Carrying on from the last two weeks of talk about Extended Challenges (Introduction and Sharing the Spotlight)

So far we’ve been looking at these skill challenges as a series of checks – yes, ones which fit the characters and can be used to craft a narrative, but still simple stat+background checks that pass or fail. But the choice of what stat+background to use is not generally a meaningful one at this point – you use whatever you’re best at that will help in some way; and avoid repeating yourself once penalties for doing so kick in.

It’s a functional system, but not really inspiring; there’s no difference between taking positive action toward your goal and preparation for such action, and no real meaning to cooperation.

So that’s our next step – differentiating between the many ways you can aid your team in achieving the goal.

1. Attempts
   This action category serves as the backbone of the whole system. Attempts are how you earn successes, they’re things that you do that get you closer to the goal – whether that be navigating through a few miles of swampland, or persuading one of the elven nobles to support your plan to prevent the apocalypse.
2. Reaction/Mitigation
   When bad things happen, sometimes it makes more sense to try and prevent the consequences, rather than moving towards your end goal. If you’re running low on rations in the jungle and will lose health due to that, you might choose to spend a turn hunting for food rather than hunting for a path forwards.
3. Preparation
   Another category is preparation – providing boosts to future rolls. Perhaps you need to cross a desert, but rather than just making survival and navigation rolls as you cross you decide to spend an action or two on finding a town and acquiring survival gear – appropriate clothing, sunscreen, water carriers and such like. These supplies will boost all sorts of rolls later in the adventure, whether they be attempts or reactions.
4. Aid Another
   This category of action could be put as a subset of Preparation – you’re preparing things for your ally to stand the best chance on their roll – but I’ve split it off because it doesn’t work in the framework we’ve got.

Within the system we discussed last week we’ve got room for the first three of these categories – Attempts are simple; Reactions/Mitigation can be done in response to whatever harm comes with the passage of a round, whether that be guards getting more suspicious or supplies running low; and Preparation can give a bonus to many other players rolls allowing you to gather future successes faster – traditionally a +2 bonus to all future rolls (where it’s applicable) tends to work well – but in 13th Age it may pay to look at the Escalation Die used in combat, and consider whether preparation could add and/or boost said Escalation Die¹⁾For those who’re unaware, the Escalation Die is a d6 that increases by 1 each round of combat, and that all players can add to their attacks. It encourages people to hold their big moves until later in the fight, and ensures that battles end climactically if they run long

We don’t, however, have room for the common Aid Another which only benefits one ally’s roll; if it requires you to spend your action for the round you’ll almost always be better off just making your own Attempt action.

We could drop it entirely, have all ways to help your allies fall under the other categories. It’s an elegant option, but in my experience some people like making Aid Another checks.

Instead I’d like to revisit a point from the last post: the idea that the penalties should come from rounds that passed, rather than attempts that failed – while acknowledging that if someone is trying something dangerous it may make more sense for a failed attempt to have negative consequences other than outright failing the Extended Challenge.

I put forward the rule that failures wouldn’t be penalised in place because otherwise you could end up in a situation where your presence actively made things for your team. But if we’re adding Aid Another actions they can still be safe even if the Attempt action isn’t. So perhaps that is the answer: if Aid Another exists failed Attempts can have penalties, but Aid Another cannot – at worst you’re not helpful.

But should all failed Attempts have negative consequences? Or only the ones that are particularly risky (like tightrope walking across a canyon)? And if it’s only the ones that are particularly risky, what makes those worth taking? Are extra successes a suitable enticement?

Perhaps the Aid Another action isn’t needed at all, and adding it just makes the whole system more complicated for a minor gain… it’s going to take a bit of pondering and discussion to work out which way works best!

What do you think? Should I lean towards the more tactical end where it matters whether you take the “risky+fast” or the “slow+safe” option, or keep things smooth and simple?

Takeaway from this step:

1. There are a lot of complexities that can be layered on – but I’m not yet sure which ones are worth it.

Next up: Non-binary Stakes

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Combat in 13th Age is very structured, but outside combat it is a lot looser. Most of the time, I find this flexibility useful, but occasionally it’s useful to provide more structured and defined challenges outside combat.

In the F20 family of games I first encountered this kind of structure in D&D’s 4th Edition – but it felt half-baked, and often functioned poorly in our games. So, inspired by that game’s Skill Challenges we developed our own style of Extended Challenge for home use; and now we’re developing it further in order to use it in future 13th Age work.

Our home system is a simple skeleton that gets fleshed out arbitrarily for any RPG we’re playing (from buffy to fate): Gameplay proceeds in rounds so that everyone is involved. How many rounds you took to reach your goal is likely to matter; repeating the same action over and over results in an increased DC, or is impossible if there’s no fiction justification; there’s no set list of skills that contribute – if the player has a good explanation for how their action aids the party then it can work; there are more options than just “roll to move towards victory” – ways to boost other players and mitigate downsides.

But that skeleton is held together by a set of assumptions that we’ve never written down, so rather than trying to work backward from that I’m here starting from scratch again over the course of these blogs – so as to ensure that the final product holds together in the wild, rather than relying on quirks of my own GMing style.

So here are the explicit goals that I’m going to work toward when creating the Extended Challenges system: 

1. Sharing the Spotlight:
   In combat every player takes part regularly. In more loose-weave situations it’s common for one or more player characters to end up uninvolved – for instance when socialising with elves the mechanical genius half-orc probably won’t have much to say.
   When big stakes are in play it’s nice to make sure everyone gets some level of input into the outcome. 4th Edition’s skill challenges often punished you for doing so – if the half-orc made a skill check they would make the team more likely to fail, and so their best bet was to stay quiet so there was no chance they’d be called upon to roll.
2. Verisimilitude
   If the Half-orc Artificer with 8 charisma and no diplomatic background contributes to your elven ball by charming the nobles, things start to feel out of place. It’s important for each character’s contributions to feel like they come from that character.
3. Meaningful Choices
   At its most basic, combat is a constant repetition of “roll to attack the thing in front of you with your best attack” until either it falls over or you do. If you’re a 13th Age player that’s almost certainly not your preferred flavour of fun – even the simplest class has significantly more going on than that.
   At its most basic a skill challenge would consist of rolling your best background+ability combination repeatedly until you either succeed or fail. That’s no more fun outside of combat than it is in combat, so we need something more to play with.
4. Non-binary Stakes
   Pass/fail is acceptable for a single roll, but when you’re going to be devoting a meaningful portion of your session to something it’s nice to have some middle ground – some possibility of an expensive victory where the resources expended (spells, powers, recoveries, etc.) put a significant crimp in your ability to move forward, or of a partial victory where you only achieve some of what you were aiming for – for instance, avoiding the guard patrol on your way into the archvillain’s castle, but not making it all the way to his bedchambers before the alarm is raised.
5. Fitting the Game
   Different games have different feels, themes and mechanical underpinnings. While a skeleton of a system can exist outside of the game in which it is to be used – and indeed, if you follow this series of blog posts I’ll start by building such a skeleton – fleshing it out such that it belongs as part of the game is a vital step. And it’s a step that is far easier if you keep it in mind throughout the process.

Those are the goals, but how can we go about achieving them? I’ve got a few more blog posts coming talking about our approach, but we’d love to hear your thoughts on how to approach such a challenge. Let us know here, or on Facebook.

Next in the Series: Sharing the Spotlight while Maintaining Verisimilitude

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