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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ximenes088" data-source="post: 4126152" data-attributes="member: 59899">In my experience, you don't get the same mechanical effect. Aside from the blisteringly difficult prospect of quickly calculating a single die difficulty out of multiple checks at variable difficulty, each stage of the process is contingent on the results of the earlier one. The players will dare high difficulties or try to bet safe with low based on how they're progressing.I recently ran a solo-PC mass combat with the Skill Challenge mechanism. The PC had a ragtag band of villagers that she'd managed to organize into an ambush on a stronghouse full of elven occupiers. She was rolling Diplomacy to inspire, Intimidate to weaken the morale of the elves, Tumble to break through their line, and three or four other skills during the course of the battle. She used her combat abilities as stunt flavor for the rolls, occasionally gaining a bonus in exchange for exposing herself to damage or expending limited resources.The dice did not favor her, and the steady racking of skill failures gave me all the reason I needed to decide that the battle was going against her. She could see the fight gradually slipping out of her control, rather than making a single die toss and watching everything collapse on a single failure. The slow failure gave her time to rethink and decide to take some major risks to get the bonii on her rolls that eventually got her the successes she needed. The fact that she'd came within one failure of loss gave me all the direction I needed to indicate that the battle had been ferociously bloody and that the villagers would surely have been slaughtered to a man without her leadership. She came out of it permanently scarred due to the risks she took in the fight, and she feels like she actually earned that scar, rather than having it be some random accident of a bad die roll. The battle simply would not have played out the same way if I'd boiled it all down to one Diplo roll to see whether she could keep the peasants fighting longer than the elves could stand it.</blockquote>

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