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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8735924" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Does it have as much mechanical heft as Dogs in the Vineyard?No it does not.But the statement that it has little heft at the mechanical layer and no meaningful decision just doesn't mesh with my vast, vast, vast amount of GMing of the system.I mentioned elsewhere that I've run about 700ish Skill Challenges in all my 4e GMing.  I've had maybe 35 to 70 macro-failures as I reflect back on it so somewhere between 1 and 2 and 20 Skill Challenges in ended up as failures...which had both (a) story snowballing implications and (b) gamestate through line implications.I can think of dozens and dozens of decision-points off the top of my head where a player made a decision in a Skill Challenge that reverberated not just mechanically through the Skill Challenge but also snowballed into the through line of the subsequent gamestate (for several gamestates to come). An easy one was when a player of a Fighter PC was in a Social Conflict to convince a demon-worshiping Gnoll Tribe to momentarily cease hostilities with the neighboring steading and join them in their conflict against a greater threat of a cult of Devil-Worshippers in their collective midst...they could go back to warring afterward.  It was very important to this player (thematically due to their Theme and Paragon Path) and to the group at large to have the Companion Characters (1 x Huge Swarms of Hyenas that would turn into 1/2 budget worth of Minions on Bloodied+ 1 x their Elite Leader) available to them for the conflict to come with the powerful cult and their devilry.So in the middle of the social conflict, with things turning against them, they pulled out:This gave them a huge bonus to their Intimidate check (which they were trained in but they had no Cha bonus) to try to get them a much needed success when things were swinging against them in the SC.  They failed their check.  This is an escalation to violence.  As such, they know this beforehand that this is turning into a nested combat where they have to physically cow these Gnolls (who are now drawing weapons themselves) in order to get back to the Social Conflict.* So meaningful decision vs an alternative because of the escalation of the consequence space.* Consequential because they needed to win this social conflict to get these assets for subsequent gamestate purposes + their staking Daily resources now (Healing Surges and Dailies in this combat) in order to facilitate this.* Worth it for this player due to thematic reasons.* The investment of PC build resources into this Skill Power was worth the opportunity cost over another Power because it let them ignore Charisma and positively impacted a great many Skill Challenges (just not this one) and Surrender moves in combat against Bloodied Leaders....and it was thematically coherent with their PC.[HR][/HR]My 4e games were shot through with this where the 4 bullet points were in play.</blockquote>

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