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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5468097" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, if it makes you feel any better KD, I have found that higher complexity SCs usually are too long. I rarely go past complexity 3. Those times where I have either involved a situation that was quite interesting and engaging in other ways or where the SC involved different sections where there were quite different things to do. That last category is fairly rare because usually there's no logic to carrying success/fail counts forward through significantly different activities (IE what does it matter if you got a failure bomboozling the gate guard when you arrive at the vault and start tinkering with the lock). You can tie things together by using the count to represent a time factor, which is reasonably common. It is possible to use it as say an overall measure of how suspicious people are of you or something now and then but such abstract measures can often derail.I think the sweet spot is around complexity 3 really. You get 11 checks maximum, so each player will have maybe 2 chances to do something. Even someone lacking the key skills can probably find ONE way to contribute in a decent challenge, and even the super ace primary skill guy is only going to be getting maybe at most 3 uses of his good skill, and chances are you can switch up a bit as the SC evolves so it isn't all one guy doing it all. Advantages help here too, you get to toss 2 of those in and you can use them to give one of the 'off' players a shot at something interesting.Honestly I'm moving more towards a style of listing resources and obstacles instead of skills and a general problem statement in general. This is especially good for the more extended challenges. By listing the things present in the situation which the players can use you know what to describe and basically what tactics are likely to be advantageous. It also defines a lot of the useful skills. The obstacles define what the successes and failures mean in terms of the scene and usually suggests the primary skills that will apply. The conditions under which each resource or obstacle comes into effect should be defined.  Of course the players may often turn these on their heads, but since they are defined in terms of narrative elements and not mechanical elements they are more helpful as guidance in running the challenge.</blockquote>

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