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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 4918003" data-attributes="member: 3820">Not even a little bit what I meant, actually. Of course, my opinion comes out of practical play, so bear in mind that it's more about my personal experiences than anything else. Sometimes there's an aid another if somebody isn't feeling totally creative, but usually someone can find something to do wherein they have a fair chance of success, if not a splendid one. That's the point of the skill challenge, after all. I won't say the skill challenge system is perfect, of course; nobody says that. The main trouble I encounter with skill challenges is that too many of the examples given encourage too few skills to contribute to success. If you limit the number of skills that "count" for successes to only three or four per skill challenge, it will be a much different experience than if you say there are two to four skills that will give you successes on moderate DCs, and about three to eight skills that will contribute on hard DCs. I think <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4865934-post581.html" target="_blank">Piratecat</a> writes exceptional skill challenges, for instance. I hope DMG2 talks more about unscripted skill challenges, actually. I was glad to find out <a href="http://blog.microlite20.net/2009/03/18/like-it%E2%80%99s-1981-all-over-again-part-five/" target="_blank">I'm not the only person who uses them</a>, and they're absolutely fantastic. Set the problem, then say "This is going to be a skill challenge. Tell me what you're going to do to try overcoming it." This works great with creative players: it's all that old-school creativity, but enough of a complicated framework to really feel like there's structure to the activity. Example: A villain has a hostage out on a promontory. He's expecting a given NPC to show up and do a prisoner exchange. The PCs are then told "Okay, it's skill challenge time." In this example, the PCs used Nature checks to find natural tinctures and Bluff checks to disguise the dwarf so he could look like the expected NPC and approach from a distance, and then the more primal-aspected ones used Perception, Nature and Stealth to locate a back route and creep up on the villain and his hostage from an alternate direction. It was a splendid encounter, and all the players came away feeling like they shone. I could have scripted this out by only earmarking specific skills, but then it would have been my plan, not theirs. I'd like to see more discussion in, say, the DMG2 about how to call unscripted skill challenges as a way to adjudicate proactive player plans. One of the things I really like about 4e is that it strives to make things easier to ad-lib; with a little more attention to skill challenges with that same spirit in mind, fewer players might come away from them feeling like their only option is to aid another.</blockquote>

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