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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6686093" data-attributes="member: 6790260">On the subject of the muddy situations that result from the skill challenge system directly interacting with the combat system, wouldn't that be the perfect place to apply penalties for failures, both resources and "narrative" costs? E.g. if you fail, you're not just fallen to the ground, you've lost a healing surge worth of HP (or even straight to bloodied, for Epic) and now the ballista operator is spooked, might open fire immediately, might do so if one more fail happens, etc. This seems like a great place to take a leaf out of Dungeon World's book and provide advice on "hard" and "soft" responses the DM can use to make high-advantage actions carry a sting without making them worthless.As for the most recent topic, ironically I'm reminded of TBS games and their combat systems. Typically, combat can be "tactical" or "auto": one takes longer to resolve because you actually direct your unit(s) on the field of battle and exploit the terrain; the other is very fast because it's just RNG plus raw numbers, but tends to be riskier or at least fail to use any clever play and this costs more.Pursuant to that idea, it might be interesting to make a system with concepts like "passive damage" (analogous to passive Perception), a "standard encounter effect/damage," and a few other little ideas like that. It's assumed that people use encounter powers, two hits = 1 HS (maybe 3 hits for Defenders?) Attacks are rolled rapidly with little or no attention to movement, etc.This is getting a bit too homebrew-y and less about how to leverage the system more or less as-is. I don't think it's *bad* to talk about such things--they can really help with solving the "combats are forever" problem--but it's sort of...I dunno. It feels weird to be trying to explain the frame of mind and successful strategies for running a game...by making up entirely new rules for that game.Edit:Another way to say this is, "Are we really talking about a 'primer' for 4e or the 'philosophy' of 4e if we're drafting our own mechanics?" It's one thing to say something like "Don't limit yourself to taking Healing Surges (or page 42-appropriate costs) for failed tasks in exploration or socialization--consider context-relevant narrative costs too." It is, or seems to be, a whole 'nother ballgame to say "here's an abstraction of the combat rules that resolves quickly without using any form of battlemap." The former feels like "don't limit yourself to the obvious/simple," which seems more useful and appropriate (for the 'main' document anyway), while the latter feels like "use this custom-built addon rather than worrying about the system itself."</blockquote>

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