More 4E stuff

[subplotkudzu]

I commented previously on how the ad hoc difficulty table advises the GM to ramp up the Target Number of checks based on the PCs level (and, by one possible by unlikely reading, whether the PC has the skill or not). The objective appears to be that Easy actions have a success chance of roughly 65%, moderate one 45% and hard ones 10%. The scaling is required because everyone adds one half their level to the rolls, so to keep the preferred targets you have to ramp up the difficulty.

The Skills chapter in the PHB runs a little counter to this, giving some more stable numbers (though it takes pains to point out that these age guidlines and the GM has specific rules). The default Target Numbers for Swim and Climb (just to grab the first ones I see) tie to the suggested difficulties for 1st level PCs in the DMG.

These stable numbers also correspond to the 3rd edition PHB. In 3rd edition, this made it possible for characters to hit a certain reliable level in a skill and then stop raising it - get you Climb or Swim to a +7 at 4th level and you could just "take 10" (an unhindered average skill check) and reliably climb cave walls or swim in rough water. This freed the character up to spend skill points elsewhere if they weren't trying to get really good at something. Meanwhile, some characters would never take any points in those skills and would rely on their attribute defaults and assistance from their more skilled allies.

In 4th edition there aren't skill points in that sense. Everyone just gets better at everything all the time. a 10th level Warlock has a +5 on his Climb and Swim rolls even if he never tries to climb and doesn't practice swimming. Mind you, this only matters if he tries to do something predictable where the PHB numbers would apply - any ad hoc action would have a +5 on the difficulty to balance it against his level.

This just strikes me as madness. Can someone playing 4E explain why this makes sense?

Is it to prevent the problems of bad adventure design, where modules had areas where everyone in the plarty had to make a DC 25 climb test? If so, I would think the very celver 4E Skill Challenge rules dealt with that.

Is it just number inflaction to make the players feel like their characters are better than they are?  

The argument can be made that the new skill system silos off the skills that will be useful in a dungeneering/adventure context (the existing skill list) and those that aren't (everything that got cut) to prevent the PCs of casual players from being outlcassed by those who have maximized the rules - anything that isn't directly applicable to the numerics of adventuring is handwaved. I find this unsettling. I happen to like the little character filigrees - Hiram spending weeks wandering Emirikol to get a point or two in Knowledge: Emirikol; Cybele spending a point or two in Craft: Calligraphy, and so on. Yes, we could hand-wave them, but we could hand wave a lot of things. I like the Pcs having the option to flesh out and have the system reflect that, rather than a flat +5 bonus if they have the skill. That hearkens back to 2E Non-Weapon proficiences, which is not a step forward. I don't need the mechanics to protect my players from inefficient decisisions - first, I can do that myself; second, if everyone makes them no one is going to "get ahead".

Maybe that's just me.

Comments

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how much of this is cross purposes because you're discussing 3.5 and I'm discussing 3.0, and the 3.0 DMG doesn't have anything like those search DCs - the samples cap out with a DC 28 search trap.

The rules weren't constructed to handle a "largish group", being designed for a party of 3-5 players. Moving outside that (and its relevant treasure guidelines) will have the same effect as giving out monty-haul treasure amounts. I expect that 4E will suffer from identical problems when players inevitably hit 28th level with a group of 8 PCs.

i.e. the Nancy Drew skills: if I advise my players to cap out skills when they get to really high levels why on earth would I then design NPCs on a different formula? The default 13th level Rogue (from the oh-so-handy 3E DMG NPC charts) has a hide and move silent of +21 after magical and attribute bonuses. That's high, but it's not out of reach for him to be spotted by PCs with a good roll (Melas and Cyble in Emirkol both have +11 Spot at 8th level), but such an NPC should be just as sneaky as the PCs would want to be if it were them with a +21 on their roll - to be able to take 10 and run at full speed past unsuspecting normal people. Even that is very high from what I've actually run - the 13th level fighter thief in my Fantasyt Revolution arc had a +13 hide and sneak, but the monk (who was the the team ninja in the supers universe) had a +30 - but that's because he expected to be able to sneak past everyone because he was a super-ninja. If I could plot for that in my supers game, why wouldn't I be able to challenge him in other ways in D&D?

I think we're coming att this from totally different angles when it comes to "challenges that suit their skill" - you're talking about maxamizing the skill and then asking for challenges that will force them to roll over a 10. I'm talking about telling the players up front that Target numbers hover at 20 and cap out at 30, and letting them allocate their points accordingly. I prefer my method - in part because it fleshes the PCs out more and in part because it prevents challenge inflation where things get more difficult, forcing the players to take multiple feats, stearch out buffing items and then cast additional sidewise buffing spells like Reduce Person to get their already very high skill over a DC that I will have to ratchet up next time to accomidate for the spells the players will make part of their standard munchkin routine.

[mneme]

Hmm. How do they handle searching for/disabling magic traps in 3.0? Do they have trapfinding there?

Re "philosophy" -- yeah, there are some interesting differences. I don't see a lot of munchkinism in maxing out at least a few skills (obviously, ones where you're going to be going against at-level difficulty and where there's a big penalty for failing) -- after all, that's the point of a level-based system, right? By having skill capped by level, you set a baseline of where someone "good" at a skill is expected to be at a given level. So players doing relatively trivial optimizing is just an expected part of the system contract.

By contrast, it looks to me as if you cap the difficulty faced on the skill front at a certain level for many skills, but try to make up for it by encouraging broad skill capabilities. Which does work, functionally, within the social contract, but also relies on the social contract (kinda. If you challenge players on a broad base of skills, with targets that they have a hope of making at low levels, it pushes players into making their characters broader rather than deeper, but either side can bend it -- a player can decide they want their character to auto-succeed a key skill and bump it up, or a GM could make an exception for a particular NPC and massively overpower the PCs in one area) to enforce the norms, rather than the challenge level/level system enforcing the norms. (also: stock monsters of types that get a lot of skill points--outsiders, dragons, even some intelligent undead -- tend to have max skill ranks in appropriate skills in 3.5 Is this not true in 3.0?).

FWIW, I -don't- think you should be consistently failing when you're playing a character that's good at something. What's the point of that? But even rolls that give a maxed out character a -chance- at failing in 3rd ed (ie, fail on a 2) will be auto-fails for characters with a very small investment (not "no"). And challenges that give them a -chance- of failing (or would give them a chance) are what make it worthwhile to play such a character in the first place.

It seems to me that you're actually taking a very similar approach to 4th ed, except for the skill inflation with level gains (which really just match stat/monster inflation with level gain -- after all, what's the difference with fighting 5th-11th level monsters at 8th level? Why not just keep the power level the same and fight more orcs?) and that you're doing it by norming at a certain set of target numbers rather than by artificially limiting the skill gulf.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

re Trap Finding: I apologize - the PHB does go up to a 34 DC for a Search roll on a magical trap by a 9th level spell; the examples in the DMG just don't correspond to that or go up that high. A quick look at the other skills doesn't show much else that hits that "higher than 30" threshold - escaping masterwork manacles, making Hostile or Unfriendly NPCs Friendly or Helpful in a single roll, opening an Amazing lock (for which you are likely intended to take 20)...oh, hearing an owl glide in for the kill through a stone wall is DC 45! But there aren't many so I missed it.

I see the point of a level based system a ready way to formulate the character's ability in their classes key aspects (which for anyone not a Bard or Rogue are non-skill), and secondarily to that their rough breadth and depth in skills. The cap is there to show how good the very best PCs are of that level, and to prevent a first level rogue from taking 16 ranks in Move Silent and Hide. By giving rogues roughly 10 points a level to select between 30 class skills I also expect that they will not be aiming for maximal rank in every skill because it's impossible. Even if they're only interested in half of the class skill list it's impossible. So your assumption that maxed out indicates where the character would be considered 'good at level' runs counter to my interpretation of 'best at level'.

To be clear, it's not MY capping of the difficulties, it's the systems. The DCs I'm mentioning are being pulled from the 3E PHB. I have to assume that they were intentional. Likewise the DMG sample characters at level has skill-based 20th level PCs maxing out at +30 or so key skills after buffing, feats and stats - high enough to roll a 1 and still not fail DC 30 check, but still occasionally be challenged by the rare DC 30-40 difficulty. (3E does have some monsters max out, but my quick perusal doesn't turn up as many in Nancy Drew skills as you might expect.) This is the system as presented, not my social contract for it.

And challenges that give them a -chance- of failing (or would give them a chance) are what make it worthwhile to play such a character in the first place. I'm confused by this statement. If my PC has an insanely high skill in something it's because I want to be reliably really good at it, and occasionally face things that are nigh impossible. So when I face those challenges, I'm not likely to bring the rest of my party along, because they aren't insanely skilled. There's no difference between a Hide/Move Silent/Climb +20 rogue and a Feng Shui Ninja with intrusion of 18, or a super with Invisibility and wall crawling - no one else in the party can even compete, so these are my niche skills. I will be kickass most of the time and challenged occasionally. So why the complaint about D&D that I haven't seen you level against other systems?

As to the question of "why not just keep the power level the same and keep fighting orcs", I see this as a false question. I use tougher monsters because they have different places in myth, and require different tactics. But I don't expect 1st level characters to free scale brick walls over lava pits while dodging an evil archer (DC 30 twice a round to speed climb, plus DC 25+damage taken whenever you're hit) - sure it's a cool image, but it's something for the greatest 18th level hero to face, not a large group of 1st level ones. And if none of the PCs have a +20 climb skill to get past that situation, I expect them to resolve it a different way - but the cap of 30 on DCs hardly denies me breathing room on my skill tests.

[mneme]

I see the level->skill differently, particularly for classes with a lot of skill points to throw around. For them (which is to say, more than half of them, particularly since one is Wizards who get a good number of skill points from Int), getting to max ranks in a skill is easy, so that's "good at a skill at this level" (they can't get good at -every- skill, but yeah). -best- at a skill means you've also thrown in feats, but that only makes sense if you really want to be the best, since a feat is really expensive, particularly for a high-skill character (otoh, once you've spent the feat, you might as well keep the skill maxed; otherwise you've burned a feat to go from 1 to 4 in a secondary skill).

Re other systems; most other systems don't have a huge level gulf, which gets magnified into a huge power gulf for those who are acting like a first level character for some aspects. In a superhero game, nobody can compete with the invisible ninja in sneaking around, but they -can- sneak up on the bad guys. In 3E, by the actual monster books, bad guys do tend to have higher and higher spot and listen rolls -- so while at first level, the would-be ninja gets spotted over half the time (been there), at high levels the ninja is like the night, but nobody else can sneak at all. (Against monsters, who seem to not have much to do with their skill points other than getting spot bonuses of +19 or higher. Opposing characters might very well spend points on skills that suit their role, in which case the non-sneaky PCs playing Nancy Drew are probably ok).

Just looking at d20srd (a Very Useful 3.5 resource), at monsters of CR 10 and higher:

Aboleth mage: CR 17, Spot+17, Listen + 15 (oddly worse than Aboleth, CR 7, Spot + 16, Listen +16, but I guess ten levels of wizard don't help your senses)
Air Elemental, elder: CR 11, spot +29, Listen +29 (actually, that kinda makes sense)
Astral Deva: CR 14, Spot +23, Listen +23
Animated Object, Colossal: CR 10, No skills (yay!)
Trumpet Archon: CR 14, Listen +18, Spot +18 (actually, pretty much all Outsiders have good listen/spot numbers)
Abyssal Greater Basilisk: CR 12, Listen 10, Spot 10 (Magical Beasts tend to have lousy skills)