AbdulAlhazred
Legend
The big issue for me, in the setup @Maxperson describes, is how do we know how many children are eaten? In a skill challenge, this can be managed through failures - each failure is more children dead. But in other D&D versions, which have no rule for determining children eaten per orc-time-mile-unit, it becomes GM fiat. So the stakes and the action resolution become somewhat illusory.
Right. I kind of naturally thought of it in terms of 4e, but this is a really big problem with running games which focus on 'story' using classic versions of D&D (or 3e or 5e either). There is simply no framework for regulating what winning and losing mean. This is why projecting a 'combat like' system into all aspects of the game is so revolutionary in 4e. I found nothing more telling in the community than the prevalence of a profound inability to appreciate this point. Obviously the types of games you often discus, BW, etc. all have even more pervasive and robust features in this direction, though aimed at producing slightly different types of games.
HoML, my 4e hack, simply states this as an invariant game play process, ALL conflict is a challenge, you can't even roll dice outside of one.