I’m going to skip the Long, Rambling Introduction™ in favor of a short warning: this is a Random Bulls$&% article. So it’s basically one Long, Rambling Introduction™. Just a big ole bloggy rant where I think through — and type through — a thing. Way more stream of consciousness than my usual crap. And I have no idea where it’ll go. Let alone whether it’ll go somewhere useful.
That’s my standard Random Bulls$&% warning. But I should add a little note: the fact that you’re seeing this s$&% means it does go somewhere useful. Or at least, that it goes somewhere interesting. In my opinion, anyway. Because I do have standards. Even for ranty, bloggy bulls$&%. There are actually some Bulls$&% articles you’ve never seen. And you’ll probably never see them. Because, after I wrote them, I realized they were neither interesting nor useful. They were just kind of s$&%. So I trashed them and wrote something else instead.
The point is, while I have no idea where this s$&%’s going to end up now — as I’m writing it — I now know it did go somewhere — because you’re reading it.
And look at that! I did manage to include an actual Long, Rambling Introduction™. Go me!
Anyway…
Skill Challenges Don’t Shouldn’t Exist
If you’re one of those smart souls who skip the Long, Rambling Introductions™, just know today’s feature is a Random Bulls$&% article. A ranty, bloggy, stream-of-consciousness pile of crap as I think through something and invite you along for the ride through my addled brain space.
Today, my addled brain space is all about skill challenges. And how they don’t exist. Which is something I’ve wanted to say — scream, really — for a while. But I couldn’t figure out quite how to scream it. That’s another thing I use these Bulls$&% articles for, by the way. To scream and rant about s$&% when I’m not sure where to start or what I’m actually mad about.
Skill challenges. They don’t exist. Stop pretending they do.
There. That’s a good start. Except it’s probably left you all saying, “wait,… what?” If you’re a recent addition to this little hobby of ours and D&D 5E is the only D&D you’ve ever known, you’ve probably never heard of skill challenges. And if you’re not in gaming diapers anymore and getting into your gaming tweens — or way, way, way beyond your tweens like me — then you’re probably saying, “of course skill challenges don’t exist. D&D 4E is dead. As dead as a doorstop. Didn’t you get the memo, Angry?”
Well, I did. But apparently, none of you did.
Okay. Let me start making sense.
The skill challenge was this mechanical thing invented for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. And like so many creative ideas from 4E, the skill challenge was dragged on stage and brutally executed to prove to everyone that 5E was really the best — and only — D&D.
I’m not saying skill challenges were good ideas, mind you. Just that they were a clever, creative, and innovative attempt to solve a problem.
Actually, I think they were s$&%. As you probably guessed from the title of this article.
So, why am I talking about failed mechanics that got flushed away with all the other crap from the failest edition of D&D ever published? Because I’ve noticed something you GMs are doing when you’re writing homebrew adventures and designing encounters. From my hiding place in the azalea bushes. Right outside your window.
You all keep making skill challenges. Skill challenges in everything but name.
A skill challenge was a way of designing a non-combat encounter. And when the designers talked about them in the months leading up to 4E’s release, lots of us GMs got pretty damned excited about them. And then the 4E core rulebooks came out — all on the same day; another idea the 5E team jettisoned — and then the 4E core rulebooks came out and we GMs got to see the skill challenge rules. And we GMs got a sick feeling in our collective GMing guts. Some of us did, anyway. The smart ones. Some GMs loved them. But the rest of us knew something was off. Really, really off.
The design was simple enough. You — the GM — created a challenging situation and figured out the skills the PCs could use to overcome it. You assigned those skills DCs. As the players used their skills to overcome the challenge, they accumulated successes and failures. If they got so many successes before they got too many failures, they overcame the challenge. If they didn’t, they didn’t. They failed.
Conceptually, it’s a neat idea. So neat, it helped inspire the Whatever Stat I invented. Along with the Encounter Progress system from the failed 3rd edition of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game. Man did that poor, maligned version of WFRPG have the best treatment of gameplay and narrative structure and pacing I’d ever seen in an RPG. What a shame the rest of the game was crap.
Anyway…
Anyone who played D&D 4E will tell you the big problem with skill challenges was the way they punished failed actions and thereby disincentivized all but the characters with the best skill modifiers from participating. Which just goes to show you why you shouldn’t listen to anyone who isn’t me. Because that’s a wrong, stupid take.
The problem with skills challenges was that they played like s$&%. However the GM built them — however he presented them — at the table, it was just players picking actions from a list and trying to roll more successes than failures. Didn’t matter what the players were doing. Whether they were disarming traps in the undervaults of Gardmore Abbey, negotiating a peace treaty with the elves of Harken Forest, or tracking orc savages across the Gray Downs, it was all just picking skills, rolling dice, and accumulating successes.
If you’re a fan of my work, you know that s$&%’s wrong. Maybe you can’t explain why, but you know it.
But, if you’re a fan of my work, the odds are high that you’ve built a few skill challenges of your own. Or asked me to build you one.
While the skill challenge is gone from the pages of D&D 5E, it’s gone in name only. The design philosophy underlying them is still there. And it’s infected other games too. You can find it, for example, in the latest Savage Worlds. Just under a different name. And that’s a bad thing because, while the idea behind skill challenges was actually really good, the design philosophy that enabled them is nothing but problematic.
Say you’re making a social encounter. An NPC has information the PCs need. They don’t want to give it up. What do you do? Well, you figure the players can either Persuade the dude, Intimidate them, or Deceive them. You set a few DCs and then decide how many successful attempts before the guy caves, right?
What about a complex trap? The PCs are locked in a room as it fills with acid or scorpions or acid scorpions or whatever. The party can disarm the trap or pick the door lock or break the door down. Making saving throws all the while. So, again, you set the DCs, decide how many disarms it takes to really disarm the trap and how many breaks it takes before the door’s broke and you’re done.
How else are you going to do this s$&% anyway?
But you see it, right? You’re just building skill challenges. They’re not called that, but they are that.
And who am I talk anyway? Because my brilliant, invented mechanics — like my Interaction Encounter rules and my Whatever Stat — they’re basically all the same s$&%. Just a way of keeping score.
Except they’re not. And it’s down to a very minor — but incredibly important — bit of GMing philosophy I’ve carried with me from the halcyon days of my angry youth. Back in those early days — back before D&D 3E revolutionized everything with its core d20 mechanic — back in those early days — and I mean that literally, by the way; the d20 mechanic was brilliant and revolutionary and it changed everything for the better — back in those early days, we didn’t actually have a lot of game mechanics. D&D had very few mechanical rules and tools. And each was highly specific. We had specific rules for attacking with weapons, opening stuck doors, sniffing out secret doors, and lifting heavy iron portcullises. Seriously. We had a rule for each of those situations. A different rule for each.
What we didn’t have rules for? Basically, every general thing that wasn’t one of those very specific things. Yeah, AD&D 1E had some rudimentary ability check rules. But they were rarely used. And AD&D 2E had an optional skill system — two different optional skill systems — but they were also pretty highly specific. There weren’t any open-ended skills like Athletics and Stealth that covered a thousand different situations each.
So, we had to wing it.
Mostly, what we did was describe situations — however we imagined them — and then listen to what our players said their characters did. Then we decided how that s$&% worked out. If we couldn’t just figure it out, we usually just assigned a semi-arbitrary percentage chance and rolled it out.
Let me be clear — and piss off all my OSR friends as much as I piss off my modern D&D friends — let me clear: I am not advocating that mechanical design. It ain’t the ideal to strive for. It’s got problems. But I think we’ve gone too far in the other direction.
Honestly, in this very specific case, I think D&D 3E hit the sweet spot for this s$&%. Design a single mechanic to resolve any general action and let the GM use that tool to resolve everything and anything the players think of.
And let me be clear: I am not saying D&D 3E — or 3.5 or whatever — is the pinnacle of RPG design. Personally, I have managed to convince myself it’s the single best-designed edition of D&D so far, but it is also deeply flawed in very big ways and there’s lots of s$&% you’ve just got to ignore to get a good game out of it. But the ratio of good design to crap design is really high in D&D 3E.
It also had the single best Dungeon Master’s Guide of any D&D edition ever. With D&D 4E’s, ironically, being the second best.
Enough edition warring, though. This is about game design philosophy. See, it’s taken me a while to work out what really bothers me about skill challenges. Including the modern skill challenges in all but name that keep cropping up in D&D 5E modules and that GMs seem to keep designing without realizing. And what I figured out is that it’s all about design philosophy.
It’s about designing mechanics in terms of action resolution.
Ha! Didn’t think I’d say that, did you? Because I just got done praising Messers Cook, Tweet, and Williams for their brilliant universal action resolution mechanic. But that’s really the key to the whole thing.
One thing D&D 3E gets a lot of flack for was that it had a stat block for absolutely f$&%ing everything. Every NPC was a fully realized, fully statted character. Every town had a stat block. Every trap. Everything had a stat block.
Let me be clear: I’m not saying everything should or should not have a stat block. I’m not advocating a position. But, if you look very carefully at the D&D 3.5 stat blocks, one subtle thing you might notice is they’re really descriptive. In fact, they’re description-based instead of action-based.
What’s that s$&% mean? Well, take an NPC for example. Any NPC. Because it didn’t matter what the NPC was doing in the game. The NPC’s stat block told you how strong they were, how smart they were, what they knew, how they’d been trained, what they owned, and so on. The stat blocks didn’t exist so you could resolve actions, they existed to fully describe the NPC in the world.
Again: I’m not saying I support that approach, but the philosophy behind the approach is very important.
It was the same with traps. Yeah, traps had DCs to describe how hard they were to find and sabotage. You need that s$&%. But they also had details about how the trap was triggered, how it could be reset or repaired, how it could be bypassed by the folks who set it up, and so on. A trap stat block provided a complete, mechanical description of a trap in the world. It didn’t just say, “if a player does this, the trap does that.” Hell, the trap-building section of the DMG almost made the GM construct the trap like a craftsman instead of a game designer.
Consequently, all this s$&% left the GM with a fairly complete mechanical picture of whatever situation the idiot players had gotten themselves into. So the GM could deal with whatever idiotic thing the players did in response. More or less.
Look again at the Whatever Stat I invented. Sure, it’s just an arbitrary one-to-ten scale that measures closeness to winning or losing, right? How close the players are to getting the NPC to cooperate. Or driving them to slam the door in their faces.
But is it? Is it really?
The most important part of the Whatever Stat ain’t the number, it’s the name. The Whatever Stat must measure something that exists in the world. Like the NPC’s patience. Or the guard’s alertness. Or the ritual’s closeness to completion. And there’s no if-then relationship between the player’s actions and the Whatever Stat. It’s not “when the players take an action, the score changes.” It’s “when something happens to change the score, the score changes.”
The Whatever Stat describes a specific world state. And the GM can use it to track the impact of any event or action or whatever on that world state. It’s a descriptive mechanic. And even though, from a practical standpoint, it does often work out to play out as “accumulate X successes before Y failures,” it’s subtly but importantly different.
Skill challenges aren’t descriptive. They’re a bunch of if-then conditionals. “If the players use this skill, they score a success or failure. If they score this many failures, they lose. If they score this many successes first, they win.” It doesn’t matter what the Skill Challenge describes. If the players roll the right skills, they win. Or lose. Whatever.
You can’t run a Whatever Stat encounter without knowing what it describes because you — the GM — have to decide what impact any given event has on the actual in-world thing the Whatever Stat describes.
It’s the same with my Social Interaction Rules. Which are just a bunch of nested Whatever Stats. Objections and motivations. Measurements of the emotional s$&% in the NPC’s head. The players can push and pull on those things, but it’s down to you to decide when they’re doing so and how it affects them.
In a social skill challenge, the players can Persuade or Intimidate or Deceive. In an Angry Skill Challenge, the players can bully the NPCs, kidnap and threaten their pets, bribe them, or bring them a piece of their favorite cake. I trust the GM to adjudicate the actions. I’m trying to describe the situation well enough to empower the GM to adjudicate.
One of the most subtle indicators of the action-first approach to RPG design in D&D is buried in the word choice. All the published s$&% — the rulebooks and modules and everything — everything’s written in an active, second-person voice. The rulebooks are always talking to you. And they’re talking about what happens when you do things. Sometimes, they’re talking to you the player, and sometimes they’re talking to you the GM, and sometimes they’re talking to you the GM about what the players do, but they’re always talking to you. And they’re always talking about you doing something.
And that’s why GMs can’t design non-combat encounters. And why players don’t take creative actions. And why GMs complain that players won’t ever take creative actions.
A while ago, for instance, I mentioned using quicksand as a wilderness hazard. Just in passing. And people lost their s$&%. “How the hell would you design an encounter with quicksand,” they screamed. So I wrote a whole article about that s$&% without ever really understanding where the communication broke down in the first place. I get it now.
GMs these days think designing encounters is about figuring out how the players can overcome a challenge. That is, if you want to design a quicksand challenge, you decide how it responds to what the players do. And what happens when the players use their skills on it. But if you look carefully back at that article, you might notice that what I was mostly doing was just describing quicksand. Oh, sure, I mentioned how I might resolve some specific game mechanical actions. But mostly, it was just “describe the quicksand, see what happens, adjudicate that s$&%.”
And, as the Quicksand Incident demonstrates, this ain’t just philosophy. This whole description-first-versus-action-first thing has important, practical consequences. If you design an action-first challenge — if you design a problem and then a series of actions to overcome that problem — you’re not building a problem. You’re building a puzzle.
Ha! Didn’t think I’d say that, did you? You thought I was going to say something about inflexible design, right? And how it was at odds with the open-endedness that RPGs promise. Well, that s$&% ain’t untrue. But it ain’t the whole answer.
A puzzle is a thing with a correct answer. The players have to pick the right skills and use those skills to accumulate successes.
A problem is a thing with no correct answers. The players have to creatively apply their skills, tools, and resources. Problems don’t have correct answers. They have possible solutions. The more, the better.
A good GM can design puzzles and still be all flexible and open-ended and s$&%. Good GMs are open to the idea of alternate solutions. They let the players succeed in lots of different ways. But puzzles are still bad design. Because puzzles are dealt with through the application of a few core skills, abilities, or actions, they don’t demand any creativity. They will, ipso facto, be soluble with the s$&% on the character sheet.
If all you do is create a problem and describe it — especially if you’re careful to use the minimum number of mechanics you need to describe it — your problems won’t be limited to s$&% that two skills can fix. Describe the quicksand. How big is the patch? How deep? What does it do? How hard is it to spot? Done? Good.
I, personally, don’t give a crap about how my players deal with the s$&% I throw in my game. If they get lucky — or they’re alert and cautious — then, yeah, the quicksand pit’s just a hazard they spot and walk around. If they miss it and someone blunders into it, maybe all the players will do is throw in a rope and drag him out. Or maybe they’ll panic because they don’t have rope and he’ll suffocate and die. I. Don’t. Care.
By the way, there’s a whole separate thing here about game balance and whether s$&% is challenging enough to count. GMs get way too bogged down in that bulls$&%. Lots of GMs won’t ever use quicksand because if everything works out perfectly, it takes ten minutes of playtime for the players to spot it and walk around it. Those are the same GMs who can’t figure out how to do anything that isn’t combat. Idiots.
My point is: when you design a challenge, your job’s to describe the challenge. Using the bare minimum number of descriptive game mechanics you need. And nothing else. When you’re running the challenge, your job is to describe the challenge, listen to the players, and use the mechanics you’ve got to work out how s$&% plays out.
That’s how you design good non-combat encounters. And interesting situations. And you don’t need a lot of game mechanics to do that. Especially given you can pull an ability check and a DC out of your a$& whenever you have to.
It’s harder than it sounds, though. Because D&D 5E doesn’t want you doing that. Its language and mechanics are designed around handling what the players do, not describing the world. So it feels wrong to stop at describing the world.
So let me give you some homework so you can practice this s$%&.
Seriously. Homework.
I want you to design three non-combat encounters: one trap, one social encounter, and one hazard or obstacle. Design them in terms of describing them, not in terms of overcoming them. And to make sure you do that, there are two rules.
First, you must use a third-person, omniscient narrator voice. The voice of God talking about the world. No talking to the GM about the players.
Second, you must design the encounter to work in any game system. You must design system agnostic challenges. This means, you’re not allowed to use any mechanics at all. The closest you can come is saying something is “easy” or “difficult.”
Let me be clear: I’m not advocating system agnostic design. It ain’t the best approach. Or even a good approach. You should design your s$&% for specific systems and settings. They’re always better that way. But system agnostic design’s a good way to practice description-first design rather than action-first design.
Now, let me be clear: get out of here and go do your homework.
This article does a great job of explaining my dissatisfaction with some elements of Pathfinder 2e, my groups game of choice. Specifically, in the Gamemastery Guide there’s a whole section for “subsystems”, most of which boil down to having the players make skill checks and hope to get enough successes before they get too many failures.
Frankly, this is a pretty good breakdown of the basics of running a game. Create problems for the players, don’t get attached to solutions, and understand the details. Adjudicate the players actions. Rinse and repeat.
That’s how I’ve always done challenges. Nice to have something I’ve done vindicated, even if I never put too much (read “any”) thought into the underlying design philosophy or reasons it’s superior too the alternative or even considered that there might be alternatives.
It’s funny reading Sam’s comment, because I’m GMing Pathfinder2e and one thing I notice is that everything is a stat block with some amount of description. Even the GMG subsystems come with stat blocks, and those stat blocks, like the ones for doing more complicated social encounters, are description first. That said, the amount of mechanics afterward, plus 4e being my first D&D, has pushed me to be buttons first and think about presenting things more like a board game.
But Pathfinder2e philosophy outside of combat (Exploration Mode, as they call it) is very much “here are examples of things adventures might do, here’s how to resolve them on our system, and use this as a framework for resolving anything else.” Hazards and Traps are written first as how it appears in the world and then how players can mechanically interact with them in the standard ways, and GMs are instructed to build their own in the same way. Monsters are completely top-down; you figure out what you want the monster to be and do, and then you use their tables to figure out the numbers of how that monster will work at whatever level you wanted. The Bestiaries always spend time explaining how the monsters exist in the world.
Parts of the game and player’s expectations from previous games has given it a very “mechanics first” reputation, but the process of learning the system is learning how to take the descriptive world and fit mechanics around it. The hardest part for me right now is that I don’t have enough imagination for the types of things that show up in D&D worlds/Pathfinder’s Golarion.
I love the direction the blog has taken this year or so. The whole idea of taking some height and giving us practical tool to deal with stuff ourselves is great. The idea to give us some kind of “template” or “thinking pattern” really helped me be more confident in my ability to improvise. Because I finally understood what i need to know and plan to be ok with dealing with shit as they occur. Something i wasn’t comfortable doing months ago.
I love getting homework from these articles so I decided to share what I thought of
Social: The heroes have infiltrated a party they weren’t invited to. The kind that’s full of important people and their important secrets. However someone has found out about the infiltration and tipped off security. The party is too important to cancel but that security is very casually looking around. Our heroes will have to chat with the people to get the information they need while also doing their best to avoid drawing attention to themselves or looking suspicious as the security pokes around.
Trap: The vehicle the heroes were riding has been rigged! It’s accelerating out of control with no conventional way of slowing down or stopping. Worse yet, if the heroes crash the vehicle, or attempt to jump out, the whole thing will explode killing everyone. They will have dodge crowds, buildings and loose debris while disarming whatever is causing the vehicle to go so fast.
Hazard: The weather has turned violently awful. Worse yet, someone the heroes care deeply about is lost in the middle of it all. The heroes will not only have a small amount of time to track down their friend. But they will also have to deal with the disorienting and dangerous aspects of the violent weather they’re now trekking in.
Woo! Doing the homework! Nice job.
I’m gonna critique, because it’s easier than being creative…
For the weather one, I suggest being more specific so you can really try to visualize the details of the problem/hazard. When I read your description, I can’t actually visualize *what* makes the weather hazardous.
Is it raining, snowing, or hailing? Is it freezing? Is there fog or darkness? Is there lightning? These details make it easier to adjudicate actions, though there is a fine line to walk in avoiding too many details, of course.
I’m afraid you designed puzzles rather than problems. In each you describe exactly what the players have to do to win. There is an out of control vehicle that the players aren’t allowed to stop, slow, or escape from, all they can do is steer and disarm. Why? The players can’t try jamming something in the gears? Or intentionally driving into a lake? I know you are describing Speed, but you didn’t describe the vehicle in a way that allows the players to interact with it. And you didn’t describe the bomb except to say that the players can use the Disarm Skill to try to disarm it. Why can’t they throw it out the window off a bridge? Is it heavy? Bolted down? Is it attached to a person?
Try this: There is a person with a suicide vest that will detonate the bomb if the players deviate from instructions. Now the players have something to interact with. Maybe they try to talk the person out of blowing up. Maybe they try to knock them out without triggering the dead man switch. Is the person a terrorist? Or maybe someone being blackmailed with a kidnapped child?
In the party, you said what the players have to do to win, get the information while staying undercover. But that limits all the options the players could take. Why can’t they create a big distraction outside so security leaves the party? Or subdue the security and then take everyone at the party hostage until they reveal their secrets? You didn’t describe the security so how do the players know what they can do?
You tried to make your situations setting agnostic rather than system rules agnostic. You didn’t describe the vehicle so that we could imagine it as a wagon, bus, or hovercraft, but for this homework you needed to explicitly describe the situations so that players could imagine how to react. If it is a wagon being pulled by horses that is going to be very different from a bus. If horses, the players might cast a sleep spell, or use their telepathy, or try to scare the horses by steering them towards fireworks. If you describe it as a wagon with horses, any system you are playing will describe how you resolve actions dealing with horses, whatever the options in that particular system may be.
You’re still thinking in terms of actions the players can take and solutions to the problem. The assignment was to “Design [the encounter] in terms of describing them, not overcoming them.”
Take the example of infiltrating a party uninvited. I’d start by defining what kind of party it is. Ball gowns and waltzes? Socializing & snacks? Dinner & drinks? Art show with guests wandering across multiple rooms?
What’s the occasion/purpose? Birthday? Coronation? Is the host trying to get something from the guests, be it clout, donations, alliances, gossip? What are the guests trying to get out of it?
Where is it located? Brightly lit great hall with massive ceilings? Smaller, dimmer rooms? Library? Are there balconies to lower levels of the party? Lit with chandeliers, wall-mounted candles, roaring fireplaces?
What kind of security is there? Armored? Military? Bored? How do guests react to security? Are they helpful? Dismissive? Ignore them completely? Chatty?
Any interesting guests? A chatty young lady? Ridiculously dressed diva? Loud, proud explorer eager to share his stories with whoever’s unfortunate enough to be within arm’s length? Heartbroken merchant tending his wounds with copious amounts of alcohol?
None of these questions are about how the players can solve the problem of security searching for them. That kind of thinking is specifically what Angry is trying to kill.
The term I thought of when reading this article was ” disassociated mechanics” as described by the Alexandrian Blog. the thing skill challenges measure (success) is disassociated from the reality of the game world.
Homework time:
Trap: The party has discovered that the sacred ruby statue of OM is being stored in the city under light guard by the patricians men inside the nave of the nearby cathedral of OM. The Ruby Statue sits on a specially crafted pressure plate which is linked by a series of ropes to the church bell which will ring once the statue is removed. The regular hourly ringing of the church bell won’t be interrupted by the mechanism (although the bell will continue ringing if it is tripped). The guards come to check on the statue every hour.
Social: Your party has just finished acquiring the Ruby Statue of OM, sacred relic of the church of OM, from a recent heist. The players have not hidden this fact. The morning after the heist they receive a message from their usual fence that they will meet them in the Nave of the church of OMto make the previously discussed payment. Over the course of the same day representatives from three different influential Sects of the Church of OM each come and offer to purchase it from you for less than it’s worth in exchange for an unspecified favor. They each independently say that they will await your answer in the Nave of the same nearby Cathedral of OM. None of the four parties know that the others have made an offer.
Hazard: The patrician is very annoyed about being made to look a fool after his guards failed to prevent the theft of the ruby statue of OM(by the players or not) and has his Dark Clerks snooping around the city trying to 1. discover who stole it, or if it is already known who stole it 2. Arrange a private meeting with them so he can have a little chat about unlicensed thieving in his city. While the Dark Clarks are around and about, It will be very difficult for the players to engage in any surreptitious activity, regardless of their connections to the stolen statue.
Alright, let’s see if the Prof is grading the homework…
Trap
After sitting down at a table for a [insert meal, meeting, game of chance], a stranger sidles up, offers the player a drink, and quietly tells them that the chair has been set to explode should they get up. He leaves a half-finished mug of ale, smiles at the player, and walks away. A slip of paper under the mug has “I expect you to die” scrawled on it.
Social encounter
A drunk has decided one of the party members is a long lost friend. He keeps following the party around and asking ‘Tom’ “how he’s doing and where he’s been.” Ignoring him only makes him more insistent.
Hazard or obstacle
An old, dead tree has fallen across the path, but it is also being swarmed by the bees whose hive was in it. The tree is blocking the path and extends 20 ft to either side of it as well.
I hate the drunkard already, which means he’s annoying and that an encounter with him as an obstacle could be great 🙂 It’d just need a good reason for existing and it’d be ready to go. I might steal it (i.e. already did).
I numbered these as I had planned to write more and theme them, but let me post this group and reply to it if I have time to write more.
1. Trap
1. A cavern is flooded such that the best way to traverse is by boat. However, a trip wire has been placed just below the surface of the murky water. If not spotted then a boat will pull the wire. If pulled, the wire leads through the stone wall to a collection of stalactites held in place by internally set spikes. The spikes will retract and let the stalactites fall. By this point, the players are probably super human enough to survive the stalactites falling, but the boat probably isn’t. And the light sensitive piranhas would love to have new food.
2. Hazard
1. Grove of two types of flowers, but they’re similarly cooored. One is harmless, and the other has poisonous pollen that easily blows with the wind.
3. Social encounter
1. Old adventurer is in self-imposed exile in the forest. Premiere expert in the subtype of wolves attacking the village, but after failing to account for a new wolf trick the caused the deaths of several children, he sees himself as no longer useful. Players need to get him as a guide to where the wolves have moved their den.
Wonderful article! And challenge accepted.
Here my homework.
Trap.
A magical trap protecting a passage. It was designed long time ago to allow the passage of animals but not people. Statues (or paintings) with magical eyes looking at whoever tries to pass: if it walks on four (or more) legs, it is hitten by magical sound waves dealing damage, and if he does not retreat they could be rendered incapacitated or die.
Social encounter.
Lady Rebecca, sister of the Marquis, was convinced by the ambitious nobleman Sir Elio to support and sponsor his request to marry the Marquis’ daughter (this is a serious threat for the PCs’ plans). Lady Rebecca does not fully trust Sir Elio, since she does not know him well; also, she knows that the Marquis’ daughter is still young. But she also thinks that the Marquis has become too weak and unable to command the region: he need to be assisted by a younger and smarter leader. Also, Sir Elio recruited a mercenary company and promised to Lady Rebecca to use them as reinforcements in the ongoing war on the northern frontier of the region: she convinced her that the region needs this help. Actually, Sir Elio is secretly planning to dethrone the Marquis (aided by the mercenaries) and take his place.
Hazard.
The treasure is on the edge of a huge, rocky mountain among a desert. Several days are probably required to reach the top. It is impervious terrain, with almost no food nor water sources. There are several paths, it is hard to distinguish the best ones. Rock falls and sand storms are common. At the same time, many competitor teams are trying to reach the top first, to get the treasure.
Good ideas. Your social encounter is a whole adventure, though 🙂
The player characters are running an RPG to please a group of local nobles. The game being unfun might lead to dire consequences!
Trap: there is a mechanism called “Skill Challenge” in the module they are about to run in the next session.
Social: there is a very, very angry sage nearby, who offers GM advice and verbal abuses. Said sage will release advice (and verbal abuse, of course) on a regular schedule, but the topics are not fixed.
Hazard: one of the nobles forget to bring their character sheet to the table, but they demand you to continue the session regardless…
The trap:
Akheva was a bustling town before it was forgotten and swallowed up by the unstoppable jungle. Only a few buildings remain, peeking out of the creeping vegetation. Among them a now nameless temple. The worn flagstones bear witness – even centuries later – to the many pilgrims, believers, merchants, beggars and supplicants who entered the temple in search of something. What the unassuming ruin belies, is that not all who entered the temple also left it unharmed. The cruel gods of Akheva demanded a blood tithe and the temple was designed to provide it. Beneath the temple lies a great machine. A system of timing cogs spins still, clicking and clanking underfoot. The machine extends countless arms, on each arm a steel spike. Once an hour, randomly, ten spikes explode between the flagstones looking for a foot, a leg, a groin. Looking for blood.
The social encounter:
Madame Souvenir has grabbed hold of Merrimax the Bard and won’t let go. She has one hand firmly on his lapel – which Merrimax can afford to tear – and one on his instrument – which he cannot. Madame Souvenir is screaming about Merrimax’ villainy, his broken promises and about the 100 gold pieces he swindled her out of. Allegedly. Already a small crowd is gathering and – for now – the situation is uncomfortable and perhaps a little funny. But it’s only a matter of time before the Bishop-Prince’s Virtue Guard gets wind of the situation. And the Guard is not known for its sense of humor.
The hazard:
The river Tornolan is deep and turbulent. “That’s what bridges are for” you’ll say and you’d be right. However, Tornolan’s Landing is burning and the helpers are on the wrong side of the foaming waters. The nearest bridge – not counting the burning, collapsed Torn Bridge – is 20 miles upstream. To make matters worse, the melting snow has swelled the waters, the swirling foam reflecting the flames devouring the once vibrant town, the roar filling the makeshift fire brigade with fear.
Sorry if it’s a little verbose, but I tried to not think about mechanics at all and I wrote spontaneously, thus you’ll find many flaws. But that’s fine.
I started GMing in earnest a few months ago with Lost Mine of Phandelver and one of the first things that happens are a pit trap followed by a snare. And there were exactly the if-then clauses Angry is talking about: How to avoid, fall for, dodge, escape, and release from these traps. And I think I had a smart GM moment because I was like, “K, but how the hell does a snare trap work?”
I ended up researching how the hell snare traps work because it seemed way more comprehensive, open-ended, and more intuitive to just deal with it as a snare trap than a list of if-then clauses. And I was right, a PC traced the rope to a counterweight and unloaded the rocks from some netting, gently lowering their fragile level 1 new friend down. That definitely was not an option given in the book, which seemed to think a snare trap is a—I dunno—magical piece of vine that tightens around your ankle and inexplicably hoists you 10ft into the air.
That’s the (a big) reason I rarely ever do traps in my games. A semi-magical, throwaway “f#%* you” to the players is never fun or challenging. A trap like you describe, on the other hand, can be both. It needs good preparation, though, a good reason for existing and good placement. By that I mean that players should have the chance to encounter it, but also to not (since we’re not railroading people ). Guess I’m a lazy GM.
My experience with it is limited because it’s a newish system, but I feel like Coyote and Crow tends to fall into this trap despite efforts from the devs to avoid it. Their Three Paths concept seems as if it’s meant to encourage more creative problem solving, but ultimately it’s just a Story Guide planning tool. Meanwhile their “skill checks over time” system is almost identical to a skill challenge. It’s a shame because throughout the rulebook you can kind of sense that descriptive, creative problem solving is exactly what the developers wanted to evoke but they are too caught up in modern gaming conventions to really get that across. Of course that doesn’t stop an enterprising Story Guide from encouraging this kind of play through better encounter design.
Brilliant work! I am understanding this as without the fiction there is no game, and the game play is making decisions, not rolling dice. Thus, designing a button pushing exercise is antithetical to the actual game. Now I am starting to think that there is no such thing as an “encounter,” only a self-contained big problem consisting of smaller problems; like how to separate the treasure from all those pesky monsters guarding it and traps or hazards surrounding it.
This. So much this. If I just wanted to gamble I would go to Vegas. I want my game to actually contain gameplay. And no, figuring out an excuse to use my best stat doesn’t count as gameplay.
Trap:
Beams of light pierce the ruins’ crumbling stonework, illuminating the narrow hallway and showing some, but not all, of the narrow wires that run across the floor. The desert bandits who moved in here have attached these wires to numerous crossbows, all set in hidden crevices, hoping to dissuade any pursuers from following them into their main base of operations.
Social Encounter:
The stench of the sewers clings to their garments, as the party passes through the hidden entrance to the thieves’ guild. Having conned their way inside, they have to get an audience with the guild’s leader and convince him to let them leave with one of his most valuable possessions, all while making sure none of their own stuff gets nicked.
Hazard:
The trackless wilds of the frozen north stretch out in every direction, and miles of snow and ice lie between the party and their destination. To make matters worse, a recent storm has covered the countryside in a thick blanket of fluffy snow, obscuring anything that might lie beneath. The party will have to stave off the cold and dodge hidden cracks in the ice, all while trying to avoid getting lost in this wintery wasteland.
I reached very similar conclusions in a different way and weirdly I think 3E is antithetical to the approach you’re advocating, and 5E is great for it. I think 5E does a bad job of explaining itself, but it does essentially give you a core mechanic and say “use this plus common sense and you should be fine for most things”, which I think is great. 3E gives you a core mechanic and then tries to tell you exactly how to use it for every possible situation. At least that’s how it seemed to me.
But I can see how all that simulationist detail could be seen as “describing a game world” rather than dictating how the GM should run everything. And the distinction between description first and action first is interesting. I wonder how it fits with the more familiar “fiction First vs mechanics first” distinction.
Anyway yes, this is how you should play D&D.
Trap
The hallway smells of rotten flesh. It’s just wide enough that man couldn’t touch both walls with his fingers outstretched. Ten paces ahead, it bends to the right. The flick of fire from the next room can be seen.
Eloise the hobbit leads the way, with Dudley the fighter close behind. As Dudley steps on a flagstone, a section of floor opens up beneath him! He disappears from view as a massive stone block comes down on top of the trap door, filing the passage and separating Eloise from Frank the magic-user.
Dudley falls into darkness, until pain explodes from his side. He’s landed on some spikes in the pitch-black pit. It smells of an abattoir, and Dudley struggles, for a moment, to avoid retching up his breakfast. What does the party do next?
Social Encounter
Traveling the blasted lands of England, three knights come across a curious sight. A tatter banner with an unknown device, a silver lion rampant on a green field, flutters, it’s pole driven in the ground at the edge of the road. Against the pole leans a ragged knight. No wait, it’s not a knight, it’s a skeleton in knight’s armor. As the knights near, the skeleton straightens up and extends its arm as though expecting to be given something.
The skeleton cannot speak, pointing to its naked jaw. Instead, it will attempt to communicate in pantomime. If the knights give it what it wants, it will lower its banner and give the banner to the knights.
Hazard
The blizzard on Mt. Angry feels like knives cutting through one’s parka. Visibility is low, but the party treks on, headed to the storm god’s shrine. Over the howling wind, the yodeling cry of a yeti is heard. This echoes, then echoes again amplifying itself against the mountain. The crescendo is joined by another sound, the roar of thunder? The rushing of a river? The ground shakes beneath the party. Avalanche! The party is in hip-deep snow in the bowl of a mountain, what does it do next?
Having done this, a question. What about when one would want the challenge to be decided in a large part by the application of some randomness or when you want the situation to change based on party’s success or failure? A chase, for example. It feels like the X success before Y failures feels somewhat appropriate to describe the incremental nature of a harrier catching up to its prey.
Ohhh, Angry has a *great* chase described in an article. Maybe search for it, it’s a great read.
I love your social encounter with the pantomime. It could be mechanically hard to implement, but we said no mechanics.
As to the trap: Could the party have discovered it? Could they avoid it, or dodge it? Because it reads like the traps I dislike, the “hahaha ha, you didn’t see THAT coming, did ya”? Those are no fun.
There’s not inherent need for mechanics for the social encounter. All the better if there aren’t any, and the GM pantomimes. This would assume that the PC knight have some prior clue as what the skeleton wants. Likely some vague oracle earlier.
The clue that the trap exists is the smell from the decaying bodies beneath the trap door. It’s otherwise a non-descript hallway; there’s no reason why the smell would be there unless there’s something hidden from view. This would be a sufficient clue for some groups to observe more carefully. Had the players looked more closely at the hallway, they might have noticed the scratches down the walls or that one of the flagstones in the floor looked different. It is not a trap I would have run with beginners.
Thanks for the link.
Screw it, I looked up the article for you. It’s that good of a read.
https://theangrygm.com/how-to-build-awesome-encounters/
I think 4e’s skill challenges actually grew from Alternity’s complex skill checks. At least it’s the first tsr/wotc product I am aware of that codified the “make x successes before y failures” in the core rules. But in Alternity they weren’t set up as an encounter themselves like 4e tended to do, they were a GM tool used when an action the players decided on would be something that realistically would take a lot of time and be made up of a lot of general sub tasks that didn’t necessarily need to be explicitly laid out, like repairing a starship, trying to cure a disease, or researching obscure information. It was very much the same mechanic but presented in the rules completely differently, more like “if the players try to do something like this, here’s some rules to cover it” rather than a “here’s specifically ways the players are expected to solve the problem, let them choose from this list”. The basic idea was sound, but it was the specific 4e implementation that always stuck in my craw.
Oh no! I’m half way through writing a blog post about A5E’s wilderness encounters, and it was coming out very like this. Now people will think I’ve just copied you…
Absolutely agree. When I first encountered the skill challenge, I thought “okay, that sounds neat, I’ll blog about it”… and then dug into the details and realised how @&£# it is (are we allowed grawlixes, or are they reserved for the Angry God?), and ended up writing a blog about how they are not they way to do it.
https://melestrua.net/2020/11/01/when-one-action-isnt-enough-part-1-complex-tasks/
I love this. I am on the player side of the screen for the first time in years and getting others to think tactically even as a player is hard. I suggested killing the scrub trash goblins rather than focusing on the ogre and it was like I insulted their mothers. Meanwhile the goblins are doing more damage in total than the ogre. Sigh.
Here is my homework.
Trap
There are a tribe of kobolds living in a set of caves. A 10x wide wooden ramp spans a 15ft stretch of broken rock near the exit to the outside world. Ropes connect the ramp to small beams over head, with a lot of small tree branches used as bracing. Kobolds can be seen crossing the ramp, going to and fro in 1s and 2s.
The ramp is on a pivot near the midpoint. If more than 200lbs crosses to the “kobold” side of the ramp, the ramp pulls on the ropes, releasing the “bracing” on the beams. These are actually a form of wicker basket, holding back twigs and sticks. 10’x15′ x10′ worth of twigs and sticks. Damage is non-fatal but anyone who doesn’t manage to dodge is buried and could suffocate if they don’t escape in a few minutes. The bigger risk is the kobold guard who will throw flasks of oil & shoot flaming arrows into the base of the mass. Even if characters escape, those on the “outside” side of the trap could die from suffocation as the smoke rises towards the exit.
Social encounter
The party arrives at town on what they think is a fair day. People have come from miles around, people throng the streets. Somewhere in the city is priest who can lift a geas off a party member but all they know is the priest recently came to town. Until then, the geased party member is required to debate anyone discussing religion.
The party learns today is a holy day declared on the event of the birth of a noble heir. Small shrines have been set up on every street corner with priests of all sects proselytizing to one and all.
Hazard
It is late fall in the mountains. An unseasonably early storm has dropped more than 4ft of loose snow that is turning into 2ft of slush. The lower roads are impassable to wagons and even sleds will be moving at half speed. The risk of mud slides will be ever present. There is an upper pass where the snow will likely be firmer allowing sleds to travel at full speed however there were sightings of peryton by the last traveler to come through the before the snow.
I like the hazard a lot. The social encounter I didn’t understand. Is the player made to talk to all the proselytizing priests? Why? As I said, I probably didn’t understand. As to the trap, don’t be mad if I say, it shows that you DM 🙂 It’s all mechanics.
the social was tied to the geas. “the geased party member is required to debate anyone discussing religion”. This is a geas I used when a PC heckled a wandering hermit-celestial. The fact that the party went to a city with a literal temple district to get the geas removed was just comedy and I was trying to recreate it.
The trap is probably less “I am a GM” and more “I’m a licensed engineer”. My gaming group has two facility managers and a mechanic so they like trap details. Plus, I like traps that don’t involve 100-ton boulders or huge, complex mechanisms. A pivot, some ropes, a bunch of dead branches and twigs. This is a trap two goblins could put together in a month if they found the right cave.
I suspect this is 90 percent of the problem. Vague “skill checks” are easy. Understanding fully how a trap (or environmental hazard, or social situation etc.) works, is hard. Researching and writing it all up takes waaaaay more effort. On top of that, actually thinking a way through problems is much harder than just fitting puzzle pieces together, so some tables may not even appreciate the effort.
Combat challenges are easy for the DM (and players) to run, because all that ‘how does the monster work’ and ‘how can we kill a monster’ stuff has been done for us. But only if killing the monster is the way your group tries to resolve it. This is why negotiation, intimidation, persuasion etc. are used less often against monsters.
I’m thinking about trying a system where something like an intimidation check can be used to reduce a foe’s HP pool. Maybe like, a roll of 15 vs a DC of 12 does 3 HP ‘damage’. Maybe the PC yells at the bear while thumping it with the flat of their sword.
This will all be context based. Sometimes intimidation makes sense, sometimes persuasion, sometimes something else, often a combo can be used (apply knowledge of a creatures religion plus some persuasion). If you have not harmed the fairy, maybe you can sweet talk it into doing what you want. The HP pool becomes a kind of ‘Whatever stat’.
I feel there should be less difference between how we overcome ‘monster’ problems and how we overcome all other ‘problems’ in D&D.
I love this. I am on the player side of the screen for the first time in years and getting others to think tactically even as a player is hard. I suggested killing the scrub trash goblins rather than focusing on the ogre and it was like I insulted their mothers. Meanwhile the goblins are doing more damage in total than the ogre. Sigh.
Here is my homework.
Trap
There are a tribe of kobolds living in a set of caves. A 10x wide wooden ramp spans a 15ft stretch of broken rock near the exit to the outside world. Ropes connect the ramp to small beams over head, with a lot of small tree branches used as bracing. Kobolds can be seen crossing the ramp, going to and fro in 1s and 2s.
The ramp is on a pivot near the midpoint. If more than 200lbs crosses to the “kobold” side of the ramp, the ramp pulls on the ropes, releasing the “bracing” on the beams. These are actually a form of wicker basket, holding back twigs and sticks. 10’x15′ x10′ worth of twigs and sticks. Damage is non-fatal but anyone who doesn’t manage to dodge is buried and could suffocate if they don’t escape in a few minutes. The bigger risk is the kobold guard who will throw flasks of oil & shoot flaming arrows into the base of the mass. Even if characters escape, those on the “outside” side of the trap could die from suffocation as the smoke rises towards the exit.
Social encounter
The party arrives at town on what they think is a fair day. People have come from miles around, people throng the streets. Somewhere in the city is priest who can lift a geas off a party member but all they know is the priest recently came to town. Until then, the geased party member is required to debate anyone discussing religion.
The party learns today is a holy day declared on the event of the birth of a noble heir. Small shrines have been set up on every street corner with priests of all sects proselytizing to one and all.
Hazard
It is late fall in the mountains. An unseasonably early storm has dropped more than 4ft of loose snow that is turning into 2ft of slush. The lower roads are impassable to wagons and even sleds will be moving at half speed. The risk of mud slides will be ever present. There is an upper pass where the snow will likely be firmer allowing sleds to travel at full speed however there were sightings of peryton by the last traveler to come through the before the snow.
This new article along with F$&% CR and unit sizes enables some really great encounters. If you stat block puzzles and traps and things like lava fields you can just slot them into encounters.
At the center of a caldera is a pedestal with a complicated mechanism that controls the lava levels. It can raise, lower or halt the lava. It has to be halted before it can reverse the lava’s direction.
The caldera is guarded by several flame lamias.
The boss flame lamia, Marilith will show up if her henchmen are incompetent or if her lava or treasure is disturbed.
At half health, Marilith changes strategy. She swims through the lava splashing it. The pedestal holding the mechanism is destroyed, staying stuck on (continuing to raise or lower the lava) or off.
I never was good at homework, so I’m not gonna care what grade I get.
I tip my hat to you, sir, as you just made everyone make adventurelets for everyone. Nice work 🙂
I run a lot of Savage Worlds, and I actually really like their version of the “skill challenge” mechanic. But I tend not to run it as specific as they do. I try to present the situation as a problem and whatever the players do, assuming it could be said to help solve the problem at all, counts towards the number of successes. This also allows me to solve certain things other people would do with combat in a different way.
As an example, a classic scenario of a horde of zombies attacking a town, but they will only do so for a specific length of time for whatever reason (they mostly come at night. Mostly). Sure, you can shoot at the zombies and that helps hold them off, or you could use your action to set up some sort of quick barricade or help patch someone up or any number of other things. And all of that helps towards completing the task. It isn’t ideal, of course, but the goal is to “split the difference” by using the mechanics but also by thinking of the situation in terms of how things are happening in the world. In this specific example, a zombie hoard attacking a town isn’t a combat. It’s a tower defense game, and I like approaching it as such.
Since I know you respect the exploration aspect of Breath of the Wild and you believe that most of the rest of it is trash, I think I can give a solid example of a non-skill challenge puzzle design. Remember the minigame in the shrine with the ball in the maze that moved with the Switch’s motion controls? Do you remember how you solved it? It wasn’t too difficult to do it the ‘right’ way, but most people just flipped it upside down, and used the bottom of the maze instead of doing the tedium of the maze.