It might be useful, or it might be cumbersome and unneeded.
...yes. That's literally the point. I'm sorry I dropped the rest of that line, I do that sometimes--get distracted responding to later parts and forget to finish the previous. The answer is, "It depends on what it does!" The whole point of that was that you are not actually asking a question. You're making an assertion, disguised as a question, that it's
not useful, that it's
inherently "cumbersome and unneeded." And, again, "unneeded" is an ENTIRELY POINTLESS standard for game design. NOTHING is EVER "needed" for games. You don't need HP--plenty of games don't have them. You don't need XP, or stats, or discrete actions, or random number generation (let alone specifically that via polyhedral dice), or...literally
any mechanical element of the game.
The ONLY standards that actually matter are (1) "Is it useful?" and (2) "Does it support the desired experience?"
Literally no rule is ever
actually necessary. Trying to frame things in terms of what is "needed" is just unfairly enforcing a standard that
no game rule has ever, or will ever, actually meet.
This does not take into account the quality of the successes and failures, the drama and the story, and the way the players react and participate to it.
Then it's a badly-run Skill Challenge, full stop. Any time you ignore these things, it's bad, short and simple. Don't run Skill Challenges that way, because literally
nothing run that way would be good--regardless of whether it's formal or informal!
The rules don't tell you to ignore those things. They just give you a really, really basic framework. As with many D&D rules, their best-practices use isn't explicitly written into the rules themselves, it's a matter of learning how they work best. The exact same statement applies to things like monster design (e.g. 5e has a lot of rather poorly-designed monsters, as the designers unfortunately have tended toward making big fat sacks of HP that don't do much damage; the same happened early in 4e as well, so this isn't a unique problem to 5e either.)
So either you make the count visible and I can guarantee that the players will just try to use skills to increase the count of successes, or you hide it, and in that case it really serves no purpose except to constrain the DM into declaring an overall failure or success when the count reaches a pre-determined value.
...except no, it really does serve a purpose. Because even if you don't make the count obvious,
even with the rules as written for SCs, it should still be quite obvious that things are heading toward success or failure. It explicitly is NOT supposed to be a state of sustained total ignorance until you hear the completely unexpected "ding!" of success or the "BZZT!" of failure.
If people ran SCs for you that way, then yeah, I can totally understand why you'd dislike them. But, again, that's not even going with the way Skill Challenges are
actually described, let alone the not-directly-stated best practices for using them. Your complaint would be like someone saying that 5e combat is frustrating and swingy because their 5e DM required them to make all of their melee or spell attacks at once, with a single attack roll. The rules
don't actually work that way, and while making that change is permissible, it's not
useful to do so.
As a DM, I don't want the players to hunt successes and skill rolls, and I value the story and my players reaction to it more than counting things arbitrarily because when I created the scenario I certainly did not envision all the ways to succeed and fail. So why bind myself arbitrarily to these?
Uh...don't? Again I just...don't understand why you would WANT to do that. You don't have to, and the SC rules text doesn't tell you to--it even kinda-sorta tells you NOT to. I will 100% admit that the descriptions and examples of Skill Challenges are not the best, but given your whole argument is "people shouldn't be limited by the rules," why should people be prevented from doing things the rules don't say anything about? Let alone doing things the rules actually (sort of) tell you not to do!
Again, it's a question of playing style mostly, I'm not denigrating another way of playing, just explaining the one that we prefer. And it's linked to preparation, for example I usually don't try and find the ways by which the PCs might succeed. I present a situation, just trying to make it so that it does not look impossible to get out of, and then I go with the flow and the PCs ideas. This avoid any sort of railroading towards pre-determined solutions - and again I'm not accusing anyone of railroading or saying that a bit is bad or not, just the fact that listing the solutions and where the PCs get points is already creating some structure that will guide the results.
But...why can't you decide how things change...
within the framework? All a skill challenge does, at its most fundamental level, is require a certain number of successes before a certain number of failures. That's it. That's literally all the "formalism" you're talking about. "To win, succeed X times total. You lose if you fail Y times
before you get enough successes." That's LITERALLY all the "formality" the system has to it. Everything else is style, approach, etc.--and those things can and
should change in response to how things proceed!
Why
can't you say, "Ah, because you were able to vault over the tops of the buildings(1) and used your squad's underworld connections to get a bead on where your target was going(2), you were able to keep on their tails when they thought they could shake you. They're getting desperate now, which means they're willing to do some dangerous things to try to stop you. They jump down into a busy market square, and start vandalizing stalls and throwing innocent people into the way of danger in order to cause chaos and slow you down. What will you do?" (Notes: (1) the result of a successful Acrobatics or Athletics check, (2) the result of a successful Streetwise or Diplomacy check, depending on the specific way you relate to these groups.) This is a dynamic and evolving scenario that doesn't have to be pre-planned. Sure, maybe the DM knows where these rapscallions are headed, but they don't have to have planned for every single possible action the players could take. They can organically adapt, accepting successful
and unsuccessful results as ratcheting up the tension on one side or the other, and allowing for a potential spread of final results within the overall binary of "you succeeded" vs "you failed."
Like...again, the rules don't tell you you
can't have grades of success or failure based on how narrow the result was. They don't tell you that you can't have the SC evolve as players make choices (and kinda-sorta tell you to DO that very thing). They don't tell you that you can't (say) provide an immediate success or failure without rolling, if a player's idea is smart enough. Why limit yourself from things the rules
don't even talk about? And then on the flipside, the rules don't tell you to plan out every possible result so that the players are just using random numbers to blindly stumble through your flowchart. They don't tell you to work through the process as mechanistically and rigidly as possible--it's a framework, not a straightjacket. Why
force yourself to do things the rules don't talk about--and indeed sometimes, whether implicitly or explicitly, tell you NOT to?
Well, please consider the fact that 5e, which does not have these formal structures, has been what, ten times more successful than 4e ever was in introducing new players to the hobby.
Yeah uh....stop right there.
You have no idea why or how things happen the way they do. Remember that 4e came out
in the middle of a severe recession. A recession in which one of the most prominent book store chains in the country went out of business. There are WAY too many factors involved to raise things like this as an objection--even if it were relevant to what I said,
which it isn't. Whether the game is designed to support new players or old ones is very nearly orthogonal to the overall financial success of a single edition.
So, again: Do you think
So for me, there are better ways to support new players.
And these are...?
It was just a tangent, to say that although it can help some people, formalising things (skill challenges, grid) has a cost in terms of ease of use of the system, that's all.
That's.....not how it read, at all, but....okay I guess.
I think you overinflate the costs, particularly because, as I said, veteran players have ALWAYS been able, and almost always QUITE willing, to tell the rules where they can stick it.
But then, what's the point in having the structures in the first place ?
(1) They help new players get their footing and figure out how they want to do things. This is very useful, and you haven't actually said why it isn't.
(2) They can be made relatively light and extensible. Again,
the only actual formality you're arguing over is, "You must succeed X times before you fail Y times."
That's it. That's ALL the formality of a skill challenge. If I can express the ENTIRE formalism in one sentence like that....is it really THAT formal? It's not even as formal as most of the rules that exist in 5e!
Again, it's just a matter of preference, if you like them, by all means use them, but as I don't like/use them, why should I bother with them ? A simpler, less structured game is much more appropriate and avoids us burdenning players, especially beginners, with things that they won't need...
[citation needed]
Again: there is
literally nothing "needed" in any ruleset ever. There is only the play-experience the designer desires to support (and thus whether the rules do support it), and the overall process of play (and thus whether the rules serve the purpose for which they were designed.) IOW, the only standards that matter are "does it make the kind of game I want?" and "does it do the job it's meant for?" Since
nothing is "needed," I reject your repeated calls for justifying the "need" for formalisms. In D&D, the desired experience is heroic adventure, which has a lot of meanings to a lot of people, but generally means doing risky things either to defend your principles (nation/origin, morals/values, etc.) or to acquire resources (money, treasure, power, etc.) The function for which Skill Challenges were designed is to give DMs a basic, extensible framework to cover essentially all possible "complex" not-specifically-combat scenarios, that is, anything where success should be dependent on an overall or collective non-violent effort, rather than violent efforts (aka combat) or individual non-violent efforts (aka single skill checks.)
So the questions that are actually worth answering are, "Do Skill Challenges support a heroic adventuring experience?" and "Do SCs fulfill the function for which they were designed?"
It sounds like you pretty clearly disagree with the former, but, as I've argued above, I think that's because the people who ran skill challenges for you ran them
extremely, almost indescribably badly. Like...they literally ignored the rules in order to run them
worse than they're supposed to.
3e and 4e were heavily mechanistic, but 5e is not, you should try PF and PF2...
...uh, yeah, about that. 5e is still quite mechanically heavy. It's WAY heavier than something like Dungeon World, to say nothing of games like Fate. 5e has loads and loads of mechanistic features. They're just packaged in familiar ways, which makes their complex mechanisms both easier to ignore and more familiar-feeling, which makes it easy to think they aren't actually all that complicated.
I mean, 5e has the THP vs HP distinction. That alone, with all its internal layers and hooked-in features, is more complicated than some
entire game systems.
I have honestly no idea whether one approach is more frequent than another, so I can't comment, the only thing I can say is that there are skills in all systems now, and if the DM incites the players to use them, they will, if he does not, they may or may not, but I don't think that the Skill Challenge encourages things specifically unless you lay it out plainly, in which case I really don't like it, I prefer my players to game th e world rather than the system.
Then, as I've said several times, you're having DMs that run bad Skill Challenges. Full stop. Really,
really bad ones. Like, worse than the worst examples from canned adventures. Actively ignoring how the books describe them, but in the worst possible ways. Again: almost indescribably badly run.
A good Skill Challenge isn't totally unnoticeable, even if the DM doesn't explicitly say it--players can usually figure it out. But a good SC is also dynamic and responsive. It permits varying degrees of success or failure. It allows the players to change the terms of engagement--or, conversely, it allows the opponents/environment to do the same, if the players screw up badly. It allows smart players to skip past the rules part entirely, if they have an idea good enough that there's no question about whether it should succeed. And, if the DM is being actually honest with herself and her group, it allows for players to circumvent the SC in its entirety, for exactly the same reasons that players could circumvent combats, while still giving the players appropriate rewards.
And...how exactly can you "game the system" with SCs? Again,
the only actual rule within the SC framework is, "you must succeed X times before you fail Y times." How is that "gameable"? Like...players are always going to try to roll skills they're good at and avoid skills they're bad at. They'll do that regardless of whether you use SCs or not. And players will try to buff up for situations they expect might happen, or in response to needing to make a skill check...again, whether or not you use SCs. So....what is it that is so "gameable" about "you must succeed X times before you fail Y times"?
Rituals are just rituals and fairly standard now, but I'm talking about spells used for intrigue or out of combat, in 4e, it's always grids and squares and encounter formalism.
...no, it's really not, and 4e rituals were VERY specifically a HUGE part of that. Skill Challenges were another huge part.
There might be options to do without that, but then what's the point of the formalism ?
The formalism--rituals--lets you know what you definitely
can do, if you meet whatever requirements (skill checks, having a scroll, whatever). Despite your phrasing, though, what was discussed
isn't "do[ing] without that." It's showing that the formalism is an
extensible framework. It's a thing that can be
expanded upon, with other tools. In this case, you can (explicitly!) deviate from the normal behavior of a ritual, by using the Arcana skill. (I don't know if this is explicit in the text, but I'd let characters trained in divine magic to use Religion, and those trained in Primal Spirit traditions to use Nature, instead of Arcana, which is implicitly for characters trained in arcane magic.)
Again, you have this notion that the formalism MUST always be 100% perfectly rigidly adhered to, or it's worthless. That's not how 4e was designed, and trying to play 4e that way is going to be either EXTREMELY frustrating or really, really, REALLY boring.
4e was designed so that using the rules as written and no more, you'll get a game that is consistently and reliably functional. It is your responsibility to do
more than JUST what the rules say. The point of the formalism is to give you a jumping-off point. A solid baseline. A foundation on which to build other things. The fact that buildings have foundations doesn't mean you can't build wild and crazy things on top. The foundation doesn't say "you're ONLY allowed to build directly onto bedrock and ONLY below the surface and ONLY with this specific set of materials." Yes, it
is (or should be!) built on bedrock, underground, and with specific and sturdy materials in specific and sturdy ways. But the whole point of that foundation--the reason it's
useful, not the reason it's
necessary--is that once you have that, you have substantially MORE freedom to do as you like building up from it.
It's hard to build a good house on sand.
It's not for lack of trying, but with all the formalism in the game, our DMs at the time played it formally, and it never happened in our campaigns.
Then those DMs were playing it wrong. Full stop.
I'm more curious why you thought that having a formal system automatically means that anything it doesn't talk about is explicitly forbidden.
I agree that the new rituals are not as complete as 4e ones, but on the reverse, it's because the spells and powers of 5e are much more open-ended and useful out of combat, so it more than balances itself out with our way of playing.
They really aren't more open-ended though. In 4e, an Arcana skill check could--
explicitly, in the rules--modify what a ritual does. Does 5e explicitly, in the rules, allow an Intelligence (Arcana) skill check to rewrite the rules for spells?
No, they also got tons of mafic items that at least partially compensated, that was the fun of the game.
And who has the capacity to
make those magic items? Who can replicate those magic items with low-level or even infinitely-repeatable spells?
Whoa, please don't go in terms of bias and such, we are just discussing preferences, OK ?
Then don't go into terms of financial success, as though financial success were a valid metric of whether a game supports new players vs long-time ones.
Rituals don't mention grids, but they are also fairly useless in intrigue and free form gaming, and don't compensate for the use of spells and powers in non-combat situation, that's all.
...how many rituals did you use or look at? Because....well, here, let me give you a list of rituals. 100% of these are from 5th level or lower (mostly so that I'm not listing hundreds of the things):
amanuensis, comprehend languages, dowsing rod, explorer's fire, fastidiousness, glib limerick, master artisan, pass without trace, portend weather, secret page, tracker's eye, traveler's chant, wizard's curtain; bloom, delver's fire, fluid funds, last sight vision, lower water, spirit fetch, survivor's preparation, tree shape, water walk; battlefield elocution, calm emotions, hunter's curse, Leomund's trap, lullaby, speech without words, summon winds, wind words; beast growth, call of friendship, dark light, familiar mount, feat of strength, hand of fate, iron vigil, snare, travelers' feast, wavestrider enchantment; animal friendship, breach disguise, deep pockets, hallucinatory item, hidden pocket, hunter's blessing, lesser telepathy, magic circle, object reading, precise forgery, reliable balance, self-holding bag, speak with nature, starshine, thorough search, tongues, uncanny strength, Vistani passkey. And that's JUST stuff 5th level or below, excluding anything even vaguely combat-related.
Not exactly sure what that means, but 20th level 5e fighters can do some pretty amazing things. If you compare it to 20th level 4e fighters I don't think they come off to bad. But I am sure that is a matter of perspective. Also, out of the gate, 4e fighters (and all classes really) need magic items to keep pace. That is not the case in 5e. Unfortunately they didn't take full advantage of that fact in 5e.
I...don't personally think 5e Fighters can do much of
anything "amazing," but I'm well-known for my, ah,
criticisms of 5e design on that front, so it may not be productive to discuss that. As for magic items "out of the gate"? No, you don't actually need any magic items initially in 4e. You can quite easily get to level 5 or 6 before you "need" anything at all--and if your group uses Inherent Bonus rules, you don't actually
ever need magic items.
EDIT: I don't remember how many EDU uses a 20th lvl fighter gets, can you remind me?
At 20th level, a 4e Fighter has 4 encounter powers, 4 daily powers, and 5 utility powers. (ou never have more than 4 encounter or daily powers; instead, at certain levels, you replace one of your lower-level powers with a higher-level power. For comparison, a 10th level Fighter has 3 encounter powers, 3 daily powers, and 3 utility powers.
I know its just anecdota... but the paltry elements for over 20 for 5e feel really pasted on.
Exactly the same for me. I feel as though I've lost more than half of the game. On the one hand, the first 3-4 levels are stultifyingly boring training levels, which are either painfully endured (and thus not adding to the game at all) or skipped over (and thus actually
reducing the amount of "playable game"). On the other, there's a whole nothingburger after level 20, if you ever even manage to get that far. Going from 30 levels of actual progression to 16 levels plus some tacked-on boons feels like a major loss.
It baffles me that people would somehow consider 5e 'more free form'. The structure in the case of 4e's SCs (which, remember are not mandatory and simply leverage a skill system which is otherwise nearly identical in general form to 5e's) is there to ENABLE the players. That is, without any structure, skills really don't do anything. They're just sort of random dice rolling. You can't say that a check will get you anything in particular, advance your cause in any way, etc. Particularly in 5e where the concept is much more "just let the GM decide" this can be really problematic, and IME is actually disempowering to players. You quickly learn to just assume that whatever is going to happen is whatever the GM wants to have happen.
4e seems much more dynamic when played the way I run it, where scenes are framed on the basis of what the player's engage with and where they can be pretty sure of what the impact of their actions will be. The process of doing these SC well also is a driving force in terms of moving the action forward.
Honestly, 4e wasn't exactly quite put together in the best possible way either, it is just that it was a lot more forward-looking game with a lot more potentially interesting ways it can be developed and played compared to 5e. Again, my opinion, but since I've done a lot of hacking on it, I can at least say I've come up with some really interesting ways to use that basic structure.
Completely agreed on all counts.
As you say: it's not like anyone HAD to use Skill Challenges. They were meant as an optional additional thing, to be used
when using them would be beneficial. 
