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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4126630" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm far from the best person to ask that.  I pretty much stopped buying WotC stuff when 3.5 came out, and I have only passing familiarity with the contents of latter WotC works.However, by my philosophy of gaming, I think it is entirely the wrong question as well.  I think a better question would be, "Can you show me a rule from official sources which would prevent you from doing a series of skill checks to resolve an encounter?"Everything that isn't forbidden, is permitted.  Besides, I never play by the RAW anyway.  Especially when they suck. (See 'Diplomacy')I think it is fairly easy to demonstrate that many problems are in fact a series of skill checks.  For example, when crossing a rickety suspension bridge, the mechanic isn't 'Make a balance check, get to the other side'.  The mechanic is, 'Make a balance check, move X number of feet'.   If the bridge is longer than that (as for example one like the one in 'X2: Isle of Dread'), it can be viewed as a series of skill checks.  Nor is the mechanic a binary, 'Fail a balance check, fall'.   It is 'Fail a balance check by more than 5, fall, otherwise make no progress'.   And that's just for a simple linear problem.  If we wanted to spice things up, we could add a gap in the bridge that must be jumped... or bridged with a craft skill check... or tyrolean traversed by using rope... or whatever.The same is obviously true of the climb skill.  The same is obviously true of the 'runaway mine cart' scenario given as an example of 4e style play.  You could run the same encounter in 3e, you just wouldn't have been encouraged to design an encounter like that.Diplomacy makes a poor example primarily because the social rules as written are so bad that I very much doubt anyone uses them exactly as written in practice.  If they do, I want to play a Bard in thier campaign.  Between maxing out my Diplomacy and the Glibness spell, the only thing we'll ever need to fight is things that are mindless.  But a complex social encounter in 3e would play out very much like the balance check example.  Social encounters can be imagined as dungeons, in which the rooms represent various states of mind of the NPCs, and the corridors represent methods of changing the NPCs attitudes.   Some rooms are dangerous and to be avoided.   Some are dead ends.   Some corridors are trapped - the way seems deceptively easy but it is in fact hard.Imagine a situation in which thier are say nine NPC's.  Each NPC starts out with differing attitudes to the PC's - from perhaps friendly all the way to hostile.  Let's imagine that the goal of the scenario is to convince all nine NPC's to give the PC's aid, and before that can happen each of the NPC's must first be friendly and then must be convinced it is in thier interest to help the PC's and then must be convinced that if they are to give aid, it must be of the magnitude the PC's desire instead of some lesser gesture.   Even under the rules as written and presented in the most simple way (all 9 individuals are part of the conversation at the same time), this is obviously not best handled as a single diplomacy check.  The DC of convincing the different individuals is different.  Different strategies might be employed depending on the individual (bribes, convincing an NPC to make an appeal on your behalf, intimidation, deciet, etc.).  Different arguments will appeal differently to each NPC.  The PC's might learn things about the NPC over the course of the encounter that given insight into how best to appeal to that NPC (they might learn that they have been falsely accused by a third party, and now that NPC holds a grudge against them, they might learn that the NPC shares a common religion or special interest with one of the NPC's, they might learn of an NPC's secret motive, or that an NPC is being blackmailed by thier enemy, or find that the NPC has a rational concern that they are able to address).  It is also somewhat obvious that influencing the NPC's attitude is a different skill check than convincing the NPC to provide aid even under the rules as written.  If you want to run a scenario like that with a single diplomacy check, be my guest.  You'll still be able to run scenarios like that with a single diplomacy check in 4e.  Obviously, social encounters aren't for you.  But the real problem from my perspective with running the above social problem in 3e isn't that you can't do it with multiple skill checks, its that diplomacy skill (and skills in general) are in 3.X much more lightly valued in the rules than combat ability which makes skills to easily broken by anyone that wants to min-max them.</blockquote>

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