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But that is not what the rules actually do. Rules do not care about obstacles, they care about the number of successful checks. Thus if the players manage to overcome the obstacles presented in the fiction with few checks, new obstacles must be presented so that the check quota can be fulfilled...

Combat rules are structured rigidly to allow a tactical mini game. I would not want all of the game to work like this. Though of course the combat minigame has far more tactical depth than skill challenges, if combat rules were just "the side which first lands six hits wins" I doubt a lot of...

Given that you said you meant literal map and key, whole tread is rather weird, given that most roleplaying do not involve such. Instead it just involves situations that are described, rather than presented on a map.

What is "wrong" is that it is the same amount regardless of what the characters do. This trivialises the fictional position and choices the players make. Now if you don't care about those things mattering, then it obviously is perfectly fine. I can't. Because I have preset obstacles and...

It is not "hidden" it is just unknown to all participants, as we do not yet know what sort of actions the characters might take and how the fictional position might develop. And this is important, as engaging with the fictional positioning is the point. Here players actually have far more...

It is very different. See my prison escape example. In skill challenge the players have less input, as no matter what they do, they have to roll the predetermined amount of successes and the GM keeps framing obstacles until they do that or fail enough. Only in the sense that it lays bare the...

Ok. Then I definitely do not think "map and key" is the default. Perhaps @Micah Sweet understood it more broadly as well? So you then agree with me that in skill challenges no solution is better than other and what the players do do not matter? So it is just a mechanical framework to prompt...

It is from the DMG1. The challenges have set of primary skills, and there is no indication that the GM should prevent the players from using those, thus the implication is such that they should frame fiction so that they can always be used. How it is different? Are you seriously asking this...

But that's what skill challenge rules say, They have set of skills you can use and then set of secondary skills that might face higher DC. It even says: "Characters must make a check on their turn using one of the identified primary skills (usually with a moderate DC) or they must use a...

Thank you for the explanation and example. This seems good to me; that the different approaches produce different outcomes and that there is not a set number of checks for the conflict but instead an action to resolve makes it far better than the skill challenges to me. (I also downloaded your...

But the player knows that it is a skill challenge, and if athletics is their best skill they will probably want to roll it six times. (Boring, but optimal.) And ultimately it doesn't matter that much what they do. The goal is to get on top, and six successes will get them there. So they might...

In the real world the courtesy title for the (non-lord) children of lords is "the honourable."

There was a long discussion about this in the giant D&D conservatism thread. Acausal complications might make the player vary of taking actions the character wouldn't. And in some games players can decide stakes for their action declarations, that do not causally follow from the actions of...

And if they do that, weird incentives arise. Many narrativist mechanics allow the player to affect things the character couldn't and give the player salient knowledge that the character doesn't have. This causes the character and player decision spaces to diverge, and now we have the player...

You said characters are not in challenge. Then why are we using challenge mechanics? What does it represent? To me the point of roleplaying games is the fiction, and the purpose of the mechanics is to represent the fiction. If they are not doing that, why are we having them? But it is not...

A lot of narrativist mechanics are like this. The games have weird incentive structures that might disassociate the player decision space from the character decisions space, especially if we assume that the player is trying to succeed, instead of just dispassionately seeing what happens. And...

Dragonborn equivalents (more like dragonborn/lizardfolk hybrids) in my setting Artra always have tails and they never have wings. Tails are mostly cosmetic, but they could certainly make unarmed attacks with them if they wanted. They usually have poison breath weapon but some rare individuals...

Why are we having a challenge mechanic if the characters are not in a challenge? What does nay of this represent? Why does arbitrary number of arbitrary actions resolve the situation? It is funny to me how a lot of narrativist mechanics really do not seem to be about the fiction to me. They're...

I mean, the design is just terrible, but I also really do not care that much. I am not obligated to follow WotC designs. The dragons in my current setting do not even have six limbs like all the D&D dragons do. It is still a bit perplexing that this got through quality control.

So I am not quite sure how literally I should understand "the map and key" in the OP. Because I don't think that this is literally how most gaming even in D&D and similar games work. But like others have pointed out, maps can be understood more broadly, nor they need to exist physically, they...