I understand your gripe but your still missing my point, this is a roleplaying game, around the table there are players and a DM (or two). Sorry if I'm trying to teach you to suck eggs but in skill challenges, my players want to discover where X is.
If your players are winning skill challenges by rolling 8's or 18's then you're not doing it right anyway, see below, at least not at my table.
Player one is social skill savvy but rolls crap, fair enough, if the players are bored we have a punch up, swearing match, I belittle him (or rather the NPC does in game). The players either accept the failure or one of the other players jump in and tries Intimidate, or Acrobatics to distract the NPC doing the nasty. If the rolls look good, or there are enough +2 aid another checks going on, or I just feel like rewarding good roleplay then that's the first success in the skill challenge. Move on...
Your players should be having crazy and cool ideas all the time, and you should be rewarding them for their ideas- reward roleplay always, the more of it that happens (and gets rewarded) the more it happens.
If not, let's try again, with a parting hint from NPC about how to improve their chances- 'you'll never find X, he don't want to be found, he's gone underground'- PCs head to the Sewermen's Union.
The point is this isn't a Video Game, the rules are always guidelines, I believe it says that somewhere (everywhere).
You can't play by the rules, and who in life wants to...
I've played with guys that have been so articulate, clever and in-game savvy that it's just been silly to reduce success down to a roll of a dice- combat I've no problem with being dice-reliant. But if the Paladin of Pelor chases off the bad guys, rescues the street urchin, feeds and clothes the fellow, recommends he visits his church, cures the street urchins mum and then rolls a '1', then screw the dice- the story is all.
As a DM you have to play (always) towards the PCs victory, your job is not to put things in place that can cause the narrative to fail- if they fail the skill challenge drop all DCs by 5 and/or change the Skill Challenge and/or have a big fight and have the bad guy reveal all.
RAW is good, no doubt, but I watch professional sports all the time- they cheat and/or break the rules all of the time, or try to. In my job- same thing.
Rules, as regards skill challenges, are in fact incorrectly labeled IMHO, like the Pirate Code, they're more just guidelines.
The game must go on, the players need to be able succeed (through good roleplay and clever ideas), keep that in mind and all else fades into the background.
One last thing- games designers are not always right, they're right quite a lot (or at least 90-whatever%) of the book is RAW for me and my guys. Then again the House Rules I put in place don't always work either, and I'm only trying to fix the odd % of the RAW that I don't like. So, they're better than me at coming up with rules to keep me and my peeps amused.
Parting shot, your world is not my world, and yet we both come together to play by a set of rules, trying to please all of the people all of the time is impossible, my suggestions above may not be to your liking- the onus is upon you to figure it out, that's why you're writing in here; because you are clearly passionate about you D&D, you're articulate, and you want answers- always be looking for answers, or at least asking questions.
I honestly have no idea what your point is. My problem was that I wanted to play by the rules and the rules didn't work. By the rules, in a skill challenge, you need to get X number of successful skill checks before Y number of failed checks. My PCs were failing checks, even though they were rolling well, because the DCs were too high.
Then the errata came out and I had the opposite problem; skill challenges weren't challenging because my PCs could roll poorly and still pass the DC.
Honestly, how you handle skill challenges doesn't make any difference to what I'm talking about. My whole point was that when 4e came out, I wanted to play completely by the book for a change. So that's what my group tried, and it didn't work because the rules were broken.
Also, you seem to think that all my PCs are doing is saying "I'll try a Diplomacy check. [rolls dice] Is an 18 high enough?". That's not what's going on. There needs to be roleplaying on top of the roll-playing. But, the "by the book" mechanics still need a check, no matter how well the PC roleplayed the situation. Sure, good roleplaying can be rewarded by a bonus to a check, or by a reroll, but if the player needs to roll a 19 just to pass the DC on a "level appropriate challenge" then the rules are broken.
The errata is also broken, for the opposite reason.
Yes, skill challenges can be handled differently then the "by the book" method. That's what I now do, because the by the book method didn't work.
Finally, I don't think you understand what "teaching someone to suck eggs" means. It means that you shouldn't offer advise on a subject to someone that is an expert in that subject. By saying "Sorry if I'm trying to teach you to suck eggs" you are saying that you're sorry to offer advise to me on a subject that I am an expert in. But then you go on to offer me a whole boatload of advise, so.....what?
Teach your grandmother to suck eggs - Idiom Definition - UsingEnglish.com
