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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5035852" data-attributes="member: 3424">As I have said in other threads and in my blog:To me, skill challenges strike a middle ground between a very free-form problem-solving approach which is almost entirely dependent on player skill/DM adjudication (e.g. solve this mystery) and a very mechanical, rules-defined approach to tackling common (but specific) problems (e.g. opening locks, noticing secret doors, finding and removing traps, following tracks). Properly used, the skill challenge framework can give you the best of both approaches. An inventive player can come up with creative solutions to the skill challenge, or novel ways to use the skills he is good at, and the DM can allow the use of those skills to score successes, or even award successes without the need to make a skill check. On the other hand, a player who is more comfortable working within a fairly well-defined framework can simply run through his character's list of trained skills and pick one that seems appropriate to the challenge. ... if you are inclined to allow player skill and creativity to solve problems in your games, the presence of the skill challenge mechanic should not prevent you from doing so. Feel free to allow players who come up with good ideas to overcome skill challenges without rolling for skill checks - just as if the skill challenge mechanic did not exist. If you want to give clever and creative players an advantage, but are not prepared to let them solve the problem without rolling dice, then the granular nature of skill challenges (in that a certain number of "successes" are required before the skill challenge is overcome) allows you to reward good ideas with more successes if the PC makes the skill check, or even automatic successes (less than the total number of successes required, if you do want the PCs to make some skill checks). Of course, none of the above is very useful if you are faced with a bunch of players who just go through their PCs' skill lists and roll dice. Under such circumstances, a DM who wants to encourage more imagination and out of the box thinking from the players should start hinting that such approaches would be more advantageous, and then actually reward the players' attempts, perhaps erring on the side of generosity, at least at first, to encourage more of such creativity in the future. </blockquote>

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