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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5631190" data-attributes="member: 54877">That's half of what is needed. The other side is there needs to be resources explicitly at risk, not merely situation established by the roleplaying. These can be any number of things. For example, in BW, if you really want to succeed on a roll, you will be spending some Fate/Persona/Deeds points to give you a better shot. On "challenging" rolls, the only ways you can win is to so spend, or get enough bonuses from other sources to lower the difficulty. If you do that, you don't get to record a "challenging test", though. So there is a crticial and meaningful decision point right there. Do I want to win more than I want to have the challenging test?  A rough and ready 4E way to approximate that might be to take the XP at risk in the challenge (as KM already noted), and make it explicit. Make the challenge a bit harder, and then you gamble part of the XP to get bonuses to your roll. No failure yet, you might go for the whole thing. Get one or two, you might start hedging and try to get some of it. Or you might decide that failure was acceptable, if that gave you a shot at getting all the XP. (Necessarily, XP must be granted for attempting the skill challenge, in this model, which is how I play it anyway. I'm not sure that is RAW, though.) Ideally, the DM is already building in story and situation-based reasons for the players to want to succeed, and there is implicit risk in some of those elements. You help the farming family escape the zombie rush, because it has been prior established in the story for the party to care (positive), and because their relatives in town might not sell you things if you don't (negative). And if things really go south, you'll be in the path of the zombie invasion (transition to another type of challenge, combat or escape or hiding, in this case). Mechanics for non-combat resources should build explicity on these things, rather than exist in a void. That is, you can risk getting all the XP by going for that last tough roll unaided, thus risking the family--or you can push hard and save the family at the expense of not getting all the XP. It thus becomes apparent why XP is a lousy resource to handle this sort of thing.  Something called "Fate" or "Luck" points would be my first choice for a simple resource built into a non-combat reward cycle. Those are hardly original, but unlike "Fame" or "Honor" or some more niche options, those work in a variety of styles and without being too jarring. You get "Fate" by attempting non-combat situations with meaningful story costs. And then you spend them to "win" such situations when it matters enough to you. That doesn't have the richness of the BW reward cycle, where it all ties back into character advancement directly, but I'm not sure that is needed in D&D. Such a system is only meaningful if the DM is willing to push situation hard. BW's whole cycle collapses if the DM does not. That is, you have to again and again put the players into tough situations where they want their characters to "win"--often enough that they can't win them all. Then the meaningful decision is primarily about which times mattered most to them--thus, drama.</blockquote>

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