Since this thread is positive and constructive, perhaps it's important to skip words, logic, and Infocom parsing about D&D 4th ed, but simply put the emotions it invokes into music so that others can feel the way you ("you" used collectively) do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnrXiaPVeHY...feature=related

At a glance, the problem is now not that the maths is broken - reducing all the DCs by 10 is definationally going to sizeably increase everyone's chances by pushing them right across the RNG - the problem now you're back to the 'send out the specialist while everyone else says nothing' model of doing things which is an upshot of the skill system. So now you're back to third edition except you have to roll the dice lots of times as opposed to once.

I've thought of an altenative but I'll have to let it brew a bit, probably focused on keeping everyone on the RNG

Edit: The maths http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=236190

I'm also liking the murder pinball idea kicking around.

Thanks for that link.

Yeah, looks like they overcompensated the maths. Now, things seem to be too easy and the steps a lot wider when you're in Hard DCs.

I do wish they would have left the group participation in there. I mean, that was a really good idea to "force" everyone to participate in a large challenge. Now we are back to the same model as before.

There was something to be said about a PC with no skills actually hurting the group. That is a type of min/max protection right there on the non-combat side. With that removed, only one person has to worry about skills...

I'm thinking that no matter what the RAW turns into, we'll be having house-rules for this at my table. Luckily, that is something we were used to in our prior SR4 campaign (with the same group of friends), so we'll be good!

I have played in my first tiny little fight. My 3rd level Eladrin Fighter (I wanted to "buck the suggestions" and make a class/race combination that would be less than ideal) has officially stabbed the shit of a skeleton. So far, so good! Onward, to glory!

...I sometimes really wish on-line gaming was a little faster. It took us the better part of 36 hours to finish these two combat rounds.

Not sure if it works this way by RAW, but if there is a skill challenge ongoing and they are present then I will probably force them to contribute(or not). Now if they have decided to stay indoors and everyone else is out there, fine. If it is a physical challenge, then sure they can not do it, but even the nonverbals of a person in the background known to associate with you will effect the attitude of the person you are dealing with. Don't let the fighter stand behind you pick his nose and roll his eyes while you are trying to get information, I guess is what I am saying. I also enforce roleplaying with people where the non-charismatic character is typically unaware or uncaring of his affect on others because that is a very common condition. How many people have you met who seem to think they are awesome but everyone you know secretly(or not so secretly) thinks they should just crawl off somewhere and die?

Chris

I agree. If the situation is such that one or more characters could, reasonably, opt-out then I see no problem with it. Of course, as with any plot I'm going to try to design it such that the characters either can not, or do not want to, opt out. But if, occasionally, there's no benefit to anyone else contributing I see no problem with a character who has gone out of their way to be the ultimate skill-monkey saying "Stand back guys, I've got this one." But it's my job as GM to make sure that a good percentage of skill challenges have some sort of disincentive to that strategy, even if they don't outright forbid it.

Yeah, based off the current errata, they removed the part where you roll initiative and everyone participates in initiative order. They even added a sentence to allow anyone to opt out of participating.

But I am in the same camp with you. If everyone is in the tavern or whatnot, talking to a bartender, then unless a party member actually waited outside, then they would be having to participate in some way.

I agree. If someone opts out by leaving, or maybe even sitting quietly in a corner, there will be realistic consequences to that above and beyond the pass/fail of the skill challenge. The bartender, who now likes most of the party, still doesn't trust that one party member, or thinks he's up to something, etc. Or sometimes, maybe it's no big deal at all. But most of the time, completely independent of the skill challenge system, there are realistic in-game disincentives to occasionally bowing out of group and sitting on your ass waiting for everyone else to do all the work for you. And sometimes there aren't. That doesn't actually bother me.

What does bother me is that you're just going to pick your single best check and hammer away on it to the exclusion of all others as much as possible, and unless you limit every skill to x number of successes or something you're not going to get away from that. You could, and they even do in the examples, limit a skill to being used once, but if you do that for every skill then designing the challenge gets really monotonous.
What might be interesting (but yet more complicated) would be if the DCs were slightly variable from turn to turn, such that one turn you're better off using diplomacy, but due to (known, or discernible) DC fluctuation on the next turn you're actually better off trying to bluff, or intimidate. But like I said, that would add yet more complexity, and I'm not really sure the benefit/complexity ratio is favorable.

I finally managed to run the little quicky one shot I've been trying to get people together for for awhile now. Our two normal games take up everyone's free nights so it's hard to find a day. Anyway, I have to say that I am actually quite pleased. I didn't see it lose the DnD flavor I kind of thought it might, and while all the characters were of roughly equal power levels(part of that might be that I made them all, but I think it was mostly the system) they were all distinct in their advantages and strategies. It works really well with our group in that we have a lot of good roleplayers, but only a couple of people(namely me, if I'm honest) who are really good at making characters and so normally there is a power gap- sometimes a significant one- between the characters in a party and so some people don't feel as though they can contribute. This was not a problem with this system.

To give you an overview, I read the PHB and found the monsters I wanted in the MM, and looked at the skill challenges part of the DMG, I wanted to put some traps in, but I wanted to try out different encounter types and didn't have time for both, so the traps fell by the wayside.

Party -
Tiefling Fey Pact Warlock - Kairon
Human Control Wizard - Quinn Tolar
Halfling Artful Dodger Rogue - Tark
Dwarf Wisdom Cleric - Vontal
Dragonborn Str Paladin - Balasar

Encounter 1 -
8 kobold minions
2 kobold slingers
1 stormclaw scorpion
Pit Environment Hazard

Encounter 2 -
2 Fire Beetles
2 Goblin Warriors
1 Goblin Blackblade
Forge Fire Hazard

Encounter 3 -
1 goblin arcanist
2 kobold slingers
2 stirges
2 stormclaw scorpions
Fire Lines and Pit Hazards

The scenario was this - the PCs were on the initiatory quest for a relatively large low level adventuring guild called The Rabble. They were headed to Lauringdale to stop the rampage(theft and attacks- no deaths just some burning) of some monsters in town. The game started as they arrived and I had built one pre-made of every class and used all the races once as well. The villagers were very skittish as the Dragonborn resembled a larger version of some of the creatures plaguing them and the Tiefling Warlock decided at the last minute to be a cross-dresser.(I had apparently originally told him that the premie warlock was a girl, but then designed a man and there was some confusion he decided to solve)

The only real skill challenge came after the mayor came and re-briefed them on the attacks, it was a streetwise challenge to assemble all the garbled and frightened fragments of information and make something useful out of them. They rolled exceedingly well, not even using the accessory skills I had set up for the challenge and managed their 12 successes with only 1 failure so they figured out/found out where they could find the trail leading to the monster lair. If they failed they were going to find a different trail nearby that led to a different cave that had a fruitless battle in it.

They proceeded inside and walked into their first combat- 8 kobold minions, a stormclaw scorpion, and 2 kobold slingers. The rogue hopped out in front, got clawed, grabbed and stung(poisoned, immobilized) before they dropped the scorpion and laid waste to the minions who managed to make a fair showing with their rain of javelins. The warlock and wizard got to shine a little as they pounded the kobold slingers to death from afar with magic. Oh, Slingers were on a 15 foot high cliff at the end of the room and there were two pretty deep pits on each side of the like 13x8 room. Rogue almost positioning struck the scorpion into the pit, but missed.

Rogue climbed the cliff, found the ladder hidden above and let everyone else up and they proceeded to the next room. Irregularly shaped room with a forge based around a magma flow on one side. The forge was during a period of activity and so it did fire damage in a radius due to heat. They fought 2 fire beetles, 2 goblin warriors, and a goblin blackblade in this room. The blackblade went first and injured the paladin, and then everyone stomped it to death(Witchfire + Sly Flourish and both hitting for nearly max damage) One goblin warrior happened to be in a bad position when the beetles unleashed their flames and went bloodied, the rogue slid the other goblin warrior into the forge and nearly toppled him into the lava, and then the mage used sleep and successfully put both beetles and the scorched warrior to sleep. The party easily finished the other warrior and coup de grace'd the rest of the critters.

In the final room, I had the mastermind behind the theft and organization, a gnome arcanist, hidden on a raised dias with two more slingers guarding him. He had two pet stirges and two more scorpions in the room and the room had two small pits and several 6 inch deep 3 inch wide wavy lines in the rock. Turned out those were filled with something very flammable and the slingers used their firepots to light them while the PCs were standing on them. A lot of grabbing later, things were not going well for our PCs till I forcibly reminded them to use action points, then the warlock saw the gnome finally, tried to E-Blast him and missed, got pissed and used Curse of the Dark Dream and threw his ass into one of the pits. The cleric moved just close enough to save the paladins life and the paladin got free of his sturge and went after the kobolds, an action pointed double scorching blast, everyone elses dailies and encounters later and everyone was just using at-wills trying to kill the last two kobolds and missing. Finally whittling them down, I forgot about the paladin's challenge and the kobold attacked the rogue and took enough damage to knock it to -1 where they could finish it off and return all the stolen goods that weren't foodstuffs and get paid.

Everyone had a lot of fun, and I am a lot more excited about this edition now. It only took about 6 and a half hours and that was with several interruptions and 3 people cooking during the game.

Chris

Oh, as an aside, I heartily recommend taking the data(scan your PDF, buy the PDF, download it if you already own the books) and printing your monsters you will use and the powers for all the characters on 3x5 or 4x6 notecards. It made bookkeeping with powers and monsters really simple and allowed us to have the pertinent effects at hand so no one had to look up their powers in the book in the middle of combat.

Chris


EDIT: I also put all racial powers and lengthy class features on note cards for my players.

EDIT2: This more the kind of positive posts you were looking for Bull?

This is something I think WotC is REALLY dropping the ball on. The D&D Mini's come with stat cards that have the 4e Game stats on them. But between the random distribution of the mini's game, and the cracked out selection of figures (Most sets only have one or two "common" monsters, like orcs or kobods or goblins, and are full of really bizarre critters), they're totally not worth buying if that's all you want them for :/

WotC could make a MINT if they'd start selling some reasonably priced packs of 20 or so figures of the common humanoid monsters, at least. Or better yet, Mini's Packs to go along with their modules.





Not every post needs to be full of sunshine and light and kittens and puppies and gushing praise for 4e, I mostly just wanted to filter out the complaints and whining. That was shot long ago, but... Whatever. <shrug>

Either way, glad you had fun with your session. I really wish I had the oppurtunity to try it out a little more in depth. I may get a game or two in at Gen Con.

I've been typing up sheets for our characters with all of their powers that they have selected listed, they're pretty much by the book. I think when I GM I will probably do the same for creature write ups so I don't have to flip through the MM constantly especially when dealing with seperate types of creatures at the same time.

Oh for those that are interested in power write-ups, after I'd already typed up the ones for all of out current characters I found these:
Ema's Charsheets

What the skill challenge system really needs is something like primary, secondary and tertiary roles, which all contribute to the challenge but test different attributes. Primary contributes to successes, secondary eliminates failures and tertiary does..something?

But then with different tests against each you'd be in business. Like your normal diplomancy encounter could have

Diplomancy <-- good cop

Bullyasurus/intimidate <-- Bad cop

Stealth/gather infomation/knowledge: some crap/whatever <-- bonus powers?

as the three attributes, and if your doing some role, you cannot participate in the other roles. Like the good cop cannot also be the bad cop, and neither of them can sneak out the back and have a sleuth around.

That's a pretty good idea, actually...