NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9213436" data-attributes="member: 6690965">The primary thing skill challenges did was remove the design incentive to write an action complete skill system. Instead of expecting the rules to lay out a procedure for all the actions a party might take when trying to get in to a castle, they offered a framework all action declarations could be fed into. If you strip them of their narrative context, skill challenges are a terrible game; select your highest skill and try to roll well. If the GM is completely transparent, you might be able to make a calculation that a skill other than your highest skill offers more success.Eventually, you get some rudimentary game conceits, like allowing resource expenditure of a power/ritual/surge to grant a success, or serving as a cost on failure, which then get handed off to the GM. Interestingly  I have never seen a compelling argument for what benefit this serves over a specified action system; instead, SC's seem to be an answer to a different kind of system, wherein players announce an action, and a GM must immediate resolve a game design task in figuring out the action's scope and an appropriate DC, essentially the modern state of 5e. The design task presented by SCs is certainly easier and provides less latitude to (through malice or incompetence) create an untenable situation for players, but I don't fundamentally think the gameplay provided by either of them is particularly good.In many ways, framing skill resolution as a choice between those two models is the enduring legacy of skill challenges, and my biggest frustration with them. I think the best and most interesting game skills (and frankly, all non-combat options) should offer is in setting a goal, and then picking from a list of available actions what will most readily achieve it, with an option to tactically reassess as the situation changes round by round. Skill challenges are a container that prevents you from needing to actually write down all those actions and a resolution system capable of parsing them; their introduction and rejection means D&D almost certainly will not try to do so again.</blockquote>

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