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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5463362" data-attributes="member: 54877">Sure, it does end up limiting what can be done with skill challenges, but I think worrying about it is getting the cart before the horse.  (And this that follows is taken everything you said with the spirit intended.  With only five levels difference, there would easily be flavor ways around anything I'm about to say.) Ask yourself, why are we playing out the scene 5 levels later, where the PCs conduct the misinformation campaign, and break in to the mayors' office. 1. You think it's a neat scene, and a good way to expand upon what has come before.  OK, then either it is mere color, or perhaps also a chance to show how much more capable the PCs are (that is, mere color with a veneer of mechanical activity to show just how easy that is).  Not that there is anything wrong with color, but you'd like to be clear about what you are trying to accomplish. 2. You really wanted a skill challenge (to provide XP, pacing reasons, whatever).  This an option that popped into your head due to prior play and player choices.  Well, ok, you can still have a skill challenge.  It's merely that picking the desk lock won't be a major part of it.  You'll need to complicate the scene somehow, to still have a decent skill challenge.  Or maybe if you want the scene and a skill challenge, you will be better off doing them separately.  Nothing says you can't have your mainly color scene at the office and then have a skill challenge. 3. You wanted this to all be a bit tighter story line, perhaps with the party breaking in with some difficulty, and then easier later, but not this extreme.  Maybe you had a preset idea.  Leaving aside the hornets nest of whether that desire is a good idea or not, then if that was the goal, perhaps 5 levels should not have separated the scenes?  Or maybe the lock should have been tougher all along, with some kind of one-time work-around the first time (e.g. temporary access to a key).  That is, ultimately, if you want challenges to be the same over a long-period of game play, then you need to not level so fast.  This is true of any edition. 4. You don't care about any of the above.  The players were just doing their thing and you were rolling with it.  In that case, you merely need to identify when something is challenging.  If it is, it might be part of a skill challenge.  If not, it is roleplayed with no substantial crunch, glossed over, or back to #1--depending on the groups' preferences at the time. Or it could be another reason.  Tell me the purpose of the scene, and I can tell you whether or not a skill challenge is a useful tool for that scene.  Otherwise, asking if skill challenges are limited is like asking if garlic is useful in cooking.  It depends upon what you are cooking. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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