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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8966768" data-attributes="member: 6690965">This is, for me, the huge advantage of systems like 4e SCs. 'Complexity 4, level+1 Skill challenge with failure consequences XYZ and levels A, B, C of success giving these specific outcomes' completely deals with all of it. This is a principled approach with an objective structure that is not subject to any of the foibles so far described. Should the PC's actions deviate wildly from a solution path, the worst that can happen is the GM might just call the whole thing. BitD style clocks will also work, but the SC being an entire specified process maximizes integrity of play.I've not been precisely subtle about my dislike for skill challenges. They are a perfect way to get rid of all the gamist advantages of a simulated world. Primarily, they just aren't a very good game: the optimization paths are trivial or nonexistent, the design specifically avoids action compression, and the case for making any particular move over any other is unclear. I think they're a very good example of how you can have clear, specific mechanics for player choice that provide very little gamist engagement.Beyond that though, the other primary advantage they remove is that you're basically designing a small dice game to play each time you create one. When they're "good" it's usually because someone has expanded or tweaked the basic dice game into a slightly more bespoke small game to play in the middle of your TTRPG. On the one hand, it's good to provide some design guidelines to GMs (because honestly a lot of what they've been doing over the years has turned out to be on the fly game design anyway), but also they're an inserted, alternative game you play in the middle of the game you're playing. A completed simulationist game should ideally run entirely on the combination of existing elements in different combinations to unfold various board states, and not require new games be inserted.Just to tie back in to this discussion, I don't think any of these concerns around how anti-climactic solving this encounter on the 1st house is are gamist concerns, they seem to be entirely narrative critiques. It just doesn't matter when that chance pays off, it matters that the PCs evaluated their options and committed to this die roll as the most efficient plan, and had the opportunity to select other plans and chose not to. If the situation was exclusively "flip one of these 8 cards until you get a queen" that would be a problem, because that's not a game to begin with.We're assuming the PC's evaluated say, tracking these people around town, researching their political positions and so forth, and collapsed that universe of possibilities down to "sneak into this house." They're done playing the "how do we find out who it is?" game after making that decision and have put it down to play a tactical game about getting into the house instead. Whether or not the stuff is there just affects if/when they'll pick up that first game again.I've been putting the burden on the process of player decision making. Games, to my thinking, are defined by interesting decisions made in limited systems in pursuit of specific goals. The players must want a specific outcome, have levers they can pull that will meaningfully influence that outcome occurring, and must be able to articulate a mechanical preference for one course of action over another. For the game not to be trivial, more than one course of action must lead to the desired outcome, thus that players must discriminate between them. It is important that these distinctions are mechanical, and not thematic; the most common rules-lite system failure to "be a game" under this model is that the differentiation between choices has no mechanical impact on the outcome, only a narrative one. From a gameplay perspective, I fundamentally do not care if I made an stealth or persuasion check to get what I wanted, if the game amounted to "roll a 10+ on this die."</blockquote>

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