I definitely like the idea.
I don’t exactly come up with great homebrew myself so I feel unworthy of criticizing other peoples stuff.
But here I go!
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pain for the GM
I like the idea. But just from what I’ve read, running Skill Challenges is gonna be a huge pain in the round bit of flesh located on the back of a person. GM’s will have to prepare skill challenges ahead of time or pause the game to rule down how the skill challenges will go, not to mention they have to determine what scenario would call for a skill check or skill challenge. It’s a lot of steps and setup which is difficult. I Game Master for OL because it’s easy, it’s rules light and I have the authority and final say on everything. Rules be damned because that’s literally the very first rule mentioned in OL: F’ the rules!
Skill Challenges are hard to prepare for, each scenario must be properly ruled by the GM to accurately represent each case by case scenario, which is a lot of thinking and brain usage!
Skill checks on the other hand… You wanna do this thing? Roll this or higher, boom.
Combat? 2 minutes, I got some monsters, they all have the same stats but I’ll give them different names and maybe feats too. Still more trouble but I think not as much trouble as Skill Challenges.
I am a forever GM though, and a pretty lazy one at that, so maybe there’s a little pinch of subjectivity in this part of my criticism. Not to mention I haven’t playtested this yet. I’m just saying how I think it might be from what I’ve read. -
I like the idea
skill checks are indeed way more mundane and boring compared to combat which has an entire section on the rules. Unlike other systems, the only part of OL that is heavily ruled is combat, some people might like that but some might not.
The reason I like it at least is because it means everything that isn’t combat is up for the GM to decide how it goes.
What will be heavily ruled and what won’t be heavily ruled.
If the campaign is a dungeon crawler, then the GM decides how the dungeon crawling experience is handled, ruled, and rolled.
If the campaign is survival, the GM will decide what part of the survival experience they want the players to experience. whether food supplies, dehydration, navigation, travel pace, or what have you. The GM decides which of those things is important and is ruled and rolled for, and which are simply faded into background as 1 note sentences.
However others might like if things were more clear cut.
That’s an OL problem though, not a Skill Challenges problem…
The fun part of non combat encounters for me at least is the roleplaying of the skill rolls, which ends as swiftly as they begin. However they are not very interactive. Again, I’ve already described how non combat encounters go in my table. Describe -> Roll -> Interpret and done. Less than 20 seconds was spent. I’ll talk about this more later… -
Encourages more well rounded attribute placements
I like that Skill Challenges actually might encourage players to invest in other attributes and create characters with builds not just specifically for a type of playstyle to be used in combat, but rather, other kinds of characters too.
Since combat is the only ruled out thing in OL, my players tend to build characters for combat, and I guess it’s partially my fault for doing a lot of combat centric campaigns too. -
Not enough meaningful decisions, just a more lengthy and more rolling version of skill checks
I think the main problem I have with skill checks is not because they don’t represent the doing of a task very well, I mean, a simple roll to determine the success or failure of something is fine. But its the fact that unlike in combat, there aren’t enough meaningful decisions a player can make. It’s GM asks for a roll, and Player rolls, success or failure (with a twist or story progresses thing obviously)
Skill challenges do indeed give a better representation of performing tasks, but they still don’t allow for meaningful decisions.
The most meaningful decisions they might be making is what attribute to use, especially when you are doing the whole disadvantage for spamming the same attribute thing. Even then that is a very simple problem of finding the odds, and might not even become a decision a player makes but rather, an algorhythm that they’ll just follow.
I think if Skill Challenges allowed for Banes and Boons to play a meaningful role as they do in combat would benefit this homebrew a lot.
Yeah the GM could just make up on the fly how banes or boons would play a role in the skill challenge, but that’d be forcing everyone to spend effort making homebrew for a homebrew, players from my experience don’t like it when a GM comes up with a rule on the spot based on a case by case basis because they think its a convenience ploy.
Unless the players are allowed meaningful choices Skill Challenge to me I think is just a more longer and more repetitive skill check. I mean when you think about it, combat is just a very drawn out skill check just like skill challenges. But in combat, players have options. Where should they move? Who do they beat up first? What’s our victory condition? That sort of stuff.
I think if anything , Skill Challenges I think could be a fun roleplaying experience. The most you’ll get out of a Skill Challenge is the roleplaying. Your examples didn’t do a good job representing how fun roleplaying a skill challenge could be but to me I think that’s where the real fun of this homebrew lies in. Reading that castle siege example I couldn’t help but fantasize about how the GM would describe each week in detail, telling the player’s accomplishments and setbacks and the players roleplaying each action roll of the week, going out to the field and giving a speech of varying degrees based on their Presence score, or the Logic guy coming up with innovative siege contraptions on the fly to keep their foes on their toes. Fun for the roleplay hardcores, not much for those looking to play a game. Unless you reward roleplaying with legend points or advantage, but stuff like that still don’t count as meaningful decision making for the player’s part.
Like I said, I don’t think I’m worthy of posting something like this. I criticized, but I didn’t offer any suggestions on how to fix things which makes me feel real bad. I thought any suggestion I come up with might just end up being absurd like most of my other homebrew.
In addition, I feel as if I’m using this homebrew of Skill Challenges to try to fix problems I have with the OL system without directly and actively participating instead in just making a homebrew that’ll work for me and my party and relying on someone else.
(The whole meaningful decision rant and all. And how I want banes and boons to play meaningful roles.)
Basically I feel my critique is more subjective and personal rather than objective and biased. Hence my feeling of unworthiness.
But yeah…
I’m definitely trying and suggesting the rule to my party. I berated it a whole bunch but that’s because I’m really interested and really like the idea! I’m hoping now that if I get the chance to play with the rule, I can modify it and adjust it to fit my wants and desires of a more meaningful skill checking experience.
And this is like uhh… One step closer to achieving that…!
(self doubting whether I should post this or not but here I go anyways!)