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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8390972" data-attributes="member: 7032025">It might be useful, or it might be cumbersome and unneeded.This does not take into account the quality of the successes and failures, the drama and the story, and the way the players react and participate to it. So either you make the count visible and I can guarantee that the players will just try to use skills to increase the count of successes, or you hide it, and in that case it really serves no purpose except to constrain the DM into declaring an overall failure or success when the count reaches a pre-determined value.As a DM, I don't want the players to hunt successes and skill rolls, and I value the story and my players reaction to it more than counting things arbitrarily because when I created the scenario I certainly did not envision all the ways to succeed and fail. So why bind myself arbitrarily to these?Again, it's a question of playing style mostly, I'm not denigrating another way of playing, just explaining the one that we prefer. And it's linked to preparation, for example I usually don't try and find the ways by which the PCs might succeed. I present a situation, just trying to make it so that it does not look impossible to get out of, and then I go with the flow and the PCs ideas.This avoid any sort of railroading towards pre-determined solutions - and again I'm not accusing anyone of railroading or saying that a bit is bad or not, just the fact that listing the solutions and where the PCs get points is already creating some structure that will guide the results.Well, please consider the fact that 5e, which does not have these formal structures, has been what, ten times more successful than 4e ever was in introducing new players to the hobby.For me, it's because it's easy to play overall,  and does not have much formalism or actually even a jargon and technical vocabulary.So for me, there are better ways to support new players.See above.It was just a tangent, to say that although it can help some people, formalising things (skill challenges, grid) has a cost in terms of ease of use of the system, that's all.</blockquote>

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