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<blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 7748860" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I think the Skill Challenge is a microcosm of a lot of 4e's problems with the D&amp;D player-base.&nbsp; We've seen it for years and years in the past and you see it again in this thread; people decrying the SC mechanic as an arbitrary practice in (mostly) fiction-irrelevant dicing.&nbsp; Which is not what it is.&nbsp; At all (which we've covered a jillion times over).I wonder if in DMG 1's initial explanation of SCs if they would have just pointed to indie, scene-based predecessors (say Dogs in the Vineyard or Fate), how much more success there would have been in staving off the &quot;Skill Challenges are just stale dice rolling.&quot;&nbsp; Just 9 months later, DMG2 did a fantastic job of better relaying the fundamental principles of closed scene resolution for non-combat challenges/conflicts.&nbsp; Then the RC in '11 or '12 put it all together succinctly (yet still didn't mention any indie games).&nbsp; Now, anyone who has played/run modern indie scene-based games like Cortex+ (any of them) or Blades in the Dark (competing Clocks), will understand precisely what a 4e Skill Challenge is architecturally (dramatic arm, pacing, locked-in resolution by way of system machinery) and they'll understand the principles/techniques that guide its resolution (eg &quot;Establish Goal/Stakes&quot;, &quot;Fiction First&quot;, &quot;Task and Intent&quot;, &quot;Change the Situation&quot;, &quot;Fail Forward&quot;).But folks smuggling in 3.x or AD&amp;D serial exploration expectations into 4e's scene resolution mechanics are invariably going to be very <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused&nbsp; &nbsp; :confused:"&nbsp; data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /> ,&nbsp; <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/worried.png"&nbsp; class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":-S" title="Uhm&nbsp; &nbsp; :-S" data-shortname=":-S" /> , and perhaps <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad&nbsp; &nbsp; :mad:"&nbsp; data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" /> [HR][/HR]As an aside, I still don't understand the video game stuff.&nbsp; 4e's combat machinery is quite clearly inspired much more by Magic the Gathering (each Role as a Magic deck archetypes; eg Control, Aggro, Mid-Range)...which is, of course, WotC...so it seems the intuitive extrapolation.I'm sure they were thinking something like &quot;wow, if we could get the massive amount of Magic players (which dwarfs D&amp;D players), D&amp;D players, some modern video game players (sure WoW but especially God of War and the Diablo player-base as the &quot;World on Fire&quot; PoL mythology/setting is a match), and entice the indie RPG community (due to its tightness of design, narrativism, and scene-based paradigm)...holy cow that would be THE BIGGEST THING EVER.&quot;But that didn't work out because there is less overlap than they thought when it came to a lot of D&amp;D players and those other games (or at least a large segment of D&amp;D players that want their D&amp;D gated from those other influences).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Manbearcat, post: 7748860, member: 6696971"] I think the Skill Challenge is a microcosm of a lot of 4e's problems with the D&D player-base. We've seen it for years and years in the past and you see it again in this thread; people decrying the SC mechanic as an arbitrary practice in (mostly) fiction-irrelevant dicing. Which is not what it is. At all (which we've covered a jillion times over). I wonder if in DMG 1's initial explanation of SCs if they would have just pointed to indie, scene-based predecessors (say Dogs in the Vineyard or Fate), how much more success there would have been in staving off the "Skill Challenges are just stale dice rolling." Just 9 months later, DMG2 did a fantastic job of better relaying the fundamental principles of closed scene resolution for non-combat challenges/conflicts. Then the RC in '11 or '12 put it all together succinctly (yet still didn't mention any indie games). Now, anyone who has played/run modern indie scene-based games like Cortex+ (any of them) or Blades in the Dark (competing Clocks), will understand precisely what a 4e Skill Challenge is architecturally (dramatic arm, pacing, locked-in resolution by way of system machinery) and they'll understand the principles/techniques that guide its resolution (eg "Establish Goal/Stakes", "Fiction First", "Task and Intent", "Change the Situation", "Fail Forward"). But folks smuggling in 3.x or AD&D serial exploration expectations into 4e's scene resolution mechanics are invariably going to be very :confused: , :-S , and perhaps :mad: [HR][/HR] As an aside, I still don't understand the video game stuff. 4e's combat machinery is quite clearly inspired much more by Magic the Gathering (each Role as a Magic deck archetypes; eg Control, Aggro, Mid-Range)...which is, of course, WotC...so it seems the intuitive extrapolation. I'm sure they were thinking something like "wow, if we could get the massive amount of Magic players (which dwarfs D&D players), D&D players, some modern video game players (sure WoW but especially God of War and the Diablo player-base as the "World on Fire" PoL mythology/setting is a match), and entice the indie RPG community (due to its tightness of design, narrativism, and scene-based paradigm)...holy cow that would be THE BIGGEST THING EVER." But that didn't work out because there is less overlap than they thought when it came to a lot of D&D players and those other games (or at least a large segment of D&D players that want their D&D gated from those other influences). [/QUOTE]

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