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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vyvyan Basterd" data-source="post: 5024378" data-attributes="member: 4892">Skill Challenges are used to reward players for non-combat challenges and to give DMs a tool for building encounters that don't necessarily involve combat.There has never been any evidence that players must be forced into a skill challenge. The 4E DMG does not state this. None of the adventures they've published that use skill challenges state this. And there is plenty of advice in the DMG and further articles that speak to the matter of not restricting the players actions. Can a DM force players to participate in a skill challenge? Just about as easily as they could force them to participate in a combat. A bad DM can railroad players with combat, with skill challenges, or completely on his own. The mechanic itself is not a railroad.You can use Utility powers during a skill challenge to boost your chances. And I do admit that most other powers aren't considered for their out of combat use. I've advocated that this is a symptom of the new system. It took time in the early days of D&D to find other uses for spells outside of combat. And those spells didn't change relatively through 3rd Edition. 4th Edition is a new game and will require some new thinking to use powers outside of combat. My advice: 1) allow powers to be used without the damage component; 2) really look at the fluff around the power and let the player describe his use of it in flavorful ways; 3) determine whether use of the power outside of combat really hurts the game; and 4) SAY YES! Bad DMs (or inexperienced DMs, which we all basically are in 4E) don't take powers into account, restrict the use of skills in imaginative ways and build skill challenge structures that are artificially long or short. But we're all learning. Skill Challenges are new to all of us.Yes you are. The problem you are encountering is that you are treating skill challenges as if they are hard, fast rules. There have been numerous example skill challenges in articles and adventures that try new things with the structure.Not if you design the skill challenge to have important consequences for both success and failure.Speak for yourself. My players enter a skill challenge only when they decide to accomplish something that warrants a complex set of actions that will have a meaningful outcome to both success and failure. They usually don't even realize that they've had a skill challenge because with practice the process feels very organic. They usually discover that they have when I mention they've hit a milestone and award them an action point. WotC has been developing these rules as the game progresses. It's a (relatively) new concept even if you count complex skill checks in late 3E. If you expect new game concepts to work perfectly from day 1 you will continue to be disappointed in any new game you pick up.</blockquote>

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