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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Harr" data-source="post: 4126079" data-attributes="member: 47190">The way I explained this is that where before we had two 'game modes' - Exploration and Combat - We now have three, Exploration, Combat, and Challenge.The whole 'Challenge time!' could seem weird, but is it really all that different from 'Roll initiative!'? They are game modes, each 'mode' tells players what to focus on. Exploration is walking around looking at stuff, very few dice rolls if any, Combat is combat obviously, and Challenge is the rolling of skills to solve a speficic problem or situation.The way we approached this dryad tree was basically, Exploration mode, party was walking around, I say to them, 'You see this tree, there's a naked corpse of a man hanging from it etc etc .... so ok, if you want to go ahead and investigate this, this is gonna be a Challenge basically, the Challenge is to fingure out what;s going on and defuse the situation, of if you dont want to deal with it right now you can back away and keep exploring the forest and come back later.' They consulted with each other for a few seconds and responded with, 'yeah, we take the challenge' and we begin.Heh this is pure metagaming. No other way to say it - it's the thrill of gambling. Do you think you can make DC 18, sure, but can you make DC 23?? Or are you gonna wuss out and go for the security of DC 13?It bears mentioning that many people at DDXP said their DM did NOT let them choose difficulty. They described what they wanted and the DM assigned the difficulty, and that was that. But you know what, I like the gambling part. It's fun.How to explain it to players through color? Basically I explained to them, just how confident in your guy are you? How much attitude and confidence and badassed-ness is he going to put into it? For the ranger and the tree:  Is this guy going to walk up to the tree and climb it reasonably well (medium), or is he going to take his time, make sure his feet are well placed, look out for bugs, try not to get any any icky sap on his shirt (easy), or is he gonna bound up that frickin tree, with a confident smirk on his face, bouncing from branch to branch so quickly and so awesomely that he's gonna have enough time left over to do something else when he gets up there (or, as it turned out, to do it so well and so gracefully that the dryad that was watching him was impressed enough to reveal herself and smile at him). I don't explain all this to him beforehand or anything, it's just implied (Though if they ask, that's what I would say.)</blockquote>

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