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Phobos - Sheep in the pen is a simple example. You can come up with plenty of analogous ones that people couldn't take 10 on. Lacyon - That's a much clearer definition of when a skill challenge is appropriate than I could have come up with. However, how many situations have that sort of...

Lacyon - Your opinion seems to be that there are situations which warrant skill challenges, and there are situations which don't. The examples I have brought up are, then, situations which don't. This is all well and good, but there don't seem to be clear delineations (at least from what I can...

Storm - Ah. So the player states what they are trying to do, -and- states how hard it is? Wouldn't that lead to conversations like: DM: "You want to get the sheep into the pen." Player A: "I dance. It is an easy challenge to get a sheep into a pen by dancing." *Rolls dancing* DM...

It is unclear whether you are willfully misinterpreting this, or I was just unclear. I'm going to assume you're a cheerful, friendly fellow and not an internet troll, and I was unclear. Let me try again. In a skill challenge, players who want to participate volunteer the skill they will use...

I'm a 4E Fanboy, and I'm still not thrilled about Skill Challenges. I think it's largely unnecessary to codify "X out of Y" checks mechanics. Let's be serious - in any serious D&D group, you have to solve challenges like this all the time. And the DM has you make checks for whatever...

Just to chuck it in there: It's a good thing whoever was defending against the army of 30,000 orcs was...errr, silly. Or didn't have access to a level 15 druid armed with only core spells. 'cause, well, a Control Winds tornado would pretty much kill that entire army. 6d6 damage per round...

I will answer with my misguided expansion of the analogy from the other post: Would you still want those extra 99 tools if you were going backpacking? =) "More is always better, because you can always ignore the stuff you don't need" is a flawed argument. Complicated systems scare off...

...what if you had to take them on a backpacking trip? Still going to take 99 heavy things that you don't need? (The more options you provide, the more cumbersome the rules set. At some point, the marginal utility isn't worth the marginal pain.) -Cross

Doesn't seem pointless to me. People have associated a certain amount of flavor with Sneak Attack - namely, that somebody is stabbing somebody else in the kidney, etc. There would be a huge cry and an uproar here if you could "sneak attack" with fireball because somebody wasn't looking...

To be perfectly polite, any system where you have to have a player on calculator duty is not "pretty easy". -Cross

It seems borderline ridiculous for us to interpret the Guard statblock as "These are the only skills any guard, anywhere has. These are the only abilities they have". It seems a lot more logical to interpret it as "This a basic template for building a guard - it contains most stuff that you...

With all due respect, Gnome, I think even you might admit that DMs who enjoy spending 3 hours out-of-game to resolve a war are in the minority, yes? I admire your valiant stand (and appreciate Lizard's insightful contributions), but: 4E stats out NPCs with the things they are likely to use...

Typically goes to the defender, at least in most examples I can think of. -Cross

That's sort of the counterpart to "I have to be able to do it, there's a rule for it!", isn't it? The sentence you quoted leaves the power in the hands of the DM. The sentence I quoted leaves the power in the hands of the player. The reason I, personally, prefer the latter system is...

Wolf - You, and to a greater extent, Lizard, have espoused the following viewpoint in a lot of threads. Correct me if I get it wrong: "The more options the rules explicitly enumerate for me, the player, the better. I always have the choice to ignore subsets of the rules and not employ them...

To be precise...err, they don't. Spellcraft to identify a spell being cast requires that it see or hear somatic/verbal components. And people only get an AoO you're not casting defensively...so, no guard is being dropped. If you defensively cast a silent, stilled spell, I'm not sure it's...

A few notes for Batman - Any critical fumble system has the person with iterative attacks missing more often. A fumble system that relies on an attack roll to confirm or deny the critical hit favors the people who are more competent at fighting. As edemaitre's game doesn't tend to go beyond...

One of the things that is most attractive to me about 4E is how the math on opposed checks seems to scale nicely. Unlike in 3rd edition, where at high levels making your low save was an auto-failure, and making your high save was an auto-success, there always seems to be a decent chance of...

As I understand it: Push - moves somebody away from you Pull - moves somebody towards you Slide - moves somebody else in any direction Shift - moves you in any direction -Cross (Edited to be less full of @#$%.)

I think all the poster is saying is that, relative to the world, the PCs seem more powerful and competent. In 3rd edition, there's a bumbling-moron phase of the party, where tasks like "Climb a ladder!" can prove daunting. This phase isn't there - your PCs don't run from everything, and are...