NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 4937789" data-attributes="member: 3586">On the occasions when a player convinces a DM to use a non-scripted skill, the game is rewarding the player's creativity; it's something that I saw more than one "old-school" person lament going out of 3E, due to what they termed as 3E's "button-pushing" mentality. (You want to find the hidden treasure? You push the button marked "search" and you find it - you don't have to actually specify where you're searching). I don't fully agree with that assertion, but I can see where it was coming from.However, if a PC is dumped into a river and has to make a Skill Challenge of Athletics and Endurance checks to survive (see DMG2/Journey Through the Silver Caves), if you're allowing Streetwise checks to get out of it, there's something very wrong with your DMing.Skill Challenges are not homogenous; they don't all work the same way, and they don't all test the same things.Some skill challenges are definitely testing whether the party has the right skills. Can they swim the river? Tightly scripted challenges with little opportunity for additions from outside the designated skill set. In those cases, the roll of the die as it interacts with the skill bonuses is important.However, you have the skill challenges where the actual skills used fall into the background (as does the success or failure of the challenge), and what you are testing is the ingenuity of the players to use the skills they have to overcome the situation. Yes, these challenges have default skills so that a well-skilled party can overcome them as the latter type; but a party with different skills can still overcome the challenge with ingenuity and daring.Note that the design of skill challenges is evolving. The concept of group skill checks - where the group succeeds on a single check if most of the party makes the check - is relatively new, coming into play after the original release of the game.</blockquote>

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