with an occasional random Dice Challenge where other folks might put problem solving and conversations with NPCs.
Skill challenges were an attempt to develop social and exploration encounters in the same way, but as written they fall pretty flat. There are very seldom any meaningful choices to be made in a by-the-book skill challenge. You pick the best skill you can find an excuse to use, and then it's all up to the dice.
Neither of these comments reflect my own experience with skill challenges.
I have a collection of rulebook quotes I like to pull out on occasions like this:
From the player’s point of view (PHB pp 179, 259):
Your DM sets the stage for a skill challenge by describing the obstacle you face and giving you some idea of the options you have in the encounter. Then you describe your actions and make checks until you either successfully complete the challenge or fail…
Whatever the details of a skill challenge, the basic structure of a skill challenge is straightforward. Your goal is to accumulate a specific number of victories (usually in the form of successful skill checks) before you get too many defeats (failed checks). It’s up to you to think of ways you can use your skills to meet the challenges you face.
From the GM’s point of view (DMG pp 72–75):
More so than perhaps any other kind of encounter, a skill challenge is defined by its context in an adventure…
Begin by describing the situation and defining the challenge. . . You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results...
When a player’s turn comes up in a skill challenge, let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. As long as the player or you can come up with a way to let this secondary skill play a part in the challenge, go for it…
In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. . . This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth…
However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. If a player asks, “Can I use Diplomacy?” you should ask what exactly the character might be doing … Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge.
So it's not about "making excuses" to use skills. A player has to
explain what his/her PC is doing to resolve the challenge. If this is not a
meaningful choice with potentially
meaningful consequences, that's only because the GM is not making the effort to set up skill challenges with meaningful stakes, where methods of resolution make a difference. As a very simple example, whether a social challenge is resolved using Diplomacy or Intimidate should have very obvious consequences for downstream relationships between the PC(s) and NPC(s) in question - and even for subsequent checks during the challenge (eg -2 to future Diplomacy after successful Intimidate).
The main difference between a skill challenge and "free-form" but skill-based encounter resolution of the sort supported by games like Traveller, Runequest and Rolemaster is that a skill challenge imposes a mechanical constraint on resolution - no more than 12 successes can be required by the GM (and XP must be allocated accordingly) and no more than 2 failures may be permitted with success still being possible. The rationale for this sort of quantification (which resembles eg extended contests in HeroQuest or some aspects of the Duel of Wits in Burning Wheel) is that the GM and players aren't free to just string the encounter along until they reach an agreement on its resolution. This imposes pressure on the GM (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, players) to narrate the outcome of skill checks in such a way that a sensible resolution within those mechanical constraints is feasible.
Whether this is a good or bad thing might depend in part on whether you see "free-form" resolution as open-ended an innovative, or as GM-fiat-"mother-may-I". As a GM who has found "free-form" resolution increasingly frustrating over the years, I personally like it.
Outside of combat, how do the mechanics respond to the choices the players make? Do they feed back into character resources? The adversity the players face? The rewards the characters earn?
Based on what I've said above, I think the answer is "Yes". Player choices should affect the resolution of a skill challenge, by opening up some options and foreclosing others. This in turn feeds into adversity. It can also feed into rewards. A very simple example: a successful skill challenge might lead to a magic item being given as a gift, which otherwise is obtained only following a fight. More complex examples might involve access to healing, to information, to social positioning that opens up mechanical and/or ingame options, etc.
there are issues with skill checks that cause problems when you use skill challenges.
I'd like to hear more about this.
I for one find the skill challenge rules excellent - near the sweet spot of providing me as DM enough to resolve things without being constraining or meaning I need to disrupt the scene to look things up.
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The guidance on how to use them sucks. Which is very different from nto finding them extremely useful.
I think the guidance on how to use skill challenges could be better. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it sucks - the passages I've quoted above are pretty clear. But I disagree with you about the
rules being excellent. I think they have at least a few problems. The main one that crops up for me repeatedly is a lack of clear rules on integrating powers and rituals into skill challenge resolution. Now I'm not an idiot, and so some of this I can work out myself (helped by what is said in DMG 2). But given the intricacy of the mechanical balance in 4e, exactly what is the expected likelihood of saving a healing surge (a fairly standard issue in a skill challenge) by using a ritual costing X gp (DMG 2 says a ritual is worth an automatic success, but this just obviously can't be right eg for a 1st level ritual used by 10th level PCs).
4e to me is the first edition to provide that without heading hard down the simulationist rabbit hole
Agreed.
