Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4191840" data-attributes="member: 4937">My reply is going to seem like excessive nit picking, but...Your first two points have nothing to do with skill challenges per se.&nbsp; I agree with you that 3e had very little information on interesting encounter design or interesting scenario design.&nbsp; But advice for making interesting combat and non-combat encounters is a separate area than the skill challenge itself.&nbsp; Supposedly, the skill challenge system is how we resolve those interesting sitautions, not how we design them.&nbsp; The second point again has nothing to do with skill challenges.&nbsp; Obviously, we could give all character classes more skills without adopting the skill challenge system.My point is to demonstrate that however nice the first two points may be, the actual skill challenge system itself of talling successes and failures is of dubious utility because there are going to be for so many scenarios we might design better ways of tallying up progress toward the goal.&nbsp; A scenario with explicit time is one of them, but there are all sorts of other ones where we are going to have tweak the rules past the point where we can claim to be using the 'skill challenge' system at all.&nbsp; Problems that are linear in nature is another one (ei, you can only do 'B' after finishing 'A', and 'C' only after 'B').&nbsp; Problems were the degree of failure at any step is non-absolute is another.And yet, the contrary assumption isn't generally useful either.&nbsp; For my part, I think the statement &quot;3e has no advice for really doing anything interesting with skills&quot; rather conflicts with the claim that 3e has explicit default assumptions about how skills may or may not be used in combination, and instead left this up to DMs depending on the situation.&nbsp; It's an intersting theoretical problem to list all the various methods we could tally up success, but I think two points ought to be fairly obvious even if we can't generate an inclusive list.&nbsp; First, refereees and players have used in an informal way all sorts of methods of using skills in combination to determine success or failure, and secondly that having only one formal method is going to lead to all sorts of trouble.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 4191840, member: 4937"] My reply is going to seem like excessive nit picking, but... Your first two points have nothing to do with skill challenges per se. I agree with you that 3e had very little information on interesting encounter design or interesting scenario design. But advice for making interesting combat and non-combat encounters is a separate area than the skill challenge itself. Supposedly, the skill challenge system is how we resolve those interesting sitautions, not how we design them. The second point again has nothing to do with skill challenges. Obviously, we could give all character classes more skills without adopting the skill challenge system. My point is to demonstrate that however nice the first two points may be, the actual skill challenge system itself of talling successes and failures is of dubious utility because there are going to be for so many scenarios we might design better ways of tallying up progress toward the goal. A scenario with explicit time is one of them, but there are all sorts of other ones where we are going to have tweak the rules past the point where we can claim to be using the 'skill challenge' system at all. Problems that are linear in nature is another one (ei, you can only do 'B' after finishing 'A', and 'C' only after 'B'). Problems were the degree of failure at any step is non-absolute is another. And yet, the contrary assumption isn't generally useful either. For my part, I think the statement "3e has no advice for really doing anything interesting with skills" rather conflicts with the claim that 3e has explicit default assumptions about how skills may or may not be used in combination, and instead left this up to DMs depending on the situation. It's an intersting theoretical problem to list all the various methods we could tally up success, but I think two points ought to be fairly obvious even if we can't generate an inclusive list. First, refereees and players have used in an informal way all sorts of methods of using skills in combination to determine success or failure, and secondly that having only one formal method is going to lead to all sorts of trouble. [/QUOTE]

Verification