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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5597412" data-attributes="member: 82106">Just to elaborate on it a bit. There is a 'natural decomposition' that has to happen with SC type scenes. If the tally of failures/successes across a set of related situations doesn't logically represent any particular criteria for overall success/failure then it makes no sense to have it be one SC. This can happen in a couple of ways. Logically a sequence where one thing strictly gates on another for instance. This could be "you have to find clue X to progress to situation Y". There's no logical connection between failures in the first part and failures in the second part. It also happens when 2 situations simply don't measure the same kind of progress. It makes little sense to have a challenge where you sneak into the bad guy's lair and pick the lock on the prisoner's cell where some checks represent the sneaking part and others the picking part since it makes little difference HOW you got to the cell, the lock will be equally hard to pick.Now, any of those CAN be reformulated to be make sense as a single challenge, potentially. You just have to make all successes and failures tally to one consistent thing, like amount of time expended, suspicion raised amongst the guards, or whatever. The question then is always if it is really worth doing that vs just making each piece a smaller separate encounter. Level of abstraction counts here. It may be worth making one complex challenge if you say have a side quest that you want to make interesting but not take up a vast amount of time. You could package it as a single SC and be done with it. Another example might be the 'overarching SC' used to track overall success in a whole adventure, but with those there's little compelling reason to make them high complexity (and you probably won't use standard encounter type XP for this kind of thing either). Overall I don't generally use many complexity 4 or 5 SCs these days. Up the challenge rating by making something lower complexity a bit higher level instead usually works better.</blockquote>

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