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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ExploderWizard" data-source="post: 5158243" data-attributes="member: 66434">[Originally Posted by pemerton ]In the modern approach, the game-mechanical difficulty is determined by the game's encounter-building guidelines - whether the level of a skill challenge, in 4e, or the dictates of the pass/fail cycle, in a game like HeroQuest 2nd ed. The GM then describes the gameworld in such a way as to make that difficulty level make sense (eg the difficulty of the Acrobatics check for level 30 characters is 35 - it's Astral Teflon Slime!). The players engage the challenge by making skill checks, and depending on how those skill checks pan out as the challenge unfolds the GM describes the ingame situation as evolving in the appropriate way, and the players respond to that in their subsequent skill checks.</blockquote>In my mind, the method of creating material for the game world as a justification response for the mechanics is bass ackwards. The game world space belongs to the participants and the mechanics should fit into that space rather than the space expanding and contracting to fit the mechanics.  As an example, I might not want to have to include astral teflon slime or anything else of that sort in my game world.  In this way the rules serve the game. The question at hand is this: What is the game? Is the game the events transpiring in the imagined space or the application of mechanical operations? For me the game is primarily the former.   [Originally Posted by pemerton ]I'm wondering what experiences others have had in actual play, whether of 4e skill challenges, or in other "modern" games like HeroQuest, The Dying Earth, etc. Has anyone actually encountered the "exercise in dice rolling" phenomenon, or is it a merely theoretical objection?[/QUOTE] I have had play experience with 4E skill challenges but not those other games mentioned. Based on my experiences with skill challenges as a player I have decided not to use them in my own 4E campaign.  I find the concept interesting but the actual procedure too structured and tedious for my tastes. Mechanically it is a combat against a task featuring players taking turns rolling to "attack" the task with thier chosen weapon (skill).  Challenge complexity is opponent level. Number of successes represent monster hit points, and number of failures are PC hit points.<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" /> Skills are used in my game whenever the players wish to make use of them. I do not construct scenes for the purpose of round robin skill checks.[/QUOTE]

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