Nytmare said:
I'm interpreting this a little differently.
I'm imagining the the choice between "easy, medium, and hard" is a little less concrete. A character can look for something to climb over, and can press for the appropriate advantage between jumping someone's fence, climbing to the roof of a low building, or scaling the glass towers of the Wizard's School; but they wouldn't get to decide to do the hard thing and insist that they get the easy roll.
Likewise, if someone wants to use their diplomacy to bribe the guards, the ease of that check would depend on the likelihood of there being bribable guards. In the crime ridden, shady back corners of a corrupt metropolis, sure it might be an easy check, but in the hallowed streets of a city full of paladins, it could very well be impossible.
In our specific game, we did not choose easy, medium or hard. We did not know the difference. We described what our characters wanted to do and consulted with the DM if we could. HE DECIDED whether the action was appropriate and advanced us towards the goal. HE DECIDED whether the specific skill use was appropriate or not. And finally HE DECIDED what the difficulty of the action would be based on what the action was, not the other way around. We did not know the target number for the particular action. The only thing that he told us was whether an action would have a penalty (e.g. using Religion instead of Diplomacy or Bluff to incite the crowd) or if the action had a bonus (circumstance due to other actions or setting). So the DM made ALL the important and relevant decisions.
I don't really know where this notion, that the players somehow "magically" shaped the environment to something that it was not, comes from. The descriptions the players used were appropriate for the description of the setting they were given. This whole interaction occured without a map. It was all based on DM description.
So the interaction went something like this.
RULES SETUP
DM: Quick rundown of the mechanics of this type of encounter. You are being chased by guards and you want to escape the town. The object is to have more successes towards your goal than failures. You may use any skill to accomplish your goal
but only successes that advance you towards your goal count for the purpose of achieving your goal. You can choose one of several paths to get to your goal. Everyone can choose the same path or you may spread out as desired. The
best way, for me, to adjudicate your success is for you to describe what your character wants to
attempt to accomplish. Then you will roll using the skill you have chosen. If you have a success at your attempt you gain a success for your team. If you fail at your attempt you gain a failure for your team. The object is to
continue getting successes towards your goal before getting too many failures. You will not know how many successes or failures are needed.
SCENE SETUP
DM: After your fight in the town square you are being chased by the town guard and you can hear the general alarm being raised. You suspect more guards will soon join in the chase. You may attempt to escape the town (goal) using one of these three locations: Market Place, Crowded Street, or Dark Alley.
Please roll initiative and decide in initiative order which path to escape you want to take.
Players: I go towards X (Four Players decided to take the market place, one went for the dark alley and the last went for the crowded street)
DM: Okay, the market place is bustling with activity. You see people trading goods, market stalls vehicle carts being pulled by horses, etc. It is quite crowded and you can see some guards starting to come into the area. They have not noticed you yet and are still behind. Player 1, what would you like to do?
Player 1: I approach one of the horse handlers. "Please sir, I've always had a fascination for horses and yours look so magnificent. Would you mind if I climbed
into one of the sacks to view your horse more closely?" I'd like to use diplomacy to attempt to convince the man to let me get into one of the sacks. I'd like to hide from the guards there.
DM: (DM and group laughing) Okay, make your diplomacy roll. The man looks skeptical but gives a hearty laugh, "You want to do what?"
Player 1: I rolled an X (If I remember correctly the player aced this roll with a nat 20)
DM: Good, that's a success. The man still looks a little skeptical but he allows you to climb into one of the sacks. The guards have still not seen you. Player 2, what would you like to do?
SCENE CONTINUES WITH ALL PLAYERS
This went on with each player taking turns in initiative order. Each player described what his character wanted to
attempt and the DM decided whether the specific skill was appropriate, whether the environment had what the player was looking for, whether there where any penalties or bonuses based on what was going on, and the consequences of successes and failures. So the notion that "secret" doors appeared out of nowhere at all games are a silly generalization and are just ill-conceived. Of course there was table variance across the convention. Is that a bad thing? Some DM's DECIDED to keep the outcome close to the vest. Others gave the players all the metagame information and had them roll based on that metagame information. Some DM's chose to not alter the environment as they saw it or had described it; some DM's did.
The fact of the matter is that the rules subsystem for skill challenges was able to support each and every one of those play styles and still worked. The system provided the DM with a solid framework on which to BUILD and RUN the encounter. That is more a credit to the system than some are willing to concede, mostly due to their anti-4e sentiment.
I'll reiterate my earlier point about the Skill Challenges system. The "beauty" of it is that IT IS PART OF THE CORE RULES of 4e. It provides a "newbie" DM a framework on which to build interesting encounters and it is explained in the core rules.
I've been playing D&D for nearly 30 years. I love 3.5. I play 3.5 with the same fast, furious and loose abandon that I played my Basic (Magenta Box) D&D. But I learned to play that way with the less RULES RESTRICTIVE editions.
I remember all the talk when 3.0 and 3.5 came out. At that time some were complaining that the game restricted their creativity and it took the "decisions" out of their hands and put them in the rules. I never really subscribed to this idea, but I had learned to play at a different time, with much less rules restrictive play. I had learned that my job as DM was to adjudicate the outcome of situations, using the rules if they existed and "winging" it if they didn't. A player would ask, "can I do this?" and I'd say, "sure you think it will be hard but you can try, roll percentile dice." I didn't have to resort to looking a specific rule in a book, sometimes even if a rule did exist. I still play in a similar manner but characters now have appropriate skills and use a d20, instead of d100. So now it is slightly easier to adjudicate those things.
But a DM that learned to play using a newer edition, might feel way more constrained with the rules and bound to follow them to the extreme. This is sometimes detrimental. How many rules arguments have you seen at tables?
I think this system is briliant in that it provides a building block for the DM to create very interesting encounters that have that free-form looseness. While at the same time the encounter has a solid mechanic as a framework to fall back on. In addition, it reverts the decision making back to the DM instead of the rules.
I'm not totally exited about all the changes in 4e, but this I like; I like it a lot.
I kept re-reading what I had written to see what I had mixed up.
