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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5628303" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes, that was very clear in your earlier post!On this point, I actually incline a bit towards NO - at least for the whole conjunction. That is, there can definitely be mysteries, intrigue and politics. But low combat makes a lot of the stuff in your rulebooks and on your character sheet redundant!I think 4e is best for conflict resolution via combat - so the culmination of the mystery, the intrigue, and the politics is a fight! This is why - in my view - it is a core feature of the game that the arch enemies, like Lolth, Orcus, Vecna etc, are given combat stats. Because the narrative logic that the whole game seems to me to support is that, in the end, we will fight it out. (Like the X-Men and Magneto - the theme, at least in the movies and the best of the comics, is identity politics and collective self-determination, but the tropes and methods are combat.)No doubt any individual group could play the game another way. But I think that is pushing a bit againt what it is good for.And like I said earlier, I also think using 4e for a kill-and-loot sort of game doesn't seem that promising either, because the loot and XPs aren't a reward in the same way they are in AD&D (for example, the treasure gain, as written, is level-based rather than success based, and the XP gain, as written, is participation-based rather than success based - given that the mechanics together with the encounter building guidelines tend to ensure that nearly all fights will be won by the PCs).I think that those who try to play 4e for this sort of game would fairly soon notice the lack of real rewards. (Is this why some people talk about having become jaded with 4e and turning back to earlier editions? Maybe.)I think this is an interesting point.Contra KM and you, I think rituals work fine. And because, at least in my experience, they're pretty quick to adjudicate, they don't really create a balance issue of the sort you describe.Skill challenges are a different beast. Some of the post-printing errata is sorting out the maths. This is unfortunate, obviously, but at least to my mind goes to implementation rather than core design.But some of the post-printing errata and tweaking does go to core design, and the balance issue. As originally presented, a skill challenge mandated participation by all PCs. This was dropped under errata. In my view, what was missing from the original mandate was an explanation of how the GM was meant to get all the PCs involved. I mean, in a combat all the PCs get involved because the monsters are trying to kill them all, and any PC who hangs back is a deadweight who is not soaking his/her fair share of damage, and not contributing to the final victory. A good skill challenge needs to be designed and run in such a way that similar considerations motivate all the players to get involved. Unfortunately, the rules don't talk about how to do this.A related design issue with skill challenges, which I believe [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] was the first on these boards to notice, is that the GM doesn't get to roll dice - only the players do. Or to put it less opaquely - the GM has no mechanical mechanicsm to inflict adversity on the PCs in a skill challenge. This has to be achieved, therefore - and thus the players motivated to engage with and resolve the challenge - by the GM narrating the situation, and its gradual resolution as skill checks are made, in a way that drives the challenge towards its culmination.But the rulebooks give basically no advice on how to do this - they don't even seem to acknowledge the need for it - and in particular don't give advice on how to do this within a structure where a predetermined number of successes will bring the challenge to a successful conclusion.The upshot is that I didn't learn to run skill challenges by reading the 4e rulebooks. I learned to run them - and then, retrospectively, to get a sense of what the 4e designers were gesturing at with their rules texts - by reading LostSoul's posts back in the early days of 4e, and by reading and rereading the rulebooks for HeroWars/Quest (especially extended contests), Maelstrom Storytelling and (to a lesser extent) Burning Wheel.A treatment of skill challenges that adequately addressed this issue of design and resolution - giving it the same degree of serious attention as tactical encounter building, for example - would, I think, be able to solve the balance issue. (At least if the skill challenge is designed with a given party in mind. So long as the spread of skill development across PCs is allowed to be as flexible as it is in 4e, designing skill challenges for a generic party will be hard. But then I think this is true for combat as well, because in so far as combat is interesting because more is going on than just dealing and receiving damage, that extra will tend to be party-specific also.)</blockquote>

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