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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MarkB" data-source="post: 7291161" data-attributes="member: 40176">I ran and played in a lot of the 4e Living campaigns, and while we tended to muddle through the skill challenges okay, I think there was only one adventure in all of those I played and ran which managed to make a skill challenge feel organic, rewarding and interesting for the whole party.Generally speaking, they all tended to run into the same stumbling blocks - either a player would come up with an innovative solution or a clever usage of a character ability that should have greatly advanced the party's success or even outright solved the situation, but was constrained to just being another tick in the 'success' column, or a player would be unable to come up with a way to apply their better skills to the problem, and would feel wretched because they knew they stood a good chance of doing more harm than good just by participating.Now, good DMing could readily solve either of those issues, but more often than not the DMs felt constrained to play strictly within the terms of the skill challenge mechanic - especially in organised-play games.Ultimately, where the skill challenge mechanic breaks down is that it stems from an assumption that any single use of a skill check by any character - even across a wide variety of characters and skills - has a specific and equivalent 'value' in resolving a particular situation. It's essentially treating individual skill checks as being equivalent to individual attacks in a combat, and that's not a sustainable model when applied to a more open-ended situation.Framing a situation as a challenge in which skills may be applied in order to progress is a reasonably good way of presenting the players with a problem to solve. Formalising it with overly-specific rules and conditions can tend to be counter-productive.</blockquote>

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