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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatula" data-source="post: 4205443" data-attributes="member: 2198">*shrug*  People said the same thing when 3e came out.  A Diplomacy skill?!  Why roleplay at all!?  And yet, we still roleplay.  3e just gave us a mechanical measure of how effective a character, as opposed to a player, is at arguing their case.  4e isn't any different in that regard - the whole skill challenge thing is actually entirely edition-independant; any game with a skill resolution system could use it.  It's simply a way to structure a non-combat encounter to potentially make them more interesting than a single die-roll.  Convincing the Duke to trust you could be boiled down to one Diplomacy check (depending on his starting attitue), but the challenge attempts to draw the encounter out, which should really give the players opportunities for more roleplaying, if anything, if they wish to take advantage of it.Of course you can always say, "I talk the Duke into trusting us.  That's a 30 on my Diplomacy check."  Some groups probably work like that, and if that's how they like to play I'm not going to tell them they're wrong.  Groups that want to roleplay will.  Those that do not will not, same as it's always been.Not going to happen.  Powers are explicitly combat abilities, and class mechanics are balanced entirely around combat effectiveness.  Roleplaying is up to the players.Having no rules at all is indeed simpler. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  No one's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use skill challenges.  They're a non-combat encounter design tool, an area of the game where D&D has not given DMs much guidance in the past.  But as the excerpt states, the challenges should not be structured so that failing one brings the adventure to a halt, so there should be nothing to handwave away.  The challenge is a possible branch in the unfolding story - if the players succeed, good thing X happens; if they fail, bad thing Y happens instead.</blockquote>

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