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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4162665" data-attributes="member: 42582">The key phrase is "how far you appear to have gone" - later on you elide this into "the party is farther along" whereas, to remain consistent, you should probably say "the party appears to be farther along".What is required here is to ensure that narration - whether by player or GM - does not produce the actuality of having gone on further than the structure of the skill challenge permits. The burden of this probably falls on both players and GM. It can be facilitated by one or more of the following: (i) somewhat abstract specifications of the situation by the GM (canvassed by you in a thread a few weeks ago involving an escape from a dungeon); (ii) directors stance narration by players or GM to introduce extra gameworld elements (ravens, dud traps etc) to explain outcomes; (iii) a willingness to acknowledge a gap between appearance and reality - it may have [/i]seemed[/i] that the PCs had resolved the encounter, but in fact they hadn't.This does require abandoning any assumption of causality in respect of a given skill check. The total causal effect can't be known until the whole challenge is resolved.I don't see the difference from other components of 4e (contrary to some others I think there is a radical difference from earlier editions of D&D - not only is there a defined structure for resolving non-combat encounters by the accumulation of a pre-defined number of successes, but there is a structure that, as you have shown, can only work if assumptions about the relationship between action resolution and in-game causality and about metagame narration rights are radically revised).The complaints about healing surges - "I can't narrate the consequences of a 'killing' blow until I know the result of the PCs stabilisation check" - and the complaints about per-encounter powers - "I can't explain why this power is not available every round unless I impose arbitrary narration about the successful opening up of an opportunity by 'reality-warping' PCs" - have a very similar character to your observations about skill challenges and causality.4e is adopting widespread FiTM action resolution. Whether it will be able to make it fully coherent, given some of the lingering simulationist-seeming mechanics (eg 5 minute rest to renew per-encounter powers, and perhaps task-oriented flavour in the skill descriptions) we won't know until we see the rulebooks. But it's not obviously incoherent to me.Not quite. Both groups of players (the actual and the counterfactual) made the same skill checks. But as a result of the actual group succeeding at those checks, they earned the right to narrate their PC's successful disarming of the trap - with no more rolls required once the challenge had been succeeded at (I am assuming here that once the challenge has been won, the GM is obliged to "say yes" to the rest of the players' narration of their success).</blockquote>

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