Game Design Sins - Character-Skill over Player-Skill

Skill Challenges - A Rant

D&D 4e had this concept called the Skill Challenge. What's a Skill Challenge? OK, so imagine you are playing D&D. You and your fellow players are fleeing from a monster. You're probably thinking "chase scenes are tricky. How is the GM going to handle this?" The, your GM tells you *imitates Kermit the Frog voice* "OK guys. We're doing a Skill Challenge."

He explains that you have to look at the skill list on your character sheet and you have to choose a skill, any skill, and think of a way to use it in the context that's being presented to you.

Player, looking and sounding confident: "OK cool. I use stealth to hide."

GM: "Roll."

Player: "I got a natural 30 or whatever. Yay! We did it!"

Then the GM describes how you use your stealth skill to hide successfully, then says "but you still have to pass two more skill rolls."

Player, looking and sounding confused: "Eh, what? But I passed the skill roll. You narrated that we hid. I don't understand."

GM: "It's called a Skill Challenge, that means you have to get X successes, and you have to avoid getting X failures."

Player: *Makes angry face*. "What?"

So, the first problem is that it's arbitrary. It's a mini game / sub-system with arbitrary point scoring in D&D! How bizarre, right? Here comes the second problem.

Player: "OK, so I just do stealth again."

GM: "Nope. You can only use one skill per skill challenge."

Player: "What! Why?! That makes no sense!"

GM: *Sticks finger in belly button and sniffs it*. "You pleb. You don't understand anything."

Other Player: "OK, I roll stealth then."

GM: "No, sorry, let me clarify: a skill can only be used once per skill challenge."

Other Player: *Makes angry face*. "What sense does that make? What else do we do to run away in a chase scene?"

That's the second problem. Arbitrary limitations. I'm sure there's a design reason for why skills can't be repeated, but I think it conflicts with the logic of a narrative. Why wouldn't I just hide, then run and hide again? Like, I don't know what the skill challenge is trying to describe within the logic of the fiction. You can't hide twice? Have you ever played hide and go seek before? I'm genuinely confused and frustrated.

Player: "OK, so what do we do?"

GM: "Try History."

Player: *Cocks pistol*. "What! How do I use history to escape during a chase!"

GM: "That's for you to come up with. You're the adventurer."

Player thinks: "I use history to remember if there are better hiding places. Then we hide there."

GM: *Shrugs*. "OK, roll."

And so that's the third part about this system that doesn't make any sense to me. You have to make very creative applications of game mechanics. Some of these you probably have to stretch. And uh, I can imagine that if you did your nineteenth skill challenge, all these stretched interpretations of skills would be familiar, and you wouldn't really struggle to work them out. You've justified nonsense enough already that you could just do it again. You would just describe how you use a skill, roll, and count points. It's very, very contrived.

I've never seen the designers who designed this mode of play comment about it. I think they were sitting around one day thinking up a reason to make skills get used more. This is it. This is what they came up with.

It turns a narrative scene into a series of pass/fail die rolls. It forces player creativity through a hoop or a strainer instead of letting players work out a solution naturally, which would be describing a plan and then the GM adjudicates. Therefore, this is a contrived mode of play. You've taken the very simple game-play loop and you've turned it into this weird thing.

Finally, that number of successes vs failures is arbitrary. Harder skill challenges mean you have to succeed 9 times and avoid 3 failures. Ugh. That means possibly 11 of these at once?

So, in summary: it's character-skill over player-skill, it's contrived, and it's arbitrary. It takes away the normal gameplay loop and imposes this new thing that's very not D&D.

I want the GM to present a problem. Then I want to come up with my solution. I don't want to be forced to come up with an arbitrary number of solutions and then outsource the results to the dice. Rolling the dice means there's a chance to fail. Rolling dice and failing isn't fun. I think if I come up with a good plan that works within the logic of the setting and the fiction, the consequences should be based on the merit of the plan, or whether or not it's just a functional solution.

I could sit here and roll a die ten times, adding a bonus from a random skill ten times, and ask a table to justify each use of the skill form me. I could do that in like 2 minutes. You've turned a game about creativity and roleplaying, and you've gamified it into a random outcome generator that gets loosely justified proactively. That's weird guys. It's not playing. That is not play. That isn't play.

It sucks and I forbid it.

For something opposite of a skill challenge, I wrote a soft-skills system supplement for Open 2d6. It's more player-skill over character-skill.