Unlocking powers during combat

A neat solution to three issues in the game. The first two issues:

1. People like new stuff. Whatever the edition, people like the shiny new toy. This is problematic because enough shiny new toys begin to clutter the character sheet, bloat the game, and introduce power creep. Fourth edition tried to solve this by allowing characters to replace existing powers with higher level ones, but a lot of people like new stuff more often than every few levels.
2. People like powerful powers. The shiniest new toys are the most fun, and powerful stuff is the shiniest of all. The problem here is that as soon as you put it on the character sheet you are responsible for its balance on the game. The classic example is the old dilemma of how you get a broken magic item away from a character without disrupting the game. 

For both of theses issues, the problems are exacerbated by the fact that as soon as the player has control over the usage, it becomes routine. Daily and encounter powers were new and flashy, but pretty quickly they just became the standard opening volley of every major combat and they lost some flash. The excitement grew stale.

The solution might be to take a handful of powers off the character sheet and put them into the encounter. I call these "unlocked powers." So instead of the fighter having Cleave (i.e. make an additional attack after knocking a target unconscious), maybe Cleave is a power that goblins provide and this gives goblins a distinct feel. For example, "Cleave: If goblin is reduced from full hit points to unconscious in a single attack, attacker may make an additional attack against an adjacent target." All of the sudden being a big damage dealer allows you to wade through hordes of goblins. It is exciting, fun, and isn't going to become an insane build that a player can use in every combat for an entire campaign.

This brings us to the third issue:
     3.  Monster knowledge skills are often under utilized.

If we set up the unlocked powers to be better or worse for different character types, monster knowledge skills become really valuable. The wizard knows not to hit the mob of goblins for 2 damage each because that forecloses Cleave on any of them. If a magma demon explodes upon dying unless someone adjacent passes a DC 20 Arcana check, then we know the wizard better standby. All of the sudden combat is riddled with mini-games; some to get access to awesome powers and others to avoid bad things, and the fact that you can piggy back flavor ("Griffon eggs are worth 1500 gp") on those monster knowledge checks is pretty nice too.

Finally, because access to these powers is limited, there really can never be any balance issues. Worst case scenario is it makes one combat too easy and too memorable. There also is no limit to what they can do or what you can introduce. So far all of my examples have been on monster death, but you could trigger the power on other conditions, too. Maybe upon shedding first blood (i.e. when first bloodied), you can tear the horn from the dark unicorn and use it as a wand implement. Maybe this limits what powers the unicorn can use thereafter or sends it into a fury or kills it outright.

Unlocked powers are a really broad design space that doesn't disrupt game balance, makes combats more memorable, adds value to existing skills, facilitates the introduction of monster ecology, and help give individual monsters distinct feels. They could be easily added to 3e or 4e and all you'd have to do is determine the appropriate cost. Maybe that cost is free and is just the reward for being in the right place at the right time, maybe it costs an AoO or an OA, maybe it costs a surge, or maybe different unlocked powers have different costs. Regardless, it is a simple idea with a lot of potential.

Why I dislike skill challenges

Earlier editions of D&D were so basic that you *needed* to make up rules, often on the fly, to handle fringe issues that arose during the game. Because there were not tools in place, it fell heavily on creativity to fill in the gaps and a lot of this creativity was satisfied through the meager skills a character had. As the game grew more robust, more tools were put in place to resolve more issues. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and so when the need for creativity diminished, it felt, to many people, that the role of creativity in the game also diminished.

Skill challenges were an effort to restore skills back to a challenge solving mechanism in D&D. Once again, challenges can be circumvented or defeated through the use of skills and coming up with creative usages. Despite this, I think they miss the point and fail in two crucial regards. 

1. Skill challenges don’t allow creativity back into the game but rather insist it return. There is a significant difference between being receptive to creative input and demanding it on the spot. 
2. The quality of the creativity is dependent on the quality of the skill challenge. Those moments of player genius where the GM never saw it coming aren’t a *part* of skill challenges. Sure, those moments could arise, but not because of the skill challenge system, almost despite the skill challenge system.

I want to spend a moment more on that second point. 

Consider combat. A lazy GM could pick a handful of monsters at random, toss them into a featureless space, and call for initiative. There is enough balance in the game and enough neat options that the players would still probably have a good time. The same approach to a skill challenge would be an unmitigated disaster. With skill challenges, you only get out what you put in. When we reconsider the role of skills in earlier editions of D&D, I frequently pitted the party against things I thought were interesting with no idea how they’d be resolved. They tried stuff, they rolled dice, and we saw what happened. The lazy moments, as often as the planned moments, lead to those great scenarios were creativity won the day. I like to call this ‘Failing in the right direction.’ Skill challenges do not set you up so that when you fail, you fail in the right direction.

I don’t mean to say that the skill challenge framework couldn’t be useful; any structure helps people understand things better. But the concept of “skill challenges” has been around for as long as someone decided it should take more than one check to complete something… this system is just dressing. Even so, it is bad dressing because it forces too many people to spend too many actions doing too many things they aren’t excited to do (i.e. aid another).

I’ve thought a lot about skill challenge-type systems these last few days and I really don’t see any redeeming feature of the 4e skill challenge system. The phrase, “some skill checks are not resolved in a single check, and may take multiple checks (possibly even from multiple skills!) to fully resolve” is basically as robust as the system. The reason being that all of the neat consequences are external to the system itself and follow from GM creativity (i.e. if you fail you anger the Baron and he pits additional resources against you) that would/could exist independent of the system.

The only neat idea is that failure might cost a healing surge to simulate arduous actions, and this is only neat because it makes the consequence of skills equal to that of combat and ubiquitious in its presence in the game. In other words, it actually matters. A skill challenge to sneak past a series of sentries and break into a prison unnoticed might be fun, but failure just means you have to fight some guys. You aren’t any *worse* off (other than having to fight) than you otherwise would have been because skills don’t use the same resources as combat. 

In sum, the skill challenge system, like 4e skills themselves, are neat designs that ended up being bad rules. They feel tacked on, don't feel organic during the game, don’t foster the type of creativity that was lost, and don’t even do what they were designed to do well. I think it would be better to take a different approach than try and re-design or retro-fit skill challenges, particularly when the concept is so simple that it really doesn’t need much of a “system” to be in the game.

Two updates

I took another mini-vacation and in my distance from the project I got some clarity on two issues.

First, the game I was creating did everything I wanted it to do, but it didn't highlight the key things I wanted it to highlight. Those key things are:

1. A game that makes house ruling simple such that it could realistically be populated by community generated content. As I got deeper into the game, I personally found it easy to develop rules, but I began to notice a distinct learning curve.
2. A game that presents basic tradeoffs at all levels of play. The simple tradeoffs presented at low levels of game play for most games are intuitive, fun, and lend a 'feel' to the play experience. I have always felt that is lost as you progress higher in levels and I don't think it has to be that way.
3. A game that truly lets you build your character (as opposed to pick your character). A game built on Reed's Law is more balanced, more robust, and more fair than a game built on a bunch of linear paths.

Second, when the articles I was posting dealt with abstract theory, the discussion that followed was really useful. The comments I got planted seeds in my head that pointed me to new directions of game design that I probably never would have stumbled upon without them. We didn't always agree and we often recognized the same issue but wanted to solve it in different directions, but the principles of our recognition were what was of value.

When I started publishing drafts of "product," the dynamic changed. The comments were more about disliking a word or pointing out a typo. Those comments are useful in their time and place (that is, during editing), but during design they are more a distraction. I guess I'm not really sure what I expected because of course people are going to comment on what they notice and I still appreciate any participation I got.

So what does it all mean?
I made some changes to the game. So far, it feels like the changes are strongly for the better. You learn so much as you design anything that you cannot help but improve on the second pass. In this case, it is more like the fifth pass, but whatever. I'm excited and the game feels like it has half the rules with all the same game play.

I still plan to publish little articles, but I'm going to try and go back to theory. There was more value (for me and, I think, for others) in those discussions than there ever was in any of the more specific articles. The specific stuff I'll save until it is done, not just posting it 10 minutes after I finish a draft. That way people can see how I chose to bring the theory we discussed into the game and judge the strengths and weaknesses together as whole instead of seeing discrete parts which may independently be impossible to appropriately judge.

Animal companions

To round out the ranger class, here is a draft on animal companions. The draft contains only five types of animal companions, but hopefully you can see how easy it would be to introduce more.

The approach treats animal companions as a style for two reasons:

1. Companions are powerful. Companions can deal as much damage as a character and have about the same chance to hit. They aren't weak and since extra attacks (particularly extra attacks without penalties) are hard to come by, that makes them powerful. 
2. The role of styles is to silo powerful and complex powers to ensure the game doesn't get too muddy. Animal companions are an awesome part of RPGs that I want in the game, but they also add another figure to keep track of, another set of statistics, and another attack. We don't want to that piggybacking with too many other complex game rules.

The ranger

Another class, the ranger. The animal companion sidebar is forthcoming, but you can get an idea of the class even without it.

Circling back on Reed's Law

I plan to continue publishing drafts (emphasis on drafts, there) of game elements to get deeper into the game, but I think there is also enough content to start circling back through my earlier articles and show how I put those simple principles into action. I want to begin this process by talking about the way classes work in general.

What follows is a simple but powerful argument. Because I'm borrowing ideas from other fields of study, the parallels are not 100% but with almost any measure of comity you should see how they align.

In 4e, you pick a class and have limited opportunities to diverge from that class. For the sake of the hypothetical, lets say you pick fighter. When a new fighter option is added, it creates many new potential fighter builds. If the new option was a fighter 4 power, every build of fighter 4 and beyond now has the option to use that power.

In 3e, you pick a class but can easily multiclass into other classes. If a similar "fighter 4" option is added, it creates many new potential builds for any build that has four levels of fighter. There are substantially more 3e builds with fighter 4 than there are 4e builds with fighter 4. An analogy would be to say that when you add an option to 4e, the additional option expands the game linearly. When you add an option to 3e, the additional option expands the game exponentially.

In other words:

• 4e. Number of builds = (number of options)
• 3e. Number of builds = (number of options)^2

Now, because this is a game we also care to some measure about balance. Either because we personally feel balance is important or because we want to ensure that each player can feel they provide meaningfully to each challenge. We can achieve balance primarily through two ways:

1. Ensure all builds are balanced
2. Lower transaction costs to move between builds

The first route is a fools errand because it requires you to presuppose how each GM will run his or her game. That isn't to say we shouldn't try, but it is to say it cannot rely on that route alone. Implicitly, 4e did try to rely on that route alone by placing such high transaction costs to shift between builds. They did a remarkable job, but the result is that each new option added has to be weighed against every build ineligible for said option. If that new Fighter 4 power is "Gain +10 attack" then every build that cannot take that power is now woefully obsolete and rightfully angry.

Third edition relied more heavily on the second route to balance by making multiclassing easy. At first it strikes against intuition but grows obvious the more you think about it--the lower the transaction cost to acquire any power, the less important balance becomes. If a 3e class were created with a level 1 power of "Gain +10 attack," everyone would take it and the game would remain in balance. Sure, it would be stupid and distract players from more interesting powers, but it wouldn't actually break the balance because everyone could get it.

The problem with 3e, though, was that each class progressed linearly. The deeper you go into a linear path, the higher the transaction cost to get there. If we change the hypothetical to a class with a level 4 power of "Gain +10 attack," now the balance is broken. In a party of 8th level PCs, the first player to restart will mop the floor with his companions and soon everyone will want to die to get those critical 4 levels. You'll see that it would be even more dire if it were an 8th level power that granted "Gain +10 attack."

Now consider that the exponentially increasing builds of 3e relied on linearly increasing high level powers. An added Fighter 4 power must be weighed against all builds that do not have Fighter 4, which is many. A Fighter 12 power must be weighed against all builds that do not have Fighter 12, which is the vast majority. The same issue that plagues 4e plagues 3e, just later in the game.

This system (which I'm tentatively now referring to as Runeward) takes the lessons from the above and goes a step further. By arranging powers not linearly, but by class score (a composite of character level and class level), you expand the number of builds to which a power is available. In fact, to an 8th level character, no power (save a capstone power) is more than two levels removed from any build. What this means is that the transaction costs between builds are extremely low and there are a great many builds.

In other words:

• Runeward. Number of builds = 2^(Number of options)

A guy named Reed named this Reed's Law. It shows that the value of a network differs based on how the network is set up, and that allowing the maximum number of couplings leads to the most valuable network. In RPG terms, a valuable network means that with a minimal number of rules memorized, you can have a network of builds that allows more customization and specification than any previous edition. It leads to a simpler game that is at the same time still more robust.

The bard

Behold! The bard in all its multiclassing potential glory. I've always seen the bard less as a minstrel and more as a batman (the British officer's assistant, but I guess the comic book version would be pretty cool too) to the party.

The bard

Stunt successes

This post follows up on the re-re-introduction to stunts and affinities and also builds off my argument for why I dislike 4e skills. The goal of this post is to communicate an understanding of how the stunt and affinities system plays out.

The following table shows the likelihood of succeeding at a level appropriate stunt with either a 'related' affinity or a 'spot on' affinity. The first pink section shows the likelihood of success if no affinity is used (this holds true across all levels). The table presumes an average ability modifier of +2. The large table-breaks correlate to how many action points are spent to re-roll results. As a reminder, no re-rolls are allowed if there is not at least a related affinity and you may re-roll one additional time per tier (level 1-4, 5-9, and 10+). This is why the Tier 1 line is blank for the 2 AP section, and similarly for Tier 1 and 2 in the 3 AP section.

This table also introduces an idea not yet presented. Affinities provide a +1 bonus per tier (+1 at 1-4, +2 at 5-9, and +3 at 10+) to the 'spot on' results or ANY re-roll after spending an action point. The math really didn't need it, but I think people might psychologically need it. If we find out later that people don't need it, it will be extremely easy to remove and won't substantively change the math.

Let's focus on the top section of the table in the '0 AP' zone. Throughout play the most common stunts faced will be basic and heroic. What we see is that even untrained heroes have a decent chance to succeed at level appropriate stunts; they can almost always be included and will face reasonable challenges. Trained heroes (spot on) have a much higher rate of success, passing 91% of the time. This 91% is more exciting, in my mind, than a similar mechanic on a straight d20. The equivalent on a straight d20 is a 3+. This is an 8+ on either of 2d20. That tends to feel more satisfying during play.

We also see that a hero with a related affinity can spend an action point to be almost as competent as the spot on hero. Maybe he'll get lucky and not have to spend the AP, but if he is willing to spend it he can be almost as likely to succeed. Because related affinities are construed relatively broadly, a player willing to put in creative effort can regularly achieve this.

One could argue that construing affinities broadly is similar to adding many different skills to a skill challenge such that everyone has something to do. There are two differences. First, that puts all the burden on the GM and we've already established that GMs regularly fall into apathy. They have a lot on their plates, so shifting some of that burden onto the players is a great idea while also empowering the players. Second, when a GM sets something up so the players can succeed it is seen as gimmicky or deus ex machina or some similarly overused term. When a system is set up so players can facilitate the narrative or input creativity, it is seen as a strength of role playing games.

Next, onto the concept of group success rate that I discussed with the 4e skill system.

This table makes two assumptions. First, that a mix of basic and heroic stunts are faced. Second, that the group is mixed of spot-on and not-spot-on characters. The results of this table are the product of averaging the success rate of basic and heroic stunts and multiplying the related affinity result by the spot on result. In other words, if we look at the top line of the table at the top of this post, it is:

[Average (65% + 40%)] x [Average (91% + 70%)] = 42%

What this reveals is that as the party increases in level and as the party is willing to commit more resources to a task, the likelihood that the party succeeds at said task increases. Compare this, again, to what happens to 4e skills as you increase. This system grows more inclusive while 4e grew more exclusive. Moreover, although the higher success rates require the expenditure of more resources, you have more resources available to spend. At the same time, those resources could go to powering more diverse and more potent powers, so the tradeoff remains poignant across levels.

Affinities and stunts

It has been a while since I talked about skills or affinities but I settled on an approach that leads to greater balance across levels and smooths out some of the oddities of DCs by approaching them differently.

First, some vocabulary. The term “skills” is poor because it references too many things. It refers to the character’s ability to achieve an act and it refers to the act itself.  This leads to a lack of precision in general that is compounded because “skill” is also used in the mechanics. “I’m good at Climb so I’ll climb the wall. [rolls d20] Seventeen with my +10 climb is 27 against the climb DC 20.” That is dumb.

In a game focusing on words, some of this will be unavoidable, but we can do better. I plan to stick with the term affinities to reference the ability of the character. I call the actions themselves stunts. The term is intended to be broad and can refer to anything from jumping a pit to training a horse to pulling some piece of knowledge from the recesses of your mind. Any action where after you succeed some grizzled veteran NPC typically short on praise might turn and say, “Nice little stunt you pulled back there” could be a stunt.

Stunts

All stunts are an ability check. The same guidelines (as presented in 4.0.1) apply in determining which ability best governs the stunt. Characters may describe how they attempt the stunt with an affinity if they so choose. Players select a single affinity and the GM adjudicates its applicability. The affinity cannot be changed after the GM adjudicates, so players are encouraged to select the most appropriate affinity in their arsenal.

Affinities

As per before, characters receive three affinities at character creation, chosen from a list provided by their first character class. Some classes provide bonus affinities chosen from the same list. If you later multiclass and select a bonus affinity as your starting feat, you can choose from any list in which you have classes. There may be other ways to add additional affinities to your list such as race or talents.

An affinity does not provide a numeric benefit. If an affinity is ‘spot on’ it allows the player to roll 2d20 and take the higher result. If an affinity is ‘related’ it allows the player to spend an action point to reroll a d20. A ‘spot on’ affinity may also spend an action point to reroll one of the d20s. At level 1-4, a single action point can be spent per check; at 5-9, two may be spent; and at 10+, up to three action points may be spent to reroll any given check.

The guidelines for determining ‘spot on’ and ‘related’ are essentially the same as last time with minor changes. Namely, ‘spot on’ is more narrowly construed and ‘related’ is more broadly construed. In this manner, the breadth of ‘spot on’ should be in line with current D&D skills and the ability to spend a resource (the action point) for related affinities encourages taking on risk and creativity.

Determining DCs

There are three DCs in the game: basic, heroic, and legendary. These DCs are then modified by a few simple concepts.

• Basic stunts are DC 10 and are standard stunts that are challenging but achievable by any character.
• Heroic stunts are DC 15 and are more challenging stunts that most common folk could not reasonably achieve. A trained hero (i.e. ‘spot on’) or a dedicated hero (i.e. spend an action point on a related affinity) will find these eminently doable.  
• Legendary stunts are DC 20 and are the most challenging stunts. Common folk could never hope to achieve these stunts and they remain challenging for all but the most competent heroes. Importantly, legendary stunts always have legendary consequences. Running across a thin steel wire may be legendary, but it is not legendary if it is strung three feet above a stack of cushions.

The type of stunt does not change as the characters progress in level. A 50-foot leap over a chasm is legendary whether the characters are 1^st or 15^th level and regardless of their abilities, powers, or magic. While these three categories are typically sufficient, sometimes you may decide that more nuance is desired. It is perfectly acceptable to increase or decrease the DC by two. This lets you have an “easy heroic” or a “challenging basic” stunt. This level of nuance is not required for the system to function.

Once the base DC is set, determine the level of the stunt. Increase the DC by one-half the stunt’s level, just as you would for characters. Many stunts are level one and never increase. For instance, training a standard horse under standard conditions is a level one basic stunt regardless of level.

A stunt may be of a higher level for many different reasons. Quickly climbing out of a steep pit may be by all accounts a heroic stunt, but when the walls of the pit are lined with the souls of the damned who tear at your flesh in the futile hope of salvation it all of the sudden becomes a higher level. Training the aforementioned horse might be a basic stunt, but breaking it within moments of leaping onto its back while racing away from worgs brings it up a bit. How much it brings it up varies by the particular circumstances of the stunt.

Throughout play, characters will often (but by no means always) find themselves completing basic, heroic, and legendary stunts of their level. At first this may seem contrived, but what it actually entails is ensuring that characters are routinely properly challenged. The distinction between this approach and pulling a DC off of a table is that this parses out the elements of the DC such that you are forced to acknowledge the “level” of the characters. When you are pulling a DC off a table it is easy to just declare the DC without a rationale; scaling the walls of the castle is DC 19 because that is what would be an appropriate challenge for this level. This approach forces you to acknowledge that the stone blocks of the castle are a heroic stunt (DC 15), but because you want the DC to be 19, you need to make up that +4. So you come up with a reason to make it more challenging, and the reason tends to make it more cinematic. Instead of climbing the wall, now the wind whips against them and ice has filled the cracks. The characters, completing the same task, now seem more heroic by virtue of the GM being forced to justify the +4. This is the difference between a DC 19 and a level 8 heroic stunt.

Next I’ll try and compare this approach against my criticism of 4e skills and show there why and how it makes for a better play experience.

Edit--A commenter felt the DCs might be complex to calculate during play so I provided a table. Blogger, of course, hates retaining formats.

Level	Basic	Heroic	Legendary
1	10	15	20
2-3	11	16	21
4-5	12	17	22
6-7	13	18	23
8-9	14	19	24
10-11	15	20	25
12-13	16	21	26
14-15	17	22	27
16-17	18	23	28
18-19	19	24	29
20+	20	25	30

The Fighter

Another class: the fighter.

The hope is that you can start to see how they'd multiclass together or how they could develop tactics to work as a team. Since it isn't anywhere else, the Glass Jaw condition makes a target act as Bloodied with regards to damage threshold (i.e. reduces damage threshold while the condition applies). The fighter applying Glass Jaw and the rogue following up with a sneak attack is a nifty combo.

Class preview: Rogue

Some of the details may change since folks have been presenting interesting ideas with regards to initiative and zones, but I think this has most of the pieces. As always, weird google docs conversion so I recommend downloading.

The Rogue

Hopefully this helps put into perspective some of the other things I've been talking about like the progression of stocks, abilities, the importance of the class modifier, and so on. As I develop more classes I'll also be putting up guides and tools to help explain the rationale behind all the little odds and ends of the system. They should make it really easy to produce new powers and new classes that play well with others and maintain the overall system balance. Feedback appreciated.

Why I dislike 4e skills

Fourth edition created a skill system that was easy and fluid to allocate bonuses and then, seemingly as an afterthought, created DCs to go with it. Maybe this is harsh, but there is a reason the DC table keeps changing. The newest iteration accurately challenges characters of different ability at a given DC, but is just terrible for the game as a whole. It isn’t the DCs fault, though, the DCs just happen to reveal the underlying weaknesses of the skill system as a whole. The system is bad and should be replaced.

D&D is a game about parties of adventurers going out, facing challenges, killing things, and taking their stuff. Across the many challenges they face, some characters shine while others fall back into support. Giving each player a chance to shine is *good* for the game. But the key is that each character has something they can provide to the challenge. If the ability between two characters grows too disparate, they cannot both be challenged and that is *horrible* for the game.

I’m not decrying the scenario where only Doug the Rogue can climb the wall and lowers a rope for the rest of the party; that’s great. But achieving that result by increasing DCs so high that only Doug can hope to succeed is bad because you’ve now replicated the “only Doug” scenario into *all* skills. Many skills, most skills, you want to be able to challenge the entire party and challenge them reasonably. Think of the impact of the “only Doug” model of skills with skill challenges; the only solution is to introduce gimmicky ways to use variant skills in the skill challenge so that everyone has *something* they can do. That defeats the purpose of a skill challenge.

Let’s walk through the following chart. Columns A-C show the 4e suggested DCs by level and difficulty. Column D shows the gap between the Hard and the Easy DC. Columns E and F show the expected skill modifier by subtracting 8 from the DC (this is given in the text of Heroes of the Fallen Lands). What this means is that the 4e system presumes that at first level, there are people in the party who are +11 to, say, Athletics and someone else who is +0. The DCs work great when you challenge characters individually by their respective skill level, but because characters belong to a party, you’ll often want to (and have to) challenge them together. Look at how the gap grows across levels.

 

A	B	C		D		E	F
Level	Easy	Hard		Gap		Bad  mod	Good mod
1	8	19		11		0	11
2	9	20		11		1	12
3	9	21		12		1	13
4	10	21		11		2	13
5	10	22		12		2	14
6	11	23		12		3	15
7	11	23		12		3	15
8	12	24		12		4	16
9	12	25		13		4	17
10	13	26		13		5	18
11	13	27		14		5	19
12	14	28		14		6	20
13	14	29		15		6	21
14	15	29		14		7	21
15	15	30		15		7	22
16	16	31		15		8	23
17	16	31		15		8	23
18	17	32		15		9	24
19	17	33		16		9	25
20	18	34		16		10	26
21	19	35		16		11	27
22	20	36		16		12	28
23	20	37		17		12	29
24	21	37		16		13	29
25	21	38		17		13	30
26	22	39		17		14	31
27	22	39		17		14	31
28	23	40		17		15	32
29	23	41		18		15	33
30	24	42		18		16	34

This next chart recreates the expected skill mods (columns E and F) and then sets a DC that splits the difference to give each character an equal chance to succeed. This is column G. Columns H and I show the likelihood of success for each character and column J shows the product of that success. Said differently, column J shows the likelihood that both characters succeed or the overall success rate of the party as a whole. This is the most important measure of the skill system. Players are individuals at a table and a party; you want as many individuals to succeed as often as possible and you want the party as a whole to succeed. You’ll note that no 4e DCs come even close to this progression. Think about that, this means that no DC in 4e is set to maximize the fun or success of the group as a whole. That’s a problem.

 

E	F	G	H	I	J
Bad mod	Good mod	Split DC	"Bad" Succeed	"Good" Succeed	Group succeed
0	11	16.5	23%	78%	17%
1	12	17.5	23%	78%	17%
1	13	18.0	20%	80%	16%
2	13	18.5	23%	78%	17%
2	14	19.0	20%	80%	16%
3	15	20.0	20%	80%	16%
3	15	20.0	20%	80%	16%
4	16	21.0	20%	80%	16%
4	17	21.5	18%	83%	14%
5	18	22.5	18%	83%	14%
5	19	23.0	15%	85%	13%
6	20	24.0	15%	85%	13%
6	21	24.5	13%	88%	11%
7	21	25.0	15%	85%	13%
7	22	25.5	13%	88%	11%
8	23	26.5	13%	88%	11%
8	23	26.5	13%	88%	11%
9	24	27.5	13%	88%	11%
9	25	28.0	10%	90%	9%
10	26	29.0	10%	90%	9%
11	27	30.0	10%	90%	9%
12	28	31.0	10%	90%	9%
12	29	31.5	8%	93%	7%
13	29	32.0	10%	90%	9%
13	30	32.5	8%	93%	7%
14	31	33.5	8%	93%	7%
14	31	33.5	8%	93%	7%
15	32	34.5	8%	93%	7%
15	33	35.0	5%	95%	5%
16	34	36.0	5%	95%	5%

The most critical thing is to look at is the progression across levels. The gap eventually grows such that the good mod has to roll a 2 and the bad mod has to roll a 20. Those two characters cannot face the same challenge and both have a good time. More likely, one is bored and one is angry. The group success as a whole also plummets. I posit that a good skill system would reverse this trend. As levels increase, the system should grow inclusive. More characters should succeed at more things to attain a more ubiquitous level of heroism. The actions of a 30^th level character are too important for them to have to wait on the sidelines because of an “only Doug” mentality. Again, this isn’t to say that certain actions shouldn’t become the purview of a single talented character. But when you build the “only Doug” mentality into the very heart of the skill system, you either end up making everything an exclusive purview or making it impossible to challenge the specialist and the non-specialist alike. In a game that revolves around a party of adventurers, that’s a problem.