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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4171892" data-attributes="member: 5143">What about it makes no sense to you?  My job as a DM is to make the players have fun.  I do that by narrating an interesting story and letting them take part in it.If the players have fun escaping from a city since they can imagine the chase scene in their heads and it is exciting and interesting then I have done my job.I can do that in a number of ways.  Some of which take a lot more work than others.One way is to map out an entire city, writing down the location of important landmarks.  I can then figure out(based on the population and the political, economic and sociological situation in this city) how many guards there would be in the city and how many of them would be on duty.  Then figure out where they would be based on the time of day and run the situation round by round as I track the movement rates of all the guards in the city.  This should probably take me a good couple of days to map out correctly pre-session and would likely slow the game down to a crawl during the session as I have difficulty figuring out the actions of 50 guards at the same time.The other way is to abstract the situation with mechanics.  I understand that I want it to be fairly easy for the PCs to escape from the city.  So, I let it come down to a couple of die rolls how everything works out.  If the PCs make, let's say, 4 successes before they get 2 failures then they get out.  This requires about 5 minutes of prep time(or not even that much as I can probably open the book to the correct page and pick the difficulty and mechanics in about 10 second, so I can do it on the fly).  During the game its quick and easy since I'm concentrating more on using my imagination to come up with interesting description than I am in tracking movement rates.However, from the players' point of view they get close to the same experience from both.  In both cases they have it described to them that there are guards after them and they need to escape.  In both cases they use their skills in order to get away.  They both have the tension and uncertainty of being caught.  However one of the ways saved me 100% of my prep time.They aren't the same thing at all.  The 3rd edition system just said "Sometimes your players will do stuff that isn't combat and you'll want to give them XP for it.  You shouldn't give them too much and about the same as one monster is probably good.  You may not want to give it out, though as there isn't any risk involved in non-combat situations."I didn't use them because they weren't really mechanics.  They were an afterthought at best that said "Oh, and instead of monsters, some DMs might want to do non-combat things."Skill Challenges are much more of an actual system.  One that balances difficulty of succeeding with the amount of XP given out in a quantifiable way.  They are modular so that when you are writing a mod you can easily say "The PCs attempt this skill challenge, if they fail, then they fight this encounter.  Both give the same amount of XP.  This way if the group decides to solve it the non-violent way they get the same XP as if they had fought the encounter."</blockquote>

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