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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 4627493" data-attributes="member: 8158">Defaulting the system to a flat three failures isn't much of an improvement though. If you have a skill challenge, it's difficult at best to ensure that everyone has a relevant skill. If not, then it's all too easy to fail three times in a row, at least if we're talking about a skill challenge that has mandatory patricipation for all players.The dichotomy with skill challenges is that, as the DMG states, the point of them is not for everyone to form a train behind the guy with the best chance of succeeding, yet they don't really offer a support role for someone who's not suited to the challenge. A party of three can often succeed at a challenge where a party of five would fail. That's because the one or two guys who are really suited to the challenge get their chances to roll spread out farther while other players participate. While the end result is probably realistic in most cases, it's just not good game design to make people feel like their presence is a detriment.There are lots of other problems too. 4e doesn't have skill points or other resources to allow characters to emphasize a particular skilll. Your 8th-level rogue is probably about as good at Thievery as any other 8th-level rogue, and he's probably as good at it as the 8th-level wizard is good at Arcana. Conversely, the wizard is probably lousy at Thievery and the rogue likely doesn't have Arcana. In 4e, it's very pat, very cut-and-dried. You can take the skill focus feat, and there's the occasional utility power, but otherwise there's just no way to really excel at skill, so nobody ever feels like "woohoo, this is my time to shine--this is what I was born to be doing".And rolling a skill check is the only variable in a skill challenge, which just makes it a matter of not rolling low. There's no equivalent of a damage roll, and there's nothing the DM can do to switch up their pitches. So, it's not very dynamic at all.Now, I don't have a DDDI subscription, so maybe Mike addresses this stuff.</blockquote>

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