Monsterpunk has Skill Challenges now

Today I want to talk about what is one of my favorite low-key mechanics in Monsterpunk: Group Tests. One of the things I'm doing is upgrading them from a sidebar suggestion to a proper full page of rules.

The idea is basically as follows: Multiple PCs cooperate to resolve a sufficiently complex task using Skills and Techs, with success and failure being determined not by individual performances but rather the performance of the group as a whole.

Mechanically, each PC participating in a Group Test contributes with a certain amount of Progress, with each task requiring a specific amount to solve it. The most basic form of contribution is through Skill Tests, as follows:

Note that you can't substract Progress by rolling badly. You can opt out of rolling a Skill Test, but there's no point to doing so since the worst you can do is not add any Progress at all. Also a single PC can contribute with only one Skill per Group Test... Unless they fail and try again using a different Skill, but even then they're still rolling once per attempt. Point is, no one can roll multiple Skills at the same time and everyone should be rolling their most applicable Skill here.

PCs can also contribute 'passively' through Features, Support or Trick Techs that apply without having to roll anything. These add +1 Progress each and, in truly exceptional cases where your Techs can cover for multiple PCs, +2 Progress each. For example: The PCs must infiltrate an enemy facility and reach the VIP area without raising an alarm. Making yourself invisible is an automatic +1 Progress, but the ability to make yourself and all the other PCs invisible would be +2 Progress instead and you can still roll Stealth, Electronics, Negotiation or whatever other suitable Skills you've got on top of that.

Comparing both ways to contribute: Skill Tests are available to everyone, they have a lower ceiling and a higher floor, but are random. Features and Techs are more reliable, but there's less of them and they are individually more niche in use, so you can't always count on having an applicable one around.

Between Skill training, Features, Techs and just plain being lucky, you can assume that most groups will get at least 1 Progress per PC and half of them will get 2. This means that the average PC contributes 1.5 Progress to any given Group Test. So how far does that get them? Well, there are three difficulty settings for Group Tests, but on average the results are as follows:

Progress Lower than the Number of PCs: As a Twist.
Progress Exactly the Number of PCs: As a Success with Twist.
Progress Over the Number of PCs: As a Success.
Double or More Progress than the Number of PCs: As a Success with Bonus.

The regular Skill Test rules lean towards Success with Twist being the most common result, with regular Successes and then Twists behind (remember that Advantages twist the odds towards higher numbers). Group Tests however lean towards Success being the most common result, not just because 1.5 Progress per PC means you'll land solidly there on average, but also because Success with Twist is really unlikely to happen, even less so than a pure Twist. Interestingly, Success with Bonus is much more likely in regular Skill Tests, thanks to a combination of Advantage stacking and Tricks that let you autoroll 10 once per day, but in Group Tests getting a Success with Bonus requires multiple people to be very lucky or having so many applicable Features and Techs that it should be obvious at a glance there's no real chance of failure here and you shouldn't even bother rolling dice.

This means you could arguably powergame the narrative rules by getting the group to work in tandem most of the time, so that you're always rolling Group Tests and minimizing chances of failure. It's exploitable, but is that a bad thing? Not really. Or at least not meaningfully. Consider that this kind of exploit is one that requires involving everyone in the story and working together, rather than making one person hog the spotlight constantly. Sure, it might make the game too easy, but if your problem is that the PCs are always cooperating and using their special talents to help each other out all the time... Well, that's a great problem to have, honestly. Even then you can always just use the provided rules to make Group Tests harder so it's not a super huge deal.

It is also preferable to what happened in old versions of these rules: They were much harder, leaning towards Success with Twist and making it possible to take away from the group's Progress with bad rolls. The end result of this subsystem was that people would rather sit out than risk undoing everyone else's work and that really sucks considering that the entire point of Group Tests is to make all the PCs participate in advancing the story.

And I think they serve a very important function in doing that. We've all been in games where one or two PCs end up doing more than the others just because they speak up more, their skillsets can solve most problems, or the GM just doesn't know how to make challenges that involve everyone. Group Tests are a formalized, simple and effective way to guarantee that - at least for one Scene - everyone does something of relevance. Or makes the attempt and fails, I guess, but, er, at least they tried?

I really like Group Tests. I've found myself using them more and more in playtesting and fine-tuning them until they became a core part of the rules. They're not flashy or fancy but they're fun and facilitate cooperative storytelling. And hey, those are two of my favorite things!

I really can't wait to get them out the door so that others can start playing with them.

Gimmick Out.