Story Arcs and Narration

After our D&D session, Eric, Thomas and I discussed skill challenges for a while. I have forgotten much of what we said, but of course I remember what I brought up. During a skill challenge as Thomas has been running them, I have no support from the System to help me set up a mini story arc for skill challenge narration.

Specifically, from play, we found a bunch of hobgoblin ghosts and were attempting a skill challenge to get them to peacefully convert one member of our party into a Dark Pact Warlock instead of attacking us. We talked them down, demonstrated magical proficiency, gave "character references", etc. At one point David repeated several times "And let's make one final Diplomacy check..." (emphasis on final). But here's the thing - we, the players, had no way of knowing that any given roll could or would be the final roll. The DM did not reveal length (4 successes before 2 failures? Who knows.), DCs, or technically even results of rolls, though in general it is easy to tell based on narration whether a roll succeeded or not.

Also from play, we were trying to set up a base of operations in the dungeon which would allow an extended rest. IMO one excellent way to do this would be some setup with rolls to make traps and misdirection, then a roll or two about exciting solutions to specific situations, then whenever there is just one success needed, an Endurance roll to successfully keep watch while still getting an extended rest. Success is a perfect falling action, failure that also fails the challenge is a perfect lead-in to an encounter, and failure that doesn't fail the challenge is perfect for a climactic final roll or two.

Contrast this to our PTA game which specifies story arcs across sessions, where anyone can look over and see that the Producer has X budget left and there's Y fanmail out so we know how close to the session climax we are, and where there's not a seemingly arbitrary endpoint so every individual arc within a session can be manipulated to the players' will. Of course PTA is all about narration making great arcs, but skill challenges should be better.

How can they be fixed? I see a couple of methods of fixing our System. One is for the DM to not announce when a skill challenge is complete. This allows the players to narrate and roll however we like, making as pretty an arc as we like, and the "wasted rolls" after the challenge was complete are a small price to pay for a better narration. Of course it's not clear what happens if we finish before the challenge does.

Another method is for the DM to reveal the scale of the challenge (4/2, etc.) and keep a public running tally of successes and failures. This should be enough for the players to set up pacing appropriately, even without knowing DCs. Maybe knowing DCs is better too, but I'm looking for a minimalistic set of changes to our current System because I love minimalistic changes.

Finally, in a few weeks I'll be GMing a Burning Wheel game. Are there any problems with story arcs that I need to be aware of and give the non-GM players good solutions to? I can't think of any, everything is open, so the only potential problems are the mechanics constraining an arc in some way that everyone at the table misses before it happens. If a problem like that exists then by definition I've missed it thus far.

D&D Clever

In our latest D&D session, something odd happened at the very end. Here's the setup: the PCs are sneaking into the second floor of a large building through a giant hole in the wall. The room inside is filled with a kobold and his fire beetles and firebat minions and is obviously quite trapped. We kill everything inside while jets of flame shoot out from the walls.

Now to disabling the trap. Our cleric takes a gander at a complex set of controls and tries to figure out how to turn off the flame jets. There is a small skill challenge (4/2) in which only the cleric participates, which boils down to "roll Thievery a bunch of times, sometimes with Dungeoneering interspersed to provide possible +2s". Nothing besides color occurs. Then I stick a frost spear into one of the nozzles to plug it, which boils down to "roll a standard attack and damage". Then our wizard suggests pouring a bottle of acid on the control panel, which the cleric does, and the nozzles are shut off.

After the DM said the trap was disabled, Chris said, "That was really clever," referring to the acid action.

This got me thinking. Was pouring the acid onto the control panel clever? Maybe, but its result, that the nozzles shut off, is not much evidence that it was clever. Perhaps the DM thought it was clever. Perhaps the DM thought it was time to move on. Perhaps Chris was referring to Eric figuring out that the DM wanted to feel satisfied about his decision to disable the trap and move on, and wasn't referring to the supposed act of thinking acid on a control panel should shut off the nozzles. Perhaps Chris was saying that given that the DM determined the acid shut off the nozzles, we should add "Eric's character was clever in figuring out that the acid would shut off the nozzles" to the SIS. Perhaps Chris was just saying random things.

D&D Play

We played a little D&D last night - not much, it was a short night, we started playing at about 8 and ended at about 11, and leveled from 2 to 3 in between - but I felt it went much better than the last few sessions. Play consisted of a skill challenge, some incidental moving around, a fight on a ship, and the sale of said ship.

At the end of last session a bunch of changeling had jumped the PCs on a tall bridge in the middle of the city. The changelings were slaughtered. To start out this session, we had a skill challenge: the guards are here, what now? First we bluffed them, then failed to intimidate them, then talked them down. IMO it was the second-best challenge thus far. We are better at playing them, but I still feel failures should actually do something, even if the challenge isn't failed overall.

Then we had some moving around where we wrapped up a major and personal quest, leveled to 3, and shipped out on a boat to our next quest destination.

Pirate attack! This was a near-ideal fight. There were two boats separated by a few squares of water, with a dozen or so minion hobgoblins and some beefier folks on the pirate ship. The PCs all began on the other ship except for Fen-Gol, our orc ranger played by Jesus Christ the Living God, who we fired over to the pirates on a ballista. In my opinion there were exactly two things wrong with this fight (as run by the DM), and they're both pretty minor. First, the only thing Kaoru the rogue got for winning initiative over the hobgoblins was -18 HP and the chance if she rolled well enough to have the choice of using her action point to make an attack. Luckily that was exactly one turn out of the entire fight, so hardly any impact. Second, we were all over a ship in the middle of the water, we knocked two enemies into the water, and none of them tried to knock us into the water at all.

Loot! Now we gave the slaves some coin to row the ship to our destination, we set them free, and then we sold the ship for lots of gold. In reality it was about the amount necessary to buy the magic items the DM was planning to have the party find but missed before we hit level 3. Also he didn't want the players to know that, for some reason. IMO it would be more fun, not less, if he said "Oh god you're level 3 already and I missed some magic items how can we get you moneyz? Capture a pirate ship? Awesome, sure."

What I liked: the skill challenge, the fight. What I didn't like: the downtime, especially setting up the fight. Perhaps this is a good use for a random prepared puzzle? There is an implicit time limit (until the DM finishes setting up), and the reward is that we shoot the orc over with the ballista (the puzzle is colored as "figuring out how to use the old magic ballista).