Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5468013" data-attributes="member: 2011">Ok, here is a fairly decent example of what I guess I don't understand about many skill challenges.The DM goes to a LOT of trouble setting up this swamp travel skill challenge.The players get to decide what skill each of them tries. The Nature skill is the skill that really counts in this particular skill challenge, so as a general rule, the rolls of one player more or less makes or breaks this skill challenge. Sure, the other players get to help, but if the primary Nature PC is rolling 1s and 2s on the dice, the other players probably are not going to help this. On the other hand, if the Nature check of the primary player are so good that he can make a 20 DC easily, then what's the point of the entire challenge?Another issue is, what happens when the PCs get lost on day one and have no clue where they are on their map? The first Nature skill fails on day one.The implication of what the Nature skill is doing is that the first failed Nature check would result in:"The character DOES NOT manage to keep the party headed in the right direction."From a plausibility perspective, the PCs should already be in trouble with just this one failure. They shouldn't know that they are heading in the wrong direction based on how the skill challenge was set up "landmarks are hard to find, swamp gas severely limits visibility", etc.But if they fail that first Nature roll, no worries. We haven't yet reached 3 failures, so it's all good. The next successful Nature roll automatically gets you back on track. Huh?To me, this is a bit nonsensical. And I'm not criticizing this particular skill challenge, most skill challenges look this way to me.Say that the first landmark is to the southwest on the map. If they make 3 successes in a row, they find the first landmark. They fail and are actually headed south.If they fail, succeed, fail, succeed and succeed, they STILL find the first landmark. There is no "we failed twice, so we should be further away each failed day and it should take longer to get to the landmark". No. Instead, a failure means that although we are lost, we are still just as far away today as we were yesterday because we still need the same number of successes today as yesterday to get to a landmark.In addition, the PC that has History and Religion and Arcana, he just flat out sucks at this challenge. He's sweating the Endurance checks. So while one player is making or breaking the entire encounter, there are a few players whose PCs are struggling just to survive against the disease. They aren't really contributing that much as far as skill checks are concerned. They can contribute a lot to the roleplaying aspect of it, but even then, it seems a bit limited.Player 1: I can't help much here, but I'll try to help Freddy by leading and pushing through the muck. Athletics check, 22. Woo Hoo!DM: Ok, the Nature check is now +1.Player 1: +1? That much? Oh boy!The player of this PC might not feel empowered and helpful here. Sure, if the Nature check ended in a 19 or 29, yeah, his roll made the difference. What's the chances of that?I'm not sure if I am clearly indicating my confusion as to why this sounds like a lame skill challenge to me, but that's how it seems (and note: I'm not trying to dig on this particular challenge, it obviously has a lot of thought and effort put into it).One player shines, the rest all sit in the back seat and just make dice rolls. If one player comes up with a really good idea and makes a roll, sure, the DM gives the Nature roll a +2, but most of the time, that +2 doesn't do much. It's the result on the actual Nature check that makes or breaks most of this.And granted, most of this confusion has got to be on my end. A lot of players like skill challenges, so it must be something about my grognard nature that prevents me from seeing how this works. To me, this seems like a bunch of exercises in dice rolling where one or two players are the superheroes and the rest are the sidekicks. Unlike a combat encounter where everyone has the potential to be a contributing hero in one way, shape, or form.</blockquote>

Verification