, and you just change the description to "yeah, I didn't really _trip_ it but I did something unspecifiable that _just so happens_ to have the same mechanics as having tripped the ooze".


How is this different from resolving the problem by naming the condition "daze" in the first place?




> If you want to use a skill for something the skill doesn't do (e.g. Religion to pray for help, Arcana to cast spells, History to perform any task the way it was traditionally done, etc) then in pretty much RPG, it just has no effect.


But isn't that "playing the game, not the fiction"? If "Religion" covers "correct knowledge of the operation of religious rites", and you live in a world where correctly performing religious rites can achieve real effects, then _shouldn't_ the fiction suggest that a sufficient Religion check could achieve a real effect? I do not think the distinction being made here is as strong or as well-defined as its defenders would suggest.




> A tier 1 full caster like Wizard loses a lot of their I-win buttons, of course, but tiering discourse would also imply that the existence of wizard isn't exactly desirable for the health of the game in the first place.


I would suggest that the tiering discourse is _wrong_, and 4e is the proof. The issue with 3e wasn't the Wizard having powerful abilities, it was the Barbarian not having them, and 4e "fixed" it in precisely the wrong way.




> Poke out from behind cover.
> Launch an attack (whether that's a crossbow, bow, spell, sling, whatever).
> Step back behind cover.


In 3e this is called "firing from cover". I find "I need to be able to move from behind a wall to in front of the wall and take a shot and move back within a single combat round" strikes me as an _incredibly_ "playing the game" demand to make.

----------


## Beoric

> Sigh. Wrong question. Let me try again: a war game consists entirely of inside the box; an RPG has both inside the box and outside the box as valid options.
> 
> So _of course_ people _can_ play inside the box in an RPG. In fact, IMO, in a good RPG, one can play all the core game loops entirely inside the box, should one so desire. The question is, how much does the game facilitate or hinder playing all the core gameplay loops entirely _outside_ the box? Could you play 4e combat while never touching your AEDs? Could someone who only knows Iron Kingdoms roleplay their Iron Kingdoms character, tell you their actions from RP stance in ignorance of 4e rules, and you adjudicate that? Or (since I dont know Iron Kingdoms), could you adjudicate for a player who never reads their sheet, who never touches their AEDs, and who only interacts narratively with the environment, pulling rugs and jamming doors and banging heads together and dropping bags of flour and setting things on fire?
> 
> How much of a chore would that be? How much would it break the game?
> 
> In 4e, all Ive ever heard is inside the box, whereas Ive seen 3e played all but exclusively outside the box.
> 
> The question isnt have you seen people play in the box, the question is, have you seen people play _outside_ the box. And, even then, my question is, where in the spectrum of facilitate to hinder does the game stand on the spectrum of how it handles going outside the box. Thats how suitable it is to being an RPG.


I have to disagree with all of this.  The reason early D&D games ran "out of the box" a lot is because they had no rules for adjudicating most things, so you resolved issues narratively using a question-and-answer technique until the players could posit an approach that either would automatically work, or would be resolved according to whatever random chance the DM decided to assign to it.

Nothing has changed in 4e.  You can still resolve actions narratively.  Narrative resolution can still result in either automatic success, or a check against whatever DC a DM decides to assign.  The only difference in the DM can also decide, depending on the player's approach, which of your skills grants appropriate modifiers to the roll.

I know this because I have run a _very_ old school game using 4e rules for at least 10 years.  You don't have to change any rules to do this.  I mean, I do have houserules, but they are not necessary to accomplish this result.

As for combat, no, many AEDU powers are not intuitive and are not likely to be used by a player who isn't aware of them.  But some kind of are, like Tide of Iron.  And it is entirely possible to run a first level martial e-class character like a slayer, thief or scout by just having the player describe what they want to do narratively.  Even unusual actions don't break anything, because the rules expressly contemplate these sorts of actions on p. 42 of the DMG.  So go ahead, bang heads together or chuck a torch into a cloud of flour

I think you mentioned earlier in the thread that you found combat boring.  I can say I really don't have that problem, either as a player or as a DM.  Positioning is so important, and there are so many methods for changing the positioning of you, your allies, and your enemies, that combat encounters never end up being static for me unless we end up stuck in a hallway.  At a minimum, the optimal positioning changes every time a monster drops.  We tend to run dynamic dungeons, so there is also the issue of preventing monsters from running for reinforcements, which can make things quite interesting.  

It does help to have larger battle maps than are usually present in published modules, but if you run on a VTT that really isn't a problem.  I have also borrowed a trick from the 1e positioning rules, which allow PCs to fight three abreast in a 10' hallway, and have started making my hallways 3 squares wide.

On a similar note:



> That's an intriguing question, and I'll tentatively say there's not enough situational abilities.
> 
> ...
> 
> It's not hard to find other examples. Playing a fire blaster in 3E/PF, enemies with fire resistance are pretty common (and then there's Evasion, and then there's underwater combat), so you'd better have some backup abilities that aren't fire. But in 4E? Fire resistance is rare to the point where fire elementals don't even resist fire. Against fire resistance, your best option is to... use fire anyway, because for a fire-specced mage it's better than your other options. Likewise, if you're under water, just... use the same fire spells again. So again, the former leads to more variation.


I don't get this problem either.  You have express permission to modify stat blocks or create new creatures.  It is nothing to add fire resistance to your fire elements, for example.  I can say that all of my gelatinous cubes have the trait "Immune: prone", because proning oozes, let alone proning a cube, is stupid.

Basically, I think the problem with 4e as it relates to these examples is one of presentation.  It was presented in published modules as rigidly structured, so people assumed that to be the case.  This was particularly stressed in organized play, because organized play has to be structured; but nobody pointed out that organized play is no way to run a home game.

----------


## Quertus

My phone is about to die; apologies if this doesnt make sense.




> You... can still do all that, though? Unless I'm misunderstanding your point terribly, 4e has exactly as much support as 3.5 for doing things outside the game rules, which is exactly zero, by definition. If anything, there's _more_ support for it, since the game's default response for doing stuff outside the defined ruleset is "roll a skill you think is relevant, against a level-appropriate DC."


Huh. I dont know whether to put this in the bin misunderstanding your point terribly, or both understood me exactly and best argument for 4e being an RPG Ive ever heard. Given the earlier comment by the Giant, we may be seeing the end of an era, and I might have to drop my running gag.

So you are at least _slightly_ in the misaligned bucket, as its not support = 0. Support = 0 is not _irrelevant_, but at the wrong layer? Like, I asked for an object of type girl, you handed me an object of type redhead.

More precisely, Im measuring the effort it takes to adjudicate I activate my AED button vs the effort it takes to evaluate, I pull the rug out from under the orcs and jam it in the door.

And I guess I can see how, if you dont have my standards, it sounds like 4e provides guidance, in terms of level-appropriate damage, and an admonition to make a skill check or something.

But the problem is this notion of breaking the game; the _real_ trick is not just making a random ruling, but making a ruling in accordance with the system paradigm.

Like, for example, in a horror game, to meet my standards, any outside the box adjudication should support the horror feel of the game just as well as the existing rules.

The issue is, look at how many people describe 4e actions: dull, boring, samey, predictable, d6+X damage plus rider effect.

So, a successful pull the rug action should require a ____ skill check against the orcs _____; success should deal d6+__ damage, and carry a rider of _____.

Maybe Im an idiot, and that really is about as easy for you to Madlib as adjudicating Burning Hands in 4e. It wasnt for me (but I never actually wrote out the template like that) or anyone I knew. But, of course, thats the wrong question.

Maybe thats _no greater extra effort_ for you than the extra effort of adjudicating that in 3e vs adjudicating Burning Hands in 3e.

Thats whats being compared: the difference between two differences. You need **4** data points in order to say, system X seems about as suited as system Y to be played as an RPG, according to this single data point, and many more sets of 4 numbers to compare their overall suitability.





> I'd also point out that 3rd and 4th *both fail* at allowing something pretty basic, at least in combat.
> 
> Poke out from behind cover.
> Launch an attack (whether that's a crossbow, bow, spell, sling, whatever).
> Step back behind cover.
> 
> That's something that I personally can do-I could be behind a wall, duck out from it, throw a rock, and duck back behind it. I wouldn't be as accurate as an adventurer, yet I can do that! But neither 3rd nor 4th allows that in basic rules. 3rd edition requires a feat chain or something like Travel Devotion to manage it, and 4th edition would require a power that lets you move after attacking.





> And 5e makes "poke out behind cover, make an attack, duck behind cover" require enemies to expend possibly insane resources to respond to it.
> 
> For example, suppose it is an enemy spellcaster.  They have to ready a spell for you to poke out from cover.  This spell is wasted if you don't do it on that turn.
> 
> Similarly, for any archer, they have to not do anything besides ready to attack you.  Depending on how flexible "ready" is this can be easily exploited.


Unless Im mistaken, thats simply a property of turn-based combat. Or, rather, of a standard implementation thereof.

Now, sure, you could argue how difficult to adjudicate turn-based combat is compared to tick-based combat, or other such resolution methods. And even go so far as to discuss which makes the game more suited to being played as an RPG.

But specific action declarations that break turn-based assumptions? Thats pretty niche compared to a more general outside the box, no? Not irrelevant, but a drop in the ocean compared to general action adjudication, IME.

(I do agree that there are more realistic implementations than turn-based; senility willing, maybe Ill find and post my examples thereof)

----------


## Yakk

> Unless Im mistaken, thats simply a property of turn-based combat. Or, rather, of a standard implementation thereof.
> 
> Now, sure, you could argue how difficult to adjudicate turn-based combat is compared to tick-based combat, or other such resolution methods. And even go so far as to discuss which makes the game more suited to being played as an RPG.
> 
> But specific action declarations that break turn-based assumptions? Thats pretty niche compared to a more general outside the box, no? Not irrelevant, but a drop in the ocean compared to general action adjudication, IME.
> 
> (I do agree that there are more realistic implementations than turn-based; senility willing, maybe Ill find and post my examples thereof)


No, it is an artifact of "you can do your main action on your turn in a spot different than where you end your turn".

Usually, the goal of turn-based combat is to emulate continuous combat.  The idea that your cannot do your main action of your turn (attack etc) in a spot that nobody else can easily react to is part of that emulation.

Exit cover, attack, duck behind cover in turn-based combat is then emulated as either "exit cover, attack, end turn, attack, enter cover, end turn" or "exit cover, attack, end turn, enter cover, end turn".  The key part is that the meat and potatoes of your turn (the attack)'s location is a place that others can react to on their turn without jumping through hoops mechanically.

5e fails at this with "you can move between and after your attacks".  You jump out from cover, attack, duck behind cover.  On other creature's turns they do not have the opportunity to treat you as not having cover, because you only stayed there during your turn.  They have to engage in exceptional and unusual mechanical things to pull off the natural "I shoot the person when they aren't behind cover".

Now, a turn based game can handle this with various mechanisms; 5e, as I noted, does not.

If you look at a tactical game like xcom (the old isometric ones at least) your troops almost always end their turn on overwatch -- combat happens reactively.  Only troops protected (snipers) or scouts (who get surprised going around a corner) attack on their turn.  This is in contrast to 5e, where off-turn actions are second class.

Or, a game where weapon combat isn't an action -- you become engaged with foes (be it at range or in melee), and that fighting is resolved action-free.  The mechanics of shooting isn't tied to an action occuring on your turn with a static snapshot of the world.

Lots of mechanics are possible.  My point is 5e doesn't have any of them, leading to that quirk.

This quirk does *not* happen in 4e or 3e, both of whom are turn-based, so it clearly isn't an artifact of turn-based combat.

----------


## dgnslyr

> Sigh. Wrong question. Let me try again: a war game consists entirely of inside the box; an RPG has both inside the box and outside the box as valid options.
> 
> So _of course_ people _can_ play inside the box in an RPG. In fact, IMO, in a good RPG, one can play all the core game loops entirely inside the box, should one so desire. The question is, how much does the game facilitate or hinder playing all the core gameplay loops entirely _outside_ the box? Could you play 4e combat while never touching your AEDs? Could someone who only knows Iron Kingdoms roleplay their Iron Kingdoms character, tell you their actions from RP stance in ignorance of 4e rules, and you adjudicate that? Or (since I dont know Iron Kingdoms), could you adjudicate for a player who never reads their sheet, who never touches their AEDs, and who only interacts narratively with the environment, pulling rugs and jamming doors and banging heads together and dropping bags of flour and setting things on fire?


I don't see how 4e supports this any less than 3.5, which is "not at all." In more positive terms, what does 3.5 do _right_ to enable all this wild out-of-the-box thinking? Because I can't think of anything. If anything, 3.5 works _against_ it, with a much larger and more granular skill list means characters have an even shorter list of general, open-ended competencies. But I always like hearing about peoples' experiences with 3.5, good or bad, and I'd be happy to hear yours. 

So far, though, the main takeaway I've gotten from you is that if the box is too fun, then no one will want to leave it, and yes, I agree! That's the whole point of paying for the box! If I wasn't interested in playing in the box, then I wouldn't have bought it, since playing outside the box is free. So all the crazy stunts you'd want to pull in 3.5 are just as possible in 4e; it's just that most people won't choose to take them most of the time, since pressing an AEDU button has a defined effect, while asking your DM to improvise is entirely at the DM's discretion. 

tl, dr: if you try to play 4e like 3.5, the worst that can happen is you succeed

----------


## MwaO

> 5e fails at this with "you can move between and after your attacks".  You jump out from cover, attack, duck behind cover.  On other creature's turns they do not have the opportunity to treat you as not having cover, because you only stayed there during your turn.  They have to engage in exceptional and unusual mechanical things to pull off the natural "I shoot the person when they aren't behind cover".


Or to use the large obvious problematical example:
Wizard, 15' behind party and around a corner, runs out in front of party, and casts a spell which if they cast it at their starting location, they would have blasted the party. Then they run back to their original location.

Which yes, you can set up your reaction to shoot the Wizard when they do that. But there's no charge option by default in 5e, so it has to be a "I shoot the Wizard" or "I wait patiently by the front lines of the party, hoping the Wizard stands next to me when the Wizard can see me, so as to get an OA when they do that."

----------


## Yakk

To be clear, this isn't "ah this makes 5e suck and unplayable".  But it is a flaw in 5e's choice of movement model that 3e/4e didn't have, and 3e/4es choice wasn't arbitrary.

All systems are going to have flaws, even if only "this is too complex".  I much appreciate the ability to weave through foes and maneuver while doing your turn, for example.  I think D&D could use more of it (mobility in combat); the risk is that it makes positioning useless.

4es attempt to make positioning useful ended up making Defenders into glue-balls, needing special abilities to get out of the glue-ball (while rewarding those who did).  That is a different kind of immobile combat.

Other games have such mobility that the front line is just not really there -- you can't defend the back line.  5e is approaching this.

----------


## Grod_The_Giant

> More precisely, Im measuring the effort it takes to adjudicate I activate my AED button vs the effort it takes to evaluate, I pull the rug out from under the orcs and jam it in the door.


I mean... in any rules-heavy game (ie, all modern editions* of D&D) it's going to be easier to adjudicate an ability that has pre-defined effects than an improvised one.  That's what rules are for, generally speaking.




> Like, for example, in a horror game, to meet my standards, any outside the box adjudication should support the horror feel of the game just as well as the existing rules.


I _would_ argue that modern D&D* is just a fundamentally bad system for out-of-the-box maneuvers.  At 1st level, shoving a goblin in a fire for 2d6 damage is a fine use for your (standard) action-- you're making a reasonable contribution to the fight, pushing it towards victory by a similar degree to stabbing someone.  But by 10th level, enemies have ten or twenty times as many hit points while the fire is presumably still dealing 2d6, and the impact is essentially nil.  You've wasted your turn and made things that much harder for your allies.

(Having environmental effects deal a _percentage_ of your hit points in damage, rather than an absolute value, would largely solve this, but would probably just lead to more arguments about what hit points represent)

But at the same time, you can't make improvised actions _too_ powerful, or else they start treading on the toes of abilities the players already picked for their characters.  If the Barbarian spent a full ASI on a "mass trip" feat that lets them trip three targets at once, how do you think they're going to feel when the Rogue yanks on the carpet and knocks five guys to the floor in one swoop?  If the Wizard needs a third level spell to blind a foe and the Fighter does the same thing by throwing some dirt in their eyes, you're upsetting all kinds of game balance and role protection systems.

And I mean yeah, a good GM can thread the needle and make them work, but... compared to other systems?  In Fate, "do something cool and influence the whole scene" is literally one of the four main actions (Create an Aspect).  Mutants and Masterminds makes power stunts a core mechanic, with the checks and balances already baked in.  Even something like Savage Worlds does a better job-- not only does it avoid the damage scaling issue, metagame resources like "bennies" gives you an easy and intuitive way to keep crazy stunts in check.  (And as a bonus, GMs are more likely to approve an improvised action if they feel like the player is paying for it somehow.



*3e, 4e, and 5e; I don't know enough about 2e or the various iterations of AD&D to comment on them.

----------


## aimlessPolymath

Having recently played in a few games of 4e (read: an 8-session aborted campaign as a warden and a one-shot as a druid), running to level 5 at the highest, some of my thoughts about my experience + modifications my GM made during the course of play: 

*Encounters:* My GM rejiggered Monster HP/damage according to the Monster Manual 3 guidelines, which reduced health and increased damage by about 30% compared to previous books. This was very impactful- during the one-shot, she didn't have the time to prep this, and the combat was much, much more sluggish- people started to devolve into using At-Will/encounter powers for raw damage rather than for their effects.

Skill checks in combat rarely came up, except to make Athletics/Acrobatics checks to climb during one encounter. We had a few cases where there were things we could have actively interacted with, but the more interesting encounters were those with geography that broke up the party (ex. widely separated enemies that caused us to split up to reach them, a large blocking pillar in the center of the map that split the group in half, areas of cover that we hid behind).

We generally did not attempt actions not written in the rules (but that could have been justified in narrative). On the one time we did try something not covered by the rules, it was along the lines of using one of our combat powers in an unusual way (targeting an environmental object to collapse it, using an ice power on a faucet flooding the room to freeze it). Generally, something would need to be doing something active or otherwise have our attention called to it for us to 'notice' it. 

*Powers:* There are a number of daily powers that provide a benefit that lasts for the encounter- for a Warden, their transformation 'stance' powers, and for a Druid, zones. I have mixed feelings on these- they're very cool ways to create ongoing effects, but I didn't especially enjoy needing to take two similar zone powers on my Druid just to make my basic strategy (make hazardous zones, slide enemies around to keep them inside) work. Choosing which of the two to use was a good decision point, but one that only happened once per day. 

My encounter powers skewed towards being control tools (a mass-pull and long-ranged charge for warden, and Wind Wall and a one-round zone for druid) and felt good- I rarely felt that I was best-served spending them for raw damage, and was comfortable holding them for appropriate situations in a fight. 

I think the party striker hewed closest to the 'blow encounter powers at the start of the fight' model mentioned by others- the other players less so.

*Skill Challenges:* These were somewhat abstracted. In general, we were presented with a general scenario (ex. 'there's an army fighting in the jungle against cultists, support them however') and the GM cycled through players one at a time until the whole party had acted for the 'round' of narrative.  While the GM suggested some skills that would definitely be applicable, most players did not have those specific skills, so they had to justify how they were able to contribute with a skill they did have. The net effect was similar to a collaboratively described montage.

If we had a power with applicable fluff (ex. my Warden's ice-storm power was used to create cloudy weather for cover with a Nature check), we could spend a use of it to gain a bonus to the skill roll- +2 for encounter / at-will powers, +5 for daily powers. 

Additionally, each player was given a bonus free skill starting from around session 4 of the campaign- one of the things we observed was that about 80% of players had roughly three freely choose-able skills, and took Athletics/Acrobatics for combat maneuverability, Perception on general principles, and a third, more defining skill. Adding the additional skill increased diversity by a massive amount. 

*Upgrades (Feats/Items)*  These were painful, and a major contributor to mental load. Most feats and items fell into the following categories:
-Required numerical upgrades (ex. Expertise feats that provide a scaling +1/2/3 bonus to attack rolls based on tier, magic items) that are boring to pick up, but numerically important. These could have been built into the expected numbers-per-level without any real change. 
-Conditional bonuses that add to mental load- combat advantage versus enemies who are slowed/immobilized, inflicting a condition on specific enemies, bonus on charge attacks. At one point, I asked my GM to stop giving me items with conditional damage bonuses (while bloodied), because it was getting to be too much to remember damage sources from all over my character sheet.

I think feat design was negatively impacted by the model of each PC taking fifteen feats over 30 levels- individual feats end up low-impact for balance, but in aggregate, they balloon to a higher math load.

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## RandomPeasant

> I mean... in any rules-heavy game (ie, all modern editions* of D&D) it's going to be easier to adjudicate an ability that has pre-defined effects than an improvised one.  That's what rules are for, generally speaking.


I would go so far as to say _any_ game that provides rules for doing things will find following those rules to be easier to adjudicate than making things up.




> But by 10th level, enemies have ten or twenty times as many hit points while the fire is presumably still dealing 2d6, and the impact is essentially nil.  You've wasted your turn and made things that much harder for your allies.


Sure. But what if the impact of the fire had been a "distracted" condition that gave you a modest to-hit bonus? That would remain relevant for as long as your to-hit remained relatively close to enemy AC (and to be fair, this is not guaranteed, high-level 3e aimed for a paradigm where you hit easily and made up the difference with Power Attack). I think "give players a smallish bonus for describing a cool tactic, and default to allowing them to get that bonus" would go a long way towards satisfying the people who want of of the box thinking, and would have a relatively low balance impact.




> (Having environmental effects deal a _percentage_ of your hit points in damage, rather than an absolute value, would largely solve this, but would probably just lead to more arguments about what hit points represent)


Having more high-level environmental effects would probably be a good thing for the game. Obviously there's a limiting principle where introducing "ultra fire" after you've already had "fire" and "hell fire" and "dragon fire" becomes dumb, but moving towards more environmental effects seems easy to do on the margin and relatively rewarding.




> I didn't especially enjoy needing to take two similar zone powers on my Druid just to make my basic strategy (make hazardous zones, slide enemies around to keep them inside) work. Choosing which of the two to use was a good decision point, but one that only happened once per day.


This strikes me as a pretty concrete example of the weaknesses of a single resource management approach for the whole system. Different playstyles benefit from expending resources in different ways.

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## Quertus

> I don't see how 4e supports this any less than 3.5, which is "not at all." In more positive terms, what does 3.5 do _right_ to enable all this wild out-of-the-box thinking? Because I can't think of anything.
> 
> So far, though, the main takeaway I've gotten from you is that if the box is too fun, then no one will want to leave it, and yes, I agree!


It wasnt about fun, but comparative effort. And Im not sure any system is actually going to live on the positive side of the line - its probably just _how much_ does it hinder roleplaying?.




> I mean... in any rules-heavy game (ie, all modern editions* of D&D) it's going to be easier to adjudicate an ability that has pre-defined effects than an improvised one.  That's what rules are for, generally speaking.


Yeah, thats one of the reasons my definitions (probably/presumably) a failure. So Ive made a new thread in case anyone wants to discuss it further, to not further clutter this thread.




> I _would_ argue that modern D&D* is just a fundamentally bad system for out-of-the-box maneuvers.  At 1st level, shoving a goblin in a fire for 2d6 damage is a fine use for your (standard) action-- you're making a reasonable contribution to the fight, pushing it towards victory by a similar degree to stabbing someone.  But by 10th level, enemies have ten or twenty times as many hit points while the fire is presumably still dealing 2d6, and the impact is essentially nil.  You've wasted your turn and made things that much harder for your allies.


Im fine with that. The fire is still easy to adjudicate, the character is just dumb for pushing a living rock the size of a skyscraper into the campfire, and expecting that to amount to anything next to the Monk who turned one to rubble with their bare hands, or the Diplomancer who showed another the true meaning of Christmas, and won its eternal loyalty to the party with a gift of earrings.

Im often the guy pushing the rock into the campfire, I just dont expect it to be terribly meaningful.




> (Having environmental effects deal a _percentage_ of your hit points in damage, rather than an absolute value, would largely solve this, but would probably just lead to more arguments about what hit points represent)


Yeah, if you dont have a firm foundation there, youre asking for trouble by changing it in just one place.




> But at the same time, you can't make improvised actions _too_ powerful, or else they start treading on the toes of abilities the players already picked for their characters.  If the Barbarian spent a full ASI on a "mass trip" feat that lets them trip three targets at once, how do you think they're going to feel when the Rogue yanks on the carpet and knocks five guys to the floor in one swoop?  If the Wizard needs a third level spell to blind a foe and the Fighter does the same thing by throwing some dirt in their eyes, you're upsetting all kinds of game balance and role protection systems.


Absolutely. Youre deincentivized from rule of cool (_especially_ the OP variety) by having baselines of this is what people _paid_ for. Thats part of what makes the adjudication difficult: theres (unspoken) rules.

And thats part of why I said my standards for adjudication were not a low bar, as Im not a fan of freebies being better than (or even as good as, really) what people paid for.

Still, sometimes, the campfire having the [fire] property, or the [was built on a leyline] property, or some such _happens_ to make it logically better than anything anyone actually paid for. And thats fine.




> And I mean yeah, a good GM can thread the needle and make them work, but... compared to other systems?  In Fate, "do something cool and influence the whole scene" is literally one of the four main actions (Create an Aspect).  Mutants and Masterminds makes power stunts a core mechanic, with the checks and balances already baked in.  Even something like Savage Worlds does a better job-- not only does it avoid the damage scaling issue, metagame resources like "bennies" gives you an easy and intuitive way to keep crazy stunts in check.  (And as a bonus, GMs are more likely to approve an improvised action if they feel like the player is paying for it somehow.


Yup. Taken at face value, my metric says that those systems are much better suited to being RPGs. And I never noticed until today? Yesterday? Sigh.

Now Ive got to ask myself two big questions: 1) _are_ they more suited to being played as RPGs; 2) _is_ this what 4e was missing?




> *3e, 4e, and 5e; I don't know enough about 2e or the various iterations of AD&D to comment on them.


Earlier editions didnt have unified mechanics - everything had its own table, its own mechanic. So whatever you/yall felt stimulated the question at hand would fit in seamlessly with the system as written. I guess.

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## kieza

> (bold emphasis added)
> 
> Responding to kieza, but I'm hoping to hear from other people as well, as many people seem to want martials to have nice things (even if magnitude an ongoing debate) and at least some people don't love too many subsystems, which leaves me confused- what's so distasteful/irritating about the standardized AEDU system?
> 
> Granted 4e did a lousy job defining what utility powers were and moved many, but not all, out of combat utility spells from other editions to ritual land, but _what's wrong with AED on the same schedule_?


For me, it felt extremely forced. Here are two characters; one of them is a muscle guy who has trained to swing a sword around and the other has an inherent gift of magic. Despite the vast difference in what they do, both of them know two at-will powers, an encounter power, and a daily power.

It also felt like it unnecessarily closed off some design space, especially since 4e took all the game-breaking magic from earlier editions and put it behind rituals. I admit it would have had to be carefully balanced, but "this subclass of warlock gains only half as many encounter powers, but they're twice as powerful" seems like it could be tweaked to balance out.

It doesn't even need to be a huge difference in how the resources are allocated. Without going into too much detail: my retro-clone has two ranks of power, lesser and greater. All characters know the same number of powers and gain them at the same rate (excluding powers that are baked in as a class feature) and the powers themselves are of roughly equal power across classes, but martial characters can use more greater powers before resting, while arcane characters have ways to rapidly swap out which powers they know so that their powers are more applicable. Divine characters, which I'm reserving for a splatbook, can once per day perform a miracle, which is an unusually powerful greater power that depends on their class and god. Animist characters (also a splatbook) get a free multiclass feature for another animist class, and are required to choose at least one power that doesn't belong to their main class. 

So, each power source's resources differ in small but distinctive ways. As a bonus, grouping these variations on resources by power source helps to establish a shared identity: martial classes are enduring, arcane classes are flexible, divine classes go nova, etc.

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## Grod_The_Giant

I would have enjoyed seeing Encounter powers work more like Tome of Battle maneuvers, in that they have to be recovered once used--that would let you play around with recovery options to give different classes different feels. (ie, the Barbarian recovers a power when they kill or bloody a foe, the Fighter when a marked foe attacks someone else, etc)

I remember working on something like that a long time ago, but I dunno what happened to the thread.

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## Zombimode

> I'd also point out that 3rd and 4th *both fail* at allowing something pretty basic, at least in combat.
> 
> Poke out from behind cover.
> Launch an attack (whether that's a crossbow, bow, spell, sling, whatever).
> Step back behind cover.
> 
> That's something that I personally can do-I could be behind a wall, duck out from it, throw a rock, and duck back behind it. I wouldn't be as accurate as an adventurer, yet I can do that! But neither 3rd nor 4th allows that in basic rules. 3rd edition requires a feat chain or something like Travel Devotion to manage it, and 4th edition would require a power that lets you move after attacking.


I'm not interessted in the Edition War, but I can't stand factual wrong statements.

In 3e your ranged line of effect is determined by _one_ corner of your space (drawing lines to all corners of the target's space). So yes, shooting out of cover is _the norm_ in 3e. Check out PHB p. 150-151.

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## dgnslyr

> i'm not interessted in the edition war, but i can't stand factual wrong statements.
> 
> In 3e your ranged line of effect is determined by _one_ corner of your space (drawing lines to all corners of the target's space). So yes, shooting out of cover is _the norm_ in 3e.


I think 4e uses the same cover rules as 3.X as well? Although I haven't cross-referenced them to say for sure. 



```
+--+------+
|.R|.....H|
|........G|
|..|......|
+--+------+
```

But the issue, I think, is that Ranger R may have clear line of sight against Goblin G, but is totally obstructed against Hobgoblin H, and the movement rules don't let you step out of cover, shoot Hobgoblin H, and then step back in, at least by default. You can still solve it pretty easily in 4e by having an attack or minor action power that lets you move a square or two, but again it's a problem that you need to somehow solve, at some minor cost.

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## Zombimode

But that is not "poking out of cover". That is "steping out of cover". Sure, you might plan to return to cover at one point, but for a significant amount of time you're exposing yourself. I don't see an issue with that.

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## RandomPeasant

> But that is not "poking out of cover". That is "steping out of cover". Sure, you might plan to return to cover at one point, but for a significant amount of time you're exposing yourself. I don't see an issue with that.


And, as I said earlier, it strikes me as a fundamentally "the game" concern. 3e allows you to step out from behind a wall, take a shot, and step back behind the wall. It just puts the turn boundary between steps two and three by default. Once you've accepted the division of combat into discrete rounds, I have a really hard time seeing "the round cuts over in this place instead of that one" as fundamentally anti-fiction.

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## sandmote

> And, as far as I know, all the rolls are made at the same DC, the crossing the River DC. Even things like lightening the load dont change the DC. But I may be mistaken.


 I think the intent is that the skill challenge has an intended _level_, and the DC for each check can be easy, moderate, or high based on what the PC says they are intending to try. 



> If a player wants to use a skill you didnt identify as a primary skill in the challenge, however, then the DC for using that secondary skill is usually moderate or hard. The use of the skill might win the day in unexpected ways, but the risk is greater as well.


Now, that doesn't quite make internal sense with the description of skill challenges because the rules suggested choosing whether the challenge is easy, moderate, or hard before it says this, and which skill checks count as medium in the example cases provided seems a bit excessive. But there do appear to be three levers to modify the difficulty of the skill challenge: 
The Challenge's complexity.The effective level of the Challenge.Whether a particular skill check made is easy, moderate, or hard for the Challenge's level. 
I think lever 3 is intended to make it so that PCs can still end up with a higher chance of success when using a skill with a lower bonus: make the difficulty for something that obviously makes sense to try easy, and increase it to moderate or hard the most squirrely the player's idea is. So a PC that tries to pray to the river spirit to help the party because they've got +11 in Religion can still have a lower chance of success than if they looked around to identify a spot where the river is shallow enough to wade across for most of the way and take their chance with a Wisdom based skill instead. 

I do think that can also make some more sense with setting a skill challenge's level. by the difficulty of what was described. Crossing a river is probably a low level challenge, which increases in level for particularly wide or rapid rivers. Crossing floodwaters, a flowing avalanche, or a river of lava are then paragon or epic level challenges. Characters with a chance to manage the latter examples can likely automatically succeed a skill challenge to cross a regular river. 

I haven't read all (or even much) of the errata for 4e, so I do hope someone more familiar with that might be able to say if there's anything there to support or undermine this reading of the DMG 1. But the idea of a "crossing the river DC" does seem inaccurate to me. And a large chunk of the "4e isn't an RPG" argument seems to flow from the PCs automatically trying to make a check with the skill with the highest bonus on the assumption it always has the highest chance of success. Which I don't seem to do any more in 4e than I do in 3.5e or pathfinder.

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## Kurald Galain

> For me, it felt extremely forced. Here are two characters; one of them is a muscle guy who has trained to swing a sword around and the other has an inherent gift of magic. Despite the vast difference in what they do, both of them know two at-will powers, an encounter power, and a daily power.
> 
> It also felt like it unnecessarily closed off some design space, especially since 4e took all the game-breaking magic from earlier editions and put it behind rituals. I admit it would have had to be carefully balanced, but "this subclass of warlock gains only half as many encounter powers, but they're twice as powerful" seems like it could be tweaked to balance out.


I completely agree, they should have done more variations on the class framework, right from the first book.




> a large chunk of the "4e isn't an RPG" argument seems to flow from the PCs automatically trying to make a check with the skill with the highest bonus on the assumption it always has the highest chance of success. Which I don't seem to do any more in 4e than I do in 3.5e or pathfinder.


The difference is that 4E gives much more leeway to replace one skill with another by refluffing. Something like "I roll stealth to _quietly_ cross the river" or "I roll history to remember how rivers have been crossed in the past" would not fly in 3E/PF but are common responses in 4E. In all systems players _want_ to use their highest skills but not all systems _let_ them.

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## Batcathat

It's kind of funny that 4e rules are getting criticized both for not being flexible enough and for being too flexible. (Doesn't mean that either is wrong, of course, since it concerns different parts, but still amusing).

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## Kurald Galain

> It's kind of funny that 4e rules are getting criticized both for not being flexible enough and for being too flexible. (Doesn't mean that either is wrong, of course, since it concerns different parts, but still amusing).


I suppose the unifying factor here is lack of variation. Being too inflexible in the AEDU paradigm leads to lack of variation, in that every class gets the same amount of powers at the same levels. Being too flexible in skills _also_ leads to lack of variation, in that players have an incentive to always use their best skill in every situation.

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## Beoric

> Being too flexible in skills _also_ leads to lack of variation, in that players have an incentive to always use their best skill in every situation.


I think there are three things going on here, and they relate more to presentation than to the mechanics of the game.

The first is that I think the separation of mechanics from flavour text is often interpreted as a separation of mechanics from narration generally.  Narration ends up being treated as a description of what the dice have determined, to the exclusion of using narration as a way of determining the parameters of an intended action.  So you end up with players defaulting to picking a skill instead of describing an approach, and this being reinforced by DMs interpreting the approach chosen by a player in a given situation ends up having no impact on the actual chances of success of the action.

For example, take a situation where one needs to persuade an aristocrat of a particular course of action during an audience before her court, and compare two approaches.  Of an infinite number of possible approaches, let's say one possible attempt at persuasion is to discuss the strategic and political advantages of an alliance with a neighbouring baron.  The other is to try to seduce the aristocrat - right there, in front of the court.

One approach should clearly have a better chance of success than the other.  However, the SC in question refers to a Diplomacy check, and a surprising number of DMs are likely to treat each approach as identical.  Admittedly I have laid it on a bit thick with my example, and quite a few DMs may treat them differently; but there can be more subtle variations that are less likely to trigger a bonus or penalty, but generally don't.  So there is no incentive for the player to find clever approaches to resolving problems.

The second is that many adventures try to broaden the application of skills to all sorts of activities, particularly during skills challenges.  I am assuming this is what you mean when you talk about "being too flexible in skills"; that you are talking about the way a skill challenge might, for example, shoehorn something like piloting a boat into Athletics or Thievery.  So in a given skill challenge a born and bred desert-dwelling barbarian character ends up being very skilled at canoeing down mountain rapids.

Again, this approach sends the player scanning their character sheet for the most advantageous skill button, rather than thinking creatively.  My approach is to assume that, by default, adventurers are trained to do things that are related to adventuring, and only to do things that are related to adventuring.  If you want to do a non-adventuring thing, you will be limited to ability checks (and may suffer penalties on those); you may need to get creative if you want to succeed.  

On the other hand, you may be able to do a non-adventuring thing if your background, backstory, theme or character archetype suggests you can do it.  So desert barbarian has limits when canoeing, but the character with the River Smuggler background or the Foamgatherer Heritage feat might be able to engage his skills.

The third problem is the way some skill challenges, implicitly or explicitly, prevent players from resolving the issue of the skill challenge in a manner that circumvents the use of the intended skills, or the number of checks, or any skill use at all.  They are presented and/or interpreted as a bit of a railroad.  So when faced with a challenge to go on an arduous check through the wilderness, the players don't think to try to reduce risks or obviate the whole thing by seeking out a cartographer to purchase a map, or trying to hire a local guide to avoid all the pitfalls, thereby rendering unnecessary a bunch of Nature and Perception checks.

All of these issues disincentivize creative play and incentivize skill-button pushing.  And I think they are all aspects of the way the game has been presented in the sourcebooks and published adventures, and the gaming culture that arose around 4e, partly from that presentation, partly from existing trends, and partly from the focus on organized play which necessarily relies on that conformity.

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## RandomPeasant

> I completely agree, they should have done more variations on the class framework, right from the first book.


The problem is that 4e has managed to split the difference in a way that makes no one happy. Classes all use the exact same framework, yet abilities are highly (yes, not totally, but very highly) segregated by class. The advantage of having abilities all work the same way is that _all the abilities work the same way_, and therefore you don't need to tell someone "no, you can't have that Wizard ability, you're a Fighter". Conversely, the advantage of having strongly-defined classes is that you can give Wizards abilities that aren't appropriate for Fighters and vice versa. If you're not doing either of those things, you messed up somewhere.




> In all systems players _want_ to use their highest skills but not all systems _let_ them.


I think the degree to which 4e incentivizes using the highest skill much more strongly also has an influence here. In 3e, if you're in a social situation and your Sense Motive kinda sucks, rolling to see if you can tell if people are lying is generally worst-case neutral. In 4e, anyone doing anything in a Skill Challenge that is not "roll the skill the DM will let someone in the party roll that has the best odds of success" is worse than doing nothing.




> So you end up with players defaulting to picking a skill instead of describing an approach, and this being reinforced by DMs interpreting the approach chosen by a player in a given situation ends up having no impact on the actual chances of success of the action.


I think this is the kind of "fiction/game" distinction that is fundamentally wrongheaded. Picking a skill _is_ describing an approach. When I say that my character "makes an Intimidate check", that is describing a different action than having them make a Bluff check or a Diplomacy check. Applying circumstantial bonuses on top of that because of how I describe the specifics of the action is not necessarily "more true to the fiction", it is privileging a specific interpretation of what the fiction should be. Obviously this is not an absolute in any direction, but part of _why_ we have numeric attributes for characters is so that players can make declarations about characters without having to have close alignment with the rest of the table about approaches within the fiction. I don't need to know about fencing to make a character who is a master fencer, I should not necessarily need to know about persuasion to make a master persuader.




> Again, this approach sends the player scanning their character sheet for the most advantageous skill button, rather than thinking creatively.


I would push back on that. How can you tell the difference? If someone looks at their sheet, thinks about the circumstance, and says "I'll try to win them over with my knowledge of Pelorite religious rites", how do you know that's because their Religion check happens to be 10 points higher than anything else and not because they decided that really was the right approach? I think you can make probabilistic statements about incentives on the margin, but "how do I get from high skill X to presented challenge Y" _is_ a form of creativity.

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## tcrudisi

I come into this thread as biased. I absolutely adored 4e. I began with AD&D, played a lot of 2nd, so, so, so much 3rd, and then found my love in 4e. I've played about 10 sessions of 5e and it reminded me so much of 3e that I quit and haven't been back.

With that said, its been years since I've played 4e. I used to have the page number memorized in the DMG, but it allowed you to perform stunts in combat. I used that page judiciously. I remember running a game at GenCon and one of the players wanted to jump from a high spot and shield slam into an enemy. I used that page, gave him the target ... he rolled Athletics, did his damage, and the entire table was absolutely loving it as everything was being described. I never felt that other editions of D&D properly allowed it without houserules. In 4e it was there on that one page. So many DMs ignored it, but it was the way to increase and improve the options in combat. 




> It also felt like it unnecessarily closed off some design space, especially since 4e took all the game-breaking magic from earlier editions and put it behind rituals. I admit it would have had to be carefully balanced, but "this subclass of warlock gains only half as many encounter powers, but they're twice as powerful" seems like it could be tweaked to balance out.


I just want to point out that the math here does not work in an easy way.

Let's take 2 example powers. One deals 10 damage but you can use it twice, one deals 20 damage and is usable only once. The enemy has 15 health.

If you hit the enemy for 10 damage, they then get to take their turn and hit you. Then you hit them a second time with the 10 damage to take them out.
With the 20 damage attack, you hit them once and they never get to respond.
In this example, its pretty obvious that the double-damage power is more than twice as good.

Getting half as many powers but they are twice as powerful would be difficult to balance out, in that regard.

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## MwaO

> I think the degree to which 4e incentivizes using the highest skill much more strongly also has an influence here. In 3e, if you're in a social situation and your Sense Motive kinda sucks, rolling to see if you can tell if people are lying is generally worst-case neutral. In 4e, anyone doing anything in a Skill Challenge that is not "roll the skill the DM will let someone in the party roll that has the best odds of success" is worse than doing nothing.


If you are in a social situation in 4e and your Insight kind of sucks, rolling to see if someone is lying to you is indeed generally worst-case neutral.

If you are choosing to roll Insight in a skill challenge scenario because whether or not someone is lying to you is important to the group and you are choosing to be the member of the group rolling Insight, and your Insight kind of sucks, that's on you. Skill Challenges are narrative in flow  everyone is trying to figure out if the person is lying, but usually, the person best at Insight makes the roll. Everyone is talking during Diplomacy, but the person good at Diplomacy makes the roll(assuming no one is being deliberately antagonistic). Etc...

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## RandomPeasant

> If you are in a social situation in 4e and your Insight kind of sucks, rolling to see if someone is lying to you is indeed generally worst-case neutral.


In 4e, social situations are _modeled as Skill Challenges_. The question is not "who is rolling Insight". It is "is anyone other than whoever has the best bonus at some skill rolling _anything at all_". It's not that your Insight check is displacing someone else's higher Insight check, it's that it is displacing a Diplomacy or Intimidate check that is rolled at a higher bonus (or perhaps against a lower DC). And, yes, you can add epicycles where you require an Insight roll and a Diplomacy roll and an Intimidate roll and so on, but that's still just an obviously worse mechanic than having people roll whatever skills are necessary for some number of rounds and counting up successes after some number of rounds.

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## Mark Hall

> In 4e, social situations are _modeled as Skill Challenges_. The question is not "who is rolling Insight". It is "is anyone other than whoever has the best bonus at some skill rolling _anything at all_". It's not that your Insight check is displacing someone else's higher Insight check, it's that it is displacing a Diplomacy or Intimidate check that is rolled at a higher bonus (or perhaps against a lower DC). And, yes, you can add epicycles where you require an Insight roll and a Diplomacy roll and an Intimidate roll and so on, but that's still just an obviously worse mechanic than having people roll whatever skills are necessary for some number of rounds and counting up successes after some number of rounds.


To an extent, I think this can be well-addressed by making off-skills have higher DCs, such that using an off-skill is sometimes-to-often worse than using an untrained skill, all other things being equal.

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## kieza

> I just want to point out that the math here does not work in an easy way.
> 
> Let's take 2 example powers. One deals 10 damage but you can use it twice, one deals 20 damage and is usable only once. The enemy has 15 health.
> 
> If you hit the enemy for 10 damage, they then get to take their turn and hit you. Then you hit them a second time with the 10 damage to take them out.
> With the 20 damage attack, you hit them once and they never get to respond.
> In this example, its pretty obvious that the double-damage power is more than twice as good.
> 
> Getting half as many powers but they are twice as powerful would be difficult to balance out, in that regard.


Hence why I said it would need to be carefully balanced. Also why I didn't actually do that in my retroclone: instead I disconnected "powers known" from "powers usable" and made variations on those factors, while holding the actual strength of powers roughly constant. So, martial powers are individually as powerful as arcane powers, and martial classes get to use more greater powers before resting, but that means that they can last longer in a fight while still using their big guns--not that they can be more effective with a single round of actions.

By contrast, the perks of other power sources mean that:
Arcane classes can quickly adapt to a situation: they can experiment with different power loadouts until they find one that works well against the enemies they're up against.Divine classes can, rarely, throw out a very powerful miracle, but most of the time they're just as effective as anyone else. Also, while miracles have powerful effects, they're also calibrated to be short-lived: a divine character using their miracle on the first turn of an encounter will be more effective than the rest of the party that turn, and possibly the next, but won't dominate the entire fight.Animist classes have an easier time multiclassing and building synergy between the playstyles of multiple animist classes, but a character of any other class that puts the same resources into it will only be marginally behind. The synergy is of the form "using this power benefiting from this class feature then makes my next turn, using this other power benefiting from this other class feature, more effective" not "these class features stack."

End result is that the different power sources FEEL different, without requiring massive variations in resource systems and without requiring overly-finicky balancing. Or at least, that's the feedback I have from my small-scale playtesting.

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## Mark Hall

I kind of like the idea of differentiating the power sources more... so two controllers would be similar, but their power sources would determine some of their feel.

Arcane: Powerful Dailies. When the wizard brings the thunder, you gotta take cover.
Divine: All encounter powers available, but limited in number (i.e. at 1st level you KNOW all the encounter powers, but you can still only use 1 without resting) 
Martial: Lots of At-wills, maybe? Or easy recovery of Encounter powers? 
Primal: 
Psionic: Already did it with PSPs
Shadow:
Elemental:

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## Keledrath

> I kind of like the idea of differentiating the power sources more... so two controllers would be similar, but their power sources would determine some of their feel.
> 
> Arcane: Powerful Dailies. When the wizard brings the thunder, you gotta take cover.
> Divine: All encounter powers available, but limited in number (i.e. at 1st level you KNOW all the encounter powers, but you can still only use 1 without resting) 
> Martial: Lots of At-wills, maybe? Or easy recovery of Encounter powers? 
> Primal: 
> Psionic: Already did it with PSPs
> Shadow:
> Elemental:


There is kind of a limited degree of this among the original 4 sources. Martial, Divine, Arcane, and Primal trend to feel more Striker, Leader, Controller, and Defender respectively
Martial: Ranger and Rogue are two of the highest output strikers, Fighter is the most aggressive defender, and Warlord can easily be the most aggressive leader
Divine: Paladin has Lay On Hands for healing and a lot of healing powers, Invoker honestly can _almost_ be played as a full leader if it had heals, and Unity Avenger can do a solid amount of party support
Arcane: Warlock has a lot of conditions it throws out, while sorcerer does a lot of effective AoE (technically a part of controller), while Bard and Swordmage also have a lot of debuff/enemy interference options
Primal: Barbarian and Druid are both very bulky for striker/controller, and while Shaman itself isn't very defendery, it _does_ have the spirit companion that can be a very efficient source of damage ablation.
Psionic has the power point mechanic

Shadow and elemental never really got enough material to establish an identity.

There are also a few other patterns, but they are less consistent. Most primal classes, for example, have some manner of end of encounter buff as a major component for their dailies (at least some of them). Barbarians have Rages, wardens have Guardian Forms, Druids have...no clean term, but they have wild shape enhancers. Martial classes have the combat style feats, while divine classes (other than runepriest, which was a latecomer) have domain feats and channel divinity.

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## MwaO

> In 4e, social situations are _modeled as Skill Challenges_. The question is not "who is rolling Insight". It is "is anyone other than whoever has the best bonus at some skill rolling _anything at all_". It's not that your Insight check is displacing someone else's higher Insight check, it's that it is displacing a Diplomacy or Intimidate check that is rolled at a higher bonus (or perhaps against a lower DC). And, yes, you can add epicycles where you require an Insight roll and a Diplomacy roll and an Intimidate roll and so on, but that's still just an obviously worse mechanic than having people roll whatever skills are necessary for some number of rounds and counting up successes after some number of rounds.


Some Skill Challenges contain social situations, social situations are not Skill Challenges.

Most social situations don't involve the whole party with a variety of skill obvious types of skill checks as per page 73 of DMG. And they're not inherently some sort of dangerous or meaningful, to the point of potentially getting XP equal to a combat. As page 72 of DMG notes, not every skill check is a skill challenge.

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## kieza

> There is kind of a limited degree of this among the original 4 sources. Martial, Divine, Arcane, and Primal trend to feel more Striker, Leader, Controller, and Defender respectively
> Martial: Ranger and Rogue are two of the highest output strikers, Fighter is the most aggressive defender, and Warlord can easily be the most aggressive leader
> Divine: Paladin has Lay On Hands for healing and a lot of healing powers, Invoker honestly can _almost_ be played as a full leader if it had heals, and Unity Avenger can do a solid amount of party support
> Arcane: Warlock has a lot of conditions it throws out, while sorcerer does a lot of effective AoE (technically a part of controller), while Bard and Swordmage also have a lot of debuff/enemy interference options
> Primal: Barbarian and Druid are both very bulky for striker/controller, and while Shaman itself isn't very defendery, it _does_ have the spirit companion that can be a very efficient source of damage ablation.
> Psionic has the power point mechanic
> 
> Shadow and elemental never really got enough material to establish an identity.
> 
> There are also a few other patterns, but they are less consistent. Most primal classes, for example, have some manner of end of encounter buff as a major component for their dailies (at least some of them). Barbarians have Rages, wardens have Guardian Forms, Druids have...no clean term, but they have wild shape enhancers. Martial classes have the combat style feats, while divine classes (other than runepriest, which was a latecomer) have domain feats and channel divinity.


I agree, but I think that this "power source identity" is hampered by the fact that each class has a unique selection of powers. So yes, they have broad similarities, but the distinct power selection means that they don't have strong ties to each other. Or to put it another way, the writers may have declared that classes are related by their power source, but they don't behave similar enough to each other to make that really convincing. 

I instead designed a pool of powers for each power source, which are available to each class within that source. 

Pros:
 More commonalities between classes of a power source. Didn't have to design a "wizard fireball" and a different "sorcerer fireball." Which also means I didn't have to design as many unique powers.

Mixed Results:
 Classes are less strongly tied to their intended role. Fighters' class features nudge them towards being tanks and Wizards' nudge them towards battlefield-control spells, but they don't have to lean into those playstyles. I like this, but the downside is that there are probably more trap options than in 4e. (A Fighter is allowed to take only ranged-weapon powers, which nominally work with their class features, but would likely result in getting swarmed and then bogged down in melee.) It leaves more room for system mastery. Following on from the previous option, there are tons of interesting, atypical combinations that can be made. It's even possible to have a ranged-weapon fighter and have them be fairly effective as a tank. (Suppressing Fire is a power...) And I like this! I like the ability to make a wider variety of character archetypes within a single class, and I like that understanding the system lets you build weirder and marginally more effective characters. But it also means that, as a first-time player, you might see an interesting concept and have no idea how to make it work. Which I tried to combat by writing longer and more detailed "how to build a character of this class" sections, but that's of limited help with really out-there combinations.

Cons:
 I do have to spend longer thinking about whether a power could be broken. To give one example, I have an arcane power that's essentially an improved Total Defense action: same action, same effect, plus it grants a moderate amount of temp HP that lasts until the next turn. (Flavor: the caster raises a ward that absorbs a small amount of harm before shattering.) Perfectly fine, on a Sorcerer, Warlock or Wizard: they use one of their power slots to get that, and now they have a spell that's slightly better than Total Defense (and if they use it every round, they can hardly do anything else). But on an Artificer...who can hand out gadgets that let allies copy their spells as a minor action...I'm concerned about the balance of letting them make a gadget containing that spell and hand it to the party tank, who could then attack normally AND get the benefit of Total Defense AND get temp HP, every single turn.

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## RandomPeasant

> To an extent, I think this can be well-addressed by making off-skills have higher DCs, such that using an off-skill is sometimes-to-often worse than using an untrained skill, all other things being equal.


Not really. The basic problem with 4e's Skill Challenges is that because the challenge ends after a fixed number of failures, any action anyone takes that is not the action with the highest chance of success is worse than not taking an action. Changing the DCs can allow you to control which of the PCs is the one who rolls over and over, and you can add various epicycles that stop people from playing optimally like "you must roll every round" or "you can only roll each skill once", but it's the basic framework that is the problem and there's no change you can make to that framework that is as effective as dropping it and switching to "the Skill Challenge ends after X rounds, regardless of how many failures were rolled in those rounds".

I think the lesson here is that you should be very careful about actions having a potential effect that makes the party worse off than if the action had never been taken. I don't think you should _never_ do it, because there are obvious flavor and mechanical reasons you might want to do that, but having it as the default should be a non-starter. I can imagine a situation where "each action has a chance of ending the challenge" makes sense, but that strikes me as a) fairly specific and b) something that requires careful design to get right. "Protect the Rogue while she carefully disarms the traps" is an interesting encounter, but it needs to be designed in a way that gives the rest of the party actions that protect the Rogue and are worth taking.




> Some Skill Challenges contain social situations, social situations are not Skill Challenges.


This is just bikeshedding. The premise of Skill Challenges, as they relate to social situations, is that some social situations that would be modeled as an unstructured series of skill checks (and possibly other actions) in 3e will instead be modeled as a Skill Challenge. And the _reality_ of Skill Challenges is that in those situations the Paladin rolling Sense Motive with a low chance of success goes from "probably neutral" to "probably negative".




> I agree, but I think that this "power source identity" is hampered by the fact that each class has a unique selection of powers. So yes, they have broad similarities, but the distinct power selection means that they don't have strong ties to each other.


I just gets you back to the same problem. Either classes are different (and having unique power lists makes sense) or classes are similar (and it doesn't). I think trying to do variations on AEDU is limiting yourself for too little gain. Just make Martial like Tome of Battle, Arcane like Vancian Spellcasting, Psionic like 3e Psionics, and Divine and Primal like ... whatever you think Divine and Primal should be.




> But on an Artificer...who can hand out gadgets that let allies copy their spells as a minor action...I'm concerned about the balance of letting them make a gadget containing that spell and hand it to the party tank, who could then attack normally AND get the benefit of Total Defense AND get temp HP, every single turn.


The problem here is that "you can give powers to your allies" _is not the same system_ as "you can't do that". You're hitting the other side of the problem. If classes have different power systems, they need to have different power _lists_.

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## kieza

> I just gets you back to the same problem. Either classes are different (and having unique power lists makes sense) or classes are similar (and it doesn't). I think trying to do variations on AEDU is limiting yourself for too little gain. Just make Martial like Tome of Battle, Arcane like Vancian Spellcasting, Psionic like 3e Psionics, and Divine and Primal like ... whatever you think Divine and Primal should be.
> 
> 
> 
> The problem here is that "you can give powers to your allies" _is not the same system_ as "you can't do that". You're hitting the other side of the problem. If classes have different power systems, they need to have different power _lists_.


I don't think I agree with that. 
A) There can be multiple axes along which classes are similar, or different. My classes are similar to others within the same power source in what powers they can learn, but they are different in how they interact with those powers, and they are especially different from classes of a different power source. The class features that do this align roughly with the four roles of 4e: Artificers make their spells benefit allies more (by letting allies actually use them). Sorcerers make their powers better at defending allies. Warlocks make their powers do more damage. Wizards make their spells' lingering effects linger longer. 
B) I also think that there can be a spectrum of class differences, ranging from "There is only one class" or "pure point-buy" to "Every class works completely differently and you have to learn complex new rules for each one." 4e, in my opinion, got a little too close to "only one class," although I don't actually think it was as bad as some detractors would say. 3.5e was closer to having a new subsystem for each class. (Magic, psionics, ToB, some of the oddities like Truenaming and...Incarna? It's been a while...but they were all very distinct from each other and from your pure martials.) I'm aiming to take just a couple of steps back: there are differences in what the powers of different power sources do and how classes interact with those powers, but it all occurs within a unified rule system and you don't have to learn a new system to play a different class. Within those variations, there are groupings and similarities between thematically similar classes.

 Groups of classes that are thematically similar have access to the same powers. Artificers, sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards manipulate the same fundamental forces to achieve broadly the same effects. Within those groups, class features alter how the classes use those powers. As mentioned, artificers can give copies of their spells to allies (with some advantages, and some restrictions, that I didn't describe). Sorcerers are immune to their own area spells and can add a mark-like effect to them. Warlocks can augment spells to deal additional damage. Wizards can make their spells more efficient by extending their durations without spending as many actions as other classes would have to. Aside from their power selection, groups differ in the availability of their powers. Martial classes all get a feature letting them use more of their greater powers without resting; Arcane classes all get a feature letting them change what powers they know rapidly. Sorcerers can retrain a power after every victorious encounter, Warlocks can exchange health for temporary new powers known, Wizards have several spellbooks and can study them to "refresh their memory" and change which pre-defined selection of spells they have ready. Artificers, in a slight departure, can alter the enchantments, and therefore the item powers, on their and their allies' magical items.

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## sandmote

> The difference is that 4E gives much more leeway to replace one skill with another by refluffing. Something like "I roll stealth to _quietly_ cross the river" or "I roll history to remember how rivers have been crossed in the past" would not fly in 3E/PF but are common responses in 4E. In all systems players _want_ to use their highest skills but not all systems _let_ them.


 I mean, it depends on the situation. "I tumble up the crevasse" is an explicit use the tumble skill in 3.5e, and has a lower DC than climbing up a perfectly smooth, flat, vertical surface, even when the climber can brace against two opposite walls (a DC of 50 for the former and a DC of 60 [70-10] for the latter). 

"I try to avoid shifting the rocks sticking up out of the river as I cross over them like I'd avoid squeaking floorboards," I'd probably allow to work, especially without a separate balance skill; I'd probably bump up the DC needed to succeed though. And for skills that make no sense with what the PC is doing, or which you don't want to work in a particular situation, the DMG1's example Skill Challenge on pages 76-77 does give an example of a particular skill giving an automatic failure if a PC attempts to use it. 

With a History check, I'd probably ask the player what physical actions the PC takes as part of the check, or list a DC of say, 40+, and ask if they're sure they want to do that. Alternatively, if another PC has just failed a check, I might allow a History check to recall it isn't done that way and have a success here negate the earlier failure (or count as a success itself, to keep things moving and avoid lowering the stakes). The general point being that there's ways to push the PCs away from nonsense without an outright "no" and multiple ways a check can be applied. 




> This is just bikeshedding. The premise of Skill Challenges, as they relate to social situations, is that some social situations that would be modeled as an unstructured series of skill checks (and possibly other actions) in 3e will instead be modeled as a Skill Challenge. And the _reality_ of Skill Challenges is that in those situations the Paladin rolling Sense Motive with a low chance of success goes from "probably neutral" to "probably negative".


 I contest that there is significant difference between saying "social situations are like this" and saying "_some_ social situations are like this." The former is appropriate when one option is _forced_ on users of the system, and the latter when the DM is able to _choose_ how to resolve the situation using this or other mechanisms. The Skill Challenge structure is there in addition to the 3e system of skill checks, not instead of it. 




> In 4e, social situations are _modeled as Skill Challenges_. The question is not "who is rolling Insight". It is "is anyone other than whoever has the best bonus at some skill rolling _anything at all_".


 Responding to this situation under the understanding that it pops up when a social situation is actually modelled as a Skill Challenge, it can occur in 3.Xe just as well. In practice, it applies in any situation with a limited amount of time (read: checks) that can be made before failure. A suspicious nobleman who's decided to order the party thrown out if they can't explain what they're doing in his home; if the party looks suspiciously quiet long enough, spouts things he considers nonsense, and/or makes an aggressive move, they're going to fail.

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## MwaO

> This is just bikeshedding. The premise of Skill Challenges, as they relate to social situations, is that some social situations that would be modeled as an unstructured series of skill checks (and possibly other actions) in 3e will instead be modeled as a Skill Challenge. And the _reality_ of Skill Challenges is that in those situations the Paladin rolling Sense Motive with a low chance of success goes from "probably neutral" to "probably negative".


4e DMG literally tells you not to do what you are suggesting because it does not contain enough choices of skills to give an entire party a wide range of skills to choose. Yes, 4e plays wildly differently than expected when you ignore the advice given to you by the writers of the book in the section where they describe the option.

If the Paladin with a low chance of success at Insight is rolling Insight in a Skill Challenge, that means one of two things has happened:
It is not a good skill challenge as DMG tells you, because the Skill Challenge does not contain a wide choice of skills. You, the DM, know their skills and should be picking some choices that they could be expected to roll. If you choose not to do that, you are ignoring what the DMG tells you to do.

Your player does not understand the point of a skill challenge is similar to a combat scenario  yes, that Paladin can throw a hammer for a Ranged Basic Attack and ignore their encounter powers too, but just because they can do something bad, does not mean they should be doing the bad thing unless it is the only possible option.




> Responding to this situation under the understanding that it pops up when a social situation is actually modelled as a Skill Challenge, it can occur in 3.Xe just as well. In practice, it applies in any situation with a limited amount of time (read: checks) that can be made before failure. A suspicious nobleman who's decided to order the party thrown out if they can't explain what they're doing in his home; if the party looks suspiciously quiet long enough, spouts things he considers nonsense, and/or makes an aggressive move, they're going to fail.


This is not a Skill Challenge. It is a series of checks that is probably actually at most a couple of checks made by one PC because they're the party face.

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## RandomPeasant

> I also think that there can be a spectrum of class differences, ranging from "There is only one class" or "pure point-buy" to "Every class works completely differently and you have to learn complex new rules for each one."


Sure. You can have a bunch of classes that use the same (or basically the same) subsystem. That's how 3e Psionics and Tome of Battle work. But I don't really see that as addressing the fundamental point. Yes, if you have classes that are sufficiently similar, they can share powers. But if they _aren't_, they can't. That's why your Artificer is causing you problems. "Who does this target" is really a very big change! You can't just slap that on to powers and expect it to work easily and not constrain the design space.




> I contest that there is significant difference between saying "social situations are like this" and saying "_some_ social situations are like this."


I just fundamentally don't see what "sometimes this is not true" means as a rebuttal to "sometimes this is true". Like, yes, I understand that you still _can_ do non-Skill Challenge checks. But if your defense of a system is that you can just not use it, perhaps the system is not working very well. Are there some significant number of situations where the game benefits from actions falling into exclusively "optimal" and "harmful" buckets? I would say probably not. So it would seem to me that a system that divides actions like that is simply not very good.




> In practice, it applies in any situation with a limited amount of time (read: checks) that can be made before failure.


That's not what Skill Challenges do. You can make as many _checks_ as you want. The challenge ends after a number of _failures_. What you are describing is a good system. It is a system where people are encouraged to participate and take actions, but still to make sure their actions are as effective as possible. Skill Challenges _are not that system_. At least, not the version in the DMG, and not any of the versions I saw before I stopped caring.




> If the Paladin with a low chance of success at Insight is rolling Insight in a Skill Challenge, that means one of two things has happened:


Stop. The problem is not "a low chance of success". The problem is _anything other than the highest chance of success_. If you want to argue that a Paladin rolling Insight at +3 when the Sorcerer rolls Diplomacy at +12 against the same DC should be a wrong choice, fine. I think that's bad too, but it's not the point. The point is that the Paladin rolling Insight at +11 when the Sorcerer rolls Diplomacy at +12 (again, against the same DC, but you get exactly analogous problems if you vary the DCs), _that's_ wrong too.




> that Paladin can throw a hammer for a Ranged Basic Attack and ignore their encounter powers too, but just because they can do something bad, does not mean they should be doing the bad thing unless it is the only possible option.


Ah, but the Paladin throwing the hammer is not a bad thing. It is, as the 3e skill check was, worst-case neutral. If the Paladin throws the hammer and hits, he does some damage and the party makes progress. If the Paladin throws the hammer and hits, he's no worse off than if he'd done nothing. With a Skill Challenge _this is not true_. If you roll Insight and fail, your party is now one failure closer to the end of the challenge. Unless you are forced to act, it is better to do _nothing_ than to make a skill check that is not the skill check with the best chance of generating a success.

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## MwaO

> Stop. The problem is not "a low chance of success". The problem is _anything other than the highest chance of success_. If you want to argue that a Paladin rolling Insight at +3 when the Sorcerer rolls Diplomacy at +12 against the same DC should be a wrong choice, fine. I think that's bad too, but it's not the point. The point is that the Paladin rolling Insight at +11 when the Sorcerer rolls Diplomacy at +12 (again, against the same DC, but you get exactly analogous problems if you vary the DCs), _that's_ wrong too.


Everyone gets to choose where they put their stats & race & background and unless something is weird going on, everyone is capable of getting the same number on their skills. You are describing a situation where the party has unequally spent resources and wow, the person who spent more resources on being good at a particular skill is better than someone who didn't.

Also, you are supposed to vary DCs on any given Skill Challenge to include Easy, Moderate, and Hard checks, and because you are the DM you have looked at people's character sheets and made choices on that basis. Merely rolling your best skill, if the DM decides that say Intimidate is a Moderate DC and Diplomacy is a Hard DC  aggressive NPC as an example  isn't necessarily the best choice.

It might be helpful for you to reread the section on skill challenges before I answer you again?




> Ah, but the Paladin throwing the hammer is not a bad thing.


They are actively increasing the chance of party failure significantly by doing a bad action. Unless that is their only choice because say they are immobilized or something along those lines. If you play in a game where your DM softballs you, sure, there may be no consequences for it. But it is most certainly a significantly bad action compared to almost any choice of any Paladin attack power, particularly when in the example given, your PC has not used up their encounter attack powers yet.

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## RandomPeasant

> Everyone gets to choose where they put their stats & race & background and unless something is weird going on, everyone is capable of getting the same number on their skills.


I will give you that everyone having the exact same chance of success in a Skill Challenge resolves the problem with Skill Challenges. I find "make everyone mathematically indistinguishable" to be a less compelling solution than "create a system where players who are less likely to succeed are not discouraged from participating", but I cannot claim my personal preferences are in any sense universal.




> You are describing a situation where the party has unequally spent resources and wow, the person who spent more resources on being good at a particular skill is better than someone who didn't.


The problem is not that the +12 bonus is better than the +11 bonus. The problem is that if someone has the +12 bonus, _not being there_ is better than the +11 bonus.




> Merely rolling your best skill, if the DM decides that say Intimidate is a Moderate DC and Diplomacy is a Hard DC  aggressive NPC as an example  isn't necessarily the best choice.


Can you explain to me how rolling +12 against DC 22 rather than +7 against DC 17 changes the math in any way I should care about at all?




> They are actively increasing the chance of party failure significantly by doing a bad action.


Not relative to taking _no_ action. It is true that if the Paladin takes a bad action the party might lose a fight they'd otherwise win. But they would still have lost that fight if the Paladin had simply declined to show up. With skill challenges, this is not true. If I roll two successes and two failures, and you roll three successes and one failure, we get five successes. But you alone (supposing your performance was statistically typical) would've rolled nine successes. My presence made our results worse. Do you see the problem, or do I need to explain things a different way?

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## kieza

> Sure. You can have a bunch of classes that use the same (or basically the same) subsystem. That's how 3e Psionics and Tome of Battle work. But I don't really see that as addressing the fundamental point. Yes, if you have classes that are sufficiently similar, they can share powers. But if they _aren't_, they can't. That's why your Artificer is causing you problems. "Who does this target" is really a very big change! You can't just slap that on to powers and expect it to work easily and not constrain the design space.


Well, that's the thing, I don't expect it to work easily. That's why I listed it in the Cons section. That one spell was the most egregious example, because it was unique in being a self-only spell that was balanced against the Total Defense action. In the end, I pared the spell down to just grant the temporary hit points, and take a less valuable action than Total Defense. 

I think that something 4e did wrong was to tie classes too tightly to their role. It led to a lot of cases where, as mentioned, a class had weird powers because the designers felt it needed powers with particular mechanical effects, so they wrote built the mechanics and figured out the fluff later. And, relatedly, it meant that a lot of powers either weren't available to classes that should reasonably have had them, or had near identical versions for different classes. (Rogues can tumble but not Rangers, rangers can dual wield well but not rogues, etc.)

I didn't like the proliferation of systems in 3.5e, but something I think it got right was that there was overlap between the abilities of similar/related classes: Wizards and Sorcerers had the exact same spell list, lots of divine classes could turn undead, etc. It had more verisimilitude than 4e's paradigm of "oh, he cast magic missile? Must be a wizard, because only wizards can do that." Having that, to me, is worth some tradeoffs, like having looser balance and closing off some corners of the design space. (And if I'm doing a good job, the corners that get closed off will be the remote ones, that are metaphorically full of cobwebs, because the concepts they contain are less popular/useful/irreplaceable.)

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## Waddacku

It's actually frequently better to use powers, items, and rituals because those can give free successes. The PCs are supposed to be busting out their resources in both SCs and combat.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a skill challenges is not a status quo until resolved. The situation changes with the actions taken, whether successful or not. This in turn affects the available further options, because actions have to make sense. Rolling History to know how to climb a wall doesn't replace the actual Athletics check to climb it, but it might get you some benefit for the climb. You might, of course, have a power or other button available to you that will just let you flat out get up that wall without a check at all. And, just to be completely clear, this is all predicated on getting up that wall being relevant to accomplishing the greater goal somehow.

I believe earlier in the thread (or another one) there was some discussion of a hypothetical river crossing skill challenge. The issue I have with the example is that it doesn't sufficiently specify a goal, which you for one need in order to decide what actions are relevant, but more importantly to be able to figure out what success and failure (both per roll and for the entire SC) actually entails. If it's just a simple obstacle for the party to get across, handling them individually or using group checks is probably more appropriate. What stood out to me here is that if you phrase it as "getting across the river with the wagon" things get a little spicier right away, because that makes much clearer stakes: three failures means you have to give up on getting the wagon across. That could mean it got destroyed by the river, or that you had to leave it behind, or that you lose time having to find a different route, or that you can't go to wherever you were going, etc.. Which it is depends completely on the goals of the characters and the actions taken to achieve them. Of course, other things can go right or wrong, too. Swimmers getting swept away and whatnot. The possibilities are endless, but what you do know is if you get your X successes you get across with the wagon and if you get three failures you don't, one way or another. Having those numbers lets players know how close they are to each respective outcome, allowing them to make informed decisions about risk-taking and resource expenditures, based on what's important to them and their characters.

And yeah, absolutely I think SCs should be mostly improvised, because of both how open they are making them hard to write in advance and because they generally ought to be initiated by the player decision to pursue a particular goal in the scene.
I've read decently compelling things suggesting that was also the intention of the designers but it doesn't come out very clearly in the rule books, and AFAIK most published SCs were bad, including the example one in the DMG explicitly not actually following the laid out model. I've read one in a module (The Slaying Stone, which I've seen praised a lot but doesn't look very good) where if the party fails to navigate through a forest they just... have to go back to where they started and can't try again. Bizarre.



Sorry for the rambling, I don't have the energy to proofread or edit before posting. I'll try to explain myself better if there's anything unclear or impossible to follow.

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## dgnslyr

> Not relative to taking _no_ action. It is true that if the Paladin takes a bad action the party might lose a fight they'd otherwise win. But they would still have lost that fight if the Paladin had simply declined to show up. With skill challenges, this is not true. If I roll two successes and two failures, and you roll three successes and one failure, we get five successes. But you alone (supposing your performance was statistically typical) would've rolled nine successes. My presence made our results worse. Do you see the problem, or do I need to explain things a different way?


On the other hand, I feel it's necessary to point out that character options are a medium for self-expression, and players choose character options _based on what they want their character to do._ A player that chooses Insight proficiency on their paladin wants their paladin to show insight and be insightful, and a player that _doesn't_ choose Insight proficiency probably would not be interested in rolling Insight in the first place; they hypothetical non-proficient Paladin rolling Insight fundamentally _should not happen_ because if a player wanted a character that solves problems with their Insight, they'd have taken Insight proficiency in the first place. So it's not a failure of the _system_ to punish a player for rolling a non-proficient skill, but a failure of the _player_ for not having a cohesive idea for how their character is supposed to act.

That said, I'd consider it a failure of the GM if the list of permissible skill checks is excessively narrow, and a player doesn't have even a single proficient skill that can contribute at all. I personally prefer it when the Skill Challenge is left open-ended, and it's up to each of the players to narrate how their character contributes with the skillset they have, but this also assumes that the point of a skill challenge is for players to express _how_ their characters succeed, and not _if_ they succeed.

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## MwaO

> I will give you that everyone having the exact same chance of success in a Skill Challenge resolves the problem with Skill Challenges. I find "make everyone mathematically indistinguishable" to be a less compelling solution than "create a system where players who are less likely to succeed are not discouraged from participating", but I cannot claim my personal preferences are in any sense universal.


Everyone in theory can have the exact same chance of success with their top skills as anyone else can. People usually do not because they do not want to do that for a variety of reasons. 

Someone might not want their primary and secondary stats to be the same. They might have a racial +2 or background +1 or 2 or an item or feat bonus. These are all choices that the player makes and just as there are some players who focus in on one thing in combat and some players who go for a variety of combat options, there are some players who focus in on one or two skills and some players who go for a variety of skills.

And in practice, both groups of players have mechanical benefits from doing so and it is not clear there is a 'right choice'

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## RandomPeasant

> Rolling History to know how to climb a wall doesn't replace the actual Athletics check to climb it, but it might get you some benefit for the climb.


In what sense does it not? Skill Challenge successes are fungible. If I get one from History, that's one less I need from Athletics.




> A player that chooses Insight proficiency on their paladin wants their paladin to show insight and be insightful, and a player that _doesn't_ choose Insight proficiency probably would not be interested in rolling Insight in the first place; they hypothetical non-proficient Paladin rolling Insight fundamentally _should not happen_ because if a player wanted a character that solves problems with their Insight, they'd have taken Insight proficiency in the first place.


I think this at once proves entirely too much and is not really responsive.

Yes, players use their skill investments to signal how they want their characters to approach problems. But that doesn't mean that players should _never_ be in a situation where none of the skills they've invested in are relevant, or that the appropriate response to such a situation should be to do nothing. Sometimes a player feels that the action their character would take right now is to roll Insight, and while I don't necessarily think the player should have a particularly high (or even non-zero) chance of success in doing so, the idea that it would be harmful as a general rule seems to go too far in the other direction.

But more than that, the issue is not simply "rolling Insight might be bad". It's that, mathematically speaking, your chance of success falls every time someone rolls a check at worse relative odds than the best check. Maybe the player _did_ invest in Insight, and it just happens that their bonus is smaller than the Rogue's Intimidate bonus. In this situation the player has invested in the strategy, and has signaled that they want their character to solve problems this way and it is _still_ a bad idea for them to use the skill to solve the problem at hand. It's hard to see that as anything but a failure, but it's an inevitable result of the "count failed checks" approach to Skill Challenges.




> this also assumes that the point of a skill challenge is for players to express _how_ their characters succeed, and not _if_ they succeed.


That strikes me as a false choice. Also, it's really a _lot_ of rolling to do if we're all meant to accept that the outcome is a matter of course. It seems to me that, even accepting this is the design goal, "each player rolls one check" is _still_ a better solution than all the accounting 4e's system asks you to do.




> Everyone in theory can have the exact same chance of success with their top skills as anyone else can. People usually do not because they do not want to do that for a variety of reasons.


So you agree that, in practice, Skill Challenges produce situations where most of the players participating at all is actively harmful?

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## MwaO

> So you agree that, in practice, Skill Challenges produce situations where most of the players participating at all is actively harmful?


No. If you make a Skill Challenge, the explicit intent is to engage the entire party and that means you think about the why say a Str/Dex PC is going to be engaged in it. And the Con/Cha PC. And the Int/Wis PC. Or any other set of stats.

If you can't answer those questions for your intended group(s), you don't have a viable Skill Challenge and that either means you have "this should be a series of checks which are not a Skill Challenge" or "think about how to include everyone and repeat until this is true."

And yes, this means if you have a DM who doesn't understand Skill Challenges, yes, you can have a lousy time with them. But you likely have an equally bad time with them as a DM when they're running regular non-combat and then they get bounced from DM'ing duties.

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## RedWarlock

A bad session ran by a DM who understands neither the extent of the rules nor the spirit behind them shouldn't be used by detractors as an indictment of the system. That is in no way arguing in good faith.

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## RandomPeasant

> No. If you make a Skill Challenge, the explicit intent is to engage the entire party and that means you think about the why say a Str/Dex PC is going to be engaged in it. And the Con/Cha PC. And the Int/Wis PC. Or any other set of stats.


And Skill Challenges _fail_ at that intent. Thus far, the only solution you've proposed to fix them is "make everyone's odds of success the same", and that solution is so obviously terrible that you won't even defend it! And without that solution it is simply _mathematically false_ that everyone is encouraged to participate. If the Skill Challenge ends after a fixed number of failures (and the rules say you do) and you accumulate less successes after a fixed number of failures with a lower chance of success (and math says you do), then you end up with less successes at the end of the Skill Challenge if anyone but the player with the best skill does anything.

If you see a solution for that, feel free to propose it. But I find "a _real_ DM would just do the mathematically impossible thing" to be less than compelling as an argument.




> If you can't answer those questions for your intended group(s), you don't have a viable Skill Challenge and that either means you have "this should be a series of checks which are not a Skill Challenge" or "think about how to include everyone and repeat until this is true."


Here's how you include everyone: don't use the Skill Challenge rules. They structurally _do not_ include everyone, and if you want to include everyone you should use different rules that do not have that flaw. Rules like "a Skill Challenge consists of a fixed number of rounds in which everyone rolls one skill". That includes everyone. This isn't a DMing problem. It's a _rules_ problem, and nothing you can do as a DM will be better than using rules that are good instead of rules that are bad.




> A bad session ran by a DM who understands neither the extent of the rules nor the spirit behind them shouldn't be used by detractors as an indictment of the system. That is in no way arguing in good faith.


I don't care about the DM at all. I would just like the "Skill Challenges are fine" people to explain how "we get nine successes if Greg isn't there and give successes if Greg is there" isn't a reason for Greg not to participate. And no one is willing to engage with that point. It's all "a good DM would give Greg something to do", but when you get to the question of what Greg is supposed to do it's just crickets.

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## Beoric

> A bad session ran by a DM who understands neither the extent of the rules nor the spirit behind them shouldn't be used by detractors as an indictment of the system. That is in no way arguing in good faith.


Perhaps.  But the sheer number of people who appear to be unable to run a good SC, as evidenced by the fact that we are still arguing about it 14 years later, may be either an indictment of the system or an indictment of WotC's ability to communicate the mechanic.

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## MwaO

> They structurally _do not_ include everyone, and if you want to include everyone you should use different rules that do not have that flaw. Rules like "a Skill Challenge consists of a fixed number of rounds in which everyone rolls one skill". That includes everyone. This isn't a DMing problem. It's a _rules_ problem, and nothing you can do as a DM will be better than using rules that are good instead of rules that are bad.


You keep saying things such as this which point out you haven't even read DMG's version of Skill Challenges let alone DMG 2/Rules Compendium's versions. So I'm done.

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## MwaO

> Perhaps.  But the sheer number of people who appear to be unable to run a good SC, as evidenced by the fact that we are still arguing about it 14 years later, may be either an indictment of the system or an indictment of WotC's ability to communicate the mechanic.


Or...1st year adventures had Skill Challenges written before the writers had finished Skill Challenges in DMG, and those skill challenges gave people ideas that were to put it bluntly, wrong. Such that 14 years later, some people think those were the rules rather than no, they were not  they were the playtest rules that as soon as they got playtested and R&D realized what was wrong, they were changed before release...but yet, as always, some people don't read the DMG.

There are still people who think the DM doesn't have the final say in 4e even though the House Rules section of 4e explicitly gives the DM that power.

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## Beoric

> Or...1st year adventures had Skill Challenges written before the writers had finished Skill Challenges in DMG, and those skill challenges gave people ideas that were to put it bluntly, wrong. Such that 14 years later, some people think those were the rules rather than no, they were not  they were the playtest rules that as soon as they got playtested and R&D realized what was wrong, they were changed before release...but yet, as always, some people don't read the DMG.


This is part of what I was referring to when I said "indictment of WotC's ability to communicate the mechanic".  And as I recall, in general SCs continued to suck in later adventures, and later advice also continued to suck.  

I think a common problem was to use SCs for situations where it was really reaching to include a broad array of skills.  I seem to recall more than one social challenge where one method of persuading the aristocrat a policy or tactic by allowing someone to use Athletics to show their physical prowess.  

The fact is that circumstances that requiring broad variety of very disparate skills based on a broad variety of physical and mental abilities are rare, and will not always occur in an adventure.  But (I infer from the fact that I can't think of a single WotC 4e adventure without one) the insistence of including at least one SC in every published adventure, regardless of whether it made any sense, combined with dereliction on the part of any editors, designers or playtesters in reviewing these SCs, meant WotC pushed out a massive amount of bad examples.

I think another problem with SCs is that they support a playstyle that is not universal, and are antithetical to a competing playstyle that is still fairly common.  That is, SCs support a playstyle where mechanics drive narration, as opposed to narration driving mechanical choices.  

SCs reward choosing approaches to problem solving that chooses a character's best skill, as opposed to choosing the most sensible in-world approach.  So players approach SCs by trying to use their characters' best skill, and try to narrate an approach that justifies that skill use (assuming they even bother with the second part).  Then, if sufficient successes or failures are realized, the DM narrates the result.

A corollary if this is that skill choice determines the obstacles, rather than the other way around.  So a player in a travelling SC may use athletics to "climb a cliff, swim a river or push through dense scrubland"; this is in contrast to a situation where the adventure puts a cliff, river or scrub in front of the party, and the party decides how to deal with it.

Note by implication this playstyle is generally ok with a "closed" encounter that has a limited number of ways to resolve it (X successes before Y failures using listed skills, with further limits on the number of times a skill can be used).

But there are still people who play a narratively driven style, where it is more important to choose a clever approach than to pick your best modifiers.  Sure, it is great to play to your skills, but you are better off if you do a smart thing even you aren't good at it, than if you do a foolish thing that you are good at.  So a low charisma fighter has a better chance of convincing the king to send reinforcements by making an honest and direct assessment of the situation in rough language, than by doing windsprints to show how tough he is.  And a lot of those people prefer "open" encounters where any action can be tried, even things the DM hasn't thought of, and for obstacles to inform their choices, rather than for their choices to inform a justifying narrative.

Both playstyles are valid (although you can probably tell that I prefer the second), but having a mechanic that only supports one playstyle, and then forcing tables to engage with it in every single adventure, was a poor choice if they wanted the product to have broad appeal.

EDIT:  It would have been interesting to create an adventure that included both playstyles, say the option of engaging in either a small wilderness pointcrawl or a wilderness travel SC, and see which DMs and players preferred.




> There are still people who think the DM doesn't have the final say in 4e even though the House Rules section of 4e explicitly gives the DM that power.


I don't think the House Rules section helps, because it is framed as a way of creating campaign-specific variant rules, as opposed to providing latitude to the DM to make _ad hoc_ rulings at variance with published rules.  "House rules are variants on the basic rules designed specifically for a particular DMs campaign," and the focus of the section is on designing permenant rules.

Any suggestion that this section can be leveraged to allow the DM to make _ad hoc_ rulings was more than overshadowed by commentary admonishing DMs not to vary the functioning of a power or feat just because it made no sense in the circumstances.  Not to mention the clearly stated and poorly reasoned justification for proning oozes, which more clearly than anything else drove home the implication that rules should not be varied just because they make no sense.

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## MwaO

> SCs reward choosing approaches to problem solving that chooses a character's best skill, as opposed to choosing the most sensible in-world approach.  So players approach SCs by trying to use their characters' best skill, and try to narrate an approach that justifies that skill use (assuming they even bother with the second part).  Then, if sufficient successes or failures are realized, the DM narrates the result.


If the DM establishes that they should try that, sure, that's the approach to take. As Skill Challenges itself describes in Rules Compendium, that's one approach to try for any given skill challenge. Or the DM might tell them which skills to use, how hard they are to use, etc...you can have scenes or narration of what happened.

Up to the DM.




> I don't think the House Rules section helps, because it is framed as a way of creating campaign-specific variant rules, as opposed to providing latitude to the DM to make _ad hoc_ rulings at variance with published rules.  "House rules are variants on the basic rules designed specifically for a particular DMs campaign," and the focus of the section is on designing permenant rules.


The very large point of the house rules is you can change whatever you want, but it works better if you get buy-in from the players  you want to make adhoc changes, you get the buy-in from the players to do that at the start of the game  this was quite common in LFR where DMs would say they wanted to make a ruling and if there was a problem, resolve after the game.

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## Beoric

> If the DM establishes that they should try that, sure, that's the approach to take. As Skill Challenges itself describes in Rules Compendium, that's one approach to try for any given skill challenge. Or the DM might tell them which skills to use, how hard they are to use, etc...you can have scenes or narration of what happened.
> 
> Up to the DM.


Ok, but whether the players are picking the skills, or the DM is picking the skills, it is still "skills first, narration second".  This is a long way from, "There are three paths heading more or less north.  Ones you know goes through the highlands, the second goes through the woods, and the third follows the river along the bottom of the valley.  What do you do? [After the players choose the valley road] You come to a large boggy area that looks like it extends for several miles.  It is very difficult terrain and will significantly reduce your speed, what do you do?  [Players ask if they can discern a decent path though the bog, and you let the ranger make a Nature check]." 

In the first case mechanics drives player choices and how the situation is narrated.  In the second, the situation as narrated drives player choices, and mechanics respond to the choices the players make.

It is worth noting that in my example, every player gets to participate, even if only one player makes a check, because it is a group decision.

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## MwaO

> Ok, but whether the players are picking the skills, or the DM is picking the skills, it is still "skills first, narration second".  This is a long way from, "There are three paths heading more or less north.  Ones you know goes through the highlands, the second goes through the woods, and the third follows the river along the bottom of the valley.  What do you do? [After the players choose the valley road] You come to a large boggy area that looks like it extends for several miles.  It is very difficult terrain and will significantly reduce your speed, what do you do?  [Players ask if they can discern a decent path though the bog, and you let the ranger make a Nature check]." 
> 
> In the first case mechanics drives player choices and how the situation is narrated.  In the second, the situation as narrated drives player choices, and mechanics respond to the choices the players make.
> 
> It is worth noting that in my example, every player gets to participate, even if only one player makes a check, because it is a group decision.


It is also worth noting that DMG literally describes obstacles such as these as not a Skill Challenge. So it resolves exactly the way you wanted to do it. Skill Challenges are an add-on to the traditional way skills work in D&D. You still can do the traditional way and you should be doing it most of the time. And then when you feel you can meaningfully engage the entire party with a skill challenge, then you run the skill challenge.

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## RandomPeasant

> There are still people who think the DM doesn't have the final say in 4e even though the House Rules section of 4e explicitly gives the DM that power.


And this is just the Oberoni Fallacy. Yes, the DM could replace Skill Challenges with something that wasn't bad. They would then _not be using Skill Challenges._




> This is part of what I was referring to when I said "indictment of WotC's ability to communicate the mechanic".  And as I recall, in general SCs continued to suck in later adventures, and later advice also continued to suck.


Skill Challenges went through a lot of revisions, and had a great many words dedicated to them. I'm quite prepared to accept that somewhere in there there's some good (or even replacement-level) advice. But the problem, particularly from the "why did 4e fail" perspective is that Skill Challenges _as they are described in the DMG_ have incentives that run directly counter to their design goals. And that's inherent to the "count failures" paradigm. Within that paradigm, the only way to fix it is "everyone rolls at equal odds", and that's an obviously-terrible solution. You can patch around it by forcing people to roll, but that is (to my mind) obviously worse than embracing the "count rounds" paradigm where participation is encouraged naturally.




> I think a common problem was to use SCs for situations where it was really reaching to include a broad array of skills.  I seem to recall more than one social challenge where one method of persuading the aristocrat a policy or tactic by allowing someone to use Athletics to show their physical prowess.


This is a problem because of the "count failures" paradigm. If a failed roll was always (or even usually) neutral, you could simply accept that in some situations the Paladin would make a crappy Intuition roll or the Wizard would toss of a bad Athletics check and that would be fine. As it is fine in 3e when there's a combat encounter with some undead and the Rogue's sneak attack isn't very useful. What becomes an issue is having those actions be _negative_ expected value. Then you get players desperately justifying the thing that doesn't hurt their team even when it doesn't make sense.




> I think another problem with SCs is that they support a playstyle that is not universal, and are antithetical to a competing playstyle that is still fairly common.  That is, SCs support a playstyle where mechanics drive narration, as opposed to narration driving mechanical choices.


People have made this distinction a number of times, and I just don't buy that it's as strong as suggested. Mechanics and narration exist together, and should work together. I also don't think your example follows very well. Skill Challenges are supposed to have variable DCs, and even beyond that it's not really implausible to imagine a situation where a character is really good at some tangentially-related action but pretty mediocre at other actions, such that they're better off doing the tangential thing even though it's not as impactful. You might imagine a skilled negotiator with no wilderness survival skills being better off trying to get a good deal on supplies rather than charting a course or clearing jungle, for instance.

The issue, again, is that Skill Challenges push you very hard towards taking the mechanically best action, whatever that action is. And that in turn means that when there is a small delta between "how the flavor and mechanics do interact" and "how the flavor and mechanics _should_" interact, people are pushed very sharply into that gap. People are very loss-averse, so penalizing sub-optimal actions pushes behavior in entirely predictable, and largely negative, directions.




> A corollary if this is that skill choice determines the obstacles, rather than the other way around.  So a player in a travelling SC may use athletics to "climb a cliff, swim a river or push through dense scrubland"; this is in contrast to a situation where the adventure puts a cliff, river or scrub in front of the party, and the party decides how to deal with it.


I think here you get into a very thorny question about where challenges come from in the first place. One of the things I'm signaling to the DM when I invest in Athletics is that I'm interested in having challenges that involve climbing, swimming, jumping, or other physical activity. If I get more challenges like that, on some level that's the game working correctly. Certainly, when I'm confronted with a situation that is genuinely ambiguous, I'm going to try to solve it that way (e.g. climb the tower instead of bribing the guards). But it's also true that when you drop that veil it pisses people off for entirely understandable reasons.




> Any suggestion that this section can be leveraged to allow the DM to make _ad hoc_ rulings was more than overshadowed by commentary admonishing DMs not to vary the functioning of a power or feat just because it made no sense in the circumstances.


It's also _literally_ just the Oberoni Fallacy. Yes, if you change the rules they do different things and may not have flaws the printed rules have. That's an admission that the printed rules are bad, not an argument against that premise.




> In the first case mechanics drives player choices and how the situation is narrated.  In the second, the situation as narrated drives player choices, and mechanics respond to the choices the players make.


But those player choices can't be entirely extricated from the mechanics either. Suppose your choices are something like "haunted graveyard", "frozen tundra", and "trapped tomb". If your party has kitted up with a bunch of anti-undead abilities, the haunted graveyard might be the obvious choice, on the expectation that it will have undead enemies that the party is well-equipped to counter. Conversely, if they've got a bunch of survival powers and fire magic, the frozen tundra probably looks like the right call. And if they have two different skill monkeys and someone with a repeatable summon for brute-force trapfinding, the trapped tomb could be a cakewalk. The players are making choice for their characters, but those choices are made in light of mechanics that represent both character capability and potential challenges. Trying to put _either_ approach first is going to tend to separate them when the goal is for them to work in harmony.




> It is also worth noting that DMG literally describes obstacles such as these as not a Skill Challenge. So it resolves exactly the way you wanted to do it. Skill Challenges are an add-on to the traditional way skills work in D&D. You still can do the traditional way and you should be doing it most of the time. And then when you feel you can meaningfully engage the entire party with a skill challenge, then you run the skill challenge.


I once again find "you can just not use it" to be a less than compelling defense of a mechanic. Skill Challenges were one of the big selling points of 4e. If we are mostly supposed to ignore them, that strikes me as a concession that they have failed to provide a useful structure for non-combat challenges and should be redesigned.

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## Waddacku

> In what sense does it not? Skill Challenge successes are fungible. If I get one from History, that's one less I need from Athletics.


While the rules encourage the DM to say yes if possible to player ideas, they also emphasize the importance of those actions making sense. That is to say, the coherence of the fiction is prioritized.
Each check is also significant enough to change the situation in ways that affect further decision-making, such as introducing or removing NPCs, gaining or losing tangible resources for the PCs, or enabling new skill uses. That's of course not an exhaustive list. The rules also allow for skill checks that don't directly lead to the resolution of the skill challenge (i.e. successes) to provide smaller benefits to future rolls.
The X-before-3 structure serves as a pacing mechanism for this narration, it tells you when the scene is or isn't resolved yet. That means that each success corresponds roughly to 1/X of resolving the situation in the PCs' favor. This then comes down to the DM's call on whether the player's proposed action (and consequence) is too small or too big to be appropriate for one check.

So in that example, since I have supposed that getting someone (or this particular PC) to the top of the wall is appropriate for one success, I decide that merely pulling up theoretical knowledge on how to make that easier is too little for one (but still potentially worth some other benefit).
I would generally recommend against allowing substituting one skill or ability for another without exceptional reason, since it leads to exactly the kind of collapse into one person rolling their highest skill all the time that you are concerned about.
As for repeated usage of one skill, well, repeating the same action over and over when it doesn't make sense to do it more than once is nonsensical. That basically leaves us with cases where a success is a partial completion of some task (repairing a large piece of machinery, maybe) or an ongoing effort (holding a door against a skeleton horde, maybe), and those are still subject to the situation changing somehow with every check.

There are two more things I'd like to mention briefly that further impact options:
One is that while the SC sets the pacing for the scene, things happening that should terminate it in one way or the other do so. This doesn't mean you should allow a single roll of "I solve the problem", of course, but consider say, a chase in a tunnel. If the tunnel were to collapse between the parties, making passage impossible, the chase is over.
The other I already mentioned in the previous post, but PC resources apply just as much in skill challenges as anywhere else. Relevant powers and rituals can even give you multiple successes at once, instead of or in addition to a roll.
Basically players have massive leeway in thinking up ways to be contribute (or steer things according to their own agenda).
As a DM you also have the option of presenting issues that can't just be handed off to another PC to deal with. Sometimes, it's worse not to answer when spoken to, even if your Diplomacy is bad.

In conclusion, I have to disagree with you. Not all skill checks are worth the same, and successes in the challenge aren't interchangeable since they correspond to different changes in the state of the fiction. Different approaches lead to different end results (and states during the challenge, of course), with one major detail determined by the overall success or failure of the skill challenge.

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## Beoric

> It is also worth noting that DMG literally describes obstacles such as these as not a Skill Challenge. So it resolves exactly the way you wanted to do it. Skill Challenges are an add-on to the traditional way skills work in D&D. You still can do the traditional way and you should be doing it most of the time. And then when you feel you can meaningfully engage the entire party with a skill challenge, then you run the skill challenge.


Well, yes, that is kind of my point.  There are consequences to the play experience depending on whether you choose a skill challenge, or to run something "the traditional way".  But if you write something the "traditional way" a group that prefers a mechanics-first playstyle can just opt to use Athletics to swim the river, and off they go; whereas a group that prefers a narrative-first, problem-solving approach can swim, or build a raft, or fell a tree across the river, or follow the river trying to find a ford or a bridge.

But if you instead make a skill challenge, only the mechanics-first playstyle is supported.  The problem-solving playstyle is not supported because the obstacles don't exist until a skill has been chosen.  A DM could try to make it into a series of concrete obstacles on the fly, but the mechanics don't support it.

So when you choose to put a skill challenge into a published adventure for activities that could be resolved in the traditional way, you are lessening the play experience of people who prefer that narrative-first approach to gaming.  It limits your market, is all.

Hypothetically, you could limit skill challenges to situations that do not lend themselves to being resolved in the traditional way.  But if you also require that the SCs employ a lot of different skills, I am having trouble imagining what those situations might be.  I suspect they don't arise very often, certainly not at-least-once-in-every-adventure, which makes it kind of a corner-case mechanic.

----------


## PoeticallyPsyco

Only read the first page so far, so sorry if this has already been said.

Utility Powers. Good idea; giving every class a way to contribute outside of combat without sacrificing build resources that could have been spent on combat. However, you get way too few of them, and a decent number of them are still primarily useful in combat, bringing you right back to having to choose between sacrificing combat potential versus utility potential.

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## Waddacku

> Well, yes, that is kind of my point.  There are consequences to the play experience depending on whether you choose a skill challenge, or to run something "the traditional way".  But if you write something the "traditional way" a group that prefers a mechanics-first playstyle can just opt to use Athletics to swim the river, and off they go; whereas a group that prefers a narrative-first, problem-solving approach can swim, or build a raft, or fell a tree across the river, or follow the river trying to find a ford or a bridge.
> 
> But if you instead make a skill challenge, only the mechanics-first playstyle is supported.  The problem-solving playstyle is not supported because the obstacles don't exist until a skill has been chosen.  A DM could try to make it into a series of concrete obstacles on the fly, but the mechanics don't support it.
> 
> So when you choose to put a skill challenge into a published adventure for activities that could be resolved in the traditional way, you are lessening the play experience of people who prefer that narrative-first approach to gaming.  It limits your market, is all.
> 
> Hypothetically, you could limit skill challenges to situations that do not lend themselves to being resolved in the traditional way.  But if you also require that the SCs employ a lot of different skills, I am having trouble imagining what those situations might be.  I suspect they don't arise very often, certainly not at-least-once-in-every-adventure, which makes it kind of a corner-case mechanic.


Isn't it the other way around? What you call narrative-first and problem-solving is what skill challenges looks a lot more like how skill challenges should be handled than what you call mechanics-first. It sounds like your issue here is much more with the pre-written, published SCs than with the system itself.

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## RandomPeasant

> While the rules encourage the DM to say yes if possible to player ideas, they also emphasize the importance of those actions making sense. That is to say, the coherence of the fiction is prioritized.


Again, "punt it to the DM" is not the sign of a good system. "Have the DM ask the players to make a bunch of rolls that seem like they make sense" is an option that is available in _any system_. Skill Challenges must be evaluated based on what they bring to the table beyond that.




> The X-before-3 structure serves as a pacing mechanism for this narration, it tells you when the scene is or isn't resolved yet.


You are once again describing something that seems _vastly_ better handled by having the Skill Challenge last a given number of rounds, rather than ending after a given number of failures. This has the added benefit of providing a natural mechanism for degrees of success (which I recall being another Skill Challenge design goal).




> I would generally recommend against allowing substituting one skill or ability for another without exceptional reason, since it leads to exactly the kind of collapse into one person rolling their highest skill all the time that you are concerned about.


No it doesn't. It leads to a collapse of _each_ player rolling their highest skill, but that's really much less of a problem, because it still means everyone is participating. What leads to the collapse into one player rolling is counting failures, and it does that no matter what skills you're letting people roll. Seriously, do the math: are you more likely to get six successes before three failures rolling at a 40% chance of success or a 60% chance?




> As for repeated usage of one skill, well, repeating the same action over and over when it doesn't make sense to do it more than once is nonsensical.


What if it _does_ make sense to keep doing? The solution here seems to be "the DM needs to craft every Skill Challenge so that the optimal skill changes over time", but that seems like a much bigger ask of the DM than simply providing a system where you don't have to roll the optimal skill to make a positive contribution.




> Relevant powers and rituals can even give you multiple successes at once, instead of or in addition to a roll.


Can you point to any mechanically-supported examples of this?




> I have to disagree with you.


I would love for just one of the people disagreeing with my mathematical claims to present some mathematical analysis of why they are wrong.

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## Beoric

> Isn't it the other way around? What you call narrative-first and problem-solving is what skill challenges looks a lot more like how skill challenges should be handled than what you call mechanics-first. It sounds like your issue here is much more with the pre-written, published SCs than with the system itself.


Well, no, but I think I get the confusion.  The problem is I am making up defined terms where AFAIK none currently exist, and we have a limited number of relevant words that could be included in the defined term.  So I get why you might think the phrase "narrative-first" could be applied to SCs, because SCs involve a lot of narration; but a SC is not _driven by_ the narration, it is driven by the mechanics.  That is why I call a SC "mechanics first".  But maybe it would be clearer if I call it "mechanics _driven_".

I chose the phrase "narrative-first" to describe traditional encounters because in earlier versions of D&D, before skill systems, ALL noncombat issues (and many combat issues) were resolved nonmechanically, through narration.  So a player would ask questions about the situation until he thought he understood what was going on, and then he would describe what action his character attempted narratively, with no reference to mechanics whatseover.  The _DM_ might make up an _ad hoc_ mechanic, assigning the odds of success he thought was reasonable and rolling a die.  But the player's description of the action was purely narrative.

SCs do not involve problem solving because the problem is too abstracted.  You are choosing a skill, making a check, and then describing how the character helped solve the problem; that is you are narrating a solution or failure, you are not solving or failing to solve the problem.  But a traditional encounter, or series of encounters, the obstacles to resolving the encounter(s) are concretely defined, and invite players to come up with creative solutions.

Let me illustrate this with an example.  It isn't equivalent to a skill challenge, but maybe just a couple of skill checks to keep it simple.  So it isn't an example of a complex encounter, it is just an example of the "narrative" part of a narrative driven encounter, and the "problem solving" part of a narrative driven encounter.  

Let's say you find a chest which might contain treasure, and you are concerned it might be trapped.  With late editions of D&D you would probably have the rogue make a skill check to detect the trap, and a skill check to disarm it if one was found.  In very early D&D, by contrast, there were no rogues.  Even when rogues (actually thieves) were introduced, they had really poor chances of detecting traps at low level, and had a really high chance of being instantly lethal.  So if you could find a way to detect and disarm a trap without relying on the rogue, that is what you might do.

So you start inspecting the chest closely - without touching it if you can get away with it.  Are there any visible holes where darts or poison needles could come out, or decorations that might double as a dart-hole cover?  Can the lid be opened slightly, and to there appear to be any trigger mechanisms resting against it?  If you slide a piece of parchment between lid and chest, will it move all the way around, or does it bump into something that might be a trigger?  Does it rock slightly, like it was sitting on a pressure plate?  

If you fail to detect a trap this way - narratively - then you let the thief make a check.  But if the thief, unsurprisingly, fails to find a trap, then what?  You can take a chance and open the chest.  You can see if you can open it from a distance by pushing it with a ten-foot pole or pulling with a rope.  You can bash it open with a mace or axe instead of touching the latch.  You could try the latch but make sure you are wearing steel gauntlets in case of a poison needle.  You could drag it to some stairs and throw it down them (and risk breaking any treasure.  Or do anything else you think will improve your chances.

If you do find a trap, then before the thief tries to disarm it you can try to figure out how it works and try to circumvent it.  Maybe the dart-hole is on the front so you open it from the side. Maybe you find the trigger and figure out a way to hold it down when you open it.  Maybe you plug the holes that shoot darts or poison gas.  Maybe, like Indiana Jones, you make sure that the weight in the chest never changes, so as not to trigger the pressure plate it is sitting on; or maybe you tie a rope to it and pull it off the pressure plate from a distance.  Maybe you break it open from a distance, or throw it down the stairs.

Now I'm guessing most people reading this thread aren't interested in playing a game with this kind of chest, and that's fine.  I'm not advocating for the chest, I'm just trying to give an example of an encounter that is driven by the narrative, not by mechanics; is probably resolved by the narrative, not by mechanics; and requires active problem solving on the part of the player, not the character.  Which is why I chose those terms to describe a traditional encounter.

Turning back to skill challenges, even if you make up a SC on the fly, and you accept any reasonable pitch regarding applicable skills, the SC is mechanics driven, and you are solving the problem only in the most high level and superficial way.  And that supports a different play style than a narrative driven encounter does, although a narrative driven encounter may also be resolvable by resorting purely to mechanics.  

I'm not saying it's a bad playstyle, I'm just saying that it isn't a universal playstyle, and it will exclude some players.  Whereas narrative encounters still somewhat support a mechanics-driven playstyle as long as there are skill mechanics that can be engaged; so narrative encounter can support both types of playstyle.

----------


## sandmote

> I just fundamentally don't see what "sometimes this is not true" means as a rebuttal to "sometimes this is true". 
> 
> Like, yes, I understand that you still _can_ do non-Skill Challenge checks. But if your defense of a system is that you can just not use it, perhaps the system is not working very well. Are there some significant number of situations where the game benefits from actions falling into exclusively "optimal" and "harmful" buckets? I would say probably not. So it would seem to me that a system that divides actions like that is simply not very good.


 I would like to note the following indented statement made by yourself, which I quote directly after the portion you are responding to: 



> In 4e, social situations are _modeled as Skill Challenges_.


 I realize there may have been a typo of dropped word on your part, but the quote as it appears at the time I write this comment still fails to include the word "sometimes." 

If you fundamentally don't see what "sometimes this is not true," means as a rebuttal to "this is true, period," I'm willing to discuss that. If the issue was a typo or you accidentally dropped the word "sometimes," in that example I'm willing to discuss why you consider the system to be bad even when its only for particular cases. But if it was a typo in one case, I expect it'll be pretty easy to stick to which you meant in the future and I request a great number of check for typos on your part. 




> That's not what Skill Challenges do. You can make as many checks as you want. The challenge ends after a number of failures.


 The challenge can also end after a minimum number of success. 

The difference if you are measuring the scenario in _actions or rounds_. If there's one action assumed to be repeated each time you don't stop to make a skill check, it wouldn't it be kind of odd to measure in rounds? As long as the Paladin dashes every turn and the Guards chasing him Dash every turn, their relative positions don't change until the PC tries sometime else. And yet each time each individual does that, a round still passes. 

Alternatively, if the party is sneaking somewhere they aren't meant to be, and bluffing to a passerby that they _are_ meant to be here isn't any less useful than not being spotted in the first place, but one person thinking its odd to see you there doesn't automatically mean they'll raise the alarm. If the alarm is up they'll likely call the guard immediately; if they're the first person to notice they'll likely try to clarify the situation and thereby give a chance to diffuse it. Doesn't necessarily negate the failure (they'll recall you if the alarm goes up) but only one person really needs to convince them to let you past this person, who's should have been included when determining the Skill Challenge's complexity. 

I don't claim the chassis of Skill Checks is rock solid, but I do maintain it has utility as a codified system for some encounters, including most chases, most escapes from collapsing buildings, and _some_ social situations. Also, see a fundamentally different use I haven't previously considered below. 




> Stop. The problem is not "a low chance of success". The problem is _anything other than the highest chance of success_. If you want to argue that a Paladin rolling Insight at +3 when the Sorcerer rolls Diplomacy at +12 against the same DC should be a wrong choice, fine.


 If you want to argue about how to set DCs, I'd be willing to do that. You realize though, that 4e Skill Challenges do not require the same DC for all checks, right? Because I notice your statement here says "against the same DC." So with 4e Skill Challenges, you then run into the problem that knowing your bonus to a particular skill _does not tell you which skill gives the highest chance of success. That's not something the party can automatically assume._ 




> It is true that if the Paladin takes a bad action the party might lose a fight they'd otherwise win. But they would still have lost that fight if the Paladin had simply declined to show up. With skill challenges, this is not true. If I roll two successes and two failures, and you roll three successes and one failure, we get five successes. But you alone (supposing your performance was statistically typical) would've rolled nine successes. My presence made our results worse. Do you see the problem, or do I need to explain things a different way?


 I will say, I do think there are some situations where tracking failures and successes separately would make more sense than the rules as explained. If the whole party is running away from something, there should a chance some party members fail and others succeed. 

Actually relevant to the example, I'm curious if you have a proportionally large problem with each PC needing rations on a long journey. After all, if you can carry X lbs. of treasure on top of your gear and the party as a whole needs to carry more than X lbs. of rations to feed you it's the exact same problem you've described here, where on this one metric they'd be better off without you. 

I don't know why Skill Challenges are actually supposed to include every single party member (relative to every other system, anyway). I realize you were responding to that claim, so I suppose that's more a question for the people arguing they do (at at least that argue it does a better job than automatically having the Party Face do everything). Actually, might be helpful sometimes to say "the party needs four success and the Party Face rolled their +11 Cha skills for 3 of them, what are _all of you_ going to try now?" I haven't really tried that before, might be worth taking a look at. 




> This is not a Skill Challenge. It is a series of checks that is probably actually at most a couple of checks made by one PC because they're the party face.


 What ruleset are you using where having a "series of checks" is not an _inherent property_ of a Skill Challenge?

*Edit:*



> You are choosing a skill, making a check, and then describing how the character helped solve the problem; that is you are narrating a solution or failure, you are not solving or failing to solve the problem.  But a traditional encounter, or series of encounters, the obstacles to resolving the encounter(s) are concretely defined, and invite players to come up with creative solutions.


 I'm not entirely sure Skill Challenges actually force the order to be Skill->Check->Description. The examples of stuff the DM should be expecting, sure, because the DM can't come up with every possible PC response, but other people on this thread appear to be taking issue with the fact that "creative solutions" to the challenge before the party are on the table in a Skill Challenge at all. There one line basically saying to insist the PCs attempting Skill->Check->Description start with the description instead: 



> If a player asks, Can I use Diplomacy? you should ask what exactly the character might be doing to help the party survive in the uninhabited sandy wastes by using that skill.



Similarly, I understand the example of the chest is idealized, but I don't think it works very well as a counterpoint to skill checks. If you want to do this in 4e, you can do this in 4e about as easily. Situations where the party can take as long as they want to deal with a potential problem are still possible and situations where the party has X rounds to achieve something are still possible. 

I think the main difference to the earliest editions is that the Player rolls most of their checks, and therefore automatically learns if their character would have missed a typical easy to spot trap (or any of a dozen other examples where knowing you objectively didn't do very well in the attempt colors your response). I somehow doubt parties in OD&D days didn't think of having the charismatic guy do more of the talking than his gruff associate (especially given the number of characters each person was usually running back then).

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## RandomPeasant

> I would like to note the following indented statement made by yourself, which I quote directly after the portion you are responding to:


I still do not understand why you think "there are some things that aren't Skill Challenges" is a rebuttal to "there are problems with Skill Challenges". It doesn't matter if I said "every single thing that ever happens in 4e is always a Skill Challenge and all those books with monsters in them are distracting lies". That can be wrong, but it wouldn't make "Skill Challenges are well-designed to achieve their goal" right.




> The challenge can also end after a minimum number of success.


Again, sure, but who cares? You get that number of successes in a smaller number of rolls if those individual rolls are at a higher chance of success. We still don't get to "it's a good idea for me to roll at +10 when someone else could roll at +12".




> The difference if you are measuring the scenario in _actions or rounds_.


I don't understand why "something happens between each action in a round" is an impossible layer to add to a round-based Skill Challenge. That is, in fact, how round-based combats basically work right now.




> If you want to argue about how to set DCs, I'd be willing to do that.


I just absolutely do not. In this case, I absolutely have been using simplifying language, and the literal claim I'm making is false in a way that impacts the argument, but that's because I don't want to specify "the skill that has the best chance of success at the time the roll is made" instead of simply "the best skill". But the hole isn't really big enough to drive anything through, because whether that best chance of success comes from a skill at +12 against DC 22 or a skill at +7 against DC 16, there's still no reason to roll a skill with a _worse_ chance of success. Which means that only "fine-tune so that everyone has an equal chance of success" produces the result we want and that's both much more work for the DM and (more subjectively) really uninteresting.




> Actually relevant to the example, I'm curious if you have a proportionally large problem with each PC needing rations on a long journey. After all, if you can carry X lbs. of treasure on top of your gear and the party as a whole needs to carry more than X lbs. of rations to feed you it's the exact same problem you've described here, where on this one metric they'd be better off without you.


I'll be honest with you: I have never played in a campaign where rations are tracked in any real detail. Most of the campaigns I've _heard_ of that tracked things at that level of resolution were played in some form of AD&D, and leaned heavily on hirelings to carry stuff. I suspect that part of the reason this dynamic is rare is exactly that people find situations where someone is dead weight kind of miserable and uninteresting.




> I don't know why Skill Challenges are actually supposed to include every single party member


One of the stated design goals of Skill Challenges was to "get everybody involved". You can certainly be happy with a system that doesn't get everybody involved, but there's clearly a failure here in terms of the design _intent_, even if you happen to like the artifact that was produced.




> Actually, might be helpful sometimes to say "the party needs four success and the Party Face rolled their +11 Cha skills for 3 of them, what are _all of you_ going to try now?" I haven't really tried that before, might be worth taking a look at.


What they are going to try is having the party face roll another Cha skill at +11. Trying to use social engineering to solve a mechanical problem is as bad as trying to use mechanical changes to solve a social problem like one player wanting to play at a radically different power level than the rest of the table.




> I somehow doubt parties in OD&D days didn't think of having the charismatic guy do more of the talking than his gruff associate (especially given the number of characters each person was usually running back then).


I don't think this is an unreasonable premise. But if this is your premise I have to ask what the benefit of having Skill Challenges is supposed to be that outweighs the costs. A complexity 5 Skill Challenge takes potentially as many as 16 rolls to resolve. It produces the same success or failure as a single skill check. What are we getting from it that's worth having an extended sequence of the Bard rolling Diplomacy a bunch?

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## Beoric

> I'm not entirely sure Skill Challenges actually force the order to be Skill->Check->Description. The examples of stuff the DM should be expecting, sure, because the DM can't come up with every possible PC response, but other people on this thread appear to be taking issue with the fact that "creative solutions" to the challenge before the party are on the table in a Skill Challenge at all. There one line basically saying to insist the PCs attempting Skill->Check->Description start with the description instead: 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  Originally Posted by 4e DMG1, page 75
> 
> If a player asks, Can I use Diplomacy? you should ask what exactly the character might be doing to help the party survive in the uninhabited sandy wastes by using that skill.


Note that in the example you cite, the player started by choosing a skill, and then is required to narrate a justification.  This is _literally_ mechanics driving narration.  The player has chosen presumably Diplomacy because it is something his character is good at.  That is he started by finding a favourable mechanic, because skill challenges incentivize him to do so.  He then comes up with a narrative to justify the mechanic he has already chosen.  This is exactly the phenomenon I am discussing.




> Similarly, I understand the example of the chest is idealized, but I don't think it works very well as a counterpoint to skill checks. If you want to do this in 4e, you can do this in 4e about as easily. Situations where the party can take as long as they want to deal with a potential problem are still possible and situations where the party has X rounds to achieve something are still possible.


Yes, absolutely, you can use narrative driven encounters in 4e.  This is in fact a _requirement_ for the point I am making.  Deciding to use a skill challenge instead of one or more narrative driven encounters is a _choice_.  The use of skill challenges is _not mandatory_.  There is nothing in the mechanics of 4e that presents the use of narrative driven encounters.

What I am saying is that in choosing to put at least one SC in every single published WotC 4e adventure, WotC required players of those published adventures to engage in mechanics driven play.  And not everybody wants to engage in mechanics driven play.  So they automatically made the game less interesting for people who prefer narrative driven play.  Whereas non-SC encounters can usually be run as narrative driven _or_ mechanics driven, depending on the inclinations of players and DM.  

By focussing so much time and energy on SCs, WotC annoyed a huge segment of their target market, and convinced them that 4e was not for them.  I think the pervasiveness of SCs is part of why you have incorrect but pervasive narratives, like 4e being "merely a tactical combat game" that is poorly suited to roleplaying.

To be clear, I am not beating up on 4e.  4e is my preferred system to run and play in.  And I am not saying that SCs are conceptually a bad mechanic.  I am merely saying that SCs are a mechanic that has limited appeal to a large segment of WotC's target market.  "Fixing" the math, or coming up with ways for them to run more smoothly, is not going to change that.




> I think the main difference to the earliest editions is that the Player rolls most of their checks, and therefore automatically learns if their character would have missed a typical easy to spot trap (or any of a dozen other examples where knowing you objectively didn't do very well in the attempt colors your response). I somehow doubt parties in OD&D days didn't think of having the charismatic guy do more of the talking than his gruff associate (especially given the number of characters each person was usually running back then).


I am not comparing editions.  I used an example from early edition play only to illustrate an example, free of any baggage about how the example would be resolved using modern mechanics, because I was trying to show how a situation can be resolved without mechanics.  As it happens, I use these techniques in my 4e game; I set high DCs and make my traps more lethal than normal (in the case of traps this is really just using higher level traps), in order to incentivize narrative play.   

That being said, none of what you have stated remotely describes how early D&D was run in practice.  I wouldn't even know where to begin to explain it, and I'm not sure there is much utility in getting into it; I doubt anyone in the 4e forums has any interest in how to run a Classic or OSR style game, even if I use 4e to do it.  But trust me, what you think you know about early D&D is wrong.

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## RandomPeasant

> Note that in the example you cite, the player started by choosing a skill, and then is required to narrate a justification.


I am still not entirely convinced this works as a description of people's behavior in practice. What is, IMO, generally going to happen is something along the lines of "I roll X to do Y", which is much harder to pin down. Even "I roll Diplomacy" doesn't seem like it's categorically mechanics-driven -- people have different communication styles, it's not impossible for someone to do the flavor -> mechanics translation themselves and present the mechanical action.

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## tcrudisi

> I am merely saying that SCs are a mechanic that has limited appeal to a large segment of WotC's target market.  "Fixing" the math, or coming up with ways for them to run more smoothly, is not going to change that.


Skill Challenges are literally a top 3 reason for why I love 4e so much more than any other edition of D&D. But I can also see why many would say they were bad. For starters, if you know you are in a skill challenge, the DM is probably doing it wrong. There's no reason to tell the players they are doing one. They require the same flexibility on the DM's part as any other time when the players are out-of-combat.

I love how the skill challenges drive roleplaying. I love how they literally reward the players xp for roleplaying and coming up with solutions besides "we kill them and take their stuff". It's just so beautifully done. Sure, there are flaws in how it was originally presented, but when properly implemented, the skill challenge system just absolutely crushes any other system that D&D has ever offered. 

But I repeat: If the players know they are in a skill challenge, it's probably being incorrectly done.

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## Beoric

> I am still not entirely convinced this works as a description of people's behavior in practice. What is, IMO, generally going to happen is something along the lines of "I roll X to do Y", which is much harder to pin down. Even "I roll Diplomacy" doesn't seem like it's categorically mechanics-driven -- people have different communication styles, it's not impossible for someone to do the flavor -> mechanics translation themselves and present the mechanical action.


"I roll X to do Y" is definitely mechanics driven.  The player is choosing what "X" is, and asserting that "X" is the proper mechanic to do "Y".

"Are there any holes visible on the front of the chest?" is not mechanics driven.  The player is trying to solve the puzzle of the chest by what can be seen readily.  Now, the DM may decide there are holes, but they are concealed and difficult to detect, and may call for a Perception check.  But there the choice of mechanic is a _response_ to the narrative, and may not be necessary or applicable in all circumstances.

"I make a Stealth check to blend in with the crowd," is mechanics driven.  But what if the player instead says, "I want to try to blend in with the crowd," and the DM says, "Well the crowd is kind of sparse, and you are tall, there is nobody to hide behind," and the player says, "I try to just get the crowd's vibe and act like I belong."  So the DM considers and asks for either an Intuition or a Streetwise check, but says if the player uses Streetwise, he has to use his Wisdom modifier instead of Charisma.  So we are establishing what the narrative action is first, and _then_ determining what mechanic is used to resolve the action.

To continue the example, suppose instead the DM says, "Dude!  You are surrounded by muddy peasants.  You are wearing plate armor with a tabard that has the symbol of Pelor emblazoned on it. In shining gold paint! You are not blending in."  And the player asks if there is anyone nearby wearing a cloak big enough to cover him, and the DM says sure, and the player buys the muddy cloak for a gold piece.  And _then_ the DM lets him make his Intuition/Streetwise check.  See, narrative first.

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## RandomPeasant

> For starters, if you know you are in a skill challenge, the DM is probably doing it wrong.


Yeah, no, this is wrong. Players need to be able to make informed decisions. If you do not tell them how their decisions are going to effect outcomes, they _cannot do that_. Just use a mechanic that encourages desirable behavior even when players know they are interacting with it.

Literally all you need to do to fix Skill Challenges is say "this ends in X rounds". That fixes the whole thing. But apparently we'd rather go back to "there are secret DM rules and the players can't know them" than do some basic math to arrive at rules that encourage the behavior we want.




> I love how the skill challenges drive roleplaying. I love how they literally reward the players xp for roleplaying and coming up with solutions besides "we kill them and take their stuff".


You are allowed and even encouraged to do this in 3e. It has nothing to do with "Skill Challenges" as a mechanic.




> But there the choice of mechanic is a _response_ to the narrative, and may not be necessary or applicable in all circumstances.


No, it's a choice _by the DM_. Suppose there are no holes, and the player rolls Perception. They find nothing. Suppose there are holes that are easy to find, and the player rolls Perception. They find the holes, but made an unnecessary role. Things were still being driven by the narrative. What's happening in this model isn't that "the narrative" is driving the story instead of "the mechanics", it's that the player is presenting an action to the DM, and the DM is deciding what mechanics are appropriate, rather than the player presenting the mechanics that they think are appropriate for the action.




> "I make a Stealth check to blend in with the crowd," is mechanics driven.  But what if the player instead says, "I want to try to blend in with the crowd," and the DM says, "Well the crowd is kind of sparse, and you are tall, there is nobody to hide behind," and the player says, "I try to just get the crowd's vibe and act like I belong."


Again, what's happening here is not that the player is making a narrative choice rather than a mechanical one. It's that the DM is enforcing a particular mechanic. If the player rolls Stealth to blend into a sparse crowd, _that's fine_. It may be that it is a less effective strategy than rolling Intuition or Streetwise would have been, but it's an acceptable one, and should the player's bonuses (and their luck) be sufficient to succeed at it, it should work. Because "I have a really big Stealth bonus and can hide in a sparse crowd" is a fact about the world in the same way that "the crowd is very sparse and social stealth is likely to be more effective than physical stealth" is.




> And the player asks if there is anyone nearby wearing a cloak big enough to cover him, and the DM says sure, and the player buys the muddy cloak for a gold piece.  And _then_ the DM lets him make his Intuition/Streetwise check.  See, narrative first.


No, mechanics first. There's an _implicit_ mechanic here. The mechanic is "your attempts at Stealth must be plausible to the DM".

----------


## sandmote

I'm breaking this comment up into full reponses and TL:DR responses to separate my main point from the details. 

*Spoiler: Full Response to Random Peasant*
Show




> I still do not understand why you think "there are some things that aren't Skill Challenges" is a rebuttal to "there are problems with Skill Challenges".


 It is intended as a rebuttal to one particular problem with Skill Challenges you listed. Again: 



> In 4e, social situations are _modeled as Skill Challenges_.


Any and all conclusions that _require_ this as a premise are unsound (at least as presented) because there are social situations that are not modeled as skill challenges.  




> it wouldn't make "Skill Challenges are well-designed to achieve their goal" right.


 Wouldn't make "Skill Challenges are poorly-designed to achieve their goal" true either. 




> Again, sure, but who cares?


 Given you say "A complexity 5 Skill Challenge takes potentially as many as 16 rolls to resolve" later in this comment, I'm not sure why you wrote anything disagreeing with the point in the first place. This can probably be dropped. 




> I don't understand why "something happens between each action in a round" is an impossible layer to add to a round-based Skill Challenge. That is, in fact, how round-based combats basically work right now.


 I did not claim it was an impossible layer to add to a round-based method of resolution, but I do think its a waste of time and a bit awkward to make the players stop and say "I'm going to Run this round," every time the PCs don't list what else they're going to try that would actually change the situation. 

Similarly, if there's only one enemy left and the PC can reach it without issue, I don't make them tell me who they're targeting and how they get in range. As far as I'm concerned, streamlining unnecessary actions is a net benefit, because it gives more time in the session to do the fun stuff. By extension, I'm willing to say that there are methods of resolving situations that can be _simultaneously possible and worse_ than running a Skill Challenge. 




> I don't want to specify "the skill that has the best chance of success at the time the roll is made" instead of simply "the best skill". But the hole isn't really big enough to drive anything through, because whether that best chance of success comes from a skill at +12 against DC 22 or a skill at +7 against DC 16, there's still no reason to roll a skill with a _worse_ chance of success.


 This requires you to know the skill with the best chance of success before you roll. My proposal remains to deny the PCs that exact information. 

I realize that could have been unclear from my previous description of "tell the PCs a skill with a drastically lower chance to succeed has a drastically low chance to succeed," but telling them 1 (out of 17) skills is a bad idea isn't enough information for them to deduce the action that lets them use the highest skill/lowest DC combo. 




> Which means that only "fine-tune so that everyone has an equal chance of success" produces the result we want and that's both much more work for the DM and (more subjectively) really uninteresting.


 I don't see how that's a result I'd want in the first place. I don't see how its preferable to making the PCs figure out which options have the highest chance of success with partial information of the situation. And if they come up with a way to use a power to solve it, or an obvious skill check I didn't think of, _good,_ they should be rewarded for that. 




> One of the stated design goals of Skill Challenges was to "get everybody involved". You can certainly be happy with a system that doesn't get everybody involved, but there's clearly a failure here in terms of the design _intent_, even if you happen to like the artifact that was produced.


 Fair point, but I consider "get everybody involved every single time you do this one thing" to be impossible. So it might be a difference of expectations. 

If it helps, I consider Skill Challenges a partial success: they're a helpful way to model a group of situations, and at least my memory says they do a better job of getting people to start trying ideas outside their field of expertise (and/or hiding behind a Party Face).




> What they are going to try is having the party face roll another Cha skill at +11. Trying to use social engineering to solve a mechanical problem is as bad as trying to use mechanical changes to solve a social problem like one player wanting to play at a radically different power level than the rest of the table.


 That I know what they're planning is that point of showing there's other things that can be attempted? 

This forum is probably not the place, so I'll only go as far as to say I don't understand where the act of saying "there's more than one way to skin a cat, try one of those," enters the realm of social engineering. 




> I don't think this is an unreasonable premise. But if this is your premise I have to ask what the benefit of having Skill Challenges is supposed to be that outweighs the costs. A complexity 5 Skill Challenge takes potentially as many as 16 rolls to resolve. It produces the same success or failure as a single skill check. What are we getting from it that's worth having an extended sequence of the Bard rolling Diplomacy a bunch?


 A single check can involve the help action, I guess. Otherwise the answer is that you're at least _attempting_ to have something happen beside the Party Face rolling the same skill a bunch? 


*TL;DR Response to RandomPeasant:* 



> I still do not understand why you think "there are some things that aren't Skill Challenges" is a rebuttal to "there are problems with Skill Challenges".


 My understanding is that you have a main conclusion (which appears to me as "skill challenges are too poorly designed to achieve their goal") with multiple supporting premises. "There are some things that aren't Skill Challenges" was intended as a rebuttal to one of those supporting premises, not to the idea "there are problem with Skill Challenges." 

Since you've since made statements agreeing that  "There are some things that aren't Skill Challenges," it looks like you agree that particular supporting point fails to stand, I hope we can move on to other supporting points? 
*Edit:*



> Literally all you need to do to fix Skill Challenges is say "this ends in X rounds".


 Apparently this supporting point has not been dropped. So, is there a _reason_ we have to do this and aren't allowed to just arrive at rules that encourage the behavior we want? 
*/Edit*



> there's still no reason to roll a skill with a _worse_ chance of success.


 If you've written a response to what happened when the PCs can't calculate the chance of success, I've missed where you did so. Because a player saying "I'm going to roll a skill I know has a worse chance of success," starts with them _knowing_ the chance of success. 

*Spoiler: Full Response to Beoric*
Show




> Note that in the example you cite, the player started by choosing a skill, and then is required to narrate a justification.


 My reading is that the Player attempted to go "Skill->Check->Description," (to use your terminology) and was prompted by the DM to instead try going "Description->Skill->Check." 

To see if I've understood you correctly, my reading it that based on what's in the quote from you above, it appears you agree with me on what the player did initially, but your reading is that the player was instead prompted by the DM to go "Skill->Description->Check." Which is something I still consider "mechanics driven;" fair enough. 

But it is also the first step I try to get players to start defaulting to "Description->Skill->Check." But suppose at this point it might be worth asking: would you consider "Description->Skill->Check," to be narrative driven? (I _think_ you agreed to this in your last comment, but I'd rather not assume here). I'll continuing where I'm going with this after the next quote:




> He then comes up with a narrative to justify the mechanic he has already chosen.


 There is no mention of whether or not this occurs in the passage, much less in the specific part I quoted to you. I would like to note that I have had all of the following happen with skill checks not made as part of a Skill Challenge: 
The player visibly tries to invent a way to justify the chosen mechanic. Either I prompt another player to try something while this one mulls it over or get the opportunity to move on to one of the other items on this list.The player lists a narrative effect that works with the same skill, and I tell them to roll for the named skill.The player lists a narrative effect that works with a different skill, and I tell them to roll for the skill that fits the narrative effect. 
I don't see why making players move closer to the last item on the list over time is a bad idea, and I see no reason it would be impossible to get players to do during a skill challenge. And that probably moves us very close to the "is doing something you know you're better at metagaming" line of questioning that probably deserves several threads elsewhere on the forum. 

Please note that my end goal is as follows:The player lists a narrative effect first, and then I determine which skill would apply to that narrative effect along with an appropriate DC.



> Deciding to use a skill challenge instead of one or more narrative driven encounters is a _choice_...There is nothing in the mechanics of 4e that presents the use of narrative driven encounters.


 I don't see anything in the mechanics of 4e Skill Challenges that prevents the use of narrative driven encounters either. I see a line telling the DM to push_ against_ players going about a Skill Challenge the "Skill->Check->Description" method, but nothing forcing it in the other direction. 




> The use of skill challenges is _not mandatory_.


 I'm glad to be able to say I agree on this point. I would, however like to once again say that a Skill Challenge being mechanics driven is _also not mandatory._ 




> What I am saying is that in choosing to put at least one SC in every single published WotC 4e adventure, WotC required players of those published adventures to engage in mechanics driven play.


 Thank you for confirming that I understood what you have been saying. If it helps, what I'm saying is that "I list the skill with the highest bonus and see if I can make it fit the Skill Challenge," is _not mandatory_ for a Skill Challenge. 




> Whereas non-SC encounters can usually be run as narrative driven _or_ mechanics driven, depending on the inclinations of players and DM.


 I appreciate the clarification that non-SC encounter can be mechanics driven under some circumstances. I'm asking for the part of SC encounters (and/or encounters which combine a SC with something else) that these other counter types lack which makes it untrue for them. Or the part of SC encounters that only SCs lack than makes this untrue for them. 




> By focussing so much time and energy on SCs, WotC annoyed a huge segment of their target market, and convinced them that 4e was not for them.  I think the pervasiveness of SCs is part of why you have incorrect but pervasive narratives, like 4e being "merely a tactical combat game" that is poorly suited to roleplaying.


 My position is that "SC's can only be mechanics driven," is one of those incorrect but pervasive narratives. Actually, its probably a subset of "4e is poorly suited to roleplaying," to be honest. Wouldn't surprise me if the actual reasoning started with "this thing I consider true about 4e must also be true of the components of 4e." Even if someone realizes it isn't true about 4e as a whole, the idea could persist in particular components. 

Not saying that's what's happened here, but that might explain why I see so much stuff saying "this is the case," and so little explanation of "why this is the case."




> That being said, none of what you have stated remotely describes how early D&D was run in practice.  I wouldn't even know where to begin to explain it, and I'm not sure there is much utility in getting into it; I doubt anyone in the 4e forums has any interest in how to run a Classic or OSR style game, even if I use 4e to do it.  But trust me, what you think you know about early D&D is wrong.


Upon checking my previous comment there appears to be a very unclear sentence in it:



> I think the main difference to the earliest editions is that the Player rolls most of their checks...


To clarify (and for all I know it was already clear) I meant that _in 4e_ Players roll most of their checks, and my understanding is that this was the opposite in the earliest days of D&D. My understanding is that originally most rolls were done behind the screen, (the legend about this being done with PC stats seems suspect though) and that even 3rd edition was a significant shift toward players performing their own rolls compared to early OD&D. 

In either case, would you be willing to provide an explanation on the Older D&D/AD&D and Other Systems tread or link a source where someone has provided this explanation off the forum? I'd like to have a clearer picture going forward. 

Otherwise I'm dropping this for this thread.
 

*TL;DR response to Beoric:*



> Note that in the example you cite, the player started by choosing a skill, and then is required to narrate a justification.


 Which can be done with situations that aren't Skill Challenges, as you say yourself: 




> non-SC encounters can usually be run as narrative driven _or_ mechanics driven, depending on the inclinations of players and DM.


If I provide an example of a regular old single skill check not made as part of a Skill Challenge where the player starts by choosing a skill and then trying to narrate a justification, are you going to start denying this true statement you've made?
If you would do this, please say so.If you wouldn't do this, can you list which aspect(s) of Skill Challenges don't exist in these other encounter types and/or only exist in Skill Challenges that makes this thing exclusively true for Skill Challenges? 
Because the larger the volume of text saying "You have to start responding to a skill challenge by first picking a skill," that fails to be followed by a "because this nasty thing necessarily happens if you start by choosing a narratively appropriate idea to try," the more it sounds like the claim is based purely on the pervasive narrative that 4e is "merely a tactical combat game," and somehow incapable of supporting roleplaying.

----------


## Beoric

> No, it's a choice _by the DM_. Suppose there are no holes, and the player rolls Perception. They find nothing. Suppose there are holes that are easy to find, and the player rolls Perception. They find the holes, but made an unnecessary role. Things were still being driven by the narrative. What's happening in this model isn't that "the narrative" is driving the story instead of "the mechanics", it's that the player is presenting an action to the DM, and the DM is deciding what mechanics are appropriate, rather than the player presenting the mechanics that they think are appropriate for the action.


Yes, exactly.  It should be clear that if the DM is deciding the mechanic, or even deciding no mechanical resolution is necessary, then the player is not choosing the mechanic.  The player is narrating his action, the DM is adjudicating it >> narrative comes first >> narrative driven.

If, for the same encounter, the player chooses the mechanic, then it would be mechanic driven.  I am saying that either narrative driven or mechanics driven playstyles can be used with traditional encounter design.




> Again, what's happening here is not that the player is making a narrative choice rather than a mechanical one. It's that the DM is enforcing a particular mechanic. If the player rolls Stealth to blend into a sparse crowd, _that's fine_. It may be that it is a less effective strategy than rolling Intuition or Streetwise would have been, but it's an acceptable one, and should the player's bonuses (and their luck) be sufficient to succeed at it, it should work. Because "I have a really big Stealth bonus and can hide in a sparse crowd" is a fact about the world in the same way that "the crowd is very sparse and social stealth is likely to be more effective than physical stealth" is.


Same answer as above.  And to be clear, I am not saying everyone needs to use narrative driven play, I am saying a lot of people like narrative driven play.




> I don't see why making players move closer to the last item on the list over time is a bad idea, and I see no reason it would be impossible to get players to do during a skill challenge. And that probably moves us very close to the "is doing something you know you're better at metagaming" line of questioning that probably deserves several threads elsewhere on the forum.


I think this is the key to the disconnect.  I am not saying it is a bad idea.  There is nothing wrong with mechanics driven play.  I am attempting to describe two different playstyles.  I am saying that traditional encounters support both playstyles, but SCs support only one playstyle.




> Please note that my end goal is as follows:The player lists a narrative effect first, and then I determine which skill would apply to that narrative effect along with an appropriate DC.


I think that is probably narrative driven play, although an example of how you accomplish this would make it clearer.  

If you can manage that in a SC, great.  I am suggesting it is not easy to do with a SC - or at least with a published SC, it occurs to me that it may be easier to run a narrative driven SC on the fly.

I am very curious, and would appreciate an example, of what you are saying to prompt the player to start by narrating an action.  With a traditional encounter, the obstacles are concrete and narrated - that is, the player is confronted with the obstacle (cross the river), as opposed to the overall objective (travel overland through the wilderness).  As published SCs are written, I think they tend to present the players with the objective, not the obstacles.  I would like to see how you are getting around that.




> If I provide an example of a regular old single skill check not made as part of a Skill Challenge where the player starts by choosing a skill and then trying to narrate a justification, are you going to start denying this true statement you've made?
> If you would do this, please say so.If you wouldn't do this, can you list which aspect(s) of Skill Challenges don't exist in these other encounter types and/or only exist in Skill Challenges that makes this thing exclusively true for Skill Challenges? 
> Because the larger the volume of text saying "You have to start responding to a skill challenge by first picking a skill," that fails to be followed by a "because this nasty thing necessarily happens if you start by choosing a narratively appropriate idea to try," the more it sounds like the claim is based purely on the pervasive narrative that 4e is "merely a tactical combat game," and somehow incapable of supporting roleplaying.


No, I would agree that your example is consistent with what I have said.

Look, I have been faced with running a skill challenge and wanting to shoehorn it into a narrative driven playstyle, and the method I took was to select the sample uses of named skills and turned those into concrete obstacles.  So for instance, if there was a list of skills in the SC like "Nature:  you find the best path though the forest", and "Athletics:  you swim a river or climb a cliff", I might tell the players the river was in their path, and then they would narrate their approach to crossing the river.  

You can do this, I am just saying that the SC, or (on reflection) at least the presentation of SCs is not well suited to this.  There would be much more effective ways or organizing the series of encounters in a way that would support the DM is presenting this series of encounters.  But I don't want to get into what those methods might be until I confirm that this is how you are doing things, or if you are using some other technique to run narrative driven SCs.

I will also suggest that if you are running narrative driven SCs you are likely an unusual case.  Nearly every example I have seen in this thread, whether responding to me or not, has been an example that was clearly mechanics driven play.

----------


## Beoric

> To clarify (and for all I know it was already clear) I meant that in 4e Players roll most of their checks, and my understanding is that this was the opposite in the earliest days of D&D. My understanding is that originally most rolls were done behind the screen, (the legend about this being done with PC stats seems suspect though) and that even 3rd edition was a significant shift toward players performing their own rolls compared to early OD&D.
> 
> In either case, would you be willing to provide an explanation on the Older D&D/AD&D and Other Systems tread or link a source where someone has provided this explanation off the forum? I'd like to have a clearer picture going forward.


I think it varied a lot from group to group, and IIRC Gygax was in the "roll everything behind the screen" camp.  But there was a lot of variation, both regionally and between groups.  I know in our group, where there were checks to be made, the players often rolled them, depending on the DM and the nature of the check.  I think even with Gygax, rolls to use thief skills, open doors and bend bars/lift gates were rolled by players.  Rolls were generally hidden when the very existence of the roll would give away the plot.  

An example would be if there was a random chance of stepping on a tripwire and triggering a trap, those rolls would be made in secret until the trap was triggered (although in 4e this would be an attack roll, so it would still be rolled by the DM), or rolls for elves to detect a secret door (which they could do while travelling, so the roll itself would give away the door's existence).

But other than that, in the very early game abilities were used very differently from what you suppose.  In 1e and (I think) 0e the only function of Charisma was to determine the maximum number of henchmen you could take on, the initial reaction of monsters and NPCs when you encountered them, and the loyalty of your henchmen, hirelings and followers.  

I think in one of the versions of Basic they introduced a "roll under your ability score" mechanic to make ability checks, but I was more of a 1e player so I don't know if that would have been used on a regular basis in social encounters.  I think as a rule in 0e and 1e, and maybe 2e, who had the highest charisma score would have been ignored by most groups in social encounters.  Non-combat encounters, including social encounters, were generally adjudicated by what you said or did without reference to any score.  

Also, decisions were made by the group.  This was a time of group initiative checks, so there was less of a focus on clearly defined turns in which a player acted without reference to, or input from, the other players.  So if someone in a social encounter says something to the king without attribution, it might be assumed that it was the paladin saying it, even if it was the fighter's character that made the suggestion (assuming the paladin's player went along with it).  Or it was equally likely that the DM just didn't care about the charisma of the character who was speaking, because there was no express mechanical benefit, and not really any culture of adjudicating based on charisma scores.

So absolutely, you would regularly have the player of the gruff guy speaking, instead of the player of the paladin, without any penalty.  Strength had more mechanics associated with it, so the wizard's player might suggest that the fighter's player should do something that required strength, but lots and lots of actions were resolved with no reference to mechanics whatsoever, or the DM deciding there was a 33% chance and rolling a DM without modifiers.  

With no ability checks or skill checks baked into the game, there was very heavy reliance on purely narrative adjudication.  This is why the distinction is so clear in my mind.  This in turn led to very different noncombat encounters than you see in modern adventures; because the selection of an approach was so important, encounters could be built to take into account common approaches.  Everything had a risk and a tradeoff.  

So if you come to a pit in a hallway, how do you get across?  Do you climb in, walk across, and climb out?  Do you shimmy along the narrow ledges on the sides of the pit?  Do you jump across?  What precautions do you take to make sure there isn't a trapper in the bottom of the pit, or the ledges aren't designed to give way, or there isn't a second, covered pit on the other side that you might be jumping into?  If you don't climb into the pit, how do you know you aren't missing some hidden treasure, or a secret door?  

Other traps and "tricks" could be very creative, they could use your own sense of self-preservation against you.  The dungeon was kind of a big puzzle, with various mechanisms designed to trick adventurers and wear them down; I have heard it described as a "survival horror" game, and I think that is accurate.  When it was done well, the whole thing was designed to encourage you to experiment, and to push your luck.  Instead of rolls for everything, you had a constant back and forth conversation with the DM, as players experimented and investigated in order to improve their characters' odds of survival.

You can still play this way if you have a skill system (and I do), but none of the sourcebooks or adventures teach you how.

----------


## tcrudisi

> Yeah, no, this is wrong. Players need to be able to make informed decisions. If you do not tell them how their decisions are going to effect outcomes, they _cannot do that_. Just use a mechanic that encourages desirable behavior even when players know they are interacting with it.


Of course they know how their decisions will effect outcomes. You don't need to know you are in a skill challenge to know how that will happen. 




> You are allowed and even encouraged to do this in 3e. It has nothing to do with "Skill Challenges" as a mechanic.


Not really. It's one thing to say that and another to back it up with mechanics. 4e literally backs it up with mechanics. It tells you how much xp to assign, for example. 3e never did anything like that.

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## Kurald Galain

> For starters, if you know you are in a skill challenge, the DM is probably doing it wrong.


I'm actually curious how you'd pull that off. Assuming the players are passingly familiar with 4E rules, how can they _not_ realize that they're doing an SC?




> "I make a Stealth check to blend in with the crowd," is mechanics driven.  But what if the player instead says, "I want to try to blend in with the crowd," and the DM says,


I agree with this. Most issues with SCs go away if the player describes what he wants to do and the GM asks for a check (instead of the player deciding on a check and then making up a justification for it). Also, it removes the option of "I use <skill X> to do <something unrelated to skill X>".




> If the player rolls Stealth to blend into a sparse crowd, _that's fine_. It may be that it is a less effective strategy than rolling Intuition or Streetwise would have been, but it's an acceptable one, and should the player's bonuses (and their luck) be sufficient to succeed at it, it should work.


The problem here is that the game math doesn't match up with what you're suggesting: if the character is well invested in Stealth, then giving Stealth the hard DC _still_ gives him the highest chance of success. The DM should be well within his rights to declare that a particular skill just doesn't help or work in the current situation.

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## Beoric

> I'm actually curious how you'd pull that off. Assuming the players are passingly familiar with 4E rules, how can they _not_ realize that they're doing an SC?


Whenever I read a statement like this I assume they are picking the examples of how a skill might be narrated and converting them into defined obstacles, like I was describing here:




> Look, I have been faced with running a skill challenge and wanting to shoehorn it into a narrative driven playstyle, and the method I took was to select the sample uses of named skills and turned those into concrete obstacles.  So for instance, if there was a list of skills in the SC like "Nature:  you find the best path though the forest", and "Athletics:  you swim a river or climb a cliff", I might tell the players the river was in their path, and then they would narrate their approach to crossing the river.  
> 
> You can do this, I am just saying that the SC, or (on reflection) at least the presentation of SCs is not well suited to this.  There would be much more effective ways or organizing the series of encounters in a way that would support the DM is presenting this series of encounters.  But I don't want to get into what those methods might be until I confirm that this is how you are doing things, or if you are using some other technique to run narrative driven SCs.
> 
> I will also suggest that if you are running narrative driven SCs you are likely an unusual case.  Nearly every example I have seen in this thread, whether responding to me or not, has been an example that was clearly mechanics driven play.


So instead of presenting a situation to the players, like, "You are faced with an arduous trek through the wilderness, tell me how you contribute to the party's success," you pick through the fluff to create individual encounters, like, "A river/cliff/swamp blocks your path," or "You come to a fork in the path and need to choose the best route."

If they players don't know you are counting successes and failures using this method, they may not know they are in a SC.

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## PhoenixPhyre

I think, to me, the core of having successful "skill challenges" is to have meaningful consequences for each action _in the fiction_. Ones that _successful or not_ change the landscape, making "I hit the same button again" not work. That force the players (_including the DM_) to react to changing circumstances. Maybe including changing what the "best" option at the next juncture is by changing DCs or by (narratively) ruling out certain types of attempts entirely. Ones that move the overall situation toward _an_ end. No action should result in "nothing changed". That way you also can include non-binary outcomes, more than just "total success or total failure". Counting successes/failures can be part of that, but should be measured more in _changes to the situation_.

Does 4e present it like that? Dunno. I only ran it a couple times and (due to external constraints) hacked the ever living heck out of it, barely using it as written. But then again, my reading is that 4e had lots of great ideas and implemented them, like most things WotC does, haphazardly and poorly.

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## Beoric

> So instead of presenting a situation to the players, like, "You are faced with an arduous trek through the wilderness, tell me how you contribute to the party's success," you pick through the fluff to create individual encounters, like, "A river/cliff/swamp blocks your path," or "You come to a fork in the path and need to choose the best route."
> 
> If they players don't know you are counting successes and failures using this method, they may not know they are in a SC.


I want to add to what I wrote here.  I think if this is what you are doing, there are better ways to present it than the SC format.  Formats that would support the DM better by not requiring him to improvise individual encounters using the (often anemic) fluff contained in the SC format.  And that would be to write very short individual encounters ahead of time.  You could then put them in a table and select them randomly until success or failure results, or place them in some sort of order.

(Of course, if you are putting them in order you could add a bit of complexity and make it more of a flow chart, with player choices, successes and failures opening up or closing off paths.  And if that flowchart is representing overland travel, you could turn it into a point crawl.)

But I am looking at the examples of play on p. 77 of the DMG and pp. 80-81 of the DMG2, and I'm pretty the "individual encounters" isn't the intention.  It is really hard to see how the players wouldn't guess they were in a SC from those examples.

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## Marcloure

> You are once again describing something that seems _vastly_ better handled by having the Skill Challenge last a given number of rounds, rather than ending after a given number of failures. This has the added benefit of providing a natural mechanism for degrees of success (which I recall being another Skill Challenge design goal).


This is how PF2 deals with extended tests, and I think it is indeed the best solution. Something like "you need 3 success by the end of the second round", and then you go through each player asking what they do. This way, if a player fail, they don't advance the failure condition, they simply don't help (unless in the rare occasion of a fumble).

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## Marcloure

> The question isnt have you seen people play in the box, the question is, have you seen people play _outside_ the box. And, even then, my question is, where in the spectrum of facilitate to hinder does the game stand on the spectrum of how it handles going outside the box. Thats how suitable it is to being an RPG.
> 
>  no? I would look for every possible approach I can imagine, and evaluate them in light of comparison between the capabilities and the expected difficulty of the approach, and the cost and morality and range of outcomes and side-effects possible from the attempt? In an RPG, factor in roleplaying and metagame considerations, as well as potential for drawing upon NPCs. So, despite being a programmer, I might choose ask to come in over hack security. Similarly, I might plead my case before attempting to rewrite time.


I have run a 5 years long 4e game to my group, and I would love to share with you all the moments my players came up with. Destroying the pillars that sustain the stairs, improvising weapons, using oil and fire, designing a trap for undead using a combination of rituals, using their familiars and flying abilities to invade a fortress, etc. 

However, I get what you mean, if a new player came and said "I want to bash the head of these two orcs together", I would have to ask "do you have a power for that?". I am just not sure this is a _problem_, that is how 5e and PF 2e works as well. Something like Dungeon World would allow this kind of free-form play.

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## Beoric

> However, I get what you mean, if a new player came and said "I want to bash the head of these two orcs together", I would have to ask "do you have a power for that?". I am just not sure this is a _problem_, that is how 5e and PF 2e works as well. Something like Dungeon World would allow this kind of free-form play.


I disagree.  Off the top of my head, Str v Reflex; Melee 1 (two targets); Practically speaking, both attacks would have to hit to do any damage to either, so I would use a limited damage expression (that is, damage for multiple targets, but increased by 50%).  

If it came up a lot, I might think harder about the math, and think about whether adding the dazed condition would be appropriate.  But I think the above meets DMG p. 42 criteria if I had to come up with something on the fly.

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## Marcloure

> I disagree.  Off the top of my head, Str v Reflex; Melee 1 (two targets); Practically speaking, both attacks would have to hit to do any damage to either, so I would use a limited damage expression (that is, damage for multiple targets, but increased by 50%).  
> 
> If it came up a lot, I might think harder about the math, and think about whether adding the dazed condition would be appropriate.  But I think the above meets DMG p. 42 criteria if I had to come up with something on the fly.


You are creating a new power there, which is fine, but just handing it to the player in the spot because they wanted to do it in that moment is counter to D&D's design (not just 4e, basically every edition's). I think what Quertus was saying is that a player can't just come up with these actions on the spot based on the narrative, but they can't do it in any D&D edition as far as I know. In narrative-first games like Dungeon World and Ironsworn? Sure. In D&D or 13th Age? No way

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## Beoric

> You are creating a new power there, which is fine, but just handing it to the player in the spot because they wanted to do it in that moment is counter to D&D's design (not just 4e, basically every edition's). I think what Quertus was saying is that a player can't just come up with these actions on the spot based on the narrative, but they can't do it in any D&D edition as far as I know. In narrative-first games like Dungeon World and Ironsworn? Sure. In D&D or 13th Age? No way


Please read p. 42 of the 4e DMG, it expressly says that you can do this, and tells you how.  Rather than being contrary to 4e's design, it is baked in.

EDIT:  It frustrates me that even experienced 4e DMs don't appear to be aware of this rule and its implications.  Clearly it adds to the general perception that 4e is a game played by pushing buttons.  I think it also points to the way gaming culture can supplant the actual rules in determining how a game is played.

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## Marcloure

> Please read p. 42 of the 4e DMG, it expressly says that you can do this, and tells you how.  Rather than being contrary to 4e's design, it is baked in.
> 
> EDIT:  It frustrates me that even experienced 4e DMs don't appear to be aware of this rule and its implications.  Clearly it adds to the general perception that 4e is a game played by pushing buttons.  I think it also points to the way gaming culture can supplant the actual rules in determining how a game is played.


As I see it, "Actions the Rules Dont Cover" is meant for stuff that is so situational that you can't have a Power for it. The book examples pushing an ogre into a brazier while swinging from a chandelier, but it could also be for something like what happened in my table: the PCs rolling a column downhill, they trying to stop a cart with their hands, or attacking the support of a staircase. A repeatable action like bashing the heads of two creatures is much more like a Power, else if you allow anyone to do that, you should also allow anyone to say "I swing both my daggers to attack the ogre", which is a dedicated power.

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## Kurald Galain

> However, I get what you mean, if a new player came and said "I want to bash the head of these two orcs together", I would have to ask "do you have a power for that?". I am just not sure this is a _problem_, that is how 5e and PF 2e works as well. Something like Dungeon World would allow this kind of free-form play.


Regardless of edition, I would rule that any ability that lets you make two unarmed attacks in one turn lets you do this (for instance, 4E's Twin Strike, 3E/PF's flurry of blows, or just two attack actions in P2).




> EDIT:  It frustrates me that even experienced 4e DMs don't appear to be aware of this rule and its implications.


An implication may be that the player, after hearing how you would rule it, notes that this is weaker than an MBA and decides not to do it.

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## Marcloure

> Regardless of edition, I would rule that any ability that lets you make two unarmed attacks in one turn lets you do this (for instance, 4E's Twin Strike, 3E/PF's flurry of blows, or just two attack actions in P2).


Indeed, but if I understand correctly what Quertus is saying, we are "playing the system" if a PC can't do something logical in the world because they don't have a Power for it. It isn't RPG by their standard, but then I wonder how other editions of D&D is a RPG, since none of them would allow you to break the action economy like this.

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## Kurald Galain

> Indeed, but if I understand correctly what Quertus is saying, we are "playing the system" if a PC can't do something logical in the world because they don't have a Power for it. It isn't RPG by their standard, but then I wonder how other editions of D&D is a RPG, since none of them would allow you to break the action economy like this.


If you lack the ability to make two attacks in one round, and you don't want to break the action economy (which I agree with) then the obvious outcome is that it takes two rounds, i.e. one round to grab one orc and one round to slam him into the other.

However, are you looking for a system that lets you _perform_ your stunt, or a system that makes it _a worthwhile action_ (compared to other things you could have done) to do your stunt? Because if it's the latter, then this two-round method falls short.

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## dgnslyr

> I disagree.  Off the top of my head, Str v Reflex; Melee 1 (two targets); Practically speaking, both attacks would have to hit to do any damage to either, so I would use a limited damage expression (that is, damage for multiple targets, but increased by 50%).  
> 
> If it came up a lot, I might think harder about the math, and think about whether adding the dazed condition would be appropriate.  But I think the above meets DMG p. 42 criteria if I had to come up with something on the fly.


On one hand you _could_ and on the other hand you probably _shouldn't,_ because if repeatable "creative stunts" are better than at-will (or encounter, if it applied daze!) powers then people will use them and nothing else, which defeats the whole point of being creative.

My personal question though would be "Why is your swordsman trying to brawl barehanded?" Because if a player _intended_ to play as a barehanded brawler, then they should have built for it, as a monk, or a fighter with monk multiclass, and then they wouldn't _need_ to improvise an attack to represent their barehanded brawling style, because they have their actual class powers to do these kinds of things already. For example, a monk can hit one monster with one power, and then flurry to damage and slide another one adjacent, to represent "banging their heads together;" a brawling fighter could use Dual Strike or Cleave or some other power, and narrate it as "banging their heads together." On the other hand, if your character is trying to improvise a power to grab heads and slam them together, it kind of _needs_ to be worse than their normal power set, because generic improvised repeatable attacks just _shouldn't_ be better than the limited powers that a player has spent character resources to possess.

Non-standard attacks work well for single-use, environmentally-contextual attacks like pulling a rug, I think, but _not_ for something universal and repeatable like "swiping their legs to trip them up." The former encourages players to explore the environment and look for novel tricks, but the latter just feels cheesy and cheaty, because players should be expected to build for the character they want to play, and playing a character with a specific and repeatable gimmick _is what character resources are for._

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## sandmote

Apologies for the delay, especially given the conversation has moved elsewhere. For that, I probably would make "thing the player can technically do at any time" require giving up a power if the PC is able to do something strong with it. A variant of a basic attack that deals, say 1d8 damage to two enemies in burst, as a standard action is probably fine. To daze or deal on-weapon damage I'd require them to make it a power. 

Contrast shoving someone next to you off of a cliff. That's a bull rush that gains extra benefits because the player used it as a smart time, and as they're perfectly able to bull rush anyway I wouldn't require them having to make it part of their build. Admittedly this is probably one of the weaknesses in 4e, as making a feat chain in 3.5e or making a feat, fighting style, or subclass in 5e that can do these sorts of things gives them more flexibility. 




> I am saying that traditional encounters support both playstyles, but SCs support only one playstyle.
> 
> If you can manage that in a SC, great.  I am suggesting it is not easy to do with a SC...


I impression I got previously was that you believe there is something particular about SCs that makes the narrative playstyle unviable with them in particular, compared to other resolution methods that involve multiple rolls. 




> I am very curious, and would appreciate an example, of what you are saying to prompt the player to start by narrating an action.  With a traditional encounter, the obstacles are concrete and narrated - that is, the player is confronted with the obstacle (cross the river), as opposed to the overall objective (travel overland through the wilderness).  As published SCs are written, I think they tend to present the players with the objective, not the obstacles.  I would like to see how you are getting around that.


 As an example, the party learns there is an assassin at some fancy event. This creates one situation with two problems: the party needs to locate the assassin, but they also to avoid making a scene that gets them thrown out. And I can track their progress on each separately. I'll likely invent some reason the regular security at the event doesn't take the threat seriously (to explain why its the party that's doing this as much as why they'll get thrown out for making a scene). They can search the various locations at the event (kitchen preparing the food, main ballroom, powder rooms, smaller side rooms, balconies, ect.) and I'll list things people are doing in that area while the party members are searching. Potential suggestions I'd have prepared:
If the victim is known, warn them to get them to safety without causing a ruckus. Or finding a polite excuse to stay nearby and guard them.Creating an embarrassing situation for a suspect so the PCs have an excuse to search their belongings. Or so the PCs can search the belongings for poison/weapons without embarrassing themselves.Come up with a Shibboleth that the assassin is unlikely to know that clerics or nobles will (making a check to determine how effective it is) and then propose the guest perform an activity that involves it.Sneak a bit of food intended to reach the suspect and test it for poison. The ritual might be an auto-success, but the PCs might need a roll to get access to the food (or to keep the intended victim from eating it while they check for poison)For several of these the relevant skill might depend on how the PC goes about doing it, and a lot could allow a second roll to ease the tension and negate a failure, but I hope the intent is clearer? 

Alternatively, the first time I tried running a chase I said the PCs were 60 feet away from their pursuers and had the initiative. My intent was that a PC who manages to put 100 feet between themselves and the pursuers (after the pursuer's actions in the same round) would get away and if the pursuers caught up they'd get caught. To increase the distance I had the party members come up with rolls that would either get onto or over obstacles or create rough terrain behind them. This dragged on longer than I intended when the pursuers repeatedly cycled closer and further from one PC, neither falling behind by 100 feet nor catching up. "You need three successes to get away and are captured if you fail three times first," would work a lot better at (a) creating more tension as the margins between escape and capture close and (b) the encounter has a point where it will definitely end after the next roll. 
Note for honesty: The game where I planned to try this as a skill challenge ended before I got the chance, but my first chase went so badly that I'm willing to list anything that creates (a) and (b) as a massive improvement. 




> Look, I have been faced with running a skill challenge and wanting to shoehorn it into a narrative driven playstyle, and the method I took was to select the sample uses of named skills and turned those into concrete obstacles.  So for instance, if there was a list of skills in the SC like "Nature:  you find the best path though the forest", and "Athletics:  you swim a river or climb a cliff", I might tell the players the river was in their path, and then they would narrate their approach to crossing the river.


 I reread pages 72-80 of the DMG 1 and didn't see these examples, although I feel like I've seen them somewhere. Drawing a blank at the moment though. 

To the examples, I think my example of crossing a river upthread was that the party was being chased. Just a general "find a method of crossing this obstacle" seems like you're just counting how many resources the party uses to get past the named obstacle. So I don't see how formatting the resolution via an SC would... make sense. 

If I were trying to shoehorn one into overland travel, I'd set it up that there one place (or type of place) the party wants to reach and some sort of place they want to avoid, and a failure for the skill challenge results in them ending up in the bad place (running back into whichever creatures the party was escaping from when it got lost, for example). Otherwise I probably wouldn't make crossing a physical barrier a skill challenge, just a series of skill checks where failing the check loses you resources but still gets you across the obstacle (which resources presumably depending on what the party tries). Or if you're stricter than I am, they lose resources until they succeed at getting across; my point is more that I'm not clear what the failure state is for an SC where the scenario is _just_ "there's a river you need to get across." 

Admittedly the scenario for getting lost in the wilderness in the DMG 1 is terrible, with the party seemingly dying if they fail:



> Setup: You must use your knowledge of the wilderness to survive long enough to find your way back to a familiar area or to a settlement of some sort.


Going through the other examples in the DMG 1:
The Negotiation and Interrogation examples seem to have the same situation where baffling or sufficiently angering the NPC party will make them refuse to continue speaking with the party for the foreseeable future, even if they were a moment away from doing what the party wanted. Not something that requires a SC, but there's certainly cases where a hard limit on what the PCs can mess up before they're forced to end the conversation works better than a video-gamey "try again until the find the right path through the speech tree." Its overkill for most conversations though. 

The failure state for The Dead Witness feels like nonsense, and tying a SC to a ritual feels weird. Could work for an incorporeal undead the party encounters though, with the ghost attacking if they can't properly dispose of its mortal remains and helping them if the party can do that. 

I'll put the Discovering Secret Lore into the "I want the resolution system to provide a definite end at some point" pile. Have the scenario end with the party confident they have information on the subject, and their rolls (presumably made in secret) determine its accuracy.  Could be a grading system where more successes is better rather than a pass/fail scenario; not sure you'd count that as similar enough to an SC. 

Combat: I'll suggest a siege situation instead of a trap, where the party managing to manipulate the besiegers makes more of a difference. "I make a check to tip their ladder back over instead of making an attack," sort of thing, where a success stalls the attackers or forces them to withdraw temporarily. Even if the party is close to being overrun it might not look like that to the attackers, making them end the assault at the last moment. 

Anyway, now I've written out a bit more and organized my thought, I think SCs fit well in the following two main situations:
There's one good thing the party is making progress toward, but missteps on the way work up to something else harmful occurring. The question is if the party can succeed before they fail.The party could be stuck making rolls indefinitely if you used an admittedly more realistic measure of success, and the SC ensures rising tension and a more definite end. Usually requires a fail state that's different than the situation the party was in before they did the SC. 




> I think in one of the versions of Basic they introduced a "roll under your ability score" mechanic to make ability checks, but I was more of a 1e player so I don't know if that would have been used on a regular basis in social encounters.  I think as a rule in 0e and 1e, and maybe 2e, who had the highest charisma score would have been ignored by most groups in social encounters.


After double-checking it appears that the "roll under your stat" resolution method was introduced in the Basic Set (I think the 1981 edition) and also appeared in the AD&D Dungeoneer's Survival Guide. Can't provide any comment on how commonly used it was, but that does indeed appear to have been the disconnect. 

Also, thank you for the general clarification on 1e play.

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## Beoric

> An implication may be that the player, after hearing how you would rule it, notes that this is weaker than an MBA and decides not to do it.


And this is as it should be.




> As I see it, "Actions the Rules Dont Cover" is meant for stuff that is so situational that you can't have a Power for it. The book examples pushing an ogre into a brazier while swinging from a chandelier, but it could also be for something like what happened in my table: the PCs rolling a column downhill, they trying to stop a cart with their hands, or attacking the support of a staircase. A repeatable action like bashing the heads of two creatures is much more like a Power, else if you allow anyone to do that, you should also allow anyone to say "I swing both my daggers to attack the ogre", which is a dedicated power.


I thought I had posted the response below a couple of days ago, but it appears to have been lost to the ether.  Kurald Galain has already covered some of this in a more pithy fashion, but I don't feel like re-writing it, so here is the original:

Your example is not a great one.  In the absence of a dedicated power, making what is effectively two attacks requires two actions.  This can be accomplished over two rounds, or by using an action point, or by being a ranger with Twin Strike, or by being a fighter with Dual Strike, or by being a Scout, or by having the Sohei theme, or probably a bunch of other means which I am forgetting.  It is _not_ an action that the rules don't cover, because there is are several rules that covers it.

But to reply to the thrust of your argument, IME improvised attacks are generally weaker than at-will or encounter powers.  For example, trying to knock two heads together clearly requires both attacks to hit in order to do any damage; you are effectively taking a -5 penalty to hit in order to do not particularly high damage with (by default, if you read p. 42) no conditions attached to it; moreover, you have to have both hands free to do it.  It scales terribly unless you are proficient with ki foci, and your DM considers it to be an implement attack, which probably means your character is a monk.  It also requires you to be adjacent to two enemies who are adjacent to each other.  It makes little sense as an attack you would spam. Rather, it is something you do in an emergency because you are unarmed, or possibly because you managed to sneak up behind the targets and have combat advantage.

IME most improvised actions play out this way.  Players choose to use maneuvers their characters have practiced and mastered because in most situations they are superior.  And the DM has discretion over this, so it is easy to ensure that improvised attacks that can be used at-will are less attractive than at-will attacks.

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## Beoric

> I impression I got previously was that you believe there is something particular about SCs that makes the narrative playstyle unviable with them in particular, compared to other resolution methods that involve multiple rolls.


I had said it was unavailable, but I have modified my stance to say it is much more difficult, and not well supported by the mechanic/format.




> As an example, the party learns there is an assassin at some fancy event. This creates one situation with two problems: the party needs to locate the assassin, but they also to avoid making a scene that gets them thrown out. And I can track their progress on each separately. I'll likely invent some reason the regular security at the event doesn't take the threat seriously (to explain why its the party that's doing this as much as why they'll get thrown out for making a scene). They can search the various locations at the event (kitchen preparing the food, main ballroom, powder rooms, smaller side rooms, balconies, ect.) and I'll list things people are doing in that area while the party members are searching. Potential suggestions I'd have prepared:
> If the victim is known, warn them to get them to safety without causing a ruckus. Or finding a polite excuse to stay nearby and guard them.Creating an embarrassing situation for a suspect so the PCs have an excuse to search their belongings. Or so the PCs can search the belongings for poison/weapons without embarrassing themselves.Come up with a Shibboleth that the assassin is unlikely to know that clerics or nobles will (making a check to determine how effective it is) and then propose the guest perform an activity that involves it.Sneak a bit of food intended to reach the suspect and test it for poison. The ritual might be an auto-success, but the PCs might need a roll to get access to the food (or to keep the intended victim from eating it while they check for poison)For several of these the relevant skill might depend on how the PC goes about doing it, and a lot could allow a second roll to ease the tension and negate a failure, but I hope the intent is clearer?


But at this point, why are you running it as an SC?  You have defined areas that can be searched.  You have defined NPCs you can interact with.  Why push it into the abstraction of a SC?  Why limit your adjudication to a particular number of successes or failures, when you can just evaluate each action to determine whether and how much it moves the PCs toward their goals?  Isn't the value of an SC that it allows the adjudication of a situation which is largely abstract and undefined?

So if the PCs warn the intended victim, isn't the length of the challenge simply the time it takes to get him to the door unnoticed?  

And if they identify a shibboleth, don't they detect the assassin the first time they successfully get him to use it?  Or if they search the assassin's stuff, and find assassin gear, and decide he is the assassin, well then isn't he detected? At which point the whole thing could become a combat encounter, depending on what the PCs decide to do at that point.

If they intercept the poison, isn't the intended victim simply _not poisoned_?  And if they don't intercept it, doesn't that mean he is _poisoned_?

So yeah, this works well for narrative play, but it seems to me that does so by no longer being really suitable for a skill challenge.




> Alternatively, the first time I tried running a chase I said the PCs were 60 feet away from their pursuers and had the initiative. My intent was that a PC who manages to put 100 feet between themselves and the pursuers (after the pursuer's actions in the same round) would get away and if the pursuers caught up they'd get caught. To increase the distance I had the party members come up with rolls that would either get onto or over obstacles or create rough terrain behind them. This dragged on longer than I intended when the pursuers repeatedly cycled closer and further from one PC, neither falling behind by 100 feet nor catching up. "You need three successes to get away and are captured if you fail three times first," would work a lot better at (a) creating more tension as the margins between escape and capture close and (b) the encounter has a point where it will definitely end after the next roll.


I am not really clear on who is deciding what the "obstacles or rough terrain" are.  Are you declaring that an obstacle exists, and the players are telling you have they try to overcome it?  Or is the player deciding what the obstacle is and suggesting their course of action, and you are choosing the skill?





> To the examples, I think my example of crossing a river upthread was that the party was being chased. Just a general "find a method of crossing this obstacle" seems like you're just counting how many resources the party uses to get past the named obstacle. So I don't see how formatting the resolution via an SC would... make sense. 
> 
> If I were trying to shoehorn one into overland travel, I'd set it up that there one place (or type of place) the party wants to reach and some sort of place they want to avoid, and a failure for the skill challenge results in them ending up in the bad place (running back into whichever creatures the party was escaping from when it got lost, for example). Otherwise I probably wouldn't make crossing a physical barrier a skill challenge, just a series of skill checks where failing the check loses you resources but still gets you across the obstacle (which resources presumably depending on what the party tries). Or if you're stricter than I am, they lose resources until they succeed at getting across; my point is more that I'm not clear what the failure state is for an SC where the scenario is _just_ "there's a river you need to get across."


I think you are misunderstanding my intent.  The physical barrier isn't a skill challenge, the physical barrier is the equivalent of one roll in a skill challenge.

Having read through your examples, I'm still not sure how you are running these SCs.  I don't understand what words you use when you are setting up a SC for your players, or what words you use (if any) to identify obstacles.  I don't even know if you are identifying the obstacles, or if the players are inventing obstacles based on your abstracted description of the situation.




> There's one good thing the party is making progress toward, but missteps on the way work up to something else harmful occurring. The question is if the party can succeed before they fail.The party could be stuck making rolls indefinitely if you used an admittedly more realistic measure of success, and the SC ensures rising tension and a more definite end. Usually requires a fail state that's different than the situation the party was in before they did the SC.


Re: #2, I don't understand why the party would be stuck making rolls indefinitely.  PCs can do something, or they can't, or they have a chance of doing it.  If they have a chance of doing it, they succeed or they don't.  Where does spamming rolls indefinitely come into the equation?

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## Mark Hall

I have not been following the thread closely, so forgive me if it's been brought up, but:

With regards to Skill Challenges, something I did in Amazing Tales was the rule that you could not use the same skill twice in a row (in a skill challenge, it would be "cannot use the same skill twice").

So, if we were trying to find an ancient tomb, I might start with History to try to figure out where it is on the map. Someone else might say "Hey, I know some guys at the local university; I'm going to lean on someone (Intimidate) to get that information." Religion or Arcana might be used to figure out where it would be based on doctrine or astronomy, etc.

But the trick would be that, once I used History, I can't use history again, and no one else can, either.

At low complexity tasks, this might not matter so much... everyone contributes their skills, and while it might be a stretch to include Acrobatics in your "find information about an ancient temple" task, that method keeps it from "Everyone 'best-skills' the test into submission", and require more variety.

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## kieza

Chiming in with what might be a unique take on SCs (apologies if I missed it being brought up earlier in the thread):

I've always viewed WotC's intent with skill challenges as being to create a different kind of encounter, one that you defeat with skills and not fighting. I don't think they did that well at all. What I have tried a couple of times is to define an encounter with "enemies" in the form of physical obstacles, hazards, social conventions, opposing interests, etc.
 Rather than HP, each enemy in this kind of encounter has a Complexity and a Difficulty: a number and DC of successful skill checks that must be made to defeat it. It also has a list of suggested (but not required) skill checks that would count as a success. Each enemy might also have rules about skill checks that automatically fail, or have other effects, or how it interacts with the other enemies in the encounter. In practice, though, the GM should be open to any skill check that plausibly contributes towards defeating the enemy within the fiction of the game, and should allow for relevant player abilities to count as one or more automatic successes. Even if a particular skill can't plausibly contribute directly, the GM should be open to ideas that support skills that do (such as using a plant growth spell to make a wall easier to climb, etc.). The encounter takes place in rounds representing about 1 minute each; during each round the players discuss what to do and each can make one skill check, in whatever order they decide on.

So an example of this in practice might look something like this:

The players want to steal something that's kept at the top of a tower. They can gain access to the grounds outside the tower during a public party thrown by the owner of the estate.

Goals:
 The Treasure: Cannot be taken until either The Door to the Tower or The Tower Walls are defeated.
Enemies:
 The Door to the Tower: Complexity 1, Difficulty 25, Suggested Skills are Subterfuge (pick the lock) and Strength (bash it down). If bashed down, see Guards. The Tower Walls: Complexity 3 (the same player must make all three checks), Difficulty 15, Suggested Skills are Athletics (climb the tower) and Acrobatics (cross to the tower on a line of pennants strung from another building nearby). See Watching Crowd. The Guard Captain: Complexity 1, Difficulty 15, Suggested Skills are Deception (Flirt) or Warfare (Engage in a work-related discussion). Intimidate and Persuasion checks automatically fail and might trigger Guards; the Captain is brave and fanatically loyal. Until defeated, anyone attempting skill checks against The Door to the Tower or The Tower Walls must also make a Difficulty 15 Stealth check. If they fail, see Guards. Watching Crowd: Complexity 3, Difficulty 15, Suggested Skills are Deception (create a diversion), Intimidation (get their attention by being scary) or Persuasion (get their attention by being interesting). Until defeated, increases the Difficulty of Stealth checks against The Guard Captain by 5.
Failure:
 Guards: If players bash down The Door to the Tower or fail a Stealth check against the Watching Crowd, the Guards arrive in 1d4 + 1 rounds and combat begins if anyone is still inside or climbing the tower.

It worked well when I've tried it, and from the GM's viewpoint I think that having this kind of loose structure is a nice compromise between completely free-form roleplay and the purely mechanical approach of WotC's SCs.

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