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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5632427" data-attributes="member: 42582">Have your read FATAL? I know the comparison is meant to be a light-hearted one, but in my view it actually obscures as much as, if not more than, it illuminates.To run a tolerable session of FATAL, you would have to override and/or ignore the mechanics. When I run a tolerable skill challenge, though, I don't ignore the mechanics, nor override them. I use them, and build on them, in various ways.And while it's flattering of you to call my a good GM, I don't want to take all the credit! I didn't work out how to do what I do on my own. I had rulebooks to help me. Just not the WotC ones. Which means I also think your reference to "working harder" is a little hyperbolic. It's not particularly hard work in 4e to build and run an interesting combat encounter, because the guidelines are there to help you: monsters classified by role, lots of terrain features presented in a fairly systematic way, sample encounter groupings, and plenty of advice on how to put it all together, and on what effects different choices will have.Giving that level of advice for skill challenges wouldn't make GMs have to work harder. It would make our lives easier, because we wouldn't have to do it from first principles, or adapt advice for HeroQuest and Maelstrom across to the slightly different framework of skill challenges.I've got nothing against any of this. But I don't think it needs to start with a complete rebuild. A lot of this can, in principle, be done with what's there: we've already got encounter and daily powers, healing surges, action points, rituals, other forms of gp expenditure, "advantages" etc (per DMG2 and RC), all of which create economies and attrition and allow victories that cost. Retreat can be incorporated in the evolution of a "structure" challenge (per DMG2). Challenges fighting back is not really discussed at all, and (as I've said above) I think is the one thing on your list that can't be done with the current mechanics other than in a narrative fashion (by "pouring on the pressure").But where is the advice and guidelines on how to use encounter and daily powers, healing surges, action points, rituals, other expenditure, advantages? It's not there - half a page in DMG2 and a sidebar in RC don't cut it. Imagine trying to build and run 4e combats with no more than a page of advice! That's what we're trying to do with skill challenges - and, in my view, that's what makes it hard.Again, I'm not saying that alternative mechanics couldn't achieve what you're looking for - and, for at least some groups and GMs, be prefereable to a "pour on the pressure" approach. But it would require rebuilding from the ground up, both in respect of character building and action resolution mechanics. So we're not going to see it for a long time, if ever. Whereas better advice, guidelines, examples, illustrations of actual play (and not imagined idealised actual play, but actual actual play), etc - stuff that made what we already have easy to work with - could be done, if not literally overnight, at least in a timeframe of weeks and months.I mean, the models are there - HeroQuest extended contests (yes, these have active opposition, but much more abstract than 4e combat - I think it could be replicated by a sophisticated mix of DC-setting and "advantages", and action points or power use could be used to emulate the resource-dynamics of Hero Points); and Maelstrom Storytelling's scene resolution (I haven't got my rules in front of me, but from memory these have less active opposition and rely more on narrative pressure - and they have a system of "quick takes", based on resource expenditure, to allow limited victories to be snatched from overall defeat - which could be amulated in 4e via action points, powers and/or advantages).The other place where work could be done would be in the existing areas of feat and utility powers (including skill powers). This could help fill your "This happens" space (although I think skills can also be used in this way - "this happens", but what else happens depends on how the skill roll turns out).</blockquote>

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