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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 5057442" data-attributes="member: 5890">The key flaw with the current challenge system is this:There is a significant disincentive to participate if you do not have top tier skill bonuses.In other words, the best possible skill challenge result is achieved by one person with the best skill modifier in a skill taking the entire challenge themselves.This basically drags the entire system down. It means that players without good skills, or with inappropriate skills don't want to participate in challenges. It means that characters don't want to risk experimenting with anything other than their best skill (which really eliminates any sort of experimentation).While some of your changes DO reduce the severity of failures, which helps with the above, they still leave the optimal skill challenge solution as "the person with the highest appropriate skill makes skill rolls and everyone else assists or contributes surges". Removing the assist means that you're back to the current scenario, which is "everyone who doesn't have a high appropriate skill does their best to abstain from the challenge".Personally I think that the entire concept of tallying failures to determine failure of the skill challenge is flawed, and the skill challenge system won't be fixed until it's replaced with something that means that a character taking part in the skill challenge is better than them abstaining. If failures accrued at a fixed or randomized rate, that would pretty much do it.My own thoughts on a replacement are something like the following:Each PC decides on a course of action, and a DC for the action (or alternately the PC describes a course of action and the DM sets the DC). At the end of the round (or alternately at the challenges initiative), the challenge (using it's own set of skills) rolls against the DC of the highest successful challenge with the same skill the PC who rolled it used, racking up an automatic success if no PC succeeded. Naturally quantities of successes and failures for overall success/failure will need to be adjusted, aiming for a challenge completing in about 3 rounds.I see the benefits if this as being1. There is some strategy involved. A given players actions will ideally take into account the actions of the other players.2. There's some gambling involved: do you go for a high DC to deny the challenge it's success, or a low one to guarantee your own?3. It allows for better narrative->mechanic correlation from the players. Someone with a high bluff skill can go for an outrageous bluff, the expert climber can escape his pursuers by choosing the difficult route (or choose a difficult route that avoids hazards) etc.4. If you really, genuinely don't have an applicable skill, you can either go for something outrageously difficult that yo're good at and narrate it in (I use my tumbling skill to distract the king's advisor, so his arguments against us are less effective), or go for something very easy that's directly applicable and uses a skill you're bad at (my weedy, bookish mage lies down on the rope bridge, and crawls very very slowly across it).Incidentally, a skill challenges skills will be set by looking at the current challenge DCs and translating those to skills that succeed 50/50. Counterintuitively, a challenge will have very high (or auto-succeed) in skills that totally do not apply in any way.Naturally a DM can still say "no, your narrative is so out of place that you automatically fail at that attempt" OR "no, given that narrative, I'm going to bump your DC to 40", and avoiding this is going to be a goal of players. If you try to use diplomacy to try to talk a rockfall into moving, you're unlikely to get away with setting a DC of 5 for that action, for instance. That said, a particularly free-flowing DM might decide that the rockfall is caused by/inhabited by a rock spirit of some description, and it all works out.</blockquote>

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