I think this is true. But the number of groups with low system mastery playing epic tier 4e D&D must be pretty small! That would be a pretty terrible play experience.
D&D General Skill challenges: action resolution that centres the fiction
Here are the 30th level PCs from my campaign (skill bonuses in brackets are circumstantial):
30th level DCs are Easy 24, Medium 32, Hard 42.
In their areas of specialisation, these characters don't struggle to hit Medium DCs. When they move out of their areas of specialisation - eg when Derrik makes social checks - they expend resources (eg Action Points to reroll).
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Honestly though, my expereince has always been that it is a lot like combat. The odds are not foremost on the mind, though tactics are. So when you see the lay of the land, you always try to pick the most obviously advantageous tactics (IE have PCs apply their best skills whenever possible). If that starts to look problematic, then deploying consumable/metered resources comes into play, and its fairly uncommon for the party to fail an SC they really seriously are determined to pass at any cost. Nor is it really to the GM's advantage to have things be surprisingly more or less difficult than expected, so they're also likely to play things in a way that doesn't 'pile it on' or 'lay off' too much, although now and then just being a brutal purveyor of hurt can make good dramatic sense (haha, what can I say, I'm evil).@AbdulAlhazred I have some of your posts to catch up on, but meanwhile I found some math here on Enworld (from 2008) on SC probabilities
Skill Challenges: bad odds
Skill Challenges in 4e can be modeled using the negative binomial distributions, as others have commented. I was curious what the odds of overall success was at the various Complexities, and I had a sneaking suspicion the d20 roll was too important. We define a function, f, that is the...
Just as with Group checks in 5e, it's quite important for a group to have grokked these odds when they implement the system (because they decline more sharply than is sometimes intuited.)
The RC came out in 2010, and perhaps the Advantages rules, along with the prescribed mix of difficulties at each complexity, were the designers' proposed solution to the maths problems. I suspect understanding and implementing the Advantages (you might like to call that that reifying the intent of previous handwaving, heh) is very helpful for groups to get SCs to work well at their table.
@AbdulAlhazred this is partially a response to your thought that
The RC is written as it is to tackle the maths problems of the earlier takes. My view is that it's pretty important for successful application to follow that design as written.
The original variable failures version WAS very mathematically unstable though, too much for most people's taste. I agree that advantages and such may be intended to help there, but OTOH they serve a great purpose in narrative terms in that they give you another measure of what to dish out, but for and against the party so you're operating in a known mechanical space. As I said up thread a bit, I tend to think using them as given is good practice, but it isn't absolutely required to be slavishly set on every complexity 3 gets exactly 2 advantages every time.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I was being fairly loose in terms of using it, as in "like D&D commonly (traditionally) is." I know there's this jungle gym of hair-splitting terms used by everyone under the sun to distinguish themselves from the next guy over, who has a slightly different definition of hit points, lol. For this purpose its enough to just point at what MOST people seem to think falls within the things commonly taken to be elements of D&D (some of which 4e flaunts, though others it upholds).
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, 4e certainly has both a vanilla skill system, not too different from 5e's really, as well as SCs. So it admits of the possibility of both approaches. I tend to feel that anything not worth at least a complexity 1 probably isn't interesting enough to roll (remember, 4e tells you to 'skip to the interesting stuff'). I think the allowance of 'free checks' in 4e boils down to A) traditionalism, and B) convenience. B is easy to consider, like how do you handle situations if you don't have free checks? Where does the monster knowledge check come into play for instance? And its very difficult to play out traditional dungeon exploration without them (when do you get a perception check if all you have are SCs?). Now, my answer is I don't think those sorts of situations are really great game play/design! I abolished free checks as a concept in HoML, it works fine, in fact the game plays better without them! But that is certainly just my answer.
Sure, but a distinguishing factor of wargames is that the SCENARIO is pretty well-defined. Maybe each side is allowed to have some hidden information (fog of war) and some factors might be left to be determined during play (IE what is the weather today). So, the RPG isn't really like a wargame at all, as the scenario is open-ended and quite ill-defined. Even if its a Basic D&D Dungeon delve its still a lot less nailed down than replaying the Battle of Borodino or even just making up a Chainmail Fantasy Supplement scenario.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Right, IMHO that '2%' is like as if the PCs went into a full combat encounter, lined up in a conga line and used Basic Melee Attack as their only power for the whole encounter, and didn't maneuver at all. Sure, they would probably loose 98% of the time to a GM that was actually trying to win... I don't think that tells us much about the combat system though!
IME PCs don't really lose SCs that often, any more than they lose combats. I've had both happen, probably SCs are more swingy than combats, but not ridiculously so. They are also GENERALLY not life-and-death situations, at least not outright. You lose a fight, you are likely in TPK land, you lose an SC and you might be floating downriver in a sinking boat with all the oars broken and a nasty rapids coming up ahead.
Yes to both.
One failed skill challenge:
Which of course was nothing at all like:
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yeah, if anything, my experience was that, even with the higher RC DC table that higher level PCs pretty close to laugh off skill checks. I mean, definitely if you don't want to spend resources, and maybe if your a fighter with a low CHA and INT, and a mediocre WIS (which is a feasible build) you might be a bit of a brick in that department, even at level 20, but you WILL still have some nice powers and probably some items and whatnot that are going to be pretty useful.
Once I got into a game with some people who I knew from the WotC boards, it must have been around 2011, because MOST everything, including pretty much all the Essentials stuff, was out there. So, I just decided I'd make the most stupidly ridiculously Swiss Army Knife wizard. He had Wizard's Apprentice, and a Tome implement, and expanded spell book, and every ritual and consumable I could possibly get hold of. The character was preposterous. I mean, even at 1st level, I was finding ways to bypass virtually any skill check I didn't like. I never got a chance to play the character at high level, but things like Sage of Ages, some of the additional spell book swapping feats and whatnot could just make you crazy capable. And Bards are worse, a half-elf bard just laughs at skill checks.
So, yeah, you really have to get kinda creative to seriously challenge epic tier PCs in an SC. Its certainly doable, but those increased DCs that @pemerton mentioned were DEFINITELY intended to help deal with the sheer variety of ways you could get skill bonus.
Can you spot the Sage of Ages in the chart I posted?
Manbearcat
Legend
I just wanted to quote this phrase for how awesome it is.
You can rest assured that I will use it in the future in real life and I’ll say “hat tip AbdulAlhazred” under my breath!
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