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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vempyre" data-source="post: 4284567" data-attributes="member: 3892">* I guess my statement was a bit too strong. It comes from my personal dislike of seeing a group of persons usually trying to find what's wrong with something/anything instead of seeing what's right. My dislike of negativism makes my own personal self negative at times (a trait of mine which I dislike of course). This was such a time and I apologizes for it.* It is just flat plain impossible to apply simple (or more advanced) maths to DnD skill challenges so therefore useless to discuss it. For me, at least. Some ppl enjoy impossible situations it seems and want their knowledge to be useful to something. NO challenge will use the same skills, the same level, the same situational modifiers or bonus for context or creative use of skills, the same primary skills, the same complexity and even within a single level of complexity the same numbers of failures needed, none will have the same characters with the same skills trained at the same character level, the same item bonuses, the same utility powers, the same decisions by players to use aid another, etc etc. Most of those mentioned situational numbers can stack (or not).Therefore, it becomes very clear that applying a math formula to skill challenges to see if they are balanced in general is an exercise in futility. What would be useful would be to come with a formula to analyze a single individual skill challenge. Example : analyzing the bonus skill challenge in KotS for the last battle is very well possible using maths because all the variables are set. Hell, even the characters are predetermined as pre-gens. Now it becomes possible to apply maths to that single challenge to determine if it makes sense.DnD isn't about maths, it's about story and context. Anybody trying to apply maths to DnD in general will see his calculations get screwed over by the context of most of not all encounters. DnD is intuition, not maths. Do you think WotC came out with the DC skills checks table with a complex math formula (or a simple one?). They took a guess, tested it, change it, tested it again until it seemed right, then put down the final format. Did they use maths to test it? Probably (I would), but not to create it.Being good at maths will not make you a better DM, assuming everybody can determine adding 100+150 = 250 or that 500/4 is 125. If you can't do that, sure a little simple maths would help. Otherwise DMing is all about intuition and knowledge of the context, it's about experience. An attempt to analyze skill challenges in general via maths is therefore useless for DMing as none of the general formulas will apply to the skill challenge you are building for your next encounter.</blockquote>

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