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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Just Another User" data-source="post: 4193751" data-attributes="member: 23516">While I don't disagree with you, I think here we are enetering the insidious ground that are personal tastes, I think the preparation for battle works better if abstracted (just the preparation, not the battle itself) something like (for example) if you win the challenge you start the battle with 50 lv3 "Peasant Militia", if you fali with 20 lvl 1 "Scared Commoner", if the extra units and levels come from near villages, morale for better fortification or just better training is not relelvant. Of course a DM could handle all than not abstractly i.e the diplomacy with near temple give you X, the history check give you Y, ecc, but this need either a very experienced DM to come up on the fly with appropriate (and balanced) rewards for every check or a lot of preparation and a certain degree of railroading in the "!no, you can't do that because I didn't thought of it before and I'm not prepared to it")Skill challengs have the advantage tobe a) simple to use even for inexperienced DM  and b) to give player a certain grade of freedom in how they use their skills.Just to avoid possible misunderstanding when I say abstracted Imean not-detailed the escape from Sembia is abstracted becuase you don't need a map of the city or the number and stats of every single guard, it is abstracted enough that a succesfull history check literaly "create" a secret escape tunnel in the sewers. In the same way the defend a village is abstracted because the DM don't need a map of the place or to know exactly how many people there are in the village or even if there are near villages where to ask for help, these informations will come out depending even  on the decisions of the players.Of course some DM could have a detailed map of the place and stats for many, if not all, of the people in the village, in that case probably skill challenges could not be appropriate to the situation.</blockquote>

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