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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Colmarr" data-source="post: 5596944" data-attributes="member: 59182">Generally, I don't like them. As you said, they tend to bog down. They're also statistically quite hard to succeed at. But most importantly, it's difficult for me to imagine a 'scene' that would require so many successful skill checks to resolve. My preference would be to replace one '12 successes' scene with 2 'six successes' scenes or 3 'four successes' scenes.  If I were to use a high complexity challenge, it would be in a situation where multiple PCs each needed to put their respective skills to work (off the top of my head, the best example I can think of is a crashing passenger airship), as an overall tracker of a situation (I've heard that Revenge of the Giants determines the overall success or failure of the adventure via a giant - pardon the pun - skill challenge), or as a short replacement for a side trek (delving into Dorago's lost tomb could be a complexity 5 free-form skill challenge rather than a session-long combat fest). Oh, and someone XP Nullzone for me. I agree with him 100%. I consider assigning skills to challenges to be best used as a guidance for the DM in (1) framing the expected course of the challenge and (2) making sure you've put enough options in the scene for the PCs to interract with. Once the dice hit the table, I allow the narrative to take over. If the PCs come up with a plausible way for Athletics to work, they get to roll Athletics.  Exactly right. Some of the skill challenges that drag the most are the ones that are more complex than the scene they are representing. Hence my rule of thumb about complexity and time. Short scenes tend to be simple ones. However, it is only a rule of thumb, and it's possible for there to be quite complex scenes (such as the crashing airship) that are nevertheless quite short. Someone XP abdul for me, too <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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