Aetrimonde

Today, I’m going to talk about some mechanics written for the GM, rather than the players. Aetrimonde provides multiple frameworks for creating encounters that don’t involve outright combat: these mostly use skills to overcome whatever the challenge in the encounter is. To start with, I’m going to cover what Aetrimonde calls a resource challenge where the players are up against a time limit or other constraint.

D&D 4e’s Skill Challenges

Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition, from which Aetrimonde takes some inspiration, introduced a mechanic called a skill challenge that tried to do the same thing I am with resource challenges and other the other non-combat encounter frameworks presented in the Game Master’s Handbook. I, and a lot of reviewers, feel that they didn’t work great for that purpose, for a few reasons:

The premise of skill challenges was simple: the GM describes an overarching challenge or obstacle, and the PCs then describe ways in which they would use their skills to overcome it. If the players achieved the target number of successes before a set number of failures, they won. At its core, this is simple…but the guidance given for using skill challenges detracted from the concept.

• Skill challenges were touted as a way to encourage players to come up with creative solutions…but the guidance for designing them encouraged DMs to pick a few skills that they intended to be “useful” in the skill challenge, with useful skills having a lower difficulty to use and all other skills having a higher Difficulty, regardless of how the player narrated their use of the skill.
• Because skill challenges gave the same Difficulty for all uses of a skill, and allowed characters to use the same one repeatedly, in practice they devolved into each player figuring out what skill their character was most likely to get a success with, and then coming up with as many uses of that one skill as they could.
• Characters take turns, and must make a skill check of some sort every turn…but if a character isn’t good at any of the useful skills, then their only choices are to make an easy check with a bad bonus or a hard check with a better bonus, which…doesn’t feel great. They don’t have the option of sitting out and letting a player better suited to the challenge try it.
• The guidance on skill challenges encouraged keeping players informed, which it suggested would include telling them what skills would be useful…which, if a player had no useful skills they were good at, amounted to telling them that they couldn’t be useful.

In between the unhelpful and contradictory guidance were some actually interesting ideas, like the idea that some skill checks could be easier to succeed at but with worse consequences if failed, different kinds of skill checks “unlocking” others, and so on, but these didn’t receive nearly enough attention to make up for the really quite bad guidance provided in the DMG.

Having seen the criticism of why skill challenges didn’t work out as intended, I’ve done my best to improve on them. Resource challenges are the closest of Aetrimonde’s three non-combat encounter frameworks to 4e’s skill challenges.

Resource Challenges

A resource challenge gives players a limited supply of resources and tasks them with achieving a goal before they run out. This models a situation where the PCs are up against a time limit or some other constraint (like a host’s patience, or food supplies), and need to achieve a goal within that constraint. Resource challenges work best for open-ended problems that could be solved in many interchangeable ways, and it doesn’t matter how the players choose to do so.

Basic Implementation

The most basic kind of resource challenge uses skill checks as its constraint:

• The players roll initiative and enter a turn order like they would in combat.
• They have a limited number of rounds, and on their turn each PC may describe how they will contribute towards the group’s objective. They then make a single skill or ability check, of a type that the GM decides is appropriate for their description, and with an appropriate Difficulty. (For an easy challenge, a rule of thumb is to give 4 rounds and require 1 success per party member; for a medium challenge, give 3 rounds, and for a hard challenge give only 2.)
• The players succeed if they achieve the set number of successes before the end of the last round.

However, this basic implementation has some potential problems, the foremost of which is that it can be really tempting for a player to pick their best skill and then shoehorn it into the challenge. In practice, this may result in players arguing that they should be able to (in an extreme example) Intimidate the rocky walls of a river gorge into revealing a secret bridge. It is therefore important for the GM to set appropriate Difficulties, and that includes saying that it is impossible to use certain skills in certain ways.

Example: Crossing a River Gorge

The PCs were chasing their nemesis, who evaded them by blowing up a bridge they had just crossed. The PCs need to get across a river gorge filled with raging whitewater within the next hour, or the nemesis will have enough of a lead to get away.

This is a medium-difficulty challenge, so the PCs have 3 rounds (representing 20 minutes each) in which to achieve 1 success per party member. There are 5 of them.

This could be solved in many ways, but some sets of skill uses that could overcome this challenge would be:

• Perception to find a spot where the near side of the gorge is much higher than the far side, Perception to spot a cleft on the far side, Dexterity to set a grappling hook in the cleft, Athletics to tauten the rope, Athletics to cross the gorge on the rope (and ferry the party’s less athletic members across).
• Nature to identify the type of stone the gorge runs through, Perception to find a fault in the gorge’s rocky walls, Engineering to plant some explosives (plus a free success from the use of the explosives), Athletics to cross the resulting rubble before the water builds up and washes it away.
• Nature to find the party’s location on their map, Insight to predict the nemesis’s route on the far side of the gorge, Perception to notice indications on the map of a ford some distance upstream, Nature to plan a course catching up to the nemesis using the ford, Endurance to make a forced march along the route with enough speed to intercept the nemesis.
• Athletics to chop down some nearby trees, Engineering to construct a crude catapult, Perception to aim the catapult, Grace to land safely after being catapulted across the gorge with one end of a rope, Athletics to pull the weaker party members through the rapids with the rope.

Complications

The basic implementation of a resource challenge has some potential problems, the foremost of which is that it can be really tempting for a player to pick their best skill and then shoehorn it into the challenge. In practice, this may result in players arguing that they should be able to (in an extreme example) Intimidate the rocky walls of a river gorge into revealing a secret bridge. It is therefore important for the GM to set appropriate Difficulties, and that includes saying that it is impossible to use certain skills productively in certain ways.

There are other ways to add verisimilitude to a resource challenge, but each one adds complexity to the encounter. One of the advantages of resource challenges is that they are simple, so consider before introducing too many rules for one.

One Success per Skill

Each of the successes required to overcome a resource challenge must come from a check using a different skill or ability. This pushes players to find different ways of contributing to the group’s efforts.

A slightly looser version of this variation is to allow multiple successes to come from the same skill only if players describe using the skill differently, or were able to apply significantly different perks. For example, it might be possible to get multiple successes using Persuasion to influence a political campaign if one player uses their Esoteric Knowledge [Political Theory] perk to make reasoned arguments in the town square, and another uses Perform [Humorous Ballad] to spread a scatological ditty mocking the opposition.

Aiding Others

Instead of trying to contribute directly during their turn, a player can describe how they will assist other PCs instead. They must still make an appropriate skill check, but if successful, another PC can gain favor on a check that would benefit from this assistance.

This allows PCs who have no applicable skills to still help the party make progress.

Group Effort

This does away with the turn order, allowing the PCs to discuss, strategize, and pick which of them will make the next attempt to contribute. This is appropriate if the constraint on the challenge is not entirely time. For example, if the challenge is to impress the guardian of a treasure, who has agreed to entertain three attempts on successive days, there is no reason that it has to be a different PC to make each check.

Earning Resources

This offers players a way to stretch their resources, gaining an extra round to work in. If a player can come up with a plausible use of their skills to do this (using Persuasion to placate a host running out of patience with the other players’ antics, or using Nature to forage for food) they can attempt this check instead of directly contributing to overcoming the challenge.

If allowing this, limit how often the players can extend their time limit. In many cases, it may be appropriate to only allow one success, or even only one attempt. In other cases it may work better to increase the Difficulty of the required check each time it is attempted.

Running a Resource Challenge

When running a resource challenge, it is more important than usual that the PCs understand the likely outcome of their actions. Even if you wouldn’t normally tell players the Difficulty of a check ahead of time, you should generally do so in a resource challenge. Because players will get relatively few chances to contribute, and their characters are not (usually) under intense time pressure, they should have the opportunity to propose and evaluate different ways they could contribute and then make an informed choice between them, representing their characters’ ability to consider their options with their in-game knowledge.

As the players achieve successes, you will need to narrate how those successes change the situation: when you’re going to be running a skill challenge, plan ahead by thinking about your players’ personalities, how they play their characters, and how they might like to apply various skills. This brainstorming can help you describe the outcomes of various skill uses, and it can be especially helpful for describing these outcomes in a way that reflects how many successes the players will still need to achieve.

Encourage players to break complex ideas into smaller steps. If, for example, they ask whether they could dam the river using Engineering, use “No, But” to suggest that this would be difficult to do without proper preparation like analyzing the gorge’s rock structure and finding a suitable spot to blast—which are suitable uses for other skills.

Ideally, the players will coordinate with each other and attempt skill checks that all contribute to a single concept for overcoming the challenge, although some individual checks might be interchangeable. If some players are trying to solve the problem differently than others, nudge them to cooperate more closely by pointing out which solution is closer to working—and if they still are trying two different solutions, you may need to track the number of successes on each one separately. Remember, a resource challenge like this is a mechanical representation of a narrative challenge: the rules and mechanics should serve the narrative, not vice versa. In the end, it should make sense how all of the players’ skill checks contributed to their eventual success.