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<blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5629765" data-attributes="member: 27160">I, too, am closer to [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], I think, but I do nevertheless find Skill Challenges &quot;under-funded&quot;, as it stands.I think it boils down to SCs, even after some good advice and suggestion work by both WotC staff and bloggers/posters, being more like &quot;traps&quot; than like &quot;full encounters&quot;.&nbsp; They sit there and either they get triggered or they don't; a succession of skill checks will disarm them, too many failures will trigger them.Now, you can design some neat traps.&nbsp; Traps can have incremental failure costs, incremental gains for partial-disarming and some good fluff to describe how they work.&nbsp; But they lack all the other stuff that can make a &quot;full encounter&quot; interesting.&nbsp; They lack active opponents, terrain and environmental &quot;landscape&quot; effects, choice between the oppositional elements to tackle first (i.e., in combat, you can choose to kill the monsters in any order - and can even neutralise some while you kill others; with skill challenges or traps, not so much) and mechanisms for the situation to develop outside of the players' control.If mechanisms were added - maybe even for specific classes of skill challenge - that introduced these possibilities into the non-combat arena it may be that non-combat equivalents of the trap-plus-monsters-in-interesting-terrain encounter could be done for non-combat, as well as combat, situations.&nbsp; That, in my view, would add to 4E in ways that new classes, powers, feats and so on never can.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Balesir, post: 5629765, member: 27160"] I, too, am closer to [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], I think, but I do nevertheless find Skill Challenges "under-funded", as it stands. I think it boils down to SCs, even after some good advice and suggestion work by both WotC staff and bloggers/posters, being more like "traps" than like "full encounters". They sit there and either they get triggered or they don't; a succession of skill checks will disarm them, too many failures will trigger them. Now, you can design some neat traps. Traps can have incremental failure costs, incremental gains for partial-disarming and some good fluff to describe how they work. But they lack all the other stuff that can make a "full encounter" interesting. They lack active opponents, terrain and environmental "landscape" effects, choice between the oppositional elements to tackle first (i.e., in combat, you can choose to kill the monsters in any order - and can even neutralise some while you kill others; with skill challenges or traps, not so much) and mechanisms for the situation to develop outside of the players' control. If mechanisms were added - maybe even for specific classes of skill challenge - that introduced these possibilities into the non-combat arena it may be that non-combat equivalents of the trap-plus-monsters-in-interesting-terrain encounter could be done for non-combat, as well as combat, situations. That, in my view, would add to 4E in ways that new classes, powers, feats and so on never can. [/QUOTE]

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