Credit to @planarbindings for the cover photo.
Another week, another Thursday. Let’s take a look at the latest episode of Critical Role to see what lessons we can bring to our own D&D games.
Warning – spoilers ahead for episode 28 of Critical Role
This week, the Mighty Nein infiltrated the Iron Shepherds’ hideout. There was a lot for DMs to learn about running encounters that rely on repeated ability checks instead of using pure combat.
Resolving challenges using skill checks instead of pure combat is one of the main reasons D&D is an amazing game – it’s what lets you do anything you want. In isolation, using a skill check or two in order to take a quick, clever action works really well. But problems arise when you try to build a larger encounter that relies on them.
In combat, you can miss a few attacks and fail a few saves without much issue. But encounters built around ability checks are much more brittle. No matter how many guards you successfully stealth past, a single failed stealth roll can leave you completely screwed.
Even if you only failed a check on a 1 or a 2, an encounter with 5 skill checks has a 40% chance of failure. In this week’s episode of Critical Role, just getting past the first 2 guards required that many checks:
To give you a sense of the probabilities for skill-based encounters, a mid-level character who’s good at something (+4 modifier, +3 proficiency) will succeed on a DC 10 ability check 85% of the time. The party will succeed on an encounter with 4 of these checks 50% of the time assuming they’re smart about who does what.
Starting from here, the decisions that you make will affect the probabilities (roughly) as follows:
Adding just a few checks can have a big impact on the chances of success. Raising the DC has an even larger impact. Given all this, how can we make sure that our ability focused encounters are still full of tense moments without making them completely impossible to pull off?
The most straightforward way to improve ability challenges is to keep the number and difficulty of checks low.
As DMs, I think we often view it as our job to enforce a strict sense of reality and make sure that our players aren’t getting away with things. But Matt seems totally fine rewarding good role play and crazy ideas.
A great example of this is when Clay asked the forest to help with the party’s stealth checks. This is a pretty implausible request. But Matt rewarded the idea by allowing the party to ignore one failed stealth role. I think he knew that the party had a lot of checks left to make, and was looking for a reason to make this check easier without totally dropping it.
Matt also lets players reuse good rolls across multiple checks. He’ll let a single stealth roll stand as a player moves through parts of the dungeon. Instead of making someone roll a persuasion check for every question they ask an NPC, players make one roll and use that to set the tone for the rest of the interaction.
For example, when Beau is convincing the dungeon guard to come upstairs, Matt only has her make one check. He doesn’t have her make a check to stop torturing the prisoner, another check to open the gate, and a final check as the guard walks past her and takes a look at her face.
Matt also allows reactions to bad rolls. If someone fails an acrobatics check jumping across a bottomless pit, he doesn’t just have them fall instantly. He says “you miss the ledge and start to fall, what does everyone do?”. This is a great way of raising the tension and danger, but also effectively giving someone advantage on a roll by giving them a second chance.
These tactics are most effective early on in an encounter. This lets the players get at least some of the value from their plan, even if it ultimately fails later on.
Something that Matt does particularly well is what I think of as “narrative consequences”. Oftentimes, when a player fails a check, Matt lets the player achieve their goal but imposes a tangential cost. A player isn’t immediately caught when they fail to stealth as they sneak up on a guard. But the guard gets paranoid and calls over a comrade, making the sneaky kill twice as hard.
A perfect example of this is when Frumpkin failed his spider stealth checks. Matt didn’t have the guards go into high alert. He just had them attack Frumpkin and force Caleb to call him back, reducing the party’s ability to scout in advance. I’ve noticed that Matt especially uses narrative consequences when players are close to passing a check.
Another way to reduce the consequences of failure is to isolate different parts of the challenge from one another. The map of the Iron Shepherd’s stronghold was well designed for this. Even though Nott failed her stealth checks and the party ended up fighting several enemies, most of the Iron Shepherds were in the basement, where they couldn’t safely jump into the battle. The Mighty Nein was rewarded for their good plan by getting to pick off a few bad guys 1 at a time, but now everyone downstairs is on high alert.
Reducing the consequences of failures is one of the most important ways to encourage role playing. If characters learn that failing a single stealth role or making one in-character bad decision leads to huge negative outcomes, they’ll quickly start avoiding what would otherwise be awesome story moments.
Tonight’s episode of Critical Role showed a lot of good principles for designing encounters that players will solve without combat:
In addition to these general ideas, here’s a rule of thumb that might work for you:
While the party is discussing the encounter, decide in your head how likely their plan is to succeed. A really good plan or a really easy challenge should probably have a 50% chance of success.
As you go through the encounter, make a mark for every ability check you ask the players to make. If the DC is 15 on an ability check, make 2 marks. If you give advantage, don’t make a mark. Treat group ability checks as 1 mark if you average the scores. An encounter with 4 marks is fairly easy. An encounter with 10 marks is nearly impossible.
Of course, this is only measuring the odds of complete success. You could require 10 checks (making complete success highly unlikely), but only give narrative consequences for the first 2-3 failures, giving the party a good chance to get deep into the dungeon or gain some value before things fall apart. More on that in a later post!
