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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5502937" data-attributes="member: 42582">Feel free not to bite if your spidey-sense is still tingling - but an oft-discussed issue on these threads is player entitlement, whether or not the GM has a final veto over what game elements players can bring into the campaign, etc.I think that for any game, given that the PC is the player's vehicle for engaging with the fiction, the more GM control is exercised the more this limits, in certain respects at least, the player's scope for that engagement. But the significance of this can vary a lot from system to system, because different systems makes the PC build more or less important to enaging the fiction. In a game like 4e it's pretty important, for the reasons I gave. And so GM control over build really is, in my view, in danger of having an adverse effect on player protagonism.Like I said - feel very free not to bite! That could be a possibility. The closest I've come to something like what you describe in my game was a situation in which the PCs had to fight a vampire in an underground room which was rapidly filling with water through many holes in the roof. Their actions included pulling open the drain plug, and forcing open the doors and then jamming their self-closing mechanism with a mace.The more typical skill challenge in my game is a social encounter, overland travel, or an attempt to understand or defuse some weird magical phenomenon. I don't use a lot of skill challenges imbedded in encounters, because (in my experience) it's non-trivial to get the pacing and balance issues right. Well, so do I, but I guess it depends a bit what the crazy stuff is.From my point of view, I think it hurts the sort of game I want to run if the mechanics of the game make it expedient for the players to have their PCs do one thing, but the game would be more interesting or engaging if they did another thing. A banal examle - nearly everyone agrees that the occasional swing from a chandelier is more dramatic then merely having two combatants stand next to one another and slug it out. A more specific example from my game - the fighter was one one side of a hyena pack filling the corridor, but wanted to get to the other side to protect one of the PCs (I think the paladin) who was isolated there, and so jumped over the pack - requiring a successful Athletics check and taking an opportunity attack in the process. The dramatic jump is, I think, more interesting then teleporting. Yet another example, more generic again: a fight which involves lots of movement, back-and-forth of advantage, and difficult decisions to be made, is more interesting and engaging than a fight which is resolved without any of that, because all the real work was done in planning and buffing before the party teleported in.So 4e doesn't get in the way of crazy stuff, but I think it is designed to reduce incentives that encourage expedience at the expense of flair.Do the examples I give shed any additional light? The short answer here is: the bit where it talks about player-designed quests. Which will mean player-instigated encounters (both combat and skill challenges).The longer answer also points to the fact that, once players start making "novel use of skills", the way in which the fiction unfolds is not under the sole control of the GM. So the concusion hasn't been predefined.As for transcending skill challenges, there are two cases. The first is fairly straightforward - if the players aren't interested in the stakes of the challenge anymore, or if some other development has happened that makes those stakes irrelevant, then the challenge is over. (For example, if the skill challenge involves negotiation over how a particular magic item is to be dealt with, and in the course of the negotiation someone drops the item through a rift to the Far Realm, then the skill challenge has probably come to an end - at least in its present form - and the fictional situation proceeds from wherever it had got to. This is much like a combat that suddenly stops because both sides recognise that they've got better reasons to be friends than to fight.)The second case, though, is where the challenge is still on foot, but the players just don't want to be part of it. The question in this case is analogous to asking how, in classic dungeon play (say in Basic, or in AD&D 1st ed) a player is to "transcend" the dungeon? Well, once you're in it, there is no way to do so within the game - other than, for examle, by letting the next monster you see eat you. But the real solution is not to play with GMs who design boring dungeons.The answer with a skill challenge is much the same. The skill challenges a GM designs - whether or not in response to player-initiated quests - are the game. If the GM cannot frame skill challenges that are worth anyone's time (to paraphrase Ron Edwards) then yes, the game will suck.It might seem that one solution to boring dungeons or adventures is teleporting out of them. But if the GM is no good, this is likely to be at best a short-term solution. Because ulimately you're still relying on the GM to make something interesting happen wherever it is that you end up after teleporting.Likewise with a skill challenge. If the players "teleport out of it" by refusing to participate and just letting it proceed straight through to failure, then they might fairly quickly move their PCs into a different situation in the game. But if the GM is no good, this is likely not to be a very good solution.In this respect, designing a skill challenge is no different from designing a dungeon (for those games that use them) or desiging a metaplot (for those games that use them) or designing a campaign world (for those games that use pre-defined campaign worlds) - if it's not worth anyone's time, the game is likely to suck. I don't think skill challenges are hostage to this problem in any special way.</blockquote>

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