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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6015614" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand the language of "confined". That word is not used anywhere in the DMG; nor are any synonyms.I can see two features of 4e that perhaps these comments are picking up on.First, combat resolution in 4e is more mechanically intricate in 4e than is non-combat resolution: you have the action economy of multiple monsters (or elites/solos), the rules for on-turn and off-turn actions, rules for conditions and hit point depletion, etc. Skill checks, and skill challenges, don't have the same mulitiplicity of mechanical dimensions. All you can do is up the DC or (in a skill challenge) up the complexity. For example, a combat encounter has both an overall level - consequent on total XP value - and has levels for each constitutent element. A skill check, or a skill challenge, doesn't have the same internal structure able to be expressed in terms of levels. This generates a certain pressure in favour of "level appropriate" skill DCs that is probably greater than that for combat encounters.Second, and not unrelated, the "dice pool" character of skill challenge resolution makes it highly sensitive to DC scaling (and hence level variation). It's well known that 4e combat encounters will work better if (say) level +4 elites are converted by the GM to level or level+1 solos - swinginess will be reduced, action economy will play more smoothly, the hit rate for both PCs and NPC will come closer to the system expecations, etc.This is even more true for a skill challenge. If you want to make it harder or more involved, it's almost always better to increase th complexity rather than increase the level, because of the different mathematical implications. (This feature of 4e provides an argument in favour of bounded accuracy.)For these two reasons, good non-combat encounter design in 4e, and also good DC-setting for improvised actions, is going to stick fairly closely to the level-appropriate DCs. Otherwise the maths of success/fail comes under too much pressure, and there are no other mechanical dimensions of resolution (of which the most basic, in combat, is the retries in subsequent rounds that are possible as long as your PC has hit points left) to compensate. Why? That's entirely up to the GM to determine, and whether or not the DCs change will depend on what the fiction is that the GM is trying to support, as well as the group's understanding of the relationship between fiction and DCs.From the DMG, pp 72-73:Level and complexity determine how hard the challenge is for your characters to overcome. The skill challenge’s level determines the DC of the skill checks involved . . . Set a level for the challenge and DCs for the checks involved. As a starting point, set the level of the challenge to the level of the party . . .That's pretty unequivocal: the level of the skill challenge determines the DCs, and the GM is advised to default to party level if in doubt (much like the advice for building combat encounters).I'm with  [MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION],  [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and  [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] here, and I don't really understand the point of arguing that Rodney Thompson misunderstood his own and his colleagues' design intentions.</blockquote>

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