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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6348370" data-attributes="member: 996">I'd actually like keeping Skill Challenges 'above board.'  If you don't spell out some aspects of the skill challenge, you'll end up with players declaring actions that use a really poor choice of skill (one they're bad at, doesn't apply, or even auto-fails) and they'll fail the challenge in short order - or even somehow wander away in the middle of it.  Also, in a free-form mode like that, you'll inevitably have some players who are more assertive about /doing/ things then others, and others that might get bored or otherwise lose the thread of what's going on.A structure - like initiative and turns/action in combat - keeps everyone involved and, hopefully engaged.That said, the basic successes-before-3-failures of Skill Challenges is definitely just a starting point.  You can turn more dramatic/complex skill challenges into veritable mini-games of their own.For instance, for the train-top chase you /could/ just call for a series of athletics or acrobatics rolls to climb or balance & run along after the hooded figure and narrate it as best you can.Or, you could have something to represent the train cars - like boxes or a cardboard cutouts on the table - or, as one DM I know did, an actual model train.  With each easy success in acrobatics, athletics or streetwise (for moving through the crowded cars instead of on top of them) a player moves his mini to the next car.  And, each turn, the hooded figure also moves to the next car.  To /catch/ him the players have to make additional checks to move another car ahead, or slow the figure down.  Those are the checks that count as success or failures in the SC.  And they can be more varied.  Hard Accrobatics, for instance, could get a success, letting the PC run along the top of the cars and move forward an extra car - but failure causes him to fall, and perhaps forces another player to stay behind to help him.  Expending a power that slows/imobilizes/etd could allow a check (hard for an at-will, moderate for an encounter, or even easy if a Daily is sacrificed) against an appropriate skill (so, Arcana for a spell, Religion for a Prayer, Athletics or Acrobatics for an exploit, etc) to keep the hooded figure from moving to the next car for a turn.  A loud Intimidate or Bluff check could create a problem for the hooded figure as someone in the car he's on reacts (pulling an emergency break, climbing up to stop the 'theif' or whatever).  You could come up with a list of possible uses or let players make a case for how a skill would help.You could also have a 'complications' mechanic, like a little table of things that could happen - tree-limbs rushing past and threatening to knock off characters using Athletics to climb along the sides of the cars, entering a tunnel that plunges the train into darkness and threaten anyone balancing atop the cars, a bend in the track that brings the hooded figure though far ahead, into range of some attack powers, others on the train doing things that might help or hinder either side, etc...Be sure to decide what success and failure mean.  A complete success (no failures) could mean they catch up and enter combat while still atop train cars.  A partial could have the fight happen in the engine, with a possibility the engineer could be killed or the engine damaged.  A failure means catching up to him in the engine and finding the dead engineer...   If that fits what you had in mind.If they're not supposed to defeat the hooded figure yet, it could reveal something about itself and trigger an escape power of some sort when bloodied (like sprouting tentacles before dissolving into a thick oily mist and mixing with the engine's coal smoke and flying back to one of the trailing cars or something.</blockquote>

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