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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Harr" data-source="post: 4126176" data-attributes="member: 47190">There's another, more 'touchy-feely' way to look at the whole 'why multiple checks' thing, and it's the psychological impact on the players of effort versus reward, which Ximenes touched upon.The reason I think this is because right after this encounter was done, one of the players commented 'you know... I think this is the first puzzle, EVER, that we have ever solved, the way it was supposed to.' And the others agreed. I hadn't mentioned that until now because it seems very over-the-top and fanboyish, and it really isn't, these are guys who couldn't care less about system and really have no idea (which is why we're playing with a mock-4e skills system in a 3e game in the first place).And it struck me that they would feel that way, because we've been playing D&D more or less weekly for over a year now, and they've certainly both lost and won their share of non-combat encounters, gotten rewards for them XP, everything. But they say they always felt that they either won through luck, or they bumbled along without knowing what the hell they were doing until something went right, or they knew what to do but messed it up somehow anyway. The encounters and the rewards and the XP were there, but the simple satisfaction of 'you did good' wasn't. Last night was the first time things actually clicked in that way.I guess I could read all sorts of things into this, such as 'team effort', 'everyone participates', 'nobody including the DM knows the outcome', 'encouraging creativity and outside-box thinking', 'appropriate reward for an appropriate effort, etc, etc, but the truth is, I have no idea why it worked, it just did. Maybe I jsut got lucky last night and I'm giving more credit to the system than it deserves. I don't know.Dude, that is awesome. Consider that bit stolen <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> You know what I'm thinking? Next session we're renting out a ship to sail across some islands in search of treasure [deserved plug: it's an adventure taken from Goodman Games's Dungeon Crawl Classics #46 "Treasure Maps" book].So then... Challenge: Ship runs into a ferocious elemental-water storm. Can the party help, direct, inspire, bluff and intimidate their crew into pulling out of it alright? Or will the ship capsize and dump them all out to find themselves alone and half-drowned on the beaches of Treasure Island? We'll see next week.. thanks for the idea!</blockquote>

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