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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5499073" data-attributes="member: 22779">Answering this before I read the next couple of pages (mostly I'm afraid of hitting walls of text that make my eyes glaze over <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  ((Unfortunately, I'm about to make my own wall)) ).Let's compare between editions.  Situation:  The party is traveling across country from A to B.  The party does not have any other means of traveling other than mundane (horses, on foot, whatever, no teleport or fly) and the trip will take about four game days, give or take.  There is no road, its wilderness trekking.Pre-4e D&D.  To do this, requires a number of checks.  There would be some sort of check to determine if the party gets lost (usually made each day) with failure meaning that the trip will be extended.  Additionally, there will be periodic checks of random wilderness encounters, with each encounter obviously slowing down the pace of the scenario.So, we have a situation which might be resolved in a few minutes (PC's don't get lost, no random encounters) or in a much longer time (PC's get lost multiple times, the Dice Gods hate the PC's this day and multiple random encounters occur).In other words, the DM has zero control over the pacing here.  The dice determine pacing.  How long or short this scenario is is out of the hands of a (non-fudging) DM.Now, let's do this from a 4e perspective.It's a skill challenge.  The DM has already decided that at the end of the challenge, the PC's will arrive at their destination.  The SC is not meant to determine if they arrive or not, but rather in what condition they will arrive in.  It could be lightning fast - each failure costs a healing surge or it could be slower - each failure triggers a different event, with three failures leading to a Lost in the Woods skill challenge where the PC's have to perform a nested skill challenge which wipes out their previous failures and then continue on from the point where they left the main skill challenge.In other words, pacing is 100% under the control of the DM.</blockquote>

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