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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7749001" data-attributes="member: 6873517">What I think tended to happen in my experience was that Skill Challenges ended up becoming an exercise in dicing. I don't think that's what the designers' intent was. I'm fairly certain that it was supposed to be an introduction of the kind of modern structured interaction to D&D. I doubt they intended the way a lot of tables ended up using SCs. There were some aspects that made it turn into that, at least where I was. One was the requirement that everybody participate. This often meant that the SC as written would have some weird skills attached just to allow the barbarian's player something to do in a social situation. Our joke for that was "he does pushups to impress the king". I played a lot of 4E with some people who had some rules lawyer-ish tendencies. Not horrible, but some, and so 4E's propensity to bring out the rules lawyer in everyone really brought it out in SCs. 4E's combat system was clearly inspired by several sources: MtG, action and action RPG video games with powers that had cooldown, miniature games, and some other RPGs such as White Wolf's Exalted. The late 3.5 releases shows that they were playing with some of these ideas, most notably in the IMO excellent Book of Nine Swords. Some of the ideas they were playing with, such as At Will powers, were clearly there to deal with the problem that Vancian casting induces among casters. IMO the big problem with 4E's design wasn't that they used that idea, it's that they made every class use it, especially in the early days of 4E. The fighter and rogue both became "spellcasters" of a sort. A lot of players I recall were really undone by that change. They wanted to swing swords, not figure out when to use which power. Essentials restored a fighter that was more of a classic fighter in the form of the slayer, but by then it was pretty clear that 4E was on its way down. Ironically, the 4E fighter and rogue actually did feel a good bit like the classic fighter or rogue in play, but it didn't involve making basic attacks.  I'm not saying this is the only reason why 4E was a relative failure. Their excessive production schedule was an issue, massive change of the game world, pushing into "weird" concepts that I think appealed at best to a very small niche (e.g., the shardmind), magic items were incredibly boring and mundane, and still others.</blockquote>

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