At The Table: Complex Skill Checks

Often times in more sophisticated campaigns you may want to devise some complex action for the players to perform. Things like repairing a piece of machinery or performing a lengthy magical ritual aren’t well-covered by most rule systems. Often these actions are too important to players’ success or the plot to wager on just one skill check. This is where the concept of complex skill checks comes into play.

What is a Complex Skill Check?

A complex skill check is, at its core, single large action spread across several skill checks. Complex checks are designed for situations where an action will take several combat rounds to complete and in this capacity are useful for adding tension to a high-pressure scenario. Complex skill checks also have varying degrees of success depending on which rolls succeed or fail. That feature makes them useful for checks with no retry, where however far you get is the limit of what you achieve. I’ll provide examples of both uses below.

Building Complex Skill Checks Into Encounters

If you are going to use a complex skill check it should be the focal point of the encounter. The character(s) performing the check will need to devote their full attention to the task at hand. If enemies threaten them the other party members will have to defend them. Damage to a character performing the check may reduce their chance of success. Complex skill checks are also time-consuming, increasing the chances of being interrupted by friends or foes. The farther into the complex task the player gets, the more difficult each individual check becomes, further driving up the tension.

Performing a complex skill check is a lot like spellcasting and for the most part can be treated the same way as concentrating to maintain a spell. Damage to the character increases the difficulty proportional to the damage received, violent motion increases the difficulty my a similar amount, and sudden noises or distractions also increase the difficulty by a predetermined amount.

Performing Complex Skill Checks

If the task involves several actions that can be done in parallel (such as opening a series of valves), then several characters can participate at the same time. They do not grant Aid bonuses to each other. A single character performing a complex action can receive an Aid bonus from a non-participating character if the action being performed would normally allow it (typically physical actions allow assistance and mental actions do not). All participating characters make their skill checks on their own turns if in combat, or simultaneously if not. Once all the dice for one set of actions have been rolled, tally up the successful checks and determine the level of success.

Often complex skill checks require a specific series of steps. Different steps in a series cannot be performed in parallel and typically (but not always) have to be performed by the same character. A failure at one step usually ends the complex skill check, but some complex checks may have branching outcomes that allow for some failures. GMs use your imagination here.

Complex Check Stat Block

Each step of a complex check has several statistics that describe what’s necessary to perform it:
Max participants: The maximum number of characters that can work on this step in parallel
Prerequisites: Things a character must have to participate in this step
Skill check: The skill check each participant must perform during this step
Successes to Proceed: The number of successes needed to proceed to the next step or complete the check. These might be per-participant or a total number overall.
Max Failures: The number of failures, which if surpassed, cause the whole process to fail. These might be per-participant or a combined total.
Time: How long this step takes to perform

Example Complex Skill Checks

Perform Ritual Magic

Step 1: Prepare ritual area
This requires writing a magic circle on the ground
Max participants: 4
Prerequisites: All participants must possess the ability to scribe scrolls
Skill check: Spellcraft DC 5+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 4 total
Max Failures: 2 total
Time: Two minutes per check (2-12 minutes depending on number of participants and if they need to retry)

Step 2: Set Up Ritual Components
You must correctly arrange the spell components within the ritual circle
Max participants: 4
Prerequisites: Trained in Knowledge (Arcana)
Skill check: Knowledge (Arcana) DC 10+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 4 total
Max Failures: 2 total
Time: One round per check

Step 3: Perform Invocation
The senior spellcaster stands within the prepared ritual circle and casts the spell
Max Participants: 1
Prerequisites: Must know the ritual spell
Skill check: Spellcraft DC 15+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 1
Max Failures: 0 (failure destroys ritual circle, requiring start over)
Time: one round


Operate Complex Mechanism

Step 1: Analyze how it works
You must examine the mechanism and correctly deduce how to operate it
Max Participants: unlimited
Prerequisites: Trained in Disable Device
Skill check: Disable Device DC 22
Successes to Proceed: 3 total
Max Failures: 0 per participant (You get the wrong idea about how it works and must stop helping. Other participants may proceed.)
Time: 10 minutes per check

Step 2: Open steam valves
Four valves must be opened in unison
Max Participants: 4 (aid allowed)
Prerequisites: none
Skill check: Strength DC 14
Successes to Proceed: 1 per participant
Max Failures: 0 total (not opening all the valves together causes a small explosion and breaks the machine, making retrying impossible)

World Building: Zoom out to Realm

A Realm is a geographic area that comprises several Regions. It may be the entire extent of an island or the territory of a single nation. Unlike a Region, a Realm's borders need not be defined by natural boundaries. Instead, a realm is usually defined by the people that live in it, their culture, politics, and the flow of resources. A single realm can be considered a self-sufficient territory that is able to produce food and common goods and consume those things within itself.

Gameplay-wise, the majority of a small-to-medium campaign can be played at the realm level. A typical realm is large enough to provide numerous adventure opportunities and a variety of terrains, while at the same time the cultural uniformity reduces the amount of time necessary to spend setting up new NPCs and settings. You can describe the look and feel of a town in this realm once and then while adventuring within the realm players can keep that look and feel in mind so that new towns don't require entirely original design. You may be tempted to make each town and location unique and that's excellent, but towns should be unique in ways that entice players to do things and explore them rather than just having a different style of buildings or different food.

Many of the principles that work at the settlement and region levels. Access to water is still a fundamental requirement for settlements, terrain types should still transition, and the speed of travel still dictates how large an area one government can control. However, as the map zooms farther out things become fuzzier:

Diversity of Resources

At the realm level the rules for deciding where settlements form start to change. Like any good game of Settlers of Catan or Civilization, access to a variety of resources is essential. People will go to amazing lengths to access valuable resources. Water still remains essential for survival, but it might not always come from coastlines or rivers. If there's ore in the mountains settlers may utilize glacier melt for water. Settlements in arid lands might tap underground aquifers or construct extensive viaducts to bring water to places where they want to settle. Areas in your realm that have resources like ore, lumber, or powerful natural magic will attract crafty settlers who make their settlements work somehow to tap those resources.

Trade Routes

The essentials of life circulate within a realm. Water, staple foods, meat, and building materials should all be produced and consumed within your realm. These goods usually won't all be found close to eachother though so they'll probably circulate by trade routes. Trade routes are the main arteries of any realm. They bring goods and information to and from far corners of the land. Usually there are a few large central cities that have markets that act as trade hubs. These will be the most populous and influential settlements in the realm.

Points of Authority

Cities exert influence over the territory around them. If you're building a nation-state there will be usually one capital city and usually a handful of provincial seats-of-power that follow policy from the capital. These provincial powers handle the actual administration of their surrounding regions and are usually the same cities as the major trading markets. If you're building a collection of related feudal states there isn't a capital dictating policy but the noble rulers may still share customs and values that dictate how people act. In the presence of external threats people from across a realm will usually band together to resist and preserve their common culture and way of life.

Evolution & Conservation of Detail

Evolution and conservation of detail go hand-in-hand. A realm is large enough that it's impractical to fully populate in one sitting. Additionally, you want to have lots of low-detail space to fill in with new adventures you come up with. Start with the region the players started in and add progressively less detail the farther from that realm you get. Regardless of how far from the players they are, you should have all major cities, trade hubs, and seats of power drawn on the map with major trading roads joining them.

Drawing a Realm Map

I don't have a super-simple grid-based system for this.

1. Figure out roughly the distances you want your realm to span and determine a map scale that works for you.
2. Draw large terrain features such as ocean coastlines, mountain ranges, and major rivers
3. Determine where resources like lakes, forests, farmland and mines are. These should be consistent with your starting region.
4. Place major trading cities in areas that are:
• On the coast if you have one
• Located very close to one one resource and not very far from others
5. If you're building a nation-state, choose one trading city to be the capital
6. Place adventure sites, towns and smaller settlements in the area around your starting region. Leave plenty of blank space to populate later as players explore the area.

Upcoming Articles

At The Table - Complex Skill Checks: Performing large, complicated tasks with a fistful of dice
World Building - Going to War: War is the backdrop for a great many stories. Bring it to the foreground.

At The Table: Dynamic Difficulty

Ahaha you thought I was going to miss another week, didn't you?

It's a problem every Game Master faces at some point: how to keep the game moving when not all players are present. To some extent Pathfinder is set up to handle this. If you're doing by-the-book encounter generation then you know that encounter challenge ratings are for a range of party sizes and not specific numbers. For instance a party of 4 or 5 people generally have the same challenge ratings, a party 5-6 have a higher one, etc. Often with one player out normal encounters don't get much more difficult, but what about encounters designed to be challenging?

As soon as you pit your diminished party against an encounter that's rated "Hard" or "Challenging" against their full strength you quickly start running into problems. Suddenly that 1-player disadvantage turns into a huge power gap that can turn a fun but challenging encounter into a desperate struggle to survive. This article will outline some techniques to help balance a 1- or 2- player disadvantage and how to apply them depending on what's missing from the party. If more than 2 players are missing, you should probably postpone your game. These tricks can only stretch the encounter rules so far before they risk breaking the game. Also remember that these techniques can be used in reverse to increase difficulty if you feel your party are having too easy a time or if someone's friend wants to join for one game.

Enemy Hit Points

Quite simply, give enemies more or less HP. This is by far the easiest way to adjust encounter difficulty. It can be used to increase or decrease difficulty based on party size and falls within the rules perfectly because most enemies have hit dice that represent a range of possible HP values. The fact that most GMs use the average HP printed on the stat block does not negate the fact that individual enemies may have more or less HP as long as it's a possible outcome from rolling the enemy's hit dice.

The key factor that enemy HP changes is the expected length of the encounter. A enemy with more HP will take more turns to kill, require more attacks, more spell slots, and more healing. If your party is missing damage dealers this is a very easy way to help balance them out. This is less useful with missing support or healing characters because if your damage output is still high you'll probably have time to heal after the encounter is over.

Enemy Gear

This only applies to enemies that wear gear, obviously. If your party is missing healing or support characters, one option is to adjust what gear the enemies are using. With HP adjustments the aim was to control how long the fight goes on for but with gear adjustments the goal is to keep the fight duration the same and instead alter the amount of damage the party take or the party's chances of damaging the enemies. This can make up for the Bless spell from the absent paladin or an application of Channel Energy from a missing cleric. Usually just changing one carefully-selected item is enough to adjust the difficulty. Choosing how to adjust gear can be more difficult than changing HP, however, because gear changes can alter far more numbers and aren't nearly as easy to do on the fly or justify in-universe. For that reason I only recommend using this if you have sufficient time to prepare.

Enemy Number

An obvious way to make an encounter harder or easier is to change the number of enemies encountered. This is easier at low levels when enemies with fractional CRs are common and much more difficult when dealing with packs of CR 5 monsters. The addition or removal of a single enemy can drastically change the difficulty of an encounter, especially when terrain and movement are considered. For this reason I don't recommend just adding or removing a member of a monster pack.

What you can do, however, is alter how long an enemy is in the fight for. This can be done through HP adjustments to just one or two combatants but can also be done by making them cowards. Having an enemy flee combat both limits the duration of the fighting and introduces the exciting possibility of chasing them down or having them go get reinforcements, effectively turning one encounter into two smaller encounters with a short break in between. This can be useful for any party composition, but don't get carried away and string together more than two encounters or you'll risk tiring your players and their characters out too quickly.

Favourable Terrain

As I've described before I like to set up encounters in arena-like spaces and rooms with lots of random set dressing to provide obstacles and cover. This makes battles more dynamic and invites players to come up with novel tactics for overcoming enemy positions. The availability of good cover (especially when fighting ranged attackers) can significantly alter the balance of an encounter.

For example, if your party's primary melee tank is missing you might rebalance an encounter by adding difficult terrain between the party or the enemies that the enemies must cross to engage the party, giving your remaining attackers an extra round to deal damage before the enemies can close to attack their squishy hides. 

Another example might be removing some cover from the enemy's side so it's easier for your ranged attackers to hit them.

If your party is missing its ranged attackers you might remove obstacles from both sides to make it easier for your melee characters to close in.

In any case, these kinds of alterations will alter both the fight length and the enemy's opportunities to do damage, thus giving great flexibility to deal with any deviation from the planned party size.

Favourable Circumstance

For non-combat encounters, how do you deal with missing someone with necessary skills? For instance, what if your best diplomat is absent? Logically you'll want to reduce the DCs of these skill-based encounters to a level such that someone who is present can succeed. The problem then is how to make it not seem artificial. The easiest way for that is to come up with some in-universe circumstance that explains why it's easier. Maybe the shopkeeper the party want to haggle with is of the same race or alignment as the player elected to do the haggling, or maybe a festival in town is distracting the city guard enough to make infiltrating the castle vault easier. Use your imagination and the possibilities are endless.

Double Rolling

Do not use this if you can avoid it because it makes the game less fun. Sometimes when all-else fails you just need to fudge it. Unlike the other techniques which are all numeric changes, this one is the GM playing games with the enemy's luck. Double rolling is exactly what it sounds like: roll two D20s for enemy skill checks, attack rolls, etc and pick the result you want. This has the potential to give the party or the enemies miraculously good luck and tip the balance in the favour of the group you want to win. Obviously this must be used sparingly as it takes a lot of the excitement out of encounters if one side always does poorly. And it's, y'know, cheating. Doing this requires no preparationat all, is not particularly suited to any party configuration, and can change from encounter to encounter if people have to leave mid-game.

Upcoming Articles

World Building: Zooming Out From Region to Realm - More basic geography and defining nation-states
At The Table: Complex Skill Checks - Dice rules for performing more complex actions

No article this week

I'm visiting friends in Vancouver and I don't think I'll have time to write it. Normal schedule will resume next week.