For a little while now, I’ve been thinking about different ways to use skill challenges in D&D, different ways to tweak the system to make it do what I want it to do. I think that the system within the DM’s Guide is fine, and does the job, but I think it gets really interesting when you start monkeying around with it. One idea that I’ve toyed with is the idea of the players accruing ‘points’ or ‘tokens’ of some sort during a skill challenge that have effects during, after, or both during and after the challenge. I think the best way to illustrate what I’m talking about is to give you an example, and since a friend of mine wants to see a drinking contest done in skill challenge format for his campaign, I’m going to go ahead and whip that up. I’ll annotate the skill challenge, too, to show you what I’m thinking.

Drinking Contest (Complexity 1 [4 successes before 3 failures], Level equal to the character/party level)
Note: the idea here is that this skill challenge represents a drinking contest with a single individual. For multiple individuals, add additional skill challenges or increase the complextiy.

Primary Skills: Bluff, Diplomacy, Insight
Other Skills: Endurance, Thievery, History, others
Note: you might be wondering why the primary skills are all social skills. The idea behind this skill challenge is that the contest is a way for the participants to prove that they’re men. Drinking is the medium, but the challenge is won or lost through boasting, bullying, and insulting until the other man sits there sputtering in frustration.

Bluff (1 success, maximum 2, DC varies*): You boast of your achievements, inflating them to make yourself seem super-heroic.

Diplomacy (1 success, maximum 2, DC varies*): You relate your actual accomplishments, use clever words to make the other guy seem foolish, or otherwise use your skill with language and social situations to come out on top.

Intimidate (1 success, maximum 2, DC varies*): You bully, cajole, or insult the other guy, trying to incite his ire or make him lose his wits.

*The DCs of these checks will vary by individual. For example, one opponent might be easy to insult or bully, but very good at seeing through false bravado. Another, on the other hand, might respect eloquence rather than coarse language.

History (0 successes, maximum 1, moderate DC): You recall some fact about your opponent’s exploits, and you use it to your advantage.
You gain a +2 bonus on the next Bluff, Diplomacy, or Insight check you make during this skill challenge.

Endurance (0 successes, no maximum, DC somewhere between easy and moderate): You take a long pull from your flagon and slam it down, showing everyone just how manly you are.
Succeeding on this check grants you a +5 bonus on your next Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate check during this skill challenge. However, whether you succeed or fail, you gain 6 drunkenness tokens. For every 5 points by which you exceeded the DC of this check, you may reduce the number of drunkenness tokens you gain by 1. For every 2 points by which you failed the DC of this check, increase the number of drunkenness tokens by 1. See drunkenness tokens, below.

Special: You may make a single Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate check during this skill challenge without making an Endurance check to take a drink. After the first such check, each additional check incurs a cumulative -2 penalty to all Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate made in this skill challenge, as real men have no respect for weaklings who nurse their drinks. This penalty is reduced by 2 for each Endurance check you make to take a drink, whether you succeed or fail (to a minimum of 0).

Thievery (0 successes, maximum 1, hard DC): through slight of hand or clever distractions, you fool your opponent into thinking that you’ve just downed your entire flagon.
You gain the +5 bonus as if you had succeeded on an Endurance check, but you do not gain any drunkenness tokens. If you fail, you take a -2 penalty to all Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate checks for the rest of the skill challenge (and possibly any other drinking contest skill challenges running concurrently), because everyone now knows you for the coward and trickster that you are.

Note: depending on the nature of the drinking contest and the nature of the opponent, other secondary skills may be appropriate.

Success: You are clearly the victor, and you gain renown in some way (to be decided by the DM). In addition, the confidence boost you gain allows you to shake off some of your stupor; reduce your total number of drunkenness points by half (round up).

Failure: Everyone knows that you are clearly the loser here; you lose renown in some way (to be decided by the DM). In addition, you drown your failure in more drink; increase your total number of drunkenness points by half (round up).

Drunkenness Points
Depending on how much you’ve been drinking, you’ll suffer different effects. Consult the table below to determine just how drunk you really are. All drunkenness points are removed after an extended rest.

Hangover
You take a -1 penalty to Perception and Insight checks. In addition, in areas of bright light, or in the presence of loud noise (such as a thunder power being used within 5 squares, or a dragon roaring), you become dazed until the end of your next turn. This effect persists until you reach one milestone.

Over on the At-Will blog there’s a post about D&D being a tactical game first and foremost. I think that this is generally true for the most part, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, but that’s not really what I’m posting about today.

There’s a section at the end of the post entitled ‘Role-Playing Made Difficult’ that talks about the idea that all of the crunchy tactical rules in D&D make it more difficult to role-play because the rules focus on tactical advantage rather than flavor or character development. Specifically, an example is given that posits the notion that, given a choice between Skill Focus: Intimidate (+3 to Intimidate) and a feat that grants you a +1 to Intimidate but makes your eyes glow when you’re angry, most people would choose the former.

I agree. And they should. The main reason being that the second feat is almost wholly unnecessary. Why do I need a feat to say that my eyes glow? Why can’t I just say that my eyes glow? Any halfway-decent DM would allow a cool special effect that has no impact on the mechanics of the game. And if your DM insists that you need to take a feat to make your eyes glow, take Skill Focus: Intimidate, and say that you get the +3 Intimidate bonus because your eyes glow when you’re mad. Done.

Wizards has actually been very good in 4th Edition about making a distinction between mechanics and things like flavor or special effects. Many of the feats in D&D have no particular flavor to them, allowing you to skin them any way you want to. The powers, rituals, and other things all have flavor text associated with them, but it’s pretty easy to divorce that from the rules and re-skin any discrete mechanical element to your liking. I think that this fact makes role-playing easier, not harder.

To illustrate my point a little bit, I’m going to do something very taboo in the gaming world: I’m going to tell you about my character. A friend of mine is in the process of starting up a campaign, and I’ve already gone ahead and created my character for that campaign. The short version is that he’s a genasi storm mage sorcerer. The long version is that he’s the child of two human parents. When he was an infant he was held up to the sky to be blessed by the primal spirits, in accordance with the traditions of his tribe. He was struck by lightning, but instead of killing him, it changed him on a fundamental level. He became the physical embodiment of the storm (represented by the fact that he’s a windsoul genasi, mechanically speaking, a storm mage sorcerer, and also has the Mark of Storm feat).

You’ll notice a couple of things about that if you’re looking hard enough. One, there’s a clear concept. That concept came before I chose the mechanics for it, and I made sure that all of the mechanics supported my concept. I also re-skinned the genasi race a little bit, making my character a human who was transformed into something unique. The second thing is that I didn’t go for optimization. The sorcerer focuses on Charisma and, in the case of the storm mage, Dexterity. The genasi gets a bonus to Strength and Intelligence, two ability scores which are almost entirely useless to me. They also happen to be some of my lowest ability scores. Why did I choose the genasi, then? Because it fit the concept for him to be an elemental creature, and also for him to be able to fly every now and again (the windsoul racial power). If I had been going for optimization, I would have made him a halfling and gotten a boost to both of the ability scores that I wanted high. But that wouldn’t have fitted the concept.

Enough about that. I feel like I’ve gotten a bit off-track anyway. My point is, there’s room for both those who optimize and those who role-play, and I think that the game supports both methods of play equally well. I think that the mechanics are so easy to separate from the flavor and role-playing that it makes it incredibly easy to come up with a really cool character with lots of role-playing potential, even if you’re optimizing. And I think that offering feats that grant a diminished mechanical benefit for a cool role-playing effect is a silly idea, because role-playing effects can and should be free. And I feel like the game supports me in that assertion.

I just ran another D&D session yesterday (a full session report will be up soon), and I had a few thoughts on it. We’re several sessions into the game, almost done with Keep on the Shadowfell, and the players have had four levels to feel out their characters and swap out abilities to get their characters exactly the way they want them. More importantly, though, I think they’re starting to get a feel for what each other character can do, and how they can interact with each others’ abilities to best effect.

The first fight of the day yesterday was against some hobgoblins (including a warcaster) and a cave troll. The party did a lot of planning going into it, and they wanted to try to bluff their way past the encounter. I ad-libbed a skill challenge, which they succeeded, and while they didn’t get to avoid the fight entirely, they did reduce the number of enemies they had to fight and they got a surprise round before the enemies got a chance to react. I thought that this fight would be very, very difficult. The cave troll, after all, is a level 7 brute with 99 hit points and regeneration 10; I thought he’d really give the guys a run for their money. Add to that the fact that there were other enemies to contend with, including a warcaster who I put in the fight specifically so he could throw PCs down a well in the middle of the room, and I figured it would be a challenge. I underestimated my party.

There were five hobgoblin minions, a hobgoblin soldier, the warcaster, and the troll. Sredni managed to push the soldier down the well by the first full round of combat, which did some damage and managed to delay the soldier for the rest of the fight (which only lasted 3 rounds plus the surprise round). The warcaster tried to throw Sredni down after the soldier but missed, and was brutally killed by Sredni, Chance, and Shava in a single round. Kraygin tied up the minions (as he’s very good at doing), taking them all out with a single dose of dragon breath (yes, that’s five enemies dead as the result of a single minor action). Then the party ganged up on the troll. Through judicious use of alchemist’s acid, a critical hit, and action points spent all around, the party managed to reduce the troll from 99 hit points to 15 in a single round, as well as negate its regeneration for a round. On the second round they dropped it, and Sredni finished it off with a coup-de-grace with his flaming glaive. Then they dropped the troll’s body down the well, on top of the hobgoblin soldier who had almost climbed all the way out. I think the troll managed to do about 20 points of damage total, and never got to use the ability that I put it in the fight for in the first place, the ability to pick PCs up and smack other PCs with them.

The PCs then proceeded to knock out two more encounters without taking a short rest between them; they knew they would be safe to take an extended rest once this part of the keep was cleared out (the defenders were running pretty low on healing surges), so they blew all their remaining dailies, which made the fights a lot easier.

Some things that I took away from this session, that I’ll have to keep in mind for future encounters:

Kragyin: this guy is a serious minion destroyer. If I want my minions to last more than a round or two, I need to keep them away from him, and keep them spread out instead of clumped up. If he manages to get into the thick of a minion mob, that mob will be dead very soon. Also, Kraygin is capable of some very impressive damage, so he’s almost like having a third striker in the party. That means I need to start using more solos, probably, in conjunction with other enemies.

Shava: she can really dish out the damage. Shava routinely does 15-20 points of damage per round, and probably gets critical hits more often than anyone else in the group. On a crit, with a single at-will attack, she can deal 2d6+18 points of damage, assuming she’s not getting additional bonuses from Sredni.

Silus: like Shava, this boy is a damage-dealing machine. He’s also a very slippery bugger. Between shadow walk and his cloak of distortion, he’s often imposing an attack penalty of -2 to -7 on his enemies. If they get close, he’s got a couple of powers that allow him to teleport out of Dodge. If he can’t, he’s got as many hit points and healing surges as Kraygin does, because of his high Constitution. He almost never uses those healing surges though, because he’s easily the least tempting target of the group.

Chance: boy is this guy durable. High AC plus lots of hit points and healing surges, and he’s got tons of self-healing abilities. Aside from second wind, he’s got lay on hands that he can use twice per day (either on himself or someone else), and warforged resolve is just a fantastic encounter power. He’s got improved warforged resolve, which grants him extra temporary hit points when he uses the power, and he generally waits until he’s bloodied to use it. He can go from bloodied to damn near full hit points with a single minor action. Also, when he charges he’s pretty devastating. He’s got a vanguard warhammer, which deals +1d8 when he charges, so he charges as often as he can. I can’t wait to see him fight some undead now that he’s leveled up. Between holy strike and cleansing challenge (both of which are nice abilities that deal radiant damage), he should mop them up pretty quickly.

Sredni: warlords may not have the healing capabilities of clerics, but they hand out bonuses like candy. The group loves to use action points because Sredni grants them a +5 bonus to damage when they hit, or some temporary hit points when they miss. That’s one of the reasons that the troll went down so quickly; almost everyone burned an action point on it. He’s also got several powers that grant either attack or damage bonuses, or temporary hit points. Add to that his wizard powers and, between him, Kraygin, and Silus, they’ve got the controller role pretty much filled. Minions just don’t stand a chance. Neither do brutes for that matter.

[Edit: dodge = Dodge]