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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Paul Strack" data-source="post: 4391862" data-attributes="member: 71340">The big problem with the skill challenge mechanic is that it is very "swishy" (sensitive to small changes in skill level). But any multi-roll system is going to have that problem to some extent. Any small percentage advantage or penalty in a single roll will grow in significance as you make more rolls.I happen to think the original core mechanic has a pretty good chance of meeting the requirements. By this core mechanic, I mean "the whole party makes skill checks from a limited set of skills trying to accumulate a certain number of successes before a certain number of failures."I think any other multi-roll skill system is going to have similar problems with swishy-ness. I also think that the original (non-Errata) challenge system has some features to help swishy-ness that folks are not considering. In particular, by forcing every party member to participate, the skill level per roll is averaged over entire the party, which mitigates the presence of both Skilly McAwesome characters and Lamo McLamerson characters.I think what the core system lacks is (a) solid base numbers and (b) additional tactical options to make the system interesting enough for long term play. There is nothing preventing us (or WotC) from adding these options to the existing challenge system.In fact, many of the sample challenges and suggestions in the DMG do include such options, just not in a rigorous way. Examples include one-shot Easy skills, Information Skills that provide data on how best to beat a challenge, failures that cost your resources like healing surges or gold, etc.My current thinking is to make those and other options for skill challenges more rigorous, assigning complexity modifiers to them when they are added to individual challenges. Each challenge would use the base challenge rules (which should be simple) plus a few challenge options to twist things up and keep it interesting.</blockquote>

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