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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 4675886" data-attributes="member: 99">Well, yes and no.What I mean is that you have a good point that theoretically you could do this "two steps forward, two steps back" kind of thing all session and never get anywhere.  But in practice I'd put a stop to things far sooner.This goes hand in hand with the fairly loose way that I run skill challenges.  I don't plan them out extensively in advance (although I did weave the encounters that I wanted to have in the last session into the skill challenge format).  And when doing something like this on the fly, if it becomes apparent that they aren't making much progress then I'd rather go ahead and have them fail the challenge and move on to something else than to keep going round after round with it.From a mathematical standpoint however that's fairly unlikely.  The odds are weighted in the favor of the PC's anyway but runs of bad luck do happen that can cause them to fail early or late in the challenge.  Anyway, you make a good point in terms of it being a possibility but I guess my thinking is that I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.I wanted to make one other point about why I opt for the "this is a skill challenge" method of presentation, because when I first heard of the concept I never saw myself doing it that way.I have a good group of players.  They are thoughtful, smart and cautious.  And sometimes that really bites us in the ass (I include myself when I'm a player in this dynamic).  We have a tendency to look at a problem from as many angles as possible and consider a variety of solutions, some of them WAY out of the box.  This is a great ability to have but it can bring a session grinding to a halt.  Over the years my participation in various one shot games at Game Days and GenCon, I've trained myself out of this bad habit a bit and adopted a bit more of a "A good plan (or a bad one or none at all) now is better than a perfect plan that we arrive at after an hour of discussion."When I've been the GM I enjoy listening to the players puzzle things out.  But there are frequent moments in those discussions when I would like to jump into the conversation and give them a hint of some kind.  But I can't do that, right?  That'd be cheating!  I mean I say that a bit tongue in cheek because I can do whatever I want as the GM.  But it still feels a bit like cheating to me if I just give them a hint.This is where skill challenges come in for me.  Announcing the skill challenge is my way of saying, "Stop planning and start rolling."  At that point the game stops being them discussing their options amongst themselves and becomes interactive with me.  If they succeed in a skill check then I suddenly have a very good reason to give them the hint that I wanted to give them earlier.  And if they fail then something detrimental happens, which from my perspective is better than nothing happening at all.This is why I make the one requirement before starting a skill challenge be "identify your goal".  Because that's probably the most productive part of the planning process we too often get bogged down in.  Once the goal is identified then the rest tends to devolve further and further into wild speculation as to what methods for getting there will work or won't work.  So when the players say, "We want to find our way out of these mines" NOW we've got a clear goal they wish to work toward and rather than them puzzle over each intersection I can simply say, "skill challenge!" and the dice start rolling.The key after that is good narration.  If all you do is have them roll from a prescribed list of skills and try to beat a number X times then that's going to be fairly dull.  It's important to encourage the players to explain the manner in which they are using a skill (I encourage this by giving a small bonus to the roll for a good explanation) and to take a few moments to describe the outcome.  I include in that some narration of how this outcome might open up some new skills to be used or close off others from being used.  The applicable skills changing in mid-challenge like this helps keep things fresh and shift the focus from player to player.Hmm, I didn't know this was going to be that long when I started typing but it encapsulates the shift in my perspective on skill challenges from something that I didn't see much use for to something that I now thing can be used in some pretty brilliant ways.</blockquote>

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