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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5880029" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sometimes DCs are public, sometimes not, depending on mood, whim, whether I think it will up the tension or reduce the tension, etc.As to the rationale for a safety net - it's a bit like hit points in combat. In general, I find 4e's hit point system fosters a type of heroic approach to combat that is different from Rolemaster's wound system, which supports ambushes, scry-buff-teleport, etc.The "safety net" from scaled DCs and damage expressions plays a comparable role for other areas of the game.I'm not saying it's the only way to achieve this. But it's one way.Well, if the Baron changes his mind, it follows that the PCs didn't succeed in getting the Baron to agree. Maybe they thought they did, though, because the players failed an Insight check in the course of the skill challenge.As for trusting more generally, it depends on what comes out of the challenge. I can think of three significant examples from my own game.(1) The PCs were in the process of raiding a hobgoblin fortress. They took temporary refuge in a room, where they found some duergar also taking refuge, waiting for the fighting to calm down. Negotations ensued. It turned out that the duergar had bought from the hobgolbins the slaves the PCs were there to rescue. The slaves were already on their way to the duergar hold; the two duergar still there were just finalising the financial side of the deal. The outcome of the skill challenge was that the PCs (who didn't feel up to assaulting a duergar hold) agreed to ransom the slaves back, the settlement to take place in a month's time in a neutral city.When, in due course, the settlement date arrived, the PCs turned up to comply. And I had the duergard comply also. The players got the benefit of their skill challenge success.(2) The PCs were dining at court where there enemy was "hiding in plain sight" (the nobility didn't know that the court astrologer was also the evil leader of the hobgoblin army), and the upshot of their successful challenge was that they goaded him into attacking them in a way that made it clear to the court that he was the villain, not them. In a subsequent session, one of the players gently reminded me of this outcome as I was in the process of narrating some subsequent free roleplaying with one of the nobles.(3) The PCs were interrogating a prisoner. The "paladin" (actually a fighter/cleric of Moradin) had been sent upstairs to guard against intruders while the sorcerer, wizard and (actual) paladin (of the Raven Queen) interrogated the priestess of Torog. She extracted a promise from the interrogating PCs that they would make sure that the fighter/cleric insist on the Baron sparing her life - noting that the Baron couldn't refuse such a request from him, given that his status and his town's survival were resting upon that PC's support. They promised, intending to subsequently kill her themselves, and she spilled the beans. Then the player of the fighter/cleric, getting bored, had his PC come back downstairs into the action - at which point she reiterated that the promise had been made. And the player of the fighter/cleric decided that his PC was obliged to keep the promise that had been made in his name, even though he hated it. As did all the other PCs.This isn't an example of me as GM being bound by a skill challenge. Rather, it shows what I like about the mechanics - in order to generate the checks that will in turn produce a victory, the players have to narrate what their PCs are doing. Which, in this case, included making promises in the name of another (honourable) PC. Who, when those promises came to light, felt bound by them. Resulting in a prisoner being spared who everyone at the table, half-an-hour earlier, had assumed would die.I like a mechanic that encourages participants - both players and GM - to put interesting stakes onto the table, and generates interesting results as a consequence.If one upshot of that mechanic is that I might become bound in the way I frame subsequent scenes, so be it - fundamentally, that's no different from my being bound by the PCs killing a monster in a combat, rendering it unavailable to turn up in some subsequent encounter.</blockquote>

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