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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6578357" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I think we cut to the heart of the matter.  Several folks have answered your inquiry already but I'll go ahead and throw some words together out of courtesy.4e is a game of conflict and escalation.  When Wyatt (or whomever it was) wrote the (unfortunately) incendiary "...skip the guards and get to the fun", what he was doing was using a D&Dized version of Vincent Baker's indie axiom "at every moment, drive play towards conflict."  There is no conflict in a benign conversation with guards.  Move the game along to the action, to the strife, to the conflict (that the PCs care about).  See  [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION]'s great post upthread, framing design conceits and juxtaposing a focus on color vs conflict.Related to your post above, 4e GMed correctly is nothing but narrative weight.  So whether you're building, manning, or repairing a water-faring vessel, the vessel itself isn't the point.  It is precisely the narrative weight that the building, manning, or repairing is load-bearing in the moment and its imminent role to play in the stakes of the conflict.My last 4e game featured a healthy dose of sea-faring adventure in the heroic tier of play.  One particular complexity 5 skill challenge, featured a maritime conflict whereby the PCs were hunting down two corrupt naval captains and one admiral in order to clear a PC's name (Mariner themed PC who was a dishonorably discharged former naval officer).  It featured several nested naval combat skill challenges.  On two separate occasions during that SC, their ship was damaged (one from combat and one from an encounter with a rogue wave).  The three PCs split into three separate roles; Captain, Engineer, Laborer.  They performed a Group Check.  If two of the three passed, it was a Primary Skill success...with failure, obviously, being the inverse.Lastly, I think there may be an answer to this design paradigm in 4e that rankles your sim-shipwright feathers (but probably not).  It seems like you just want to create an asset?  Is that correct?  In 4e, this would be handled via the magic item economy.  The aforementioned PCs' ship was an asset but we hand-waved its modification (it was originally...confiscated...ok, they stole it from the corrupt navy...so they didn't build it).  Basically like the transition scene montages in "The A-Team" where they build/modify vehicles for the showdown to come (which is very relevant pulp source material for 4e, just like Indiana Jones, X-Men/Avengers, Die Hard, and Diablo).  They spent some of their collective group magic item value to trick out the ship with properties/encounter powers (using alternate advancement items as templates).  If you wanted to make building a ship or modding it an actual skill challenge, you could certainly do so.  It just likely wouldn't be terribly satisfying as the construct and its GMing principles are premised upon creating conflict-charged scenes basically run through Freytag's Dramatic Arc/Structure.[HR][/HR]As an aside, there is a large cross-section of people that consider "proper D&D" to be three things mashed together:1)  Fantasy Effing Vietnam meets Conan/Swords and Sorcery genre mash-up2)  A pseudo-process simulator of 1.3)  An asymmetrical puzzle game to be solved; see "Portal."If you consider "proper D&D" to be those 3 things, you will be brutally unhappy with D&D 4e.  And if you try to GM D&D 4e with those 3 things serving as a fulcrum, you will inevitably GM it horribly, have a frustrating experience, and surely pass those frustrations on to your players.</blockquote>

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