Skills should have been like /Combat/ should have been a skill.

[Arlough]

What if combat was a skill or based on skills, rather than having it's own math; and skill challenges were more like a combat where you fighting a battle pitting your endurance (not the skill, but the ability to go on) against the challenge's ability to wear you out, rather than an arbitrary number of roles.

If the challenge had to wear you down for you to loose, by making "attacks" against the participants that ate into their reserves and fatigued them (this is a scenario where HP represents your ability to go on and surges represent you life/vitae/etc.) while you tried to make headway against it by making "attacks" against the challenge working your way toward resolution, I believe it would be more engaging. It would also be more inclusive as everyone is encouraged to participate because failure would not have as disproportionately large of a cost.

In a normal challenge, you must make X successes before 3 failures, meaning that failure has a HUGE cost but success is only a 1/X gain. Unless X <= 1/3, then only people with at least a 66% chance of success should even try it.
Even in Obsidian Skill Challenge System, a superior system which reduces the cost of failure significantly, the resolution of a challenge is still arbitrary (being set at three rounds) and therefore lacking in drama.

Additional benefit would be that you could build monsters and challenges with the same format stat block, using the DC tables as your defenses and the damage tables as the challenge's attack results. And skill challenge building and encounter building would have the same considerations with regard to how much of a challenge and what resources it cost the party.

Given that, a challenge to break into the treasure room could be built just like an encounter:

• 3 guards on the walls = Brute Challenge
• 1 patrolled treasure room = Elite Controller

Built into this model is the assumption that failures can be overcome by extra efforts on your part. That is why it is fatiguing, but lacks failure until you are out of reserves.
Fail your Stealth vs. the guards, now you have to improvise a way to convince them they were just seeing things.
Hand cramps are hampering your lock picking, and you haven't made any real progress. But, this doesn't mean you are out of the game, yet. If you break another set of picks in the door, or cut yourself bad on one attempt to "get the damn thing to open" though, you may just have to call it a day. But, your remaining allies may at that point just decide to break it down. The thief failed the challenge, but that didn't stop the group.

Anyway, I think it would have made for a more integrated system accommodating combat, heavy RP, and puzzle challenge play styles.

These, at least, are my retrospective thoughts on 4th. What do you think?

 

[Jhaelen]

These, at least, are my retrospective thoughts on 4th. What do you think?

Many systems treat 'combat' or rather weapon and spellcasting skills just like any other skill. I kind of like that approach, however, in order to work properly, combat skills must not be more important than the areas covered by other skills.

In D&D this is traditionally not the case (even if it may be true for many groups). So, I'm not sure if it would be a good idea for D&D.

 

[Arlough]

Many systems treat 'combat' or rather weapon and spellcasting skills just like any other skill. I kind of like that approach, however, in order to work properly, combat skills must not be more important than the areas covered by other skills.

In D&D this is traditionally not the case (even if it may be true for many groups). So, I'm not sure if it would be a good idea for D&D.

I am talking about skills being more like combat or spellcasting rather than the reverse.

The combat system in 4e is very robust, where the skill system seems to be an afterthought.

Most skills system based games (systems that treat combat as a skill) do not have you rolling to attack a skill challenge, but rather have you do a skill check to see if you successfully navigated the complexities of the situation to overcome, with a combat maneuver. Most skills system based games do not have the skill attacking you in return. And as you pointed out, most skills based systems do not have combat as a focus.

D&D 4th edition, I think we can agree, is a combat system with a combat focus. So instead of dragging the majority of the system towards skills, let's drag the minority of the system towards combat.

The only way I suggest that combat is become more like a skill, is an alignment of defenses and DC tables.

I obviously was not clear, and I apologize for that. I will review my original post to see if I can make it more clear.

 

[Nytmare]

When the first rumors of 4th came out, this is exactly how my group thought skills were going to be handled and we were ecstatic. We imagined that every skill attempt was going to fit into some kind of "skill powers vs hit points/study points/crafting points" kind of framework.

In retrospect, I'm kinda glad that it didn't.

Now, I'm running a 4th ed-esque wiki game that is handled entirely with (slightly modified) Obsidian Skill challenges. The biggest shock was realizing exactly how few of the rules are not explicitly tied to the battlemat.