At Will

Well-designed skill challenges offer options to players at every level.  The highest level choice can be offered to a player is at the strategic level.  What we’ve discussed so far are tactical matters:  The players are in the challenge, making decisions, performing skill checks.  A strategy, for our design purposes, is any decision that there is no skill/action equivalent that represents the choice in its entirety.  Parsing this a little more, a strategy is the high-level choice that a party makes that decides the nature of all the other actions they take.  The act of sneaking through an enemy fortress is represented with a multitude of different skill or attribute checks.  The decision to sneak, as opposed to kicking down the door and fighting through, is a strategy.  Not every skill challenge will need strategies designed.  Many of the skill challenges you will run dictate one optimum strategy throughout, and all decisions made from that point are a result of that strategy.  If the party is chasing a fleeing villain, for example, there’s one thing to do : catch him!  If they don’t, then the skill challenge is immediately over and there’s no need to worry about it.  Anything else they do towards catching their foe is in service of the decision they made to catch him.

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Skill Challenges typically represent a progression of events. You start at point A and move to point Z while progressing through points, B,C,D, etc.

But sometimes the most sensible thing to have our players do is to repeat their actions. Certain actions are iterative, and not just a flowing of actions from one thing to the next. In City Ablaze PCs do just that. They are attempting to rescue people amidst the burning wreckage of a part of the city. Each cycle of the skill challenge (you’ll note the cycles are also sequenced and broken up into distinct phases) takes the group of players through one iteration of finding townsfolk and rescuing them. Read the rest of this entry »

Skill challenges at their base describe a progression of action:  X happens, which causes Y to happen, which results in Z.  What do you do if your skill challenge really takes place in parts, or acts?  The first part gets them to the mountain, the next part gets them up the mountain, etc.  When you want one skill challenge to be broken up in multiple stages, you are thinking of the sequencing of the challenge.

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What is nesting?  If branching gives us better differentiation between choices, then nesting is a away of expanding our initial array of choices. Normally branching provides some quality of feedback, positive or negative.  The feedback that nesting provides is more choice. Option A leads to option A1, A2, and A3.

Before tackling implementation, let’s discuss what makes nesting desirable. The rewards of nesting stem from the assumption that good games offer meaningful choices to their players. Accept this and you can accept that the most rewarding feedback is not positive or negative rewards, but more choices. When we nest in skill challenges, we create depth.  Our players will see that we’ve obviously thought things through. They also see that their choices have further consequences. We can’t hold off positive and negative feedback forever; eventually the players need to win or fail the challenge. Deferral of  that ultimate reward of success or failure with varied, multiple choices with relationships with each other creates more interest and more fun for ourselves and our players.

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It’s been a while.  Determining how best to break this down has taken a bit of work, but I think I’ve gotten to it.  Thanks for waiting!

Previously we discussed how skill challenges are made interesting through the proper use of choice.  Now we are left with the question:  how do we design choice?  We build meaningful choice through use of branches and nests.

Nesting will be covered in a later article.  For now we will discuss branching.

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