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Seriously? Because this is not a fair, or accurate, description of SCs in total. The rules ALSO state that skill use has to make sense in the fiction, the player must justify their use of a skill in a specific situation. This is not some dice rolling game. It is an RPG, remember!? You had to...

Exactly! Right. Now, a valid criticism of a technique might be that it incites this kind of thing, but I don't think that is the case here myself. Yeah, your example crossed with my post, so that did clarify things a bunch. It reminds me of DitV conflict, TBH. The mechanics are different, but...

At a big standard level the DC for each check is the same, but some skills are considered primary, your first use is at the medium DC. Further uses are hard. Secondary skills may be used, with more restrictions. The GM can specify other additional things if they want, and each side has the...

OK, but if a GM is lazy and unimaginative to the point of just describing some fiction that always lets you do one thing to solve every problem, I'm not sure I see how that is a problem with game system. I could just as easily sit around and tell you to roll Athletics again and again in 5e, I...

I don't think I agree. The players are attempting to get their characters through the challenge successfully. They are simply operating within the confines of a set of game rules! Those rules let them propose solutions to obstacles presented by the GM which are germane to the challenge at hand...

What I'm saying is that 'Skill Challenge' is not a diegetic construct. Characters do not look around and say "boy, I'm in a skill challenge, I'm going to need to find a way to roll Athletics a whole bunch!" They don't understand the world that way, it isn't organized that way, and the fiction...

Well, lets not overemphasize that. I'll take the example of Dungeon World, since I am running it now. The players, before creating characters, expressed some ideas/preferences for a type of milieu/sub-genre of play. Then they assembled some character ideas over a few weeks and made some...

I don't even understand you. Why are you playing a game at all? I am playing one for the same reasons, because the structure of the game allows us to measure success and failure, and gauge when and how progress is made. If you want to just do freeform RP without any rules, go ahead! Otherwise I...

Yeah, if for some reason a challenge is entirely fictionally inappropriate, then there's no challenge! That could result from some PC expending some sort of very high level resource. That's fine, some other challenge will soon appear, these are adventurers/heroes after all! But, in all my...

Totally disagree. The situation is simply all fiction. It is just up to the GM to frame the situations as checks, or not in some cases. There are 5 levels of complexity available here, requiring 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12 successes (and thus between that number and 2 more) total rolls. It is pretty easy...

And in which type of game would it NOT be true that this is a goal of the players', or at least a strategy! I don't send my wizard out to melee the enemy in 5e, do I? I don't attack an opposing force in a time and place in which victory for them is assured, do I? In 4e the GM is the arbiter of...

Yeah, IaWA seems like a bit of a special case. Honestly it is a very different sort of game, there's really only a certain amount that can happen in a game where all of the premise is laid out at the very start of play. Still, the way I, as a DW GM, frame scenes is not ENTIRELY different. The...

So, there was discussion of In a Wicked Age and 'agendas' (best interests to use IaWA terminology). I think we then have some hybrid approaches, like DW where you have bonds, which are a kind of limited agenda, and an alignment, which is a more general orientation/agenda. DW then also has...

Yeah, and you mentioned that complexity is essentially a matter of determining the overall weight of the events contained within the challenge. I tend to give low weight to fairly straightforward situations. Say you are needing to lift a portcullis, and the mechanism is broken. The approaches...

One other thing I would add on 4e SCs. There are 5 complexity levels, each requiring more successes. Yes CL5 is harder than CL1, but let us look closer... Typically a party of 5 PCs will cover 80% of the skills at +5 or better, yielding around 90% success rates per check. CL1 requires 4...

But that 'someone' can only be the GM. Yes, at first glance SCs, used in a freeform fashion, are fairly favorable to player-side decisions about salience and position. But don't give up on the GM! First the GM sets the complexity of the challenge, so they have a bunch of leeway here. The...

I don't think the two must be mutually exclusive, but they will have to share. As the race happens at the pyramid, if the map dictates a narrative, then to the extent it does that, it will push motives out of the spotlight. If Praya can't ambush El-Mash because he's behind the pyramid, then...

This is a good question. So this assumes that the GM baked a path into the SC, like the graphs mentioned elsewhere. This is certainly possible, and the problem you mention is then relevant. The GM could either force things back on track, or rewrite the SC on the fly, including additional...

I like your description. What I found is that it leads to a lot of distribution of authority over the salience, and shape, of the fiction. So, there could be a lot of things which might be salient to, say, sneaking into the Princess's Quarters in the Palace. Which things the players describe as...

I would not characterize, say, FitD clocks, 4e SCs, and TB2e contests as always being equivalent to a graph. In fact, my experience with SCs in particular tells me that this sort of presentation is often overly rigid. The GM is overthinking the thing when building it that way. The PCs will start...