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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7348810" data-attributes="member: 1465">No.What I do, is just call for an ability/skill check at a time. Then depending on the result I narrate the consequence, and the player decides what to do next, which might eventually call for another ability/skill check. It's quite normal for a success in a skill check to lead to new possible actions, as well as a failure in the first check to prompt the player to either try something different or having to take new actions to clean the mess of the previous failure, so it's not really that one skill check is always an isolated thing.But setting a series of required skill checks beforehand? Nope. I can imagine that the whole procedure makes sense if associated to the narrative, such as the DM planning for example a whole &quot;tree of possible outcomes&quot; depending on each check's result, every &quot;node&quot; in the tree corresponding to a new narrative situation. Example: a trap with an alarm, a pit door and poisoned spikes; player needs 3 checks to disable all the trap components, some checks may be correlated (e.g. succeeding at jamming the pit door means no need to disable the spikes), degrees of failure may be involved (i.e. differentiate between simply failing at disabling the alarm and actually triggering it).The problem is that a skill challenge that isn't tied to narrative is just a series of checks, ultimately not different from a single check (probabilities may vary, but the DM is always in control of the probabilities by adjusting DCs). Possibly the only difference is in the ability for the player to withdraw from the attempt (e.g. before failing the last check), but this possibility can always be included also in a single check if wanted.Bottom line is, I'd rather not plan too much ahead considering that the narrative is subject to the player's ideas, better just go with the natural flow!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 7348810, member: 1465"] No. What I do, is just call for an ability/skill check at a time. Then depending on the result I narrate the consequence, and the player decides what to do next, which might eventually call for another ability/skill check. It's quite normal for a success in a skill check to lead to new possible actions, as well as a failure in the first check to prompt the player to either try something different or having to take new actions to clean the mess of the previous failure, so it's not really that one skill check is always an isolated thing. But setting a series of required skill checks beforehand? Nope. I can imagine that the whole procedure makes sense if associated to the narrative, such as the DM planning for example a whole "tree of possible outcomes" depending on each check's result, every "node" in the tree corresponding to a new narrative situation. Example: a trap with an alarm, a pit door and poisoned spikes; player needs 3 checks to disable all the trap components, some checks may be correlated (e.g. succeeding at jamming the pit door means no need to disable the spikes), degrees of failure may be involved (i.e. differentiate between simply failing at disabling the alarm and actually triggering it). The problem is that a skill challenge that isn't tied to narrative is just a series of checks, ultimately not different from a single check (probabilities may vary, but the DM is always in control of the probabilities by adjusting DCs). Possibly the only difference is in the ability for the player to withdraw from the attempt (e.g. before failing the last check), but this possibility can always be included also in a single check if wanted. Bottom line is, I'd rather not plan too much ahead considering that the narrative is subject to the player's ideas, better just go with the natural flow! [/QUOTE]

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