The Predator Skill Challenge

Maybe I’ve been playing too much Batman: Arkham City, or maybe after all this time playing Star Wars Saga Edition, I’m really starting to stretch my arms in regards to encounter design. Either way you slice it, I was struck tonight with a concept for an encounter for a module I’ve been working on, and it does draw a lot of inspiration from way that the Dark Knight’s latest two console/PC releases have handled the gameplay.

There are times in the game where it is better to be stealthy that it is to run in, fists swinging, dropping foes one at a time from various areas and degrees of cover and stealth, be it dropping down from the rafters and grabbing a hapless foe, dangling him from your perch until he passes out, or dropping down behind one as he passes you and putting him in a sleeper hold. Meanwhile, the enemies patrol the area you’re in (usually contained to a single room or area of the map), and will occasionally do searches of the room, and go on alert if and when they find the body of another goon.

This led me to envision a new type of encounter for a GM to run – a Covert Ops Skill Challenge, or a Predator Skill Challenge. Here’s the basic concept as I’m seeing it:

You stat out the CL as normal. The goal of the PCs however is not to hit a certain number of successes before accruing three failures however. Instead, this is run as a pseudo combat encounter, with the PCs either needed to make it to a certain spot on the map, or defeating all of the enemies before accruing a certain number of failures (I’m thinking five or maybe even a few more to account for the increased risk inherent in running this kind of encounter).

Every one rolls for initiative, and you break out the battle map. The enemies, on their turns move in a set patrol route on their Initiative. If, from the direction they are facing, any of the PCs enter their line of sight, the PCs earn a failure and must immediately move back to the nearest square on the map where they are out of line of sight. That enemy (or enemies if they’re linked by radio) also enters into the “alert” condition (more on that below).

Restrict the skill list to ones that make sense in the situation and assign them DCs as normal. If they’re in a shipping yard, Knowledge (social sciences) and Survival probably aren’t going to be useful to the task at hand. For skills like Stealth, or Deception (to create diversions) or wherever it’s appropriate, assign them an opposed Perception check from the nearby patrols. If you want, you can have the patrols all make Perception checks and not the results down when their turn in the initiative comes up.

When the player starts his turn, he can take a move action and a standard action. The standard action is to make a skill check, or to take out of an opponent should he be positioned to do so (more on that below as well). With his move action, he can well… move. There should be a discernible location on the map that they should be moving towards (unless the encounter design is “take out all of the bad guys in this room”). If they all make it there before accruing the requisite number of failures, they succeed. If they take out all of the enemies on the map, they succeed. If they fail the challenge, the alarm gets raised and they have a fight on their hands.

Should the PC be in position to take out an enemy, he can do so with his standard action in lieu of making a skill check. He needs to be adjacent to the enemy and not have been noticed (sneaking behind him, around a corner, above him, etc). The PC then makes an attack roll against the target’s Reflex Defense. A hit means the opponent’s down, regardless of what his hit points are normally. But should another patrol find the body, he and any nearby patrols gain the “alert” condition.

Just what is this “alert” condition? Well, it can mean what you want it to mean. Maybe they get a +2 circumstance bonus to their Perception checks. Maybe they get a Perception reroll, keeping the second result. Maybe they alter their patrol routes. Maybe they pair up. Maybe some combination of any or all of the above.

I plan on putting this idea to the test in the module I’m currently working on, with the PCs needing to escape a shipping yard after smuggling themselves onto an Imperial Detention World without being seen to avoid mucking up the entire operation. Should make for an interesting encounter at the very least.

The Assault Skill Challenge

A while back, while doing some design brainstorming for the rewrite of my Hard Contact Clone Wars module. I knew that I wanted to insert a scene that involved the characters storming an enemy fortress. The question then became, how best to model the scene in a short amount of time, without bogging things down with numerous weak enemies that wouldn’t represent a major danger to the party.

Then, I hit on it: a modification of the basic skill challenge rules as presented in Galaxy of Intrigue. This is what I’ve modeled for a new Challenge Effect to fit the situation:

Assault

In a skill challenge modified by this challenge effect, characters cannot accrue failures by failing a skill check. The only way the characters can accrue a failure is by the enemies making a successful “attack” against them. The enemy side makes two attack rolls, calculating the attack bonus as if it were a hazard (equal to the CL of the challenge +2). If the attack roll beats the DC of the Medium difficulty of the challenge (shown on Table 2-1, GoI 43) then they have successfully hit the party, and they have accrued a failure.

However, a PC can also choose to make an attack roll on their turn in the skill challenge instead of making a skill check. This attack roll is made at the PC’s attack bonus against the same DC as the enemies attacks (Medium). If they are successful, instead of accruing a success, they erase one failure from their total, giving them more breathing room.

Other than that, the normal rules apply. Determine complexity as normal to decide the number of successes necessary for completion and if the enemy makes three successful attack rolls before the requisite number of successes are met, the challenge is failed.

I ran this challenge in a recent session, where the PCs had to storm a fortress occupied by an invading force and reestablish command. It worked very well, giving the combat heavy characters a chance to shine while also still playing into their skill strengths (plenty of uses for Climb, Jump, and Initiative checks in a combat situation) without taking anything away from the characters who are more skill focused. There’s also plenty of uses for the characters to make use of their feats and talents in a situation like this on a case by case basis.

As a note, this challenge effect should work very well in an “approaching enemy horde” situation, be they waves of stormtroopers, battle droids, or dark side zombies, putting the PCs into a heavy combat situation without putting them through what could be a really tedious combat grind if not handled carefully, not to mention putting a scenario that could potentially take an entire session if handled the “traditional” way into something that can be handled in less than an hour, thereby keeping any player interest and tension levels high, which can make or break any table situation like this.

Skill Challenges, Star Wars Style

I’m starting to make an effort to publish more generalized tabletop content to this blog instead of merely making it a repository of builds and stat blocks, and for the first “article” I want to discuss my ideas on a topic that seems to be generating a fair amount of discussion on various gaming blogs: Skill Challenges.

The concept of a Skill Challenge, a codified set of rules for adjudicating success and failure in a non-combat scenario was first introduced with the launch of Dungeons and Dragons 4^th Edition, and has been revisited, restructured, and streamlined again and again. However, there was another release of the rules with the Star Wars Saga Edition line in Galaxy of Intrigue, and that continues to be my go to for ideas on running skill challenges.

Skill challenges can be something that is really difficult for some players to get their heads around, while some of them will take to it like ducks to water, much like anything in a tabletop game. However, the skill challenge can be hard for the soldier or Jedi characters to get excited about, regardless of how the player feels about them, with their skill spread lending itself mainly towards the physical and combative tasks during the game.

Then again, it’s just as often that I see the GM afraid of putting the skill challenge into their games, because they don’t understand what their supposed to represent or because they’re afraid their PCs won’t enjoy them, or they’re simply worried about not doing it correctly.

However, it doesn’t take much looking to see how many of the scenes from the Star Wars movies could be run as a skill challenge and in doing so, it becomes readily apparent just how integral the skill challenge mechanics can be to a great Star Wars Saga Edition experience.

For example, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s investigation of Jango Fett that eventually leads him to the knowledge of the clone army and the Separatist plot is most definitely a skill challenge being run with intervening action and combats.

Luke’s Jedi training on Dagobah could also be envisioned as a skill challenge (and is a great way to show how the physical skills can be used in these challenges).

The Millennium Falcon being chased through the asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back could also be easily represented as a skill challenge.

Sometimes these problems can disappear just by talking to the players (or looking at them from a mechanics standpoint if you’re the GM) about these scenes. Sometimes, putting it in a cinematic perspective can help them come around to the idea of what a skill challenge is supposed to represent in game.

This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg in what can be major problems in putting skill challenges into your game, a problem that I like to call “the one trick pony syndrome.”

This is the idea of the PCs looking at their character sheets to find their skill with the biggest bonus and then spamming it through the challenge, or worse yet, simply abstaining from making rolls because Jump or Endurance doesn’t have a place in this particular challenge. This can be a fairly prevalent tactic; especially in younger gaming groups that have grown up with systems that have strongly codified skill systems (though older gamers can also be put off by the idea of needing to roll a dice to see if there idea has merit). This can be a tough idea to break, but once again, you have a strong resource in your inventory that you can use to help with this.

Once again, point to the movies. Ask the players if the movies would have been nearly as exciting if Leia had handled all of the negotiations? What if R2 had handled all the Mechanics? How about if Han had taken care of every single piloting roll? The answer from around the table should be a resounding “No.”

As a matter of fact, we see the heroes (and villains) in the films making attempts with skills that they are not trained in, or at the very least, skills they don’t have the highest modifiers in. Luke attempts to make multiple Persuasion checks while in Jabba’s Palace. We see (or at least hear about) Threepio making Mechanics checks while aboard the Millennium Falcon. Padme’s making Climb checks while in the area on Geonosis, and in the same scene, Anakin is even making Ride checks. Heck, we even see Leia making an untrained Use the Force check in Episodes V and VI to get a sense on where Luke is.

Heroes are called upon to make checks in skill that they aren’t “trained in” all the time under stressful conditions. The difference is, the heroes in the movies, books, and comics don’t have the meta-problems that characters at the table have. They don’t have the luxury of stopping the action, looking at their character sheet, and realizing that they only have a +5 bonus on that particular skill and would need to roll a natural 20 on the die to achieve a successful result. They simply know they have to get to the top of the column, isolate the reverse power coupling, or convince the crime lord to let his friends go free.

So, it becomes a matter of getting your players into the mindset of not looking at their skill list during a skill challenge. Even go so far as to ask them to turn their sheet over, and then get into the mindset of their characters. What would their character want to attempt in a given situation? What reaction would they have? Figure out as a GM what skill would be best represented by that action, and then, and only then, have the player check out what that modifier is. This doesn’t mean that the player shouldn’t also be encouraged to take an action that does line up with their skills (after all, they did spend valuable resources to train in the skills they did).

There are a number of ways that you as a GM can help to encourage this kind of behavior at the table. The first and most important is talking frankly with your players about just what a skill challenge is, and more importantly, what it isn’t.

A skill challenge, at its core, is nothing more than a way to advance the narrative in a number of directions while using existing game mechanics as an arbiter for determining which way the narrative will progress. It’s incredibly important for the players to know that they aren’t going to suffer character death just because they’ve botched one Persuasion check. It’s also just as important to know that they aren’t going to be “stuck” should the skill challenge wind up a failure.

Yes, they may find themselves a little banged up and worse for the wear, and yes, they may find themselves faced with a brick wall in their path. However, this also means that they are simply going to have to find a way around that wall, and may very well experience some side plots and other parts of the story that they might not have gotten a chance to if they had passed through the skill challenge with flying colors.

What this does, is take the fear of failure out of a skill challenge. By doing this, you’ve put a big safety net underneath the players during these encounters, and one that they will stop noticing after a while.

Next, it’s important to let your players know that just because a skill isn’t listed as a “primary skill,” that doesn’t mean it’s shut off from the rest of the skill challenge and completely useless. Make sure that you as a GM make it very clear to them that if a player comes up with a creative use for a particular skill that makes sense in the given situation; you are probably going to roll with it and allow them to at least try it.

This show the players that while you may not have planned for all contingencies, you are willing to go along with their ideas, and a little bit of power (even perceived power) in the players hands can go a long way towards helping them to enjoy the process.

Finally, make sure you’re throwing the occasional bone to the soldier and the Jedi in these skill challenges. Throw in some skill checks that are going to allow these characters to shine and give them the opportunity to pull the rest of the party out of the fire.

What this shows the players is that you are taking their abilities and the resources they have invested into their characters into account with your planning.

Running a successful skill challenge requires you as a GM to walk a fine line between planning and execution, but the payoff when the players finally “get it” and start getting down and dirty, and most importantly, having fun with it is worth all the time and effort you put into the entire process.

Now, this entire process can take some time, but there are a number of ways that you can give the players a “push” into making the transition to this idea of participating in a skill challenge. They may not work with all groups, but they might be worth trying.

The first one is the easiest: Reward the players for their creativity. Now, I don’t mean reward them in game with bonus experience points or better gear (though you might be able to get away with that occasionally). Here’s what I mean. Say a player comes up with a really creative use for the Acrobatics skill during a skill challenge. Whether or not they blow the check out of the water, barely succeed, or even fall flat on their faces doesn’t matter. The fact is that they thought outside the box, put the idea out there, committed to the idea, and actually tried it.

Look at them after the session and say, “Remember that trick you tried with the Acrobatics skill? That was brilliant/great/really good/whatever you want to say here.” Sometimes that all that’s necessary to get player buy-in, and encourage him to try something equally as daring and creative during the next skill challenge.

The second piece of advice is simply this: Don’t tell the party that they are in a skill challenge. Set up the scene as normal, but don’t let the party know that this is an obvious challenge. Just start asking them what they want to do in the given situation, and keep track of successes and failures in secret.

Particularly astute players might be able to pick up on the fact that they are in a skill challenge, but probably not for a  couple of rounds, and that might be all that’s needed to get TPBI (Total Party Buy-In). If, by some chance, no one does pick up on the challenge, finish it out, and then after the session, drop the bomb on them. “Remember that scene where this and this happened and you did that in response? Yeah? That was a skill challenge. That’s how they’re run and that’s all the more that needs to be done in them.”

If, after all of this, things still aren’t clicking, you can institute a few table rules for skill challenges. One you can institute is one gleaned from listening to the Critical Hits podcast. A player cannot use the same skill two rounds in a row, and they cannot use the same skill as another player has used in the same round. This forces the players to start diversifying their skill choices during the challenge.

Secondly, you can institute the rule that the only way for the PCs to accrue a failure is when not every PC attempts to contribute in some way. Oftentimes, the removal of the fear of failure can get a player to start thinking outside the box a little bit and take some more risks. It might takes some fighting,, especially if the player is set in his ways opposing skill challenges, but after a few challenges run like this, you should be able to transition into the “normal” skill challenge rules after that.

Finally, remember, keep it cinematic, keep it cool, and keep it fast, but most importantly; remember to keep it Star Wars.