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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 4715870" data-attributes="member: 3146">They haven't. I ran the numbers recently (after spending a few hours working on the formula with my brother and a statistician friend of his) and was shocked at just how bad the numbers are for high complexity skill challenges. In order to get even a 50% chance at beating a complexity 12 skill challenge with the new system, you need to swing around an 85% aggregate chance of success on the individual skill checks that go into it. So, skill challenges come very close to being automatic success or automatic failure at high complexities without much in between. The way the math works, the goofball who rolls a few checks at 50% odds hurts your party much more than Skilly McSkillmeister who automatically succeeds on the checks helps your party.As far as the math goes, they are absolutely horrible. The effect is not quite so pronounced at low complexity skill challenges--complexity six, for instance requires an aggregate 75% odds on the individual checks to breach the 50% mark, but that still approaches the auto-success/autofailure problem. In Living Forgotten Realms, there are a few other hacks that disguise these problems--player reward cards like "that'll do" have a dramatic impact on the math by essentially turning one failure into a success and the ability to use the +1 (or +2) secondary die bump feature of the cards also makes a big difference in the margins.It doesn't get much better when it comes to conceptual or fluff related matters, but that is more open to debate and it is not really the subject of this thread. I will limit myself to this: the stated goal was to make non-combat encounters interesting--to introduce strategy to them and make them worthy of experience in a manner comparable to combat. What they ended up doing was imitating a combat where you roll 6-14 dice at a limited set of 14 or so applicable defenses and the result is always "hit. hit. hit. miss. hit." You can describe it however you like just like 2nd edition fighters were free to describe the hit/miss/hit/hit however they liked, but in the end it's hit/miss/hit/hit.</blockquote>

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