Social Failure (broken off from D&D Next thread)

[beejazz]

The best fix I've seen for this is to remove penalties for failure and set a fixed round limit.

Yes, I think something like that is good. I had a thought a few posts back to merge the skill challenge system with something like this list that LC posted and have, like you mentioned, a fixed round limit. Essentially, the players and DM would figure out what the goals of the encounter were, and then start the skill challenge with that "shopping list" in mind. Everyone would take a shot at doing something, and every success would buy you one thing off the list. Maybe some way to get bonus items off the list if you beat the DC by a lot, too, but I'm not sure. Then, not only does everyone get involved, but the skill challenge can result in vastly different outcomes (with varying degrees of "success" or "failure") depending on what objectives players pursued and succeeded or failed at.

You could make a pretty standard chart with fail effects on one side, success on another, and difficulty numbers for entries. If the success/failure effects could be sort of standardized for social encounters it could work out well.

So player would propose actions, DM would determine success/failure effects, the skill to use, and the difficulty based on the chart and common sense, and then the player rolls.

I can only see this being easier to balance with 5e's flatter looser approach to skills.

[beejazz]

See, now you guys got me thinking about this. I think I'd start with a standard difficulty chart (easy is x, medium is y, hard is z or whatever) and then a grid with failure and success modifiers. As in bigger potential failures might make tasks slightly easier while bigger potential wins might be harder. On one side of that grid would be (helps the group/helps individual/no effect) and on the other would be (hurts the group/ hurts the individual / no effect).

Then people would improvise tasks, and the DM would adjudicate success/failure effects and difficulties based on the proposed tasks using the above guidelines.

All this in a framework like was mentioned above (x successes in y rounds, or x successes before your opponents get x successes). Hurts the group fails could supply an alternate fail condition more like 4e skill challenges, but in this case statistically weaker characters could at least attempt tasks that would not hurt the group.

Individual success/failure would account for effects that only hit one member of the group, and no-effect-success is effectively a save. So if you're climbing and someone's dangling, there would be a "hang on" strength check with hurts the individual and no effect success.

That might be an ideal "skill challenge" formula.