Skill Challenge

[Glistam]

One of the players in my pre-Bloody Monday, Century Station-based game has decided that he wants to dedicate his character's investigation efforts into researching the true identity and abilities of Iron Mike before the inevitable, big upcoming confrontation. Though it's certainly within my power to just say "You find nothing," I felt that was a little too boring. I could turn his investigation into its own series of adventures, but with all the potential dead ends that also ultimately felt a little too boring.

What occurred to me to do was create a "skill challenge." This player and I have talked before about the idea, but I had never until now tried to formally incorporate it into the Palladium ruleset. He's forwarded me stuff from D&D 4th Edition, and some other supplements as well, that all have different ways of going about this sort of thing. After looking over everything I had, I saw basically two "versions" of doing it.

OPTION 1: Lay out a series of sequential skills, possibly with set difficulties/penalties to them, that the character(s) have to roll against. The total number of those skills which are successful determines complete failure, complete success, or partial success.

OPTION 2: Set a core skill that needs to be rolled, possibly with a set difficulty/penalty to it, that the character or characters need to succeed in rolling against. Allow other skills to be rolled in order to offset that penalty, and once the penalty is gone bonuses can start accruing. When ready, the final key skill is rolled, and success or failure is determined by that one roll.

After mulling it over for a while, this is what I decided upon for this situation. It seemed to fit my needs, and if I had to do something similar again I'd probably also use this as a template. I tried to select a series of skills that were a mix of appropriate for the research, and would also lend themselves well to telling a narrative. I also made sure that not every skill in the list was on the character's sheet, thus forcing him to either work with other P.C.'s or involve N.P.C.'s, unless some very, very good rolling happens.

Skill Challenge

• Every skill roll for this has a -30% penalty, including Research. This will take the character two game sessions to investigate. If he wishes to finish investigations by next game, then the skill penalty for each skill rises from -30% to -40%.
• The Research skill has a special use here. Roll Research along side the skills where [+Research] is listed (the same skill penalty noted above applies). For every three successful Research skill rolls, either one failure can be negated or one skill roll can be skipped and considered an automatic success. This does not apply towards Research skill rolls.
• The skills to roll are as follows:
  
  1. Business & Finance [+Research]
  2. Prowl OR (Walk Tightrope/High Wire AND Climb AND Backflip)
  3. Streetwise [+Research]
  4. Criminal Science and Forensics [+Research]
  5. Dance OR Sing OR Charm/Impress
  6. Interrogation OR Seduction [+Research]
  7. Find Contraband [+Research]
  8. Computer Repair
  9. Computer Hacking [+Research]
  10. Surveillance Systems OR Imitate Voices
  11. Escape Artist
  12. Wilderness Survival [+Research]
• The order these skills are rolled in isn't vitally important, especially if you feel a slightly different order can provide a more amusing/interesting narrative.
• All 12 skills rolled successfully is a full success, and you receive the information you seek minus the consequences. Anywhere from 8-11 successes will be a partial success, and the amount of information (and the severity of the consequences for receiving it) will be dependent upon the number of successes. Less than 8 successes is a failure, and there are consequences.

[Daniel Stoker]

It's an interesting idea and I like how you've set it up there but I'd also like to think some good RPing of the research actions like talking to informants etc would be there to help augment (or detract if he does some bad RPing) certain rolls.


Daniel Stoker

[Glistam]

It's typically my standard practice to reward when the player interjects more "flavor" than currently provided. In this case, if the player does good rp set-ups for the rolls we may rp it out more, or not, but the extra effort will likely be rewarded with reduced penalties.

[Daniel Stoker]

Well there you go...


Daniel Stoker

[Glistam]

With only seven successes, the character failed to make any significant headway into his investigations. His efforts to find this deliberately obscured information triggered safeguards which alerted Iron Mike to his attempt, and this was the result:

The "basic" information this research/investigation nets you is that the Kieromin Ironworks has been around since the founding of the city, run by the Kieromin family. The latest owner, and last of the family line, was a man by the name of Mikal Kieromin. He ran the Ironworks successfully for many years, including during the Project Daedalus days and the advent of the superhumans.

When the city was in its growth "boom," the Ironworks was just one of many, many businesses profiting and doing well. When the alien bubble collapsed through the arrest of Dr. Sarnoff and the dismantling of Daedalus, the Ironworks fell on bad times. By all accounts, Mikal was a fair employer, and losing all these contracts bothered him more because of how it would affect his employees rather than how it would affect his bottom line.

Here's where the information trail got hazy. It seems that in order to help keep his company afloat and keep his employees from feeling the recession as hard as the rest of the city, Mikal started taking on other projects... "off the books" sort of projects, so there's very little to find about them. Sometime shortly thereafter, Mikal seemed to disappear, and Iron Mike seemingly stepped up from out of nowhere to take over running the place.

It certainly seems like Mikal could be Iron Mike, but all the accounts of Iron Mike physically (basically, similar to Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin) place him to be wildly different than Mikal in almost every way. While mutation and science and other forces (that some may call magic) can do a lot, it is extraordinarily unlikely that it changed someone so drastically. But trying to trace where Mike might have come from is where you ran into dead ends. There were rumors of a criminal organization starting up around the time of Mike's appearance, but who or what was behind it before Mike subsumed it into his own organization couldn't be discovered. There were also stories of a brutal vigilante in the Waingroh area during that time, but you couldn't uncover much about him at all - his exploits were small scale, local, and apparently brief. Only one eye witness could vaguely recall that the guy seemed to be skilled in boxing. Those were your best leads but none of them panned out.

It kills me to say that this was all you could uncover. As you recover I will leave you with this final bit:

You can smell her before you see or even hear her. For a human she is very good at remaining hidden. But not many people consider the sense of smell, and her mistake of approaching you from downwind is all that alerts you to her presence nearby. Moments after you become aware of her presence she steps out of the shadows, as if she were aware of your awareness of her. She is an Asian woman with long, dark hair. She stands about five foot three and is dressed in black garb, reminiscent of a Ninja outfit. Her face is completely expressionless and remains that way throughout the entire encounter. From the descriptions you have of Iron Mike's lieutenant's you know this is Amaya. She looks straight at you as she talks, and you can see the weight of years in those aged eyes.

"As orders go, this one is very clear," she says out loud in a bored, cold voice. "I am to find and kill this detective creature called Bogart." She says no more and begins to walk towards you.

We won't game again until November, but I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes from here.

[Glistam]

In other news, I've set up another "skill challenge" for the group. In the last game, they managed to capture one of the villains who attacked their H.Q.. They're keeping him sedated now and this was the their discussion:

At a minimum he knows where he met Blaspheme and probably has a way to contact her again. He might have a way to contact other Lieutenants or Iron Mike himself. We can't stay on the defense forever. Sooner or later we need to find them and take the fight to their home base but on our time and plan.

If we can't have someone mind-scan him then I'm thinking we can rig up an artificial reality system, leave him loopy enough that he doesn't realize that it isn't reality and try to talk him through either being recruited again or perhaps convince him he escaped from the tomorrow legion base and follow him in VR to see where he goes.

I told them I thought it was quite ambitious, but set forth these guidelines:

Skill Challenge

• Roll the following skills at a -10% penalty for success due to this being a difficult/complex task.
• Each skill can only be rolled once by a character, and each skill can be attempted no more than twice. A character can roll for more than one skill.
• The skills to roll are as follows:
  
  1. Find Contraband
  2. Research
  3. Jury-Rig, or both Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering
  4. Computer Repair
  5. Computer Programming
  6. TV & Video
  7. Optic Systems
  8. Photography or Art
  9. Land Navigation or Navigation
  10. Medical Doctor or Paramedic or Holistic Medicine
• For every bullet in the above list that is a success, you will have a 10% chance of being able to fool the person into believing it is real, with a maximum chance of 98%.
• Depending on which skills are a success or failure there may be complications.
• Feel free to create any stories or RP that you feel justifies the need to skip rolling for one of those skills.
• If none of the group has the skills (or wants to roll them) you can either create an N.P.C. who you "bring in" to perform the skill (I'll assign skill level, you can roll), or you can ask me to concoct an N.P.C. with an appropriate skill (in such a case I will assign a skill value and then roll).

[Glistam]

I was definitely a little disappointed that they didn't try the skill challenge, above, in our last game. But I guess they just didn't like their chances of success.