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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4758264" data-attributes="member: 80487">Most players probably know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Some steps are optional (Toast the bread? Slice it?), and some can be done in different order (Spread peanut butter or jelly first?). One can recognize that some techniques might be more or less efficient. (Setting aside use of utterly inappropriate ones, it might make a difference if one were preparing multiple sandwiches at once.) It's common to have from first-hand experience a sense of how difficult the task should be.What's not clear is why x "failures" at any arbitrary portion(s) of the operation should render it impossible. Dropping bread on the floor has obvious consequences, perhaps mission critical if the supply of bread is not ample. Such situations, though, are unusual in this enterprise.Not that I suppose anyone is likely to run "making a PBJ" as a Skill Challenge! My point is to contrast the relevance of experience and common sense to that case with its irrelevance to your magical undertaking.That raises another problem with the 4E paradigm. If (per DMG p.42) swinging from a chandelier is an "easy" task, then what is the DC? Why, that depends on the level of the character attempting it -- so that experience never makes it any easier!The Skill Challenge rules are devoted to producing the same result. The suggested applicability of a wide range of skills not only "involves all the players" but -- given the array of numbers in a typical assortment of characters -- ensures that one skill challenge is much like another. Only the skill names associated with the numbers change.There is no basis for any rational assessment of a situation apart from "meta-gaming" in the role-playing sense. By design, 4E depicts a world that mutably conforms to the nature of the player characters.HOWEVER, one at least has some basis for another gauge when it comes to combat encounters. One can look up (e.g.) a pit fiend in the Monster Manual and see in the entry its characteristics and XP value. "Level appropriate" encounters are the assumed norm, and monsters can be modified -- but there is at least a suggestion that a pit fiend is not the same as a goblin.</blockquote>

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