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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4205545" data-attributes="member: 4937">First, 'successes correlating directly to ingame causation' is more or less how the two example skill challenges played out.  Secondly, I think you are making the mistake of assuming that HeroWars is being ported into D&D and basing your whole argument around that assumption.  The example in the excerpt on skill challenges looked much more like 'successes correlating directly to ingame causation' than they do look like a mechanism for distributing narrative control.I freely concede that I've never played D&D with formal mechanisms for distributing narrative control.  (I have had third parties sit in as co-DMs or major NPCs, but attempting to elaborate the narrative in that way is a different thing with a different motivation.)  However, at its heart the skill challenge doesn't look like a way of distributing narrative control.  It looks like a way of ensuring a challenge is not resolved in a single die roll.Yet, they are also a series of success/failure mechanics leading up to a scene resolution.  Moreover, I'm less convinced than before that there is any nar play being ported into D&D.  The elements that I do see - like carrying over success to the next role - are only superficially related to HeroWars.  I don't see any bidding going on for the right of the player to tell the story.If you toss out the unnecessary assumption that the skill challenge mechanic requires or even encourages the distribution of narrative control, then my proposition doesn't seem so cheeky at all.  Mechanically speaking the example skill challenge in the recent excerpt is nothing but a number crunching exercise.  It does not lend itself to narrative interaction any more than the absence of a skill system would.  Any narrative interaction or distribution of narrative control in a system such as the excerpt is going to be purely through DM-player negotiation - which is exactly what you have when you don't have a system.The excerpted system is so causal that it has linearity built into it in the form of primary and secondary skills which are opened up by success in the primary skill.  The equivalent method would be to say that in resolving the trap scenario, search and insight are the primary skills and the first success in search allows you to attempt a disable device check.  We could easily imagine extending the system with tertiary skills made available by success in the secondary skill and so forth.</blockquote>

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