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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9098933" data-attributes="member: 6877472">The issue with skill challenges were that many examples of them in adventures were basically "select one of a few skills the writer decided were relevant.  Some can actually generate success, others just grant a small advantage.  You need X successes before Y failures to succeed".The worst two skill challenges I ever endured were in Living Forgotten Realms and Scales of War.LFR: after a battle at the docks, valuable cargo belonging to a Shou merchant was damaged and she takes you to task for it.  You need to convince her to let you off light, as she has the law on her side.  Mostly social and knowledge skills.  The DC's for many of these checks were set absurdly high, and, as my Fighter discovered to his horror, the NPC as written has this for the Intimidate option: "the NPC is immune to Intimidate"!This meant I had no skills which could generate any success or benefit, and I had to engage directly with the DM in hopes that I would be able to do anything but contribute to our failure!  I even asked the other players if they wanted me to stand up and leave the session rather than drag them down, as I was basically nothing but an anchor, dragging them down!Scales of War: we were in combat with some kind of drakes during the skill challenge.  This might sound cool, but in reality, you had a choice each turn; fight drakes or use your action to progress the skill challenge.  The drakes could stun you until the end of your next turn with their attack.  Multiple turns went by with the characters able to make skill checks being stunned so they couldn't roll, while only our ranged combatants were really able to do anything to the drakes.  It was a miserable affair, and we only succeeded because of luck.Most of the advice and examples of how to make skill challenges fun and dynamic were apparently completely missed by the people creating content, and more often than not, a skill challenge was thrown in for no other reason than "we have to have a skill challenge".I remember one adventure where we had to travel in a forest.  The adventure posits that the forest has many hazards.  Ok, fine.  But when the list of skills was presented, I asked a simple question.  "We have a Ranger, he's amazing at all of these checks.  Why are the rest of us idiots rolling when all we should have to do is listen to what the Ranger says, when all we can do is make things harder for ourselves?"The DM was flabbergasted and had no good answer for me.  That some characters were good at a broad base of skills and others weren't seemed to never be taken into account with skill challenges presented; especially heinous were Fighters, who mostly had physical skills, which you'd think they'd be good at, but these were penalized by their armor, which had the effect of generally making them mediocre to terrible at everything.  By contrast, with the right build, you could have a Bard who is practically proficient with all skills (+5 if proficient, +4 if not)!That's not saying that skill challenges couldn't be run well, but more often than not, they felt like the opposite of what 4e was trying to do.  In combat, you have a wide range of options you can take, and thanks to knowledge checks, you can make informed choices about which ones to use.  This was exciting and fun, IMO.Suddenly out of combat, however, you are limited to a few reasonable options, if that, and everything is reduced to a single die roll each turn.  This tended to be not very much fun, again, IMO.</blockquote>

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