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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4203844" data-attributes="member: 42582">Isn't this a little cheeky? The five successes here correlate directly to ingame causation, and the question of whether skill check successes lead to council members voting the PCs' way is left up to GM arbitration of the ingame causal consequences of a player's successful skill roll.That is quite different from how (I assume) a 4e skill challenge will work.For the same reasons I don't think that these resemble skill challenges either. You could do all that you describe in RM or RQ or The Wilderness Survival Guide. They do not use the sort of success/failure mechanism that more modern narrativist-type games use, and that skill challenges in 4e appear to at least resemble.Of course not. Nor does RM or RQ preclude such gaming - indeed, it strongly supports it. The play experience that skill challenges are intended to deliver, however - at least if one looks at the internal logic of the mechanics and compares them to other known RPG systems that resemble them - is one in which player control over the story is increased. This is achieved (rougly) by using the dice to distribute narrative authority, rather than to resolve ingame causation.This also comes across as a little cheeky. The notion that HeroWars mechanics, or skill challenge mechanics that resemble them, are best suited to tournaments or computer games does not seem right to me. For a start, neither of those play environments lends itself to the narrative interaction that skill challenges support, and that makes them more than just a number-crunching exercise.The question is whether the judgement and invention is to be narrative, or ingame causal. If the former, then skill challenges clearly support and facilitate it - and also player narrative creativity.</blockquote>

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