I was also thinking about how to actually start using skills and roleplaying. I started thinking up a town with a couple different places-barracks, shop, blacksmith, inn/tavern, etc. with various people who would act differently or have different problems/quests. Maybe the blacksmith needs mines cleared out, maybe there's a pickpocket who tries stealing from a character, maybe someone could join in on a card game and be caught cheating. The more things I think of, the more it sounds like Baldur's Gate.
It sounds fun - we've never done much seacoast stuff - there are lots of possibilities there... The skill stuff is tough - you have to play it. We should try to commit to something like a town or similar setting one of these times, and see what we can get. I think it gets easier, after a while - once you've done some of that, it gets to be second nature. It was back in the day... I'm still too lazy to sit down and build a good playable setting though... maybe talking about it will light a fire...
ReplyDeleteThis is in response to both posts really... I like the idea of Waynesburg being on a huge lake. You can go away into the hills in one direction, forests in another, plains to the south and east, or jump in a boat and go upriver or into the mountains. We also used to use Naswol as a sea base for a few adventures. I think it would be interesting to develop a settlement on the west of the lake that connects through a mountain pass with the coast. We could base an adventure out of any of them and have reasonably quick access to all others.
ReplyDeleteI am partial to a coastal town... whether from growing up in West Point or reading Hardy Boys books doesn't matter. Caves, islands, smuggling, sea monsters, storms... there's a lot of fun ways to go. It doesn't hurt that a fishing village is probably isolated and insular as well.
I think the tricky part with skill challenges is going to be finding a way to run them that is interesting or engaging. They are set up to roll a certain number of successes before another number of failures, and I can't bend my mind to make that interesting. "You can use bluff twice and intimidate once... " That stuff seems ridiculous. I think the answer lies in making them much more common, with a simple roll for an effect or the like. Like, roll and intimidate check to gain a bonus to your attack roll on your first action, or make an athletics check to gain a defense bonus for the following round. Things of that nature that make using them and rolling part of the regular round of action. You can still use larger challenges like climbing a cliff and so on, but use the lesser checks to force them into the thought process and gameplay.
The way skill challenges are described in the book makes them seem awfully unappealing - though I can kind of see the point of it. I suspect some of it is explicitly to account for the type of players who walk into a bar looking for One-Eyed-Tom the Bounty Hunter and say, "I use Gather Information to see if anyone knows where One Eyed Tom is." But I can see some use to it - it seems to be a way to let the DM know when you have Utterly Failed - and how hard you have to work to get something. I don't know if it's necessary to roll, even - something like that - maybe everyone in the bar knows where One Eyed Tom is, and no one cares if you find him or not - if you ask nice, they'll tell you. So you say, 2 successes before 2 failures and you find out where he is - and "gather information" or "diplomacy" is an automatic success - and "intimidate" is an automatic failure.... Something like that - mainly tells you that if you annoy the barkeep twice he'll put the dogs on you...
ReplyDeleteI also think one of the tricks of it would be translating - knowing that "gather information" in a situation like that means, asking if anyone knows where One Eyed Tom is; diplomacy might be offering 5 GP reward; grabbing someone by the shirt is intimidation. What the rolls might mean, of course, is another matter - but again - sometimes, I think it's perfectly reasonable not to bother with rolls... or maybe - in this situation - you might have some automatic successes and failures, some dice rolls - maybe you make up a story about One Eyed Tom - you'd have to roll a bluff to not get caught in the lie; or you might use perception to look around for some sign of him, that sort of thing... The main value, I think, is in accounting for uncertainties, and quantifying what counts as total failure...
When you start to think about it, that is the kind of fun that we remember from playing games as kids, and that is missing from the new system. It's like they've created skill challenges as a way to codify role-playing. You are right to say that most of it can be done without any rolling. I guess the value of skill challenges then becomes knowing how you rate for success with a given tactic. Intimidation may seem like instant failure, but when it's Geronimo or Eugene grabbing you by the shirt collar, the result can shift. The real value comes in the modifiers you can apply individually. Still, I think it will take some doing to implement comfortably.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I imagine the only way to find out how it works is to do it. The next time we play, we should set up something very heavy on the skill checks - a town, or a location where the terrain or whatever is inherently challenging, or just more encounters with people/creatures who aren't obviously enemies...
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