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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3807513" data-attributes="member: 4937">In terms of flavor, I think you are correct.  But in terms of crunch, I think there are two things going on:a) Can a specific skill check in any system (not just D&D) be considered a group challenge, or do they always tend to be individual challenges.  Niches in this sense aren't unique to D&D and its class system.  In skill based systems like GURPs or Chaosium CoC you are going to have skill challenges that are essentially individual challenges as well because skill systems encourage specialization.  You can't be good at everything, so you might as well be good at something.  (GURPS is notoriously even worse in this regard, and the WW WoD rules are as well.)  Returning to Remathilis's interesting disk jumping example again, this is counterintuitive but it's still an individual problem even if the entire party is rogues with maxed out jump skills.  The reason is that if all 4 rogues try to approach the problem in the same individual way, one of them is bound to end up in the lava.  In sixteen different jump checks, one of them is almost certain to roll a 1 and take a tumble.  So the smart party will treat this as a single individual skill challenge, and then do something to reduce the risk of failure to zero for the rest of the party.  Maybe the first guy ties a rope around his waist, gets the rope to the other side, and then using the rope, some spikes, and a hammer mitigates the risk for everyone else: "If you roll a 1, just grab the rope."I don't see SAGA's changes addressing this because I see this as more or less fundamental to the math of skill systems. b) If you create some amount of universal competancy are you really just creating power inflation, because the DC of the numbers will have to scale up as well to achieve the results you want.  If the DC's don't scale up, are you really any better off than you before?</blockquote>

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