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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8993922" data-attributes="member: 82106">You might want to reread the SC rules... Yes, they do tell the GM to decide what the 'primary' and 'secondary' skills are. OTOH you are allowed to employ ANY skill that fictionally makes sense, and you can employ other things besides skills, powers, rituals, items, etc. The GM can also grant multiple successes (this is likely to be rare, but the option exists). IMHO the whole 'primary and secondary' thing was a bit of a boondoggle. I think it is meant to kind of explicate the framing, but certainly the GM should carefully consider revisiting those designations if the PC's approach the challenge in a radically different way as you describe here. But even with the most basic DMG1 definition, you can still use different skills. The GM is told they 'probably' can only be used once, might require hard DCs, etc. but these are all guidelines.Well, OK, so MAYBE there's a case where its just overwhelmingly obvious that the player found a tactic that basically negates the whole challenge. There's a small section on that in DMG1, it just basically says "hey! Great! Give 'em the XP, they deserve it!" OTOH I kind of suspect in 95% of cases the GM can reasonably interpret things as the character gets SOME advantage that is short of bypassing the entire challenge. Finally, how common is this? I think both of us have GMed for a LONG time. I can pretty much suss out challenges and approaches. High level parties can make that tougher, perhaps, but I think either of us can manage to craft something that will require the party to keep rolling MOST of the time.I mean, again, sometimes you can remove a failure. I think the main problem most people had with SCs is that they created these very static kind of 'puzzle scenarios' where most of the challenge is poking at some situation and trying to get something to happen. Those were not really well thought out, and DMG1 has some examples that basically ARE exactly that (the miserable Duke Convincing one is a poster child for this). My answer there was always to widen the scope. So instead of just browbeating the Duke, maybe you also have to thwart the evil suitor for the daughter, uncover the malicious plan of the councilor, unmask the assassin, etc. Or maybe the challenge includes things like research and scouting to ascertain facts that will make your argument. Thus instead of some blah scene full of attempts to use Diplomacy on the Duke where all that changes is "he doubts you a bit less now" or something silly, instead there's the scene with the painting of the Duke's ancestor, the duel between the fighter and the evil suitor, etc. And I don't know why anything would be 'penalized' in SCs. As I say, the whole notion of primary and secondary skills I look at a bit askance. I think its probably useful from a DESIGN perspective, I'm not sure its something that should be player facing.I don't know about that. I think it can be a productive discussion. The other pretty decent thing that I find with SCs is that they regulate the GM! So, once I've set a complexity (number of successes required basically) then I'm bound to it. If the dice say you did what is needed to convince the Duke, by gosh I'm not really going to be able to make you keep rolling just because I now think it was too easy. Likewise I am going to think through what makes this worthy to be an encounter and do my due diligence on it (as I mentioned above, like adding various dimensions to the convince the duke scenario). This is most readily apparent in 'race' type situations where the PCs need to face a gauntlet or race a clock. In classic D&D we don't have a good way to know when the party has won (or lost)!</blockquote>

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