Voss said:
Actually the example annoys me specifically for that Intimidate prohibition. Why? Why is this guy immune to getting leaned on? Offer to feed him to your pet demon and he just laughs? Threaten his family, and he just responds with 'Go ahead'?
You can intimidate the Duke. But it doesn't bring you closer to your goal. That's the idea. You get him to fear you, but that doesn't mean he will lend you troops or whatever you wanted to do. It makes it just likely that he will send his family to safety, ask his mage to improve the magical protection barriers, and, if all that doesn't seem enough, he will have you arrested or betray you at a later point. The NPCs role and personality just doesn't fit being intimidated in this context. That's the idea.
You have to keep in mind that if you need his help, that means you depend on him. This gives him power over you.
Imagine trying it in the real world. Go to your mayor, and threaten to kill his family, if he doesn't send his sheriff to help you in taking out a biker-gang. Don't you think this will make him work against you at a later time? He will use every opportunity to hinder your efforts.
Remember that failing the skill challenge doesn't mean that you are unable to continue. Depending on what happened during the roleplaying part of the challenge, it means you are not in the perfect situation. If you failed barely, maybe the Duke lends you a small and weak unit, but since you threatened him, they have orders to leave you to die if you face real opposition.
It feels too artificial and just a quick band-aid replacement for actual role-playing.
'Come on guys, roll high 8 times, and we can just hand-wave the whole thing and get back to killing'.
If you're not interested in Roleplaying, that's what you can do. But if you want to role-play, you can use the system as a guide "what" to roleplay. it structures what you do, and you can measure the progress and flow of the roleplay situation. It is more then just fancy-talk and convincing the DM. It's also more then just rolling a single dice and telling a story with them.
It allows you to tell a story based on the decisions the character make and their skill or success in following their decisions. It provides a more complex structure then "roll a single check against a fixed DC", and you can use this structure to base your roleplaying on, or can use your roleplaying to create the structure.
I don't have a problem with 'find the temple in the jungle' example, because that makes sense- it isn't something the players and DM can actually do, so you game it out with dice rolls. But faking a role-playing session seems to defeat half the point of a game. Go down that road, and you really are playing a board game.
I disagree. You're really playing a
dice game, at least during the skill challenges. You don't need a board, just your skill checks.
Edit: But if you want to roleplay, but either feel a little overwhelmed by the possibilities, or just want to know what your roleplaying means in mechanical terms and how it all worked out, the skill challenge is ready for you.