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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ryryguy" data-source="post: 5202537" data-attributes="member: 64945">Are you talking about the mechanical (character-building) choices they make, or the action/narrative, in-character choices they make?With regard to mechanical choices - yes, from one perspective it does make the players' choices less relevant.  If you train Religion you get one sort of skill challenge, if you train Intimidate you get another, so it doesn't matter which you train.  That is true to some extent.  It's a bit of a glimpse behind the curtain, where the DM is employing a bit of "forced choice".  But viewed another way, it's actually being more responsive to the player's choices, in that you are giving them what they want.  If the player chooses Intimidate over Religion, why force him into a skill challenge involving deep theological discussions?  He wants his character to bust heads, so give him that.  (Not all the time, of course - but you want to lean in that direction.)  It's not that much different than if nobody is playing a controller - you won't use minions as often.  Not never, but less often.With regard to narrative choices - I think there is a danger of what you describe happening, but it doesn't have to be that way.  You do want the challenge to feel tied organically into events.  The character's background and history can carry advantages and disadvantages into the challenge.  As an example, in a challenge I ran last session involving an urban investigation, a PC had previously established connections with a group of street urchins.  Asking them for information gave him an automatic success in the challenge.Pulling back a bit, it feels like maybe you are too focused on the mechanical process of the skill challenge, gaining successes and failures, and overall success and failure in the challenge.  (This may seem like an odd comment since I brought up the need to consider mechanics during design, but here I'm not talking about design, I'm talking about why you do it at all.)  Like this statement:A big part of the fun and "value-add" of a good skill challenge is that it produces an interesting, directed yet non-deterministic group narrative.  Of course success or failure in the challenge is important to "what happens next" in the big picture.  But the journey is also part of the fun, and part of the point!So yes, whether a character achieves a success by Diplomacy or by Intimidate it still adds a success, so on those narrow terms, "the action the character takes doesn't seem to have any affect on the outcome."  But the choice still made a difference to the story.  It made a difference to what it says about who the character is.  Furthermore, beyond also affecting what might come next in the challenge itself (what other options are opened, etc.) choices made during the challenge may have longer lasting effects.  That Intimidate success was a success, but if the PC meets the intimidated NPC later on, the NPC is going to remember that.  If the group chose a direct approach over stealth, others will hear about what they did (for better or for worse).I agree with this statement, but I don't see it as a problem.  Skill challenges are more freeform and less well defined than combat on the grid.  On the grid, you need to know exactly how many squares that Athletics check lets you jump, because the pit stretches a specific number of squares.  In a skill challenge, that's not relevant.  The skill check still resolves the PC's action in the sense that it resolves success or failure, and informs "what happens next", but the details of the resolution are going to vary from check to check, from challenge to challenge.*edit* Oh, I do think it would be good design to build in some player choice over the skill check resolution, a la your chart... After a Diplomacy success, the NPC offers to do one of two favors - which does the PC choose?  (Maybe one choice gives something outside the scope of the challenge; choosing this option doesn't grant a success.  Might be an interesting choice for the player.)Also, I may have unintentionally implied that the player's stated intention for a check is irrelevant.  Actually, most of the time when a player says "I use Skill to try to do X", and succeeds, then X is what will happen.  But sometimes only part of X, or something close to but not exactly X, or every once in a while, Y.  Again, this is more art than science, but one specific case where you'd probably get Y instead of X, is where X would derail the challenge.</blockquote>

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