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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 4113075" data-attributes="member: 3424">This.If taken to extremes, I will simply rule that too many implausible ideas racks up one failure for wasting time pursuing dead ends. My views on the new skill system can be found in my <a href="http://www.circvsmaximvs.com/blogs/viewblog.php?userid=249" target="_blank">CircvsMaximvs blog</a>, and are reproduced below if you don't want to click the link. I've thought more about the new skill system and I've gone from grudging thumbs up to fairly positive. It seems to me that I can use it to resolve some of the tension between player ability and character ability.Of course, it should be noted that the new skill system isn't entirely new. The idea of complex skill challenges that require more than one successful skill check to overcome had previously appeared in the 3e Unearthed Arcana. The main difference between the new system and the one presented in Unearthed Arcana is the explicit acknowledgement that the skill challenge could be open-ended, and different characters with different skills might be able to contribute to overcoming it if the players can come up with a plausible reason why their individual skills might help. However, even that idea is not completely new - coming up with <s>crazy</s> creative schemes and convincing your DM that they could work is a tradition as old as role-playing.The improvement I see in the new skill system is that it better balances (in my view) player ability with character ability by providing a nice, structured middle ground between the emphasis on character ability in 3e and the emphasis on player ability in the earlier editions. Rewarding player ability was a delicate balance in 3e for me because on the one hand, I wanted to reward clever and perceptive players, but on the other hand, I wanted character abilities to mean something. So, good player ability pretty much translated into a bonus on the skill check. However, if you had to use a skill that you had no ranks in, even a +4 bonus could mean that you had no practical chance of success. Of course, I considered it a feature at the time - an experienced DM could always put ways to bypass the need for a critical skill check or enough items and information that grant circumstance bonuses in an adventure, so that the lack of ranks in a key skill would not stop a good player.The 4e approach of abstracting a skill challenge into a number of required "successes" and allowing the player to select a skill and describe how he will use it to overcome the challenge is, in my view, a good balance. Some skills will be directly applicable to the skill challenge at hand, and even relatively inexperienced players will immediately be able to see how they can be used. Other skills may not be so obviously applicable, but an experienced and creative player might be able to find a way to use them. Player ability thus increases the character's options, but is still required to work through the character's abilities: you still need to roll well to get your successes, after all.The "multiple successes required" abstraction also creates more granularity when it comes to overcoming a challenge, and is another variable which player ability could affect. For example, certain actions by the player might result in automatic successes, lowering the number of successes that the character has to roll for. A simple puzzle might require three successful checks, for example, but if a player is able to solve the puzzle within 2 minutes real time, it might count as two successes, while a partial solution might count as one. The characters ought to be required to roll at least one success, though, so that character ability is still necessary.In addition to allowing for greater player input into skill challenge resolution, this increased granularity could be a good mechanism for allowing previous successes (or failures) to affect future events. For example, the PCs may require ten successes to persuade a king not to go to war. However, if they had earlier found evidence that a pro-war noble was actually an agent of a third country, presenting it to the king might count as four successes.</blockquote>

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