Back with a reply now after having ran a session running multiple instances of this rule in play.
Here’s what I got, in terms of the experience, and feedback…
Also, replying to things and have some questions with the rule.
Tl;dr This was pretty great!
The Skill Challenge system is indeed a great and generic system that can be used to run all sorts of challenges pertaining to the skills…
We used skill challenge to run:
A chase sequence, a game of slay (makes no sense without context… Oh well), a bae infiltration not too different to one of the examples shown in the google doc.
And I can think of many more things the skill challenge system can be used for.
A dungeon crawl or similar exploration type things, some sort of drawn out social interaction like a debate, and yeah.
I’ve got a question I wanna ask first though, how do you determine when a skill challenge ends?
Is there a let’s say a sort of time limit to it? The doc didn’t describe it and the examples didn’t help me either. Do you roll a set amount of times? Do you keep rolling until a result is achieved? Combination of both? Determined by GM to set accordingly? Yeah, that one probably…
The mechanic of an opportunity or setback event happening is a mechanic I don’t quite like. It’s a positive feedback loop mechanic. The mechanic makes it so that someone who wins is more likely to spiral into victory, and the opposite is true. Sort of like a rich get richer, poor get poorer type thing. I don’t know how I could change this or if it should even be changed but yeah. If you get an opportunity event, if you succeed at that event your required successes reduce which is the same thing as succeeding and increasing the tally. Advantages and basically any other form of reward do the same thing, opportunity events make it more likely that they’ll just succeed anyway, so after the first roll it feels like things get set in stone. Of course it’s up to chance and there’s always the chance for a comeback but yeah… This sucks twice for failing and getting a setback event. Disadvantages and straight up increasing the fail tally by 1 sucks. The latter one especially since fail tally’s are lower than success tallies usually and can only increase on a fumble roll. Essentially if you fail, even if you didn’t fumble, you get a chance to fumble, and if you fumble, well you get the chance to fumble again!
The first idea that came to my mind was to just make events neutral, neither good or bad, but I think that’s boring and goes against the ‘every roll matters’ thing. As said in one of the replies, events exist to make the things happening in between rolls interesting, and having something neutral happen would just suck. My next idea on how to not make events be a positive feedback loop mechanic is to make the event random! Either a random chance of an event happening, or a random chance of an opportunity or setback event. But I think that’s also terrible. How will you determine it? Is it gonna be 50 50, do you not roll and let the GM decide?
If this was the intention of events then that’s fine in the end. My player(s) certainly haven’t complained about the mechanic. Just me.
Now then… In response to the responses and my old response. (heh)
Yeah, future me disagrees with this. From just reading it I thought it might be hard, but after running a game… It’s really straightforward and easy. Obviously fumbled it on my first try but it was smooth sailing afterwards. I disagree with everything said in that bullet lol.
The only reason I find running a combat easy was the fact that I’ve memorized the quick NPC creation table which is funny because that took me months of playing, and this took like 5 minutes.
I thought I did expand on what I meant by meaningful choice from my original reply?
In Combat, players are given the opportunity to make meaningful decisions, in other words strategize. They can prioritize their targets, select banes and boons, move around and use the environment etc. Skill Challenges should give way to meaningful choices. However, after running the system I found my player couldn’t care less. Along with the whole, “Oh, it’s just a skill check but more repetitive” thing I said. They liked the chance to just get to roll lots of dice. And events did make them interesting. Strategy, and the incorporation of banes, boons, feats, perks, flaws, items, whatever, all just came by naturally with each skill challenges and wasn’t as convoluted as I had originally thought.
My video game developer brain just didn’t agree with having no strategy, but I guess the player was more than happy with rolling and me coming up with events for them to deal with was enough…!
In one instance, we actually had a really long back and forth mini skill challenge in the middle of a skill challenge as the after roll event before rolling the next round. Which was fun and strategic I guess???
You didn’t quote more from this and what I meant by roleplaying was different.
Firstly, I was saying the best part of Skill Challenges was that they gave everyone more chance to role play as opposed to a single skill roll.
And by roleplaying, I meant fluff, we roleplay the result of our rolls in our table, not the other way around. In the example of the hacker, I imagine the final roll could go something like this…
after the roll has been made and the results determined, the GM describes how the results play out. “The hacker made a fatal error while busy fighting your other attacks, giving you the perfect opportunity to just very easily overthrow the hacker out of your system! How do you do this?” “I smirk and fix my glasses, (insert witty remark here) and then activate my super convoluted anti-hacking device!”
More chances to describe the results of rolls are fun!
That’s what I like about the Skill Challenges, playing with the system didn’t change how I thought, it only reaffirmed that, that is the strongest part of Skill Challenges to me.
Obviously good description of actions in the table deserves rewards and advantages but in our tables culture we make sure everything that happens is the character’s doing. We don’t describe an action but more often describe an intent/goal behind a roll. (Not “I swing my sword like really hard and fast!” but rather “I desire to inflict massive damage!”) Making it unbiased and every action the character’s not the player’s. A character solves investigations, tugs peoples hearts and things. Not normal but that’s how we do it. Descriptions come after the result of the roll has been determined.
Thank you for the kind replies! I was anxious when I wrote that long ass reply that took me a while to write!
After running with the rule, we’re definitely continuing to use it as is!
It is a very good.