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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tervin" data-source="post: 4283851" data-attributes="member: 66491">Having some spare time right now, and wanting an excuse to dive into the books, I looked through the powers and magic items in the PH.There are only 12 utility powers that directly boost skill checks in the PH. Some of them are very specific and unlikely to come into play very often in a skill challenge, some are general. Most of them will only boost one or a few rolls, which is a good thing for the system as it means that they will be more useful to low complexity challenges. There are several other utility powers that might come into play if they fit the challenge, the player is creative and the DM is in a good mood.On the other hand there are 30 magic items that give skill check bonuses, up towards twice as many if you count different versions of the same item. Those items generally give a constant bonus to certain skills, which means that they will have to be accounted for when setting the DC levels for a skill challenge, but they won't help with the complexity problem.As a DM this tells me that I really have to keep track of the players' skill bonuses including relevant items if I want to set the DCs right for challenges. (The math quickly turns ugly if you get it just a few points wrong.) Also that utility powers might sometimes help me in my struggle to make complex challenges as good as possible in my game.I want to add a couple of things, because they seem to matter to people. I really, really like 4th Edition D&D. If I put all this effort into going on and on about the bad bits of a part of the new system, it is because I want it to be as good as it can be, instead of that smudge in the corner of that painting you love that you fight to ignore every time you look at it. Also, I love the concept of skill challenges. There are other parts in the new D&D that I think are weaker points in the design, but I can simply ignore those because they are not part of what I want to do with the game. But because I love the concept of skill challenges I also want to be able to love them in play. And I am not able to do that if they seem like they are based on some unfortunate math, and come with bad instructions.So, I am not trying to be mean here. I promise. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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