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<blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 5274553" data-attributes="member: 58416">To give more context to my comments on the DCs...&nbsp;&nbsp;The low DCs were often leading to grind. Most of the PCs were easily capable of exceeding DCs even when they rolled single digit numbers. Even using DCs from higher levels didn't seem to work out. As a DM, I'm not out to kill the PCs, but using skill challenges by the book became so trivial that it tended to lead to mindless rolling of dice to reach a conclusion which we already knew. This is similar to the problem that a lot of the 4E monsters used to have where the PCs would know early on in the fight that they had in the bag; all that was left was to spam at-wills until it was over.&nbsp;&nbsp;The DCs aren't the only thing I've changed for my game either. I don't use the success/failure guidelines as written either. I've had skill challenges where the amount of failures weren't even kept track of. An example I can give of this is a skill challenge I ran where the party was trapped inside of a room which was essentially one giant trap. It was a different take on the navigation skill challenge; they had to discover how to get out. It took a set amount of successes to get out. There was no failure limit; each failure simply set off more of the trap and made the room more deadly. That's only one example of many, and it's one of the most tame examples of how I've broken from the SC guidelines because it was one of my first attempts to use the system differently. In my current game, skill challenges have only a passing resemblence to being the same system.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Argyle King, post: 5274553, member: 58416"] To give more context to my comments on the DCs... The low DCs were often leading to grind. Most of the PCs were easily capable of exceeding DCs even when they rolled single digit numbers. Even using DCs from higher levels didn't seem to work out. As a DM, I'm not out to kill the PCs, but using skill challenges by the book became so trivial that it tended to lead to mindless rolling of dice to reach a conclusion which we already knew. This is similar to the problem that a lot of the 4E monsters used to have where the PCs would know early on in the fight that they had in the bag; all that was left was to spam at-wills until it was over. The DCs aren't the only thing I've changed for my game either. I don't use the success/failure guidelines as written either. I've had skill challenges where the amount of failures weren't even kept track of. An example I can give of this is a skill challenge I ran where the party was trapped inside of a room which was essentially one giant trap. It was a different take on the navigation skill challenge; they had to discover how to get out. It took a set amount of successes to get out. There was no failure limit; each failure simply set off more of the trap and made the room more deadly. That's only one example of many, and it's one of the most tame examples of how I've broken from the SC guidelines because it was one of my first attempts to use the system differently. In my current game, skill challenges have only a passing resemblence to being the same system. [/QUOTE]

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