What's the best way to write a skills challenge?

[ClaytonStine]

I saw a tweet online discussing how a skills challenge should be written for D&D.
(I didn’t include the tweeter because that felt rude.)

Now, ignoring the parentheticals and all of D&D’s style guide, focusing only on the order and syntax of the sentence. Which do you think is best?

I’m a professional copywriter outside of RPGs and I have an opinion that I’d like to distill into an article for fledging game designers, but before I start I want every counter-argument and idea out there in case I’m missing something.

[sangjun]

Personally, I feel Option B is more “RPG” in that it describes the character doing things rather than a mechanical event doing things. This is from a psychological point of view, though. As a technical manual, I would prefer Option A especially if whole paragraphs are made of these.

[BeckyA]

to be honest I don’t like either - but although it is harder to parse I slightly prefer B since it tells me what the characters are doing before the check they need to do it. I find seeing the fictional trigger first is more helpful.

[Jeremy_Strandberg]

B is definitely better IMO, because:

• B is active voice, rather than passive (I guess A might not strictly be passive voice, but it’s good as)
• B centers the action on the characters doing something, rather than on a game mechanic doing something (which is how A reads)
• B implies a flow of fiction >> dice >> fiction, whereas A implies a flow of dice >> fiction.

Personally, I’d take B a step further and add something like this:

B) The characters can convince the guard to let them through with a decent reason and a successful DC13 Charisma (Persuasion) check.

[Curubethion]

Echoing B.

Option A makes it feel like the check is doing the convincing, completely cutting the characters out of the picture. It’s subtle, but it influences how players and GMs understand the game.

[Mathias]

Oooh! This is interesting!

The two are different in meaning, I would argue.

A can be achieved accidentally in fiction; i.e. I’d feel the gm could roll behind the screen if the guard is convinced by just the presence of the characters or by a something they idly say.

While B implies a character needs to have an active intent to convince the guard.

[Kyle_Simons]

I also like B, but mainly because it implies one of many other possibilities whereas A implies more to me that that’s how the PCs are expected to overcome the obstacle.

[flatvurm]

I strongly prefer the structure of B. Not only, as Kyle mentioned, is the implication that there are other possibilities, but imagine a book or scenario that does list other possibilities. If I’m needing to reference the text to figure out what mechanics to engage when the players try X, I’d have a much easier time scanning a list of options structured like B instead of A.

[William_Nichols]

Is this an option?

When you try to convince the guard to let you and your allies in with persuasion, roll diplomacy. On a 13+, they let you by. Otherwise, something else interesting happens.

[ClaytonStine]

The D&D style guide is fairly prescriptive (which I think is good) but that means most twists on the format don’t have that stamp of approval like other shiny D&D products.

Frankly, the best way to indicate skill challenges and narrative conflict might not be in either of these two “official” versions, but my writerly-robot brain thinks one must succeed over the other in most use cases.

So, playing devil’s advocate.

Maybe A is the best option. For instance, considering the message isn’t player facing and needs to be quick to look-up for the GM, it makes me consider order of phrases in addition to quantity of characters. The more words there are, the less each word matters.

Technically the characters could intimidate, deceive, sneak past, climb through a window, attack, cast a spell, etc, etc. Whenever someone writes B they usually try to amend extra conditions or fictional positioning, but is that time wasted? How far can we bury the game’s mechanical trigger (the DC in D&D) before we’re looking at a large paragraph with the “if this, then that” at the end next to the start of another narrative option? If we’re going to try framing the characters, the logical conclusion is to write lots of different DCs. But that seems like a bad idea regardless of which two options we use.

[yoshi]

Which do you think is best?

Slight aside: “best”, to me is loaded, and context dependent. I need to know what criteria and goals you have in order to make something “best”. This leads me to making assumptions about what is the point and context of the text for these skill challenges. So in order for me to tell you what I think is best (not necessarily what I like better), I should make clear my assumptions, criteria, and goals for the text.

Assumptions (stated and unstated) :

• the game is D&D 5th ed
• the text is for the GM only, non of the players playing adventures need, or will, ever see this text
• the GM will be referencing this text in game, as the adventures reach the guard, this may or may not be the first time the GM actually reads this text.

As much as I personally like the second better (and @Jeremy_Strandberg’s updated version even more), I think the first option is “better” for the context and assumptions I see for this text.

For me, I see D&D as a game where the mechanical target/trigger/condition is the most important thing. Does this mean that the adventure’s can just roll a skill check and pass by without the player thinking of a reasonable reason? Yes, but in the context of D&D, this feels perfectly acceptable and quite appropriate. I wouldn’t need conditions and qualifiers before the mechanical numbers, and it would infact make it harder and slower for me to find, parse, and use the text when running the game and finding this text on a random page in a module.

Again, I might prefer the second option, but I think the first is actually better at what it needs to do in its context.

[ClaytonStine]

@yoshi Honest truth, I did not mean to pose a loaded question with “best”, so this is an awesome response because it illuminates something I hadn’t really realized about my curiosity.

Not defining the context or definition of best is probably the real emergent subject of this question, not the options, but how do we measure these options? The question when originally posed online had the wording of “which do you prefer?” Which, because of my own obsessions, became focused on whether there could be a “best” in whatever dimension that might be construed.

I had many of the same assumptions (stated and unstated) and therefore came to most of the same conclusions. The second option has a more natural language, but the first has a mechanical value however unintuitive it feels.

[Jeremy_Strandberg]

To devil’s advocate your devil’s advocating… If your goal is brevity and assumes “good play” as a default, it seems like there isn’t even a need to include it as a full sentence.

E.g.:

A guard (10 HP, Halberd +2 attack, 1d10 damage) watches the entrance. Charisma (Persuade) DC 13 or similar to bypass.

[ClaytonStine]

I agree, but D&D’s style guide doesn’t permit that version without specifying if the result is from a success or a failure. In the D&D design, you’re example might read like this:

A. A guard (10 HP, Halberd +2 attack, 1d10 damage) watches the entrance. A successful Charisma (Persuade) DC 13 check or similar is needed to bypass.

B. A guard (10 HP, Halberd +2 attack, 1d10 damage) watches the entrance. The characters can bypass the guard with a successful Charisma (Persuade) DC 13 check or similar.

D&D’s verbal design will push skill challenges to one of these formats (plus or minus alterations). I was devil’s advocating the preference of A over B. Not D&D’s style guide which is a done deal.

[JimLikesGames]

Extremely Gygaxian, that’s the preferred AD&D style!

[JimLikesGames]

Yikes, that or similar is doing some heavy lifting that makes thhat a completely different thing from your A/B binary.

[ClaytonStine]

Yeah, and the worst bit is when it grows increasingly disconnected form the thing it’s comparing, does “or similar” mean similar ability checks like Strength/Intelligence/Ect. or does it mean similar DCs to 13 like 11/12/14/Etc. It’s an unintentional obfuscation.

I prefer the older, pragmatic style. Unfortunately, that’s outside the design philosophy of 5E atm.