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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5468580" data-attributes="member: 2011">I still don't get it. It's not exciting to talk about dreary walking through the swamp and rolling the dice 24 times each or 120 times in an hour and a half.Player: "I rolled a 16."DM: Ok, that's +1 to the Nature roll. Sally, what are you doing?Player 2: "I guess I'll try Athletics again."Do people layer this effort with a lot of significant worthwhile roleplaying? They might stay in character a bit more, but then again, maybe not.And sure, a few jokes will be told and there can be some fun involved, but 120+ rolls??? Seriously? And the players have very limited decision making insight involved? The problem is that there are no real choices here. The players are going through the pre-selected motions. A few players might come up with a new idea once in a while, but not for 12 rounds in a row.That's exciting to you?Could you imagine a combat encounter where the players roll a D20 120 times? With saving throws, that would be like a 15+ round encounter.The only player really highlighting his skill set is really the Nature PC. The rest are just giving a bonus to that roll or to the Heal vs. disease roll here and there.And since each "round" is a day, no significant resources (other than food/water) should be used up.I'm not criticizing his effort. I'm criticizing the entire concept. I think his idea had merit, but the implementation was based on the WotC framework and I see the same weaknesses and wonkiness in his that I see in the ones that I have seen in a WotC products.A dozen skill rolls spread over the group, 5 to 10 minutes of gaming time, sure. 120 rolls? Not so much.There are SO many different ways to enjoy the game, but rolling a bunch of dice to get from point A to point B for an hour or two seems pointless.Combat is cool.Puzzles are cool.Interacting with NPCs is cool.Problem solving can be cool.Walking through the swamp, that's not heroic. Does that really highlight the Nature skills of a given PC? Or just show that he can make the roll over and over again?SCs are typically not problem solving (although some can be, at least for the first skill or so per player), at least SCs set up like this one are not. Each player is more or less railroaded into a few skills and some players have PCs that have ZERO trained skills that are applicable. So that player tends to make nearly useless rolls for an hour and a half of real time.Rolling skill checks is not a lot different than the 1E through 3.5 version of "I roll to hit. I roll to hit. I roll to hit." . 24 times in this case per player.To me, this is not much different than roleplaying any other pedestrian type of event. Walking through the swamp and fighting off bugs is pedestrian. For example, some players get a thrill out of roleplaying their PC trying to get a date with a barmaid. zzzzz. Not only is barmaid chasing mostly worthless for the overall story (although a good DM would still find some way to pull something out of this dross), it's often pretty darn boring for some of the rest of the players who actually do want to get to a real storyline.Sorry, I still don't get the SC appeal. I'm sure that some groups find this to be a wonderfully fun experience. But I don't see the appeal at all.When I have time later tonight, I will be checking out some of the other SCs posted here. I went off to that link, but the few I saw there weren't that impressive either. I'm trying to have an open mind because I think there are probably good, clean, fast ways to run SCs where the players aren't pigeonholed in their skill selection and the SC can be run in 5 to 15 minutes, but I haven't seen it yet. I do think that the potential is there, but so far I haven't found what I personally am looking for with it.Fast. Exciting. Personally satisfying for each player and highlighting their skill selection.</blockquote>

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