After waxing mathematic on my wariness of the 4th Edition D&D skill challenge system, I ran across the DMG Errata. Oh look, they totally retooled the target numbers, number of failures, etc. Because there are so many changes, I’ll just put the relevant, updated text below:

What level is the challenge? What is the challenge’s complexity?

Choose a grade of complexity, from 1 to 5 (1 being simple, 5 being complex).

SKILLCHALLENGE COMPLEXITY

Complexity	Successes	Failures
1	4	3
2	6	3
3	8	3
4	10	3
5	12	3

Level and complexity determine how hard the challenge is for your characters to overcome. The skill challenge’s level determines the DC of the skill checks involved, while the grade of complexity determines how many successes the characters need to overcome the challenge, and how many failures end the challenge. The more complex a challenge, the more skill checks are required.

For an easier or a harder challenge, use DCs from the row that corresponds to a lower or a higher level, and assign the challenge’s level as the midpoint of that level range. For example, if designing an easier challenge for an 8th-level party, you could use the DCs from the “Level 4–6” row. That would adjust the challenge’s level to 5th.

Set a level for the challenge and DCs for the checks involved. As a starting point, set the level of the challenge to the level of the party, and use moderate DCs for the skill checks (see the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table on page 42).

Example: A complexity 3 challenge using hard DCs and cutting the number of failures needed in half increases this skill challenge’s level by four.

This modification, along with a revised pg42 Difficulty Class table (effectively reducing the difficulty of skill checks by 10), means that the death spiral of skill challenge futility now points in the opposite direction: characters that excel at a set of skills related to a challenge now stand an excellent chance of succeeding. The math now looks an awful lot more like “roll some dice, feel good about training a couple of skills, win” instead of “roll some dice, curse your dice, throw your dice at the DM, curse a lot, fail.” Probably a good thing, though they may have swung things a bit too far over.

I picked up my 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons books the day they came out. I couldn’t help it; it’s a weakness of mine. I read through the rules, formed a few opinions, and got a hankering to run a game. Problem was that my playgroup is already hip-deep in a 3rd edition Forgotten Realms game, and I didn’t want to rock the boat by taking the reins from our current DM. So I waited. And jotted down some notes here and there about some adventure ideas.

Then, for reasons I would just as soon not go into on a blog, our campaign hit a bump and our DM isn’t really available at the moment. So we cracked open the books and four of us sat down for our first actual 4e game together. Jimbo put together a tough-guy hammer-and-shield Fighter, Daniel brewed up a halfling Warlock (Infernal Pact), and Jasper finally settled on a Warlord after strongly considering making a Cleric.

The new rules were foreign enough to these three that making characters required a bit of explanation, quite a few questions, and more than a little guesswork. When all was said and done, we were able to create three characters hailing from a desperate little foothills town with a Goblin problem. It had taken us about half a game session to make the characters, so I wanted to get straight to the action: they were on their way into Goblin territory to scout out a temporary logging operation. Times are so rough in town that gathering firewood for the season amounts to a military operation. Two skirmishes followed, which gave us a chance to flex our muscles and throw around some dice. A few observations:

• I would have had a really hard time making Goblin Tactics and Tide of Iron make sense to everybody at the table if I weren’t using a battle mat. Miniatures weren’t necessary; I just used some scraps of paper and used the grid to keep track of where everything was.
• Assuring that the party worked well together was a no-brainer. I encouraged them to each have a different party role (defender, striker, and leader, respectively) and the core rules character abilities took care of the rest.
• The Warlord ability Commander’s Strike works wonders along with the Fighter’s Combat Challenge against a badguy that’s trying to disengage from the fight: Fighter takes a double-move to get into position, Warlord goads the Fighter into a free basic attack, and now the fleeing ranged baddie is stuck.
• The Fighter works differently than he used to. Lots more reasonable options in the heat of the moment. Jimbo has been playing Fighters since I was in preschool, and after a little initial hesitation was right on top of his newly-refined party role, using Cleave and Tide of Iron to mop up minions and break up wolfpack flanking maneuvers like nothing. The Fighter rules have changed a lot, but Fighters haven’t really changed at all from what we really think of them as.
• The Warlock worked a lot like I used to wish Magic Users would, back when I thought Evocation spells were really cool. A Warlock can blast away all day, every day, with his curses and Hellish Rebuke really doing the heavy lifting when it came to parting the bad guys from their hit points. That’s the whole point of a “striker” character class, but it seemed to work out better than just reading the books had implied.
• The Warlord suffered from bad die rolls. Really bad die rolls all night. This made his Commander’s Strike and Inspiring Word abilities all the more important; he could be useful when he was rolling twos and threes.
• Whipping up appropriately-challenging encounters was a breeze. About 100xp worth of bad-guys per first-level character made for a pretty easy scrap. Throwing in an encounter of 125xp critters (two gray wolves and a Goblin Sharpshooter) challenged the party enough to blow a handful of healing surges and dropped the Warlock into negative hit points (largely due to some very good die rolls on my part).

Overall, though I’m dismayed by the cause of the interruption in our 3rd edition game, I’m pleased with how this seriously-reworked new edition of Dungeons & Dragons worked out. I am highly interested in seeing what Privateer Press does with the system, if anything. The creation of new character classes strikes me as superficially labor-intensive, but there are a number of design features built into the new system that I think really help keep things on an even keel, particularly in the area of keeping characters of diverse themes useful.

Next time we have a 4e game session, I’ll have to try out the Skill Challenge system a bit. It is intended to make non-combat encounters a bit more playable within the rules framework (as opposed to a bunch of jibber-jabber finally resolved by a single die-roll by a single character), but the math just doesn’t look right to me. We’ll see what happens when we start throwing dice for determining the location of their logging camp. It’ll almost certainly be interesting, but statistically I’m betting that following the DMG’s guidance will lead to a failed encounter.