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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Goonalan" data-source="post: 5228550" data-attributes="member: 16069">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.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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