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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5499318" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yep, this is what I meant. (Can't XP you yet though - sorry!)I agree with Hussar. And even when (as in the skill challenge that I actually ran in my game, and that I described the resolution of upthread) there is a specific river to cross - the Volaga river, marked on the 1 hex = 3 miles map that is on the inside cover of the module - I still don't need to know how wide it is, how deep it is, or how fast it is flowing.I also agree with Nagol. In the skill challenge I describe, one consequence of failure was being surprised by the manticore-riding gnoll archer while in combat with the gnoll shaman and her band of gnolls and ghouls. This was a case, then, of using a combat encounter - and the arrival in the second round of that encounter of another two combatants - as part of the resolution of the skill challenge. Sometimes, though, I have handled combat as an immediate component of a skill challenge (eg in an infiltration challenge, I mentioned to the player that his PC sees two guards flanking the doorway he wants to enter - he spent his area attack encounter power, and as per the guidelines in DMG2 I then gave him +2 on his stealth check - when he succeeded this was narrated as him having dropped both guards with his halberd before then entering the doorway).On other occasions I've handled "combat" as a simple skill check - when the party was fleeing the collapsing temple (as mentioned upthread) the player of the wizard decided that his PC would use Magic Missile to kill the devil-worshipper who had been rescued/captured from the gnolls by the players - I resolved this via a simple arcana check, forming the view that making him wade through the 50-odd hit points the NPC was statted as having for an actual combat context would add nothing at all to the game. (One way to construe this in mechanical terms - on a successful Arcana check, the player was able to "minionise" a lone NPC, who had no context or companions to make him a serious combat challenge.)Incidentally, I don't know how 3E would handle this - with it's more simulationist treatment of hit points what I've described would be closer to cheating, and also there is no skill that is the functional equivalent of Arcana in this context - Spellcraft or Knowledge doesn't quite seem to fit. For me, then, this is another example of 4e's non-simulationist approach to skill use, and situation design, and resolution, offering better support for thematic play. The real issue in the scene I've just described was not the difficulty of killing the NPC, but the ruthlessness displayed on the part of the PC (and in some sense at least therefore endorsed by the player).So can I set the DC of the swim check without knowing how deep and/or wide and/or fast flowing the river is?The d20 SRD says this about swimming:Make a Swim check once per round while you are in the water. Success means you may swim at up to one-half your speed (as a full-round action) or at one-quarter your speed (as a move action). If you fail by 4 or less, you make no progress through the water. If you fail by 5 or more, you go underwater.That implies to me that the players have to make at least as many swim checks as twice the ratio of the river width to their movement rates. The number required is more if some of those checks fail. I don't see how this is not the mechanics determining the pacing in a pretty simulationist fashion.Except that making it across a 15' wide river is not a very heroic achievement. I'm a pretty crappy swimmer (at least by Australian standards) and I've swum without difficulty across rivers quite a bit wider than 15' - even channels with fairly strong currents.This relates back to the point about heroic protagonism. In a skill challenge I'm free to describe the river as wide and deep (and therefore challenging) while still resolving the crossing with only a handful of rolls. In 3E, at least according to the SRD, this would require a GM handwave. And in my view, at least, that GM handwave/fiat is at odds with the players' protagonism.At least two differences. First, these are almost always secondary checks (and so contribute to the consequences of the challenge, but not to ultimate success or failure), or if primary checks are a group check as per DMG2. The heroic protagonism is therefore still there - if the endurance checks are secondary then what will contribute to sucessful primary checks is someone's successful nature (or similar) check, or if it is a group endurance check the group will be anchored by (for example) the dwarf fighter who can't fail on an easy DC, therefore meaning that only half of the other 4 PCs must succeed in order for the group as a whole to clock up a success.Second, there is no need to specify the minutiae of the ingame elements (dust, heat, lack of food, whatever) that determine the frequency and DCs of these checks.What I'm interested in is the nature of the GM fiat. Skill challenges support the GM framing a scene with challenge and pacing in mind, and then leaves the players to take the lead in resolving it, without needing to get bogged down in minutiae. Whereas, at least according to the d20 SRD if I want to achieve this for a river that's more than 15' wide, I either have to start doing multiple swim checks, or else have to start GM fiating the action resolution rules.I'm not sure what you mean here. A PC ruthlessly killing a (for all practical purposes) helpless and unwitting NPC isn't just fluff. That's a significant event in the fiction which is mechanically modelled, in some form or other, in every edition of D&D.If part of the point of playing is for the players to be able to express thematic ideas through engaging with the fictional situation via their PCs, then the mechanics that permit them to do that - and therefore, for example, to kill off NPCs in the way I've described - make a big difference.Apart from anything else, if killing the NPC requires multiple rounds of to hit rolls, the possibility of retaliatory attacks by the doomed NPC, etc etc then suddenly the game's focus shifts away from the thematic material altogether, and instead it's become just a combat fest. (This is also an illustration of how pacing concerns, the ease of improvisation, and the ability to run a game that allows players to express thematic content, are all inter-linked.) I'm not sure what "by the book" means here. I've got quite a few 4e books. They have a lot of sample skill challenges. I use these both as direct sources of skill challenge design, and as inspiration for my own ideas.The very first skill challenge I ran in 4e - at a point when I had only the three core books plus Adventurers' Vault - was an adaptation from the Basic module Night's Dark Terror. The situation is this: the PCs, following the trail to the homestead that is their destination, come out of the forest, see the homstead on fire across a creek valley, and see goblins on wolves circling round the outside of the homestead to try and cut them off.Having never designed or run a skill challenge before, I was able to determine in advance how I would adjudicate athletics, acrobatics and stealth checks, as well as attempt by one PC to help another. In the course of resolving the challenge I also worked out how to adjudicate an attempt by a PC to intimidate the approaching goblins. And I successfully implemented my pre-prepared idea that failures on the challenge would result in one or more PCs having to fight their way past a goblin wolfrider or two. I was even able to implement differential consequences for different PCs, with those who succeeded on athletics checks without opting to help others making it into the homestead fine, while those who opted to help, or who tried to hold off the goblins by intimidation while the squishier PCs made their way inside, had to fight the wolfriders.I don't know if this was "by the book" or not, but it was what I came up with after I read the DMG, read the module, and thought about how to adapt it to 4e.Of course a similar encounter could be played out in Rolemaster or 3E, but in my view, and consistently with what I've said earlier in this post, that would require detailed maps and terrain. And it would at least be more fiddly, and probably also more handwavey, to integrate considerations like one PC helping another, or one PC intimidating the goblins while others escape to safety. (In the module as written, the PCs make it to safety unless they hesitate for more than two rounds, in which case they have to fight the wolfriders. How to adjudicate the number of rounds passing in hesitation isn't explained. In particular, it's not clear whether the GM is meant to run a real-world stopwatch on the players - 2 rounds in Basic would be 20 seconds - or whether the GM is meant to actually adjudicate 2 rounds worth of actions on the part of the PCs, counting anything other than "run full tilt for the homestead" as hesitation.)I've got a pretty good working knowledge of the rules. I've got a lot less play experience with it than with 4e.Yes. It's 4e's version of the HeroQuest pass/fail cycle, which makes DCs depend on the place of the conflict in the narrative rather than determining them in a simulationist fashion. (In 4e, instead of escalating DCs in response to success, as HeroQuest does, the players gradually lose access to their enhancing resources or ablative resources, like powers and hit points/healing surges.)Another, more practical, benefit of level-appropriate DCs is that they make determining difficulty on the fly very easy. You don't need to worry about how wide the river is, for example, in order to set a DC to cross it successfully without incident. (Combat works differently in this respect - it does depend on details accounting for time and space. I've already stated upthread that the lack of guidelines on integrating combat resolution with non-combat resolution is a weakness in 4e's action resolution mechanics.)Yet another feature - which I think is a benefit, but which others may not - is that the way the GM conceives of the situation that the PCs find themselves in has comparatively little impact on the likelihood of their success, once the complexity of the skill challenge is determined (and subject to Nagol's general concern about skill challenges being a maths trap). Whereas in setting up a situation in the way Imaro describes his overland swamp journely, a lot seems to turn on the GM's fiat about whether swimming requires one check overall or one per round, or whether everyone in the party has to make a survival check or just the ranger, and whether everyone in the party gets a perception check against the bandits or just the best, etc, etc. In my view this makes the players' prospects overly subject to GM fiat. It also sets up a situation that encourages check mongering by either GM or players (or both).Right. This relates to the point I made upthread about combat, also, and how (in my view) it supports narrativist play - 4e combat is designed to force the players to step up or be beaten, with that crunch point coming somewhere about half-way into an encounter. This can be the focus for "step on up" play (and Balesir, on <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/301668-pleasure-rpgs-alternatives-overcoming-challenges.html" target="_blank">this thread</a>, has helped me get a better understanding of how 4e works in this regard).But because the system is robust across a wide range of choices - as LostSoul describes in relation to skill challenge DCs - this crunch point can also be the focus for thematic choice, as different ways of meeting the test express different sorts of commitments or ideals.Agreed, although there are a number of published example skill challenges that give a reasonable idea of what the designers think count as reasonable consequences. And, as you say, traps and monsters help - traps especially, because these often have a "disable traps" skill challenge built in that allows fairly clear inferences from failures to mechanical consequences.Of course in many contexts the consequences of failure aren't mechanical but purely fictional (eg someone doesn't like you, or you lose an item crossing the river, or . . .). In some systems these could be handled mechanically, but they are not in 4e.</blockquote>

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