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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord_Blacksteel" data-source="post: 5329300" data-attributes="member: 53082">I didn't mention 3E but if they weren't called skill challenges nor were they described in detail it doesn't sound like it's "not strictly true" - it sounds like they didn't exist in 3E either as a concept presented in the rules. That matters. I'm not disagreeing that you can make them work (better than any of the earlier editions) but it is a retrofit one might want to mention when starting a campaign.Yes, 1.5 had some NWP's added on late. IME they were rarely used and little loved. Even today I don't see retro 1E games using NWP's (it's kind of a dividing line for 1E vs. 2E fans) so I don't think an "NWP Challenge" is going to be a feature of 1E games. They played a much bigger role in 2E being part of the core rules and you could rig up something like a skill challenge there pretty easily.But a skill challenge would involve multiple stat checks - that's kind of the point - and you're likely to end up with "OK now the mage rolls an INT check, OK, now the Cleric rolls a Wis check, OK," etc. In effect each character has 1 good skill, maybe 1 or 2 OK skills, and a few average to poor skills. There's not enough detail there to make it very interesting. As a concept the Skill Challenge/NWP Challenge works great when there's a skill system to support it but the two versions of the game I specifically mentioned don't have one in their original versions which were played by most people at the time. You could probably get more out of a "Party Challenge" - to get across this weird bridge the fighter has to cut a rope or hold back a wooden lever while the thief disarms a trap and the mage casts knock -all at the same time. Let them use their class abilities rather than a slapped-on skill system or a series of stat checks and make it count for something. You would probably need a diagram like something out of Grimtooth's Traps to make sense of it but a lot of the old dungeons featured some pretty weird mechanical or magical devices or traps or rooms and something like this could liven it up a bit.I don't think it is a similar feel - 4E players know that skill challenges are part of the system and it's a consideration during character creation as in "what do I want to be good at besides straight-up combat." They can use ability score placement, trained/untrained skill selections, feats, powers, multiclassing, and even magic items to design for this. Basic/1E players don't have to worry about this as the system primarily describes combat and leaves the rest to the players and DM to work out. Quantifying non-combat/thievery character abilities in a Basic/1E game is a fairly significant change that goes way beyond letting you add skill challenges - typically it stomps on the Thief class in particular - so it's not as simple as just bolting something on. Player expectations are a factor too as a lot of the appeal of the old games is that they are fast and loose outside of combat and adding a skill system can drag that downI'm not disagreeing that it's possible to rig up something like a skill challenge in any edition - I'm saying that we didn't then and that it's not a good fit with some of them. I could add a powers system onto a Basic game if I wanted to but that doesn't make it a good idea. There is an emphasis on different things in each edition and some of them work fine with it - 3E gives a player most of the same tools as 4E to optimize for skill challenges, losing the powers angle but gaining multiclassing flexibility - but some of them don't. Your original comment was that you could rig up a skill challenge system for traps in any edition - In 1E the Thief has the trap-defeating skills so he's the guy who does it when mechanical resolution is called for. When the DM wants more it involves descriptions of who's looking where and for what. I just haven't seen a huge demand for an in-between step like a skill challenge in those games and the mechanics and class structure don't really support it.</blockquote>

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