NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9293372" data-attributes="member: 6790260">But "on the right track" applies just as much to "I am 10% of the way there" as "I am 90% of the way there."Okay. Then this isn't for you--which I literally already said. Do you use "gritty realism" rules, for example? If you do, then congrats, you already know what it's like to use and appreciate a rule that most people don't. If you don't, then just imagine how fans of gritty realism would feel if you had told them, "Well, because this isn't how I run things, it shouldn't be part of D&D."It's not a meta currency. It's literally just a count. You count up successes. That's something in the world: the number of times they have succeeded vs failed.Again: consider it like a race; no, better yet, consider it like you're trying to beat a world record. You are running, but you're competing against other people in the past, so you're by yourself. You know that you're on the right track (almost literally!) because there are markers.Now, imagine you have no idea how long the race is. It could be only five minutes' light jog (so about 500 m). Or it could be five hours cross-country running. Or it could be three days. Or three weeks. You have no idea. You'll know if you get turned around and if you get back on track. But you have no idea whether you've crossed the finish line until you actually do.There is no tension in this. You know you're making progress, but you've no idea if the second chunk will end things for good, or if you'll still be working on it five chunks later. Your horror movie example is a disanalogy because there, you know there isn't a finish line. Things that don't have a finish line, a place where success has been achieved or failure has befallen the party, should never be used with this setup, for exactly the same reason that things that don't involve the use of physical conflict shouldn't involve the combat rules.They are. They happen when the players fail 3 times (or perhaps more; 3 is a good starting point, after all. Once may be a fluke, twice may be coincidence, but three times is a pattern, after all.)The only part that wouldn't be DM-facing in a skill challenge is the number of failures (almost always 3) that result in full failure, and the number of successes required to fully succeed (I'd assume this one would be roughly 4-6 successes? Depends on exactly how difficult you feel it should be, context matters a hell of a lot there.) Everything else is pure DM content.The problem is, this extremely frequently (at least in D&D) results in the 1-3 most highly skilled characters doing everything, and the 1-2 quiet players doing nothing at all. Using some form of initiative ensures that it is a true team effort, not merely the star player(s) taking over.Try to tell anyone else that! They were despised, outright vilified, in the past. That's why they don't exist in 5e. They had 4e cooties. To include them would have told the 5e partisans that there was something of value in 4e's rules, which would have been intolerable to them. (Keeping in mind that I am, and have long been, of the opinion that the vast majority of what elements of 5e "came from" 4e really aren't anything like 4e rules at all, not even partially, they just <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/how-is-5e-like-4e.681629/#post-8354225" target="_blank">wear the flayed skin of 4e rules</a>. Further, this was a highly intentional effort from the 5e design team, despite Mearls' protestations to the contrary.)Does "you must succeed this many times before you fail 3 times" count as some kind of "meta currency"? Because I'm not seeing what that could possibly be. It's...literally "you have to do things in the world that succeed, and do enough of them before you screw too much of it up."</blockquote>

Verification