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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mach1.9pants" data-source="post: 4836596" data-attributes="member: 55946">I think the basic way a SC is presented is wrong. In the majority (all?) of the published SC I have seen they have a list of skills and next to it a description of what the PC s are doing if they use this skill. Can anyone explain how that works at the table? You declare the skills that are relevant to the challenge (if that is your thing) then the PCs have to guess what they are supposed to do with these skills? What if they suggest another useful use of that skill that is not listed? Well you are not going to say 'nope in the SC here it says X with Bluff and you want to do Y, so it doesn't work'. Your going to run with it, so why do they have this list of 'what to do with skills' in the first place. It is totally irrelevant. For example (picked at random from your links provided, I have never used it)<a href="http://www.thecoremechanic.com/2008/12/skill-challenges-of-war-in-4th-edition_23.html" target="_blank">The Skill Challenges of War - Part 6: Flush Out a Spy | The Core Mechanic</a>The way I run them is here is the challenge what are your PCs going to do solve it. They give me ACTUAL PC actions, I convert them to the relevant skill and they make a check. The list of things you can do with each skill is so so so narrow (i.e. one) as to be pointless, what a waste of space. In combat there are set things you can do so this sort of narrowness works, for skill challenges, which are so much more open, the whole thing is page 42 IMO. The above SC should have bullet points by each relevant skill (if you want to lock it up more than I do) with multiple things of what the PCs may do. The chance of my PCs guessing exactly what they are supposed to do with each listed skill is pretty much zero. It is the worst form of small scale railroading, I would have to tell my PCs not only what skills are most relevant but also what to do with those skills. If I ran that skill challenge as written I would just read it all out and let them roll away.... pointless.</blockquote>

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