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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DM_Blake" data-source="post: 4192372" data-attributes="member: 57267">One point of clarification:I'm fairly sure that the suggestion to NOT use this ssytem when it can result in player death lies in the random nature of dice.You tell a player, or a group of players, that 4 bad rolls means he/they die, then let them roll them, they might make good rolls, or they might make bad rolls. They might survive the first time, the first several times, the first many times, but sooner or later, they're going to get those 4 bad rolls and then its TPK time.Now it's true that in combat, the players could suffer from a string of bad rolls and end up in a TPK. But, combat is usually resolved by scores of dice, maybe even hundreds of dice - with that many rolls, the odds of one side having way better or worse luck than the other side is slim. In all statistical analysis, larger sample sizes (more dice to roll) means more reliable outcomes (less depended on randomly streaky good/bad luck).And if it does happen, the DM has a whole lot of control over a combat TPK. If the DM rolls behind a screen, the monsters might also have a string of bad luck (read: the DM fudges the rolls to save the party, turning hits into misses, crits into hits, high damage into low damage, etc.). Or the monsters might simply make bad decisions (the owlbear decides to go eat the party's pack mule rather than finishing off the last conscious party member). There are many ways a DM can pull a combat out of the TPK realm.But, with skill challenges, every die rolled is rolled by the players. Worse, if the DM has already said "You die after X failures", the players will know when they roll that last failure. The DM can't fake it, fudge it, or make the failures go away. Basically, now all the DM can say is "You all die" or, e.g., "Behold, Elminster teleports in and alters reality to save your butts".Now, if the DM never told the players the number of successes/failures, and the players roll their final failure, the DM can fudge by increasing that number on the spot, and the players will never know. Or reduce the number of success (if they still need 3 successes, but only one failure will kill them, when they roll their first of those 3 remaining successes, tell them that they solved the problem and eliminate the risk of rolling a failure before rolling the remaining 2 successes).In a nutshell, the skill challenge system leaves fgailure up to the dice, and to only a few die rolls, in fact. With just a few die rolls, and no way to fake it, it is inevitable that some skill challenges will be failed. That's the nature of dice. And if those failures can result in TPKs, then TPKs will happen.Hence the suggestion not to use Skill Challenges in such a way that death will occur on a failure.</blockquote>

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