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Message: <blockquote data-quote="thomasberg1974" data-source="post: 4289267" data-attributes="member: 62010">I'm impressed by the complexity of your analysis, but I'd like to try a simpler and more intuitive approach when judging skill challenges.First of all, lets assume that the PCs are supposed to be winning the skill challenges, just like they're supposed to be winning most of the combat encounters. Some of them should be very hard, and perhaps be close calls, but our heroes are supposed to come out victorious in the end. A failure or two shouldn't hurt once in a while - and failing skill challenges are not nearly as terrible as losing a combat encounter...My next assumption is that the primary skill user for each check is trained and has a decent score. For a 1st level character that'd be about a total skill score of 9.Furthermore, my players like to help each other out - like they do during most combat encounters. However, not all of them can help on all skill checks. In my experience, there'd be about 2-3 actually aiding with each check. While I realize aid another will become automatic as the characters increase in level, and the DC for aid doesn't change by tier, there is usually some situation to limit how many who can practically be of help (space, combat, personality, etc.). We'll go with 2 as a basic number of helping hands, providing a total of +4, giving the primary skill user a total score of 13 and a success chance of about 70% with each check. While it should be quite possible to roll under 30% two times on 5 checks (for a complexity 1 challenge) or 5 times over 14 rolls (for a complexity 4 challenge), success should be the most common result. In fact, a quick number crunch tells me that my score of 13 would work out in roughly 55% of the cases for a complexity 1 challenge.A look at the other end of the scale, at high level charactes should give somewhat similar results. Our 25th level skill user has a skill score of about 12 (level) + 5 (trained) + 6 (ability and other stuff) for a total of 23. With his helping hands increased to 3 people on average, he'll have a score of 29 for moderate DCs of 33 that'll give us 15% chance of failure for each attempt. This should work in about 85% of the cases.Conclusion: Skill chances work the way they are written, as long as the DM uses common sense in limiting aid to practical circumstances and develops challenges that use a variety of skills that can't be won by maximizing a single skill.</blockquote>

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