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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4193532" data-attributes="member: 4937">(emphasis added)I agree.  And yet the irony is that when you produced an example, you did not naturally produce one which was abstract.   Rather, you engaged your natural DM creativity to produce a non-abstract scenario in which various concrete actions by the PCs produce various concrete results.   The example you gave is not best handled as a skill challenge if you in fact want to have some sort of PC participation in the battle because each concrete action is more than just a success that contributes to overall success, but a success which contributes a particular concrete resource - reinforcements from a nearby village, low level spellcasters from the temple, fortifications to provide defenses in battle, higher moral in particular units, and so forth fepending on PC action.  If the eventual intention is to have some sort of skirmish, running this as a skill challenge makes little sense because the total number of successes means much less than the particular outcome of each success.  You'd probably only run it as a skill challenge if the intention was to leave the battle purely abstract as well - something that the PC's only witness or hear about rather than participate in by fighting and leading troops.  Skill challenges are at there best when not only is the scenario abstract, but each success (or failure) creates some interchangable abstract resource the total of which can be thought of as success.  So far, the best designed skill challenges are those that deal with things like winning affection or prestige from a particular person or community, moving some abstract distance (Oregon Trail style scenarios, a mile is a mile), or running a merchantile business (money is money).There have been alot of suggestions for things that are sorta like skill challenges, but not really when you look at them closely.  For example, a challenge that involves running an obstacle course to prove your manhood might be resolved if you get X successes but not Y failures, but the actual skill checks involved are to some extent predecided in a way that seems to run contrary to the notion of a skill challenge.  The trap as skill challenge scenarios suffer from the same problem in that yes, you can route yourself around the trap with obilique thinking, but the straight forward way through the door still involves the classic concrete techniques of  'thievery' or bashing the door down and more or less all participants (DM and players) seem to expect this.  Similarly, you could run things like 'preparing a meal' or 'defending someone in court' in a skill challengy way that involved several different skills and tallying successes, but the skills to be used are still highly constrained by the concreteness of the scenario.  If you do that, there is no real change in paradigm between how skills are used and how they have been used in the past in published scenarios (I can think of 'running a farm' scenarios in Dungeon and 'fighting a battle' scenarios in Dragonlance and many others that used the same basic mechanic); certainly not the big change in paradigm to a more narrativist and less simulationist construct that many early adopters of skill challenges advocated and embraced.Of course, we haven't seen the actual rules yet.  It could be that the actual rules are merely an endorsement of this long standing tradition in D&D and RPGs in general.  It could be that they are not even rules at all, but guidelines readily embrassing and even listing some of the different ways of tallying up success I've mentioned.  It could be literally nothing more than design advice and all this sound and thunder on all sides is over nothing.  It could be that the intention is merely to give novice DMs exposure to these techniques to inspire and enliven gameplay.  I'd be all for that, and I have to say that I'm impressed by and refreshed by the maturity that I'm seeing alot of DMs pickup from 4E.  I love the rules of 3E but I have to admit that as a whole the game wasn't, based on my experience, good for producing quality players.  Seeing players embrace the non-combat RP side of the game again is good, in no small part because it gives me some hope that the ill-effects of making the games combat more boardgame like will be mitigated.</blockquote>

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