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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3257357" data-attributes="member: 4937">They are also very much setting and game system dependent. Nice in theory, but in practice it rarely works that way.  Many players build characters to be as situation independent as possible.  A well designed character can simply 'brute rules force' thier way through almost any sort of challenge, by doing more or less the same thing over and over again but doing it very well.  A balanced party of well designed characters often more or less does this with minimal input or creativity on the part of the player.  If it works well, its likely to continue working well.  Your average published adventure (to use this as a standard of what most adventures are probably like) consists 80% of material that a well designed party can over come by rince and repeat tactics with very little intelligent input.  Player skill (except for the character design itself, which may be cut and paste) hardly comes into play.  The optimal combat tactic is pretty much always the thing that your character is designed to do.  The extreme case of this is your average 12 year old DM's initial forays into dungeon design - a series of identical 30x30 loosely connected rooms with level stone floors offering good footing and empty of everything but an alert and hostile monster (that always fights to the death) and a pile of randomly generated treasure.  These adventures can almost always be solved (and arguably can only be solved) by bringing the battle to the enemy as rapidly and with as much ferocity as can be mustered.  Roll initiative.On the other hand, in the extreme reverse case, a DM that presents as challenges a series of puzzles or riddles may create an adventure which is just as easy (or hard) for a party of 1st level characters as a party of 10th level characters.  The build of the characters is then irrelevant.These are clearly very different styles of game, and the fact that one has to do with combat and the other doesn't has little to do with it.  In many horror role playing games, the players are often asked to solve what amounts to a series of riddles and puzzles with the end result of collecting enough information to destroy the otherwise invincible overpowering monster, and an adventure could reasonably consist of nothing more than a series of stealth challenges in which the player did nothing more than roll move silently checks X number of times in the row.  Whatever flavor is given to a dice challenge, the fact that you are rolling the dice to overcome the challenge matters less than the fact that rolling the dice is principally how you overcome the challenge.I don't know if you noticed it or even indeed whether it was intentional, but your breakdown of challenges corresponds pretty closely to the six ability groups in dungeons and dragons.Combat: Strength based challenges.Bypass Obstacle: Dexterity based challenges.Persuasion: Charisma based challenges.Information Gathering: Perception (Wisdom) based challenges.Endurance: Constitution based challenges.Which leaves us with Stealth: Another dexterity based challenge.And that reveals the basic problem I see with your system.  Stealth is really another form of bypassing an obstacle.  What's missing?You have no intelligence based challenges.  You have no puzzles and no riddles.And the thing is, almost noone that I'm familiar with runs intelligence based challenges as purely or even mainly things to be overcome by dice rolling.  Sure, its more 'fair' or more 'pure' to avoid metagaming and solve the riddle or puzzle by having your 18 INT Wizard beat the DC 22 Intelligence check, or whatever, but its less fun to do it that way.  That's why puzzles don't fit well into information gathering.  Information gathering is what you do to get clues to solving the puzzle, but its not the puzzle itself (of course the reward of a puzzle can be a clue to another puzzle, and often is, just as the reward of a combat is often the letter to the mook from the evil bad guy detailing part of the sinister plan).The reason that it is less fun to dice your way out of puzzles is that it renders all the challenges of the game more or less the same except for the flavor you give them.  If the challenge is beat a DC 25 on the throw of a D20, it hardly matters whether you call it a strength challenge, an intelligence challenge, or a dexterity challenge save which character is best suited to the challenge.All of which is a long way of saying that I think challenges are differentiated mainly by the sort of skill that the player brings to them, and not the skill that the character brings to them.  You very clearly saw that things like 'magical challenges' and 'divine challenges' weren't particularly good ways of classifying challenges, and kudos to you.  But, aren't challenges that depend on the application of a particular character skill nothing more than different ways of saying 'party role specific'.  Look at it this way, in many game systems magic is literally just another skill.</blockquote>

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