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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 8273224" data-attributes="member: 58416">Thinking more...There is actually an example which covers both skill challenges and the game-world math.I can't remember which book it is in, but I believe one of the official examples for how to incorporate a skill challenge into a combat was an example which had a rogue attempting to disable a trap as a skill challenge while in the middle of combat.looks at character sheetSo, my choices are either...a) attack the trap (with even one of my weak powers) and have a good chance of breaking it with one actionor...b) one of the PCs chooses to not participate in helping to fight the enemy for 3-4 rounds, and the end result of doing that might be a failure which makes the situation worseIn my head, the idea of B sounds pretty cool for an adventure game and the mental picture of trying to hold off a zombie horde or whatever so that my ally can use his specific skill set to fix a problem facing the party is cool. That's a common scene in movies.However, the reality is that the math of the game makes option A the far better option in most circumstances.It is possible for the DM to fudge the numbers against the players or just simply say it doesn't work. Depending upon how exactly the scene is framed and what the particular trap or problem facing the PCs is illustrated to be, it may also be viable to say that attempting to smash it is an auto-fail and makes the situation worse.Even then, the solution appears to be to simply just not use the numbers which the game says to not use. As my solution was to also not use them (by virtue of using altered math,) I suppose I have something in common with the previous paragraph.That's part of where the cognitive block was for me. How the actual books of the game were telling me I should run/play the game from the perspective of framing a scene did not make sense in the context of how the same books told me the mechanics of the game worked.A lot of things about 4E were really good. To be completely honest, if I were to run a game for the group of my friends who typically only play D&D, I may be inclined to choose running 4E over 5E. However, were I to do so, I would hope I were able to find my old notes from how I ran things differently from the published material.~edited to fix a spelling error</blockquote>

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