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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6061881" data-attributes="member: 42582">No it wasn't. I said that "No matter how wonderful a PC's attack in combat, and how brilliant both the idea and narration behind it, it cannot kill a monster or NPC on full hit points." And subsequently made clear that I meant in the general, or typical case.It's the contrast between a hit point system of the D&D (as opposed to, say, Runequest) style, and a crit style as seen in (say) RM and HARP.Assassins and monks in AD&D can also one-shot certain NPCs and monsters. But that doesn't negate my claim that, in general, hit points are an obstacle to single-blow kills, no matter how sharp the PC's sword and no matter how florid the player's narration of the blow, and the fighting footwork that leads up to it.No, they weren't designed that way. But they have that effect - and I'm hardly the first to notice it (eg the 4e designers noticed it, and built a combat resolution system around that fact!). I can't remember where I first came across the idea of D&D combat as conflict resolution - it would either have been on these boards or rpg.net, I imagine.4e DMG 2, p 82:Let's say you designed a combat encounter for your next adventure. The charaters need to cross a bridge, and there's a big, hungry troll in their way. TIme for a fight! That is, unless the players decide to sneak around the troll or bribe it with a cask of fine ale. . . A good DM thinks on his feet and rewards clever, interesting ideas. The same logic applies to skill challenges. . . D&D is a game about creativity and imagination. If there's only one specific, scripted path to success, you've lost what makes D&D fun. When you build a skill challenge, be prepared for it to head in a direction you didn't anticipate . . .The relevant rules are the rules for setting level and complexity. As I've mentioned a couple of times upthread, because you are not giving any examples I can't tell what exactly you have in mind, but it may well be the sort of thing that goes to framing the challenge in the first instance (and hence to level and/or complexity).And I have tended to see a pattern in which people say that the rules don't cover things - like for instance the role of the GM in framing and re-framing the situation, or the possiblity of achieving successes via something other than a skill check - and then not acknowledging when I post the relevant rules that discuss just these very things.They seem to me to be extremely relevant to the question of whether or not the plans that a player has his/her PC implement make a difference to achieving the goal of a skill challenge. You asserted upthread that they make no difference. The rules I quoted show that this is not what the rulebook says - so a GM who treats the choices of the players as to skill use, planning etc as irrelevant to the challenge's outcome is not following the rules.That may be good or bad, depending on whether or not you prefer a railroad - but it is not following the actual mechanical procedure laid down in the book.I don't know what you mean by an "organic" number of successes or failures. We are talking about a narrative construct here - there are as many points of complication as the creators of the narrative choose to inject. The skill challenge framework is about establishing parameters for that injection. You seem to be describing a game in which (i) one main aim of play is not to achieve outcomes within the fiction, but rather to manipulate the pacing at the metagame level, for example by reducing the number of dice rolls required to generate an outcome, and (ii) the GM's injection of complications to drive the narrative is a burden on the narrative rather than the source of the narrative.The only way I can make sense of that is under a strong simulationist assumption, that (i) every die roll at the table corresponds tightly to some defininte event/action within the fiction, and vice versa, and (ii) that all resolution and GM ajudication must correspond to ingame causal logic triggered by those dice rolls.I take it to be pretty obvious that skill challenges, and extended contest mechanics more generally, will not work under such an assumption. (And this relates to [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION]'s point about abstraction, I think.) But as is often the case, I find myself wondering why anyone who likes playing a game with such strong simulationist emphases would be playing D&D. Why are successes before failures "artificial", for instance, but hit points "logical" and "organic"?</blockquote>

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