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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7599421" data-attributes="member: 42582">Just picking up on a few bits of your interesting post:The most developed non-combat resolution system for D&D that I'm aware of is the skill challenge in 4e. It needs your (a) but no rulebook directly states it. A GM needs either to bring that from outside (normally by experience with another game with better-stated rules), or intuit it, or else complain that skill challenges are broken because we have to keep rolling the dice even though the conflict is resolved!I'm not sure about your (1). In 4e the standard solution is to just ignore all the quasi-simulationist stuff in the PHB skills chapter (which is mostly dropped in Essentials, for good reason). I'm not sure that 5e skills are really even quasi-simulatoinist, though I'm not the best qualified to comment. I think the issue is less about quasi-simulation and more about setting appropriate expectations for players and GMs: eg having a good Investigation skill means (something like) when a conflict involves investigating stuff, than I'm more likely to succeed at that conflict than others. This will cause a lot of players to go ballistic but for culture/expectation reasons rather than narrowly mechanical reasons.Your (2) is a recurring issue in 4e play, although most of us who care have developed various sorts of workarounds/coping mechanisms. It's an issue even in a system that one might expect to be tighter than 4e, like BW: eg the rules for BW set out both an action economy and a correlation of that action economy to ingame fictional passage of time for it's ranged skirmish conflict resolution system and its melee combat conflict resolution system. The ingame time is different for each (a roughly 10:1 ratio), but the GM is encouraged, when adjudicating the two side-by-side, to ignore this and run them more-or-less back-and-forth. It's a smaller thing than the 4e issues, but is still a blemish rather than a virtue.</blockquote>

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