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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6184830" data-attributes="member: 42582">For me, judging the concept not from WotC briefings but from the DMG, plus the resolution systems in other games by which skill challenges are obviously inspired, what is missing from your basic presentation is one further thing: at the start of the challenge, and after each check, the GM narrates the fictional situation giving rise to the challenge; the player, in making a check, narrates or otherwise makes clear what his/her PC is doing in the fiction; the GM, after that check succeeds or fails, narrates its consequence, leading to rinse & repeat until the challenge is concluded one way or another.In combat, what makes it "not just rolling dice" is that there are framing decisions to be made - who attacks what, who moves where, etc. In a skill challenge, the GM and player narration play the same function roll of framing the stakes and context for resolution via dice rolls, but it is in purely fictional terms rather than in the quasi-mechanical terms of positioning and targetting.The idea of "putting the skill checks into a storyline" sounds to me like a recipe for disaster, because that is analogous to prescripting a combat, which doesn't make any sense.I tend to think of this as a complex skill check, which is a special case of a skill challenge, and - as your example illustrates - mostly interesting only when something else is at stake so the expenditure of action economy on the dice rolls actually matters (eg in a combat). Out of combat, you may as well just calculate the odds of success on 8 Arcana checks and set the DC for a single check at that level. Because, at least as you present it, this situation has no internal dynamism and hence nothing is at stake in the individual checks other than ultimate success or failure.I think the best examples of writing these sorts of challenges for a pre-packaged scenario are provided by Robin Laws in the HeroQuest Narrator's book.These indicate the initial set-up, and also give indications of what the various dynamics and possibilities are, and hence how things might unfold. They suggest the sorts of abilities that the players (via their PCs) might bring to bear. And they indicate roughly what the range of possible outcomes might be expected to be, and how the GM might build on those outcomes to continue the adventure. In other words, much like a combat is presented in a typical D&D module.I think WotC would have been well-advised to try and emulate Laws's style.</blockquote>

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