Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7086646" data-attributes="member: 996">Combats have a few likely outcomes - everyone on one side being defeated is the obvious one.  The analogue in a Skill Challenge would be gaining the requisite successes before any failures.  An SC that ends in success after one or two failures can have had some consequences along the way, or have have a less desirable version of the final outcome.  A failed skill challenge might also have different consequences based on the number of successes acquired before that third failure.  There's a fair range of variability in the resolution for the DM to work with if he likes.  Or, he could just ignore all that and have only one way to approach & resolve the challenge.   Sure, in that sense a combat encounter is a simpler thing to 'frame,' because the stakes are always life & death.  Of course, it could be complicated by some other objective, capturing an item guarded by the enemies encountered rather than defeating them all, for instance, and the players might, likewise, decide on an alternate objective like that.   Again, I suppose there are analogues - an officious assistant-chatelaine who's job is to keep the rif-raff from bothering the King is going to be an obstacle players seeking an audience will have to get through, and not much else.  But, sure, I see what you're getting at.  I don't think it's a big/important difference, though.  You can use encounter-design guidelines or skill challenge guidelines (or any workable set of guidelines for making a scene 'challenging') whether you're approaching the game in a DM-directed or players-directed way. Quoted because it's worth reading (enjoy your XP), not because I have anything to say in response.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification