PCs are routinely tasked with solving problems like "save the princess" or "stop the opposing army". Being clever, in this sort of situation, generally involves finding a solution that is less than obvious. Instead of navigating through the spooky woods and sneaking past the army to confront the Big Bad, the clever player might go in the opposite direction to seek the aid of a powerful water spirit, to flood the plains and drown the army. Or convert the stone under 70% of the general's tower to mud, such that it collapses under its own weight.
Well, this kind of clever isn’t orthogonal to SCs at all. In fact, I would say SCs could be a useful tool to resolving that kind of clever.
From some of your other posts, a lot of the inappropriateness seems to come down to when to use a SC or not. You don’t have to/shouldn’t use a SC in all situations. If a party decides to sneak through the woods to bypass a combat encounter there's no combat encounter. Once you’re in the combat encounter however, there isn't often an 'I win' button in 4e by design. You have to play it out under the structure of combat. Of course, you can always retreat from the combat and find another way to obtain your goal though. Same in a SC. Once you decide a SC is appropriate, you have to play it out under the structure of a SC (or abandon the goal and figure something else out).
A SC is a choice. And by deciding on a SC the group is declaring that:
1) this goal requires multiple, incremental actions (and shouldn't fail on just 1 action)
2) success and failure are interesting and meaningful
3) the nature of skill checks and actions are now changed- a single action can only lead to incremental success or partial failure.
4) the nature of actions can become more abstract (doesn’t have to be but has the flexibility to be). Each skill check can serve as an abstraction for a bunch of related activity.
Once you've accepted this, I just don't think it's that hard to make sure each check either leads incrementally closer to the goal or is a setback (and do this fairly smoothly inside the fiction).
Yes, X success before Y failures is a little artificial but not really more so than HP and other traditional ways to measure success/failure.
I also have to say that the SC tool was in its infancy and never really had the chance to be refined and built upon.
For instance what if there was an option for either
X success before y failure
Or
X successes in Y rounds (like Stalker’s Obsidian)
The second has a very different feel and might be a better fit for some situations.
Also you may be feeling the lack of strategic choices for the player. I definitely wish there were more choices than just narrative framing and skill choice. IMO this helped bolster the 'it's just a bunch of skill checks' thing. Imagine if in combat you abstracted everything but the attack role and which kind of attack you chose. Not as satisfying I think.
I haven't found many systems that add an additional layer to abstract non combat resolution mechanics well but look at Diaspora (Fate) social combat. This structure gives a few interesting choices to players using an abstract 'map'.
Here's the example in brief (I’m simplifying a bit):
The PCs want to use a political/social campaign to persuade the government of Planet Z to end the slave trade, while their opponents want the government to ramp up the slave trade and go to war with Planet W (very appropriate for a SC).
There's a map that basically looks like this, with each ‘O’ and the ends being separate ‘zones’:
(Free Planet Z) – O – O – O – O – O – (War with Planet W)
The party (as a group) is represented as a token and the opposition is represented as a token. There are also four tokens representing the key influencers -- Working Class (WC), the Academics (A), the Nobles (N), and the Thought Police (TP). Each token starts on different zones depending on their initial predisposition on the issue.
The goal is to get three influencers into a target zone (each side of the map), which ensures the government of Planet Z acts toward that goal.
It’s decided both sides have 7 turns to do this (representing 6 months).
All actions are resolved with an abstract skill check (like SC) but there are several options for what a success of a check can mean:
A) move a influencer token closer to a target goal (level of success indicates how far can move)
b) set up a barrier for the opposition to overcome before it can move things
C) create an asset that can be used for a bonus on a later roll
D) attack the opposition's mental/social hit points directly in an attempt to take them out of play (note that doing this in itself doesn't meet the goal)
E) move along the map, representing getting closer or farther from the sphere of influence of a target (how far you are from your target influences difficulty on your skill check)
This actual play is very similar to a SC -- a bunch of skill checks with narrative positioning. However this structure adds a bit more strategic depth during the challenge.
Really cool stuff and an example of what 5e could have included (at least as an optional DM module) if it wanted to push the SC concept further. That’s my biggest disappointment from all the SC hate-- that it killed an interesting concept and didn’t give it time to be developed into something even better.
