It will come up, for instance, if you want an epic-tier brute to interact with a Terrain Power or similar thing that has been designed in accordance with the player-facing DC charts.
My post not far upthread elaborates on what the weakness is in NPC/creature design that produces this outcome.
That's among the general ballpark of things I was mentioning. Honestly, for a while, I didn't notice. I do not believe the group I was playing with at the time really noticed until we started to get around the middle of the second tier. At first, it was a few weird edge cases which came out of the players coming with a creative solution, so not much was thought about it. As it started to occur more, I became curious as to why it was occurring. When I started to run the game, I noticed it more. As a DM, my goal has never been to murder the PCs nor has it ever been to make challenges unbeatable, but (on the other end of the spectrum) it's nice when the antagonists appear to competent. From the player side of things, some of the in-game fiction seemed out of place.
For whatever it's worth, the group of people with whom I primarily played during that point in time played a lot. We met twice a week for a little over a year.
I agree with this. The most common complaints I saw about skill challenges were two:
(1) "Dice-rolling exercise" - this is a picture of the skill challenge in which (i) the GM stipulates the checks required at the outset, (ii) these are then made by the players largely independent of the initial fictional framing and with no unfolding framing over the course of the challenge, and (iii) the outcome of the challenge is determined by totalling up the results of those checks. This approach to skill challenge resolution obviously contradicts what the DMG says, and what it models with its examples, but it seems to have been extremely common.
(2) "Artificial pacing/outcomes" - this is a complaint that rests on a premise that the only way to frame and adjudicate skill checks is "naturalistic"/"process-oriented", and hence rejects or does not even consider (a) that failure can be narrated in all sorts of ways beyond
you suck! (see eg
@Manbearcat's gorge; or an example I once gave of a failed Diplomacy check, in an outdoor context, being narrated as the rain starting to fall part way through the character's entreaty) nor (b) that the whole point of the SC pacing (and much like hp pacing in combat) is to constrain the GM's narration precisely so as to deliver a degree of certainty and control to the players.
On this point
@Argyle King is correct. Here is the relevant passage from p 55 of the 4e PHB:
When damage of a power is described as more than one type, divide the damage evenly between the damage types (round up for the first damage type, round down for all others). For example, a power that deals 25 fire and thunder damage deals 13 fire damage and 12 thunder damage.
This was later changed by errata; I don't remember when. The revised rule is found in the glossary in PHB 3, but I think that the errata predated that. (Sidenote: in looking up books on this point I also discovered that PHB 2 changed the MM definition of Overland Flight! I don't think I ever knew that before.)
I agree with your comments on skill challenges here.
Thanks for pointing out where the way of handling resistances changed. I know that's a small detail and something which may be overlooked as not important, but my opinion is that one small change had a ripple effect which changed a lot of other parts of the game and how those pieces interacted. On the player side of things, it lead to (as mentioned upthread) players trying to collect obscure keywords so as to effectively bypass resistances.
I think, on some level, this change was also noticed by the people designing the game because I also remember -shortly after that- a lot of errata and clarification being needed to address how things with multiple keywords worked in certain situations. In particular, I remember classes which could use weapons as implements starting to become an issue because you could find a weapon which did some rarely resisted damage type, say it was your implement, and then start giving the keyword associated with said damage type to your spells.
My solution to that: In home games, I simply ignored the "official" errataed way of doing resistances. Sometimes that meant looking over something from a newer book to make very minor changes because I knew newer stuff was designed with the official way of doing it in mind, but there was very rarely something which I needed to make more than minimal changes to, if I even needed to make changes at all. For me, I found that lead to the game functioning better and also not having many of the headaches I read about here on Enworld.
This is very true. In the context of 3E it produces nonsense like "natural armour bonuses" of 30+!
My view is that, especially at paragon and epic tiers, the skill bonuses in NPC/creature stat blocks are largely ignorable unless being used for some particular combat-related purpose like resolving a jump check or perhaps an escape from a PC's grapple. What is missing (which is not missing in the defence and attack numbers) is an integration of the sorts of bonuses that high-level PCs have that make their skill bonuses meaningful in relation to high-level DCs.
Solving this problem in a fundamental way would require revisiting the maths of skill bonuses from the ground up and trying to bring it into line with attack and defence numbers. I believe that
@AbdulAlhazred does just this in his HoML hack/variant.
The end of what you said here is, I think, maybe similar to what I was attempting to do toward the end of my time with 4E. But I was doing it in a different way. Instead of looking at skill bonuses, I was looking at how to move the various maths of the game closer. It probably would have been easier to just update skill bonuses. What can I say? At the time, I had a lot of free time, and I was playing the game a lot, so I devoted a lot of time to thinking about how I thought it might work better.
I remember I got as far as redesigning encounter XP guidelines; a lot of changes to how I did skill challenges; how I determined DCs; figuring out a way to build my own version of elites and solos (and how much XP they were worth given that they were made differently); and trying to figure out a way to fix the original version of the orb wizard so that it wouldn't be ridiculously OP without nerfing it as hard as the later changes to it did.
Hearing all of that may make it sound as though I disliked the game. Truthfully, at the time, there really were aspects of 4E which rubbed me the wrong way. Though, as I look back, the reality is that I would not have spent so much time on trying to make the game better if I didn't on -some level- enjoy it or have an emotional attachment to wanting to do the work. And, while it was during 4E that I started to explore beyond D&D, I will again say what I am sure I have said in past threads: it was not the things that 4E got wrong which pushed me to try other games; it was the things that 4E got right which pushed me to try other games because I wanted to further embrace some of the concepts.
In an attempt to end on a positive note, I will add that one of the most fun skill challenges I ever ran as a DM was a skill challenge in which some of the PCs had to help one of the PCs choose a suitable bride. The quick version of the story is that one of the PCs was believed by a religious group to be the last remaining member of a bloodline related to one of their saints. Part of this meant that he (the character in question was male) was required to be wed to one of the potential mates the keepers of the bloodline felt were suitable, within 3 days of accepting his status as the chosen one and receiving the various boons associated with such. The catch was that the PC himself was not allowed to view or interact with any of the potentials, so he had to rely on the other PCs attempting to gather information about his possible options. I left them a write up of what the keepers had explained to them about the ceremony and some vague first impressions which were obvious during a first meeting with the master of ceremonies and a group of veiled and heavily shrouded figures.
I went and sat in the kitchen, so as to actually be physically separated from the gaming group. The other players would come out and explain to me what they were trying to do to gain more information and/or what kind of information they were attempting to gain. Since they were limited on time (3 days; X number of rolls in skill challenge terms,) sometimes this meant one player coming out by themselves because they had split up from the others to gain more info, and sometimes this meant multiple players trying to gain more (or better) information about one of the potential brides. The player of the groom-to-be had to rely on the other players to then relay the information to him. I could hear the discussion in the other room, and they would come back out to ask more questions when ready.
Thinking back on all of the games I have run over the years, I believe that may have been the most invested I've ever seen a group of players in the outcome of the encounter. The funny thing was that there really was no way to "fail" the skill challenge. At the end, the choice from the lineup was still in the hands of the PC. The difference was how much information he had available to make the choice.
