Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 4532248" data-attributes="member: 99">Didn't realize this has been forked.  My take on Skill Challenges is as follows:I think that for a new GM or one who hasn't traditionally used much in the way of skills or their implementation, it forms a backbone for how to use them reasonably well.  Personally I've been GMing for over 25 years now and much of that has been in systems that were intensely skill based (Rolemaster).  I've pretty much got it down.So the way I do it is much like FireLance does.  I have the players determine a goal and tell me how they wish to go about accomplishing it.  This gets assigned to the appropriate skills and success or failure is determined.  The roleplaying follows the ebb and flow of how close (or far) they are getting from their goal and the outcome is determined when I feel it is appropriate.Now I think it is fair to level a charge at me here, particularly in light of the post this thread was forked on, that says, "But Rel, how can you say that it plays better than it reads when the way you're playing it isn't really how it reads?"  My answer to that is, "With a little smirk?"More seriously what I'm getting at is that, as an experienced GM, I am more than happy to adopt the parts of a system that I like and ignore the parts that I don't.  Anybody looking for me to spout the line that 4e is perfect per the RAW will be disappointed.  I simply think that the core of the system is sound and, with some modifications, works quite well for my purposes.Coming back around to Skill Challenges for a moment though, one thing that I've adopted from the 4e RAW is the idea of trying to make sure that everybody in the party (or as close to that ideal as possible) is involved in the encounter.  In the past our 3.x games tended to be ones where somebody in the group was the "face man" and had good scores in Bluff, Diplomacy, etc.  And they did all the talking, albeit with some input from the rest of the group.With 4e, I'm much more likely to handle something like that by "going around the table" more and seeing if the players are creative enough to bring other skills to bear on the challenge presented.  So while I'm not running the game precisely by the RAW, my methods are somewhat inspired by the RAW.  This philosophy is guiding my use of 4e in a great many ways and I'm trying to keep my tweaks small but meaningful.</blockquote>

Verification