There is a huge difference here, in that making an attack involves making a decision - to attack, who to attack, using what attack, and to not run away. Rolling a single dice on your turn involves no decisions. It is just a mechanic timer over which you have no effect whatsoever, and can easily be delegated to a computer. In fact, I find my players prefer non-interactive unconsciousness - this is where you go make a new pot of tea and let some of the tension out you your system. Making rolls each turn does not make a situation involving as long as this roll does not involve any choices, any tactics.
Of all the attempts at rebuttle, this is by far the strongest. My only responce is to say that while that is true, in many cases making an attack involves a trivial decision. Indeed, often the decision is so trivial as to be perfunctery and made without thought. One of the things 4e tried to do (and opinions will vary on how successful it was in achieving this) was create a system in which the moments where the decision to attack was trivial was minimized precisely to avoid this 'slog' problem I'm discussing. One point I have raised thus far is that in many cases, your participation in the system in a slog is so minimal that your turn amounts to rolling the dice and passing it to a player whether or not you succeeded in the task. In this case, the participation is failing to provide the illusion of accomplishment even when nominal success is achieved, because the player has nothing invested in the moment and percieves that his participation is rote and meaningless.
I know the thread passed over this topic and there were some answers along this line, but I still want to stress that participation is about choices - not merely die rolls.
But this in my opinion only leads us back to the original point I was trying to make. People are defining participation in such a way that it excludes certain types of participation, and despite protests the contrary I still insist that when you start taking apart that definition it ends up meaning 'participation where I can achieve a meaningful degree of success (even if ultimately we fail in the challenge)'. You want to say, "Well, it's not just participation, it's participation with choices." But I simply respond to that by saying, "When you say choices, you mean choices where there is a reasonable chance of success and where there is an expectation of success at least some of the time. If we played the game with a rigged die such that we could gaurantee that each of yourr choices ended in failure, the people who are protesting that they don't mean 'success' they just mean 'participation' will then complain that those aren't 'real choices'."
You keep trying to obfuscate the meaning by shifting from one word to the next, but so long as you retain the orginal within the implication of your new word, you aren't making any progress. In the context they are being used, you can't divorse participation or choices from success.
And that is a big issue with mechanics like (the original 4E) skill challenge rules - once you've identified the skill to use, there is no further need of choices, there is only mechanics in the form of dice rolling. This is the point where my players lose interest. Keeping their interest trough a 18-roll skill challenge (complexity 5) is just not possible once they analyze the situation.
Agreed. See my comments on the slog problem, and my disemboweling of the idea of a 'skill challenge' in various threads before the mechanic was introduced.
In the introduction to my new campaign, the very first scene (first 13 or so rounds of the game) was a tsunami smashing through a coastal town. The scene involved skill checks by virtually every player virtually every round, balance, climb, jump, diplomacy, animal handling, tumble, escape artist - I ran the gambit as I threw various obstacles in front of the fleeing players. But it differed from a 4e skill challenge in that each choice was immediate and had immediate consequences.
