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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ProfessorPain" data-source="post: 4669490" data-attributes="member: 82012">Every group is different. And everyone takes home a different impression of each edition.  In my group, this would be considered metagaming, and I would ask the party to keep it in character. Even if they persist in metagaming though, you need to spice it up. Sometimes the guy with the highest rank in diplomacy, isn't the person the NPC wants to address. Maybe the mayor of the town, refuses to deal with someone who appears too manipulative, or has a "roguish" manner about them. They might single out the most dim-witted looking member of the party in order to take advantage of them.   This is normally true in combat adventures, but in investigations splitting up usually speeds things up a lot. It is much easier if people pair up and follow different leads.    No adventure should hinge on a single roll of the dice. There should always be alternatives to jumping the pit. In these circumstances, different levels of skill in different things, allow characters to shine in different ways. A good way to solve this, is to have failure result in making things harder, but not impossible. Think of it like a movie, maybe the guy falls onto a small ledge fifteen to twenty feet down. Sure he takes some damage as punishment, but now the party has to figure out a way to rescue him. In my mind this is more exciting anyways.   See my suggestion above. Again, this boils down to adventure design and how you handle failures. I always try to keep all my players from gettting bored no matter what. The question you need to answer, is where does the player fall? This can be really interesting. Even if the party leaves him, he can still try to figure his own way out and catch up later (and hey that makes for a great little side trek--plus it is an opportunity to do a split party which is often fun if done well)  Again this is adventure design. If failure of one roll means the adventure stops, then it is bad no matter what skill system you use, because you either let them fail and everything comes to an end, or you make it a cake walk. You need to be creative with failures, and understand there is always more than one way to overcome a challenge. Okay, so maybe they didn't impress the king.  But maybe the king's uncle saw an opportunity, and offers to get them on the king's good side in exchange for a favor. Or maybe they have to deal with the theives guild instead of the king.   Sure. In near impossible situations, people will seek alternate paths. I would argue a clever party can use the theives high rank to get everyone across (maybe he jumps and then throws a rope back for everyone else). In this case, he shines, but the others still get across.    They aren't rare at all in my games. Especially if you are playing a non-combat heavy adventure, where skills keep coming up.  So don't plan around who succeeds. Just make sure there are different paths to success. and that these different paths yield different results.</blockquote>

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