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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8271544" data-attributes="member: 6704184">It’s hard to believe that your takeaway from that is that people don’t know what they’re talking about wrt their own experiences.   Maybe you could consider the possibility that people see things differently from how you see them. That’s actually how some downtown activities work in Xanathar’s. Crime is 3 checks with 3 different skills, and you either get jailed (no successes), caught but escape (only 1 success), partial success getting half the intended score (2 successes), or get in and out like a phantom, getting the full score (all successes). I would probably add a way to potentially get more out of it than planned, maybe all successes and at least 1 nat20, but otherwise it’s solid.I think the heist discussion also suffers from one word meaning a huge scale of different things.When I did a caper that involved a bank, a big Tourney, and a misdirect with the local paper and one of the criminal organizations in Sharn, each character acted independently. The Paladin was never trying to sneak. She was doing a con, and legitimately winning the joust, and using the joust to get close to the mark, another knight from her country. There were two Firbolg bards (married couple), and one took an a false identity as a rich foreigner with a precious artifact in a case, and get the Kobold Wizard inside the vault of the bank, to plant a device that would allow him to hack the arcane security system. The other ran the misdirect with the paper, using faked letters of recommendation to get a job at the local gossip rag replacing the mysteriously ill reporter on the adventurer beat, covering the Tourney, and making contact with the crime family to alert them that the emerald claw terrorist group was doing a caper in their town, which bore fruit at the end of the caper when the claw would have otherwise been able to interfere with the real caper.Each character had 3-5 key checks to make, with a whole bonus B plot involving competing in various events at the Tourney.We also used a simple flashback mechanic that was entirely in the hands of the players. When a complication arose or they hit a wall in moving forward, someone would call a flashback, and we would cut to the scene at the beginning of the adventure where they’re noble friend hired them for the caper, and they formulated The Plan, and we’d collectively figure out what part of the plan had been constructed to account for this complication.The whole thing where the Kobold had been snuck in and out of the Bank was a result of the Kobold rolling a 1 to disarm the Artifact Recognition Protocol of the arcane security system, and so we concocted the idea that he had tripped the alarm on purpose, because his device would hack the system during the system reboot, so 1 failed roll became 3 checks, 2 to get him in and out and 1 for him to set up the device and switch the artifact and the copy of it. All of it was done using the same structure you’re describing in the first example you give, and it ran like a dream. I mean the stuff that emerged from finding clever solutions to complications was just wild. There was a whole scene involving a chase, and several buskers, and gathering a crowd for the whisper bard to influence to create enough confusion to disappear when things nearly went sideways with the emerald claw chasing another member of the team who had the real artifact, giving enough time for the crime family to show up and fight the claw.Anyway, yeah skill challenge as a way to make resolution less binary is very cool, and has precedence in existing 5e mechanics.</blockquote>

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