I see no reason to suppose that 4E assumes all encounters must be rushed, threatening or distracting.Mustrum_Ridcully said:Probably because a skill challenge is an encounter?
(Can't tell you if that's true without the books)
I'd say that a task that a minimally talented (non negative stat mod) trained person can succeed 100% of the time when they're not in significantly stressful situations (i.e. not in an encounter) *IS* easy.Stalker0 said:Let's talk skill challenges for a moment.
At 1st level, an "easy" skill DC is 15. Well...how easy is that.
Let's pick our best guy for the job. We'll give him a +4 from his primary stat, and +5 for being trained, a pretty reasonable assumption. So he has a +9 to the roll, meaning if he can't take 10, then he will fail the check 25% of the time.
25% failure doesn't sound easy to me. Now let's take a guy with training but not the best at the skill, he only has a +2 from his stat. That's a 35% failure. I succeed only 2 out of every 3 times, doesn't sound very easy.
Your DCs are wrong across the board. You're talking about level 1 skill difficulties and using ones from... well I don't know where. The chart for the DCs for skill challenges is on page 42. Under that chart, a Medium DC for 1st level characters is 15, which means that if you're not going for Easy (which would mean your competent characters have a 100% chance of success) you've got a 31.6% chance of succeeding in the first 4 rolls and a 63.3% chance of succeeding overall. That's at level 1, where the chance of success is LOWEST overall. The DCs don't scale up at the same rate as the 1/2 lvl mod and stat mods combined do.Now let's look at a moderate DC, which at level 1 is a 20. With our +9 guy, he needs an 11 or better, a straight up 50/50 chance to make a check. Let's also not forget that with this DC, you can't take 10, as it wouldn't be enough. Well...personally if I'm walking a tightrope and I have a 50/50 chance of falling off, I would consider that pretty hard.
How this really effects the players is with skill challenges. For the most part, skill challenges have moderate DCs for the challenge, and you cannot take 10. That means with every check you have a 50/50 shot at making it. This is assuming of course you are using one of your absolute best skills. Considering that you need twice the number of successes as you need failures....that means MOST skill challenges will statistically end in failure!!
For example, let's say you have a complexity 1, level 1 skill challenge for level 1 PC. About as straight forward as you can get right?
Let's assume moderate skill challenges for the board, and assume every player is rolling with a +9. Aka, everyone is got a good skill to roll on this one. The players chance of winning the challenge is....15.6%.
That's right, about a 1 in 6 chance for the most basic of challenges.
neoweasel said:Your DCs are wrong across the board. You're talking about level 1 skill difficulties and using ones from... well I don't know where. The chart for the DCs for skill challenges is on page 42.
Whoops! Well, color *me* embarrassed.Stalker0 said:Read the chart again, pay careful attention to the footnote.
hong said:So, I now have the books. There were more people at Tin Soldier at lunchtime than I've ever seen there.
Anyway, I can't find where it says that you can't take 10 in a skill challenge. Is there a page reference for that?