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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5630956" data-attributes="member: 82106">Contrariwise to what the DMGs and many posters have said over the years I have no problem at all with lethal skill challenges. That being said, there are many non-lethal conflict situations that can come up in a game, and SCs were specifically designed to allow you to deal with those. So there will inherently be a lot more non-lethal than lethal SCs in general. Of course games vary and in some styles of play lethal SCs could be fairly common.Mathematically I'm not too worried about the SC mechanics. Random chance isn't going to be a big problem, as the variance in checks over say 15 tosses of the dice is pretty small. Not as small as it is over the maybe 100 tosses of a combat, but statistically they are pretty close. You just need to make sure that the checks are roughly in the right success range. I think Stalker0 did some basic calculations, but for a complexity 5 challenge failure starts to become a serious possibility when an appreciable number of checks require more than around a 3 to pass. This may sound like easy checks, and it is, but you also have to figure that lethal consequences should actually happen pretty rarely. Now, considering that PCs will probably have chances to erase failures, gain auto-successes, etc at times you can maybe tweak that a bit higher.Which brings things to the question of control. Combat does provide a lot of chances to expend extra resources to 'step up' and deal with a fight that isn't going well. You can drop an AP or a daily, etc. You can also usually retreat or even surrender. So you will need to make sure that your SC has some similar possibilities. Usually this would mean things like certain rituals or powers providing automatic successes, maybe successes given for sacrificing an HS, etc. It should be fairly obvious how to incorporate these possibilities into many classes of SCs. Another option might be to use a bunch of smaller SCs to represent a series of choices and possibly bad luck/planning/choices leading into an 'incident pit' kind of situation. This is kind of the classic 'disaster scenario'. A few small mistakes that usually wouldn't matter, a bit of bad luck, a bad decision, and then suddenly you're in over your head. Of course this gets back to SCs that probably aren't 'lethal' on their own, but as a whole you can have an adventure that doesn't need much/any combat and still has lethal potential on the whole. I think this is kind of what the DS survival stuff is aiming at, but I haven't read DS so I'm not sure exactly how they handled it.I could also see lethal social challenge situations too. It sort of seems like there are more interesting consequences in that sort of situation though. I mean if you're going to have the PCs framed for murder and executed I suspect you'll probably try to run an escape, rescue, or whatever somewhere in there. So again it comes back to there's just a lot of stuff that isn't directly lethal that SCs usually get used for, not that they are inherently bad for lethal situations.</blockquote>

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