D&D 4E What Doesn't 4E Do Well?

[Rel]

I'd remind everyone that, whatever your thoughts on the matter at hand, you are obligated to express them respectfully.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I'm confused:



Well, magic items (especially the big three) are vital for all classes, not just fighters. But if you want, you can use the DMG2 inherent bonus rules, and then magic items won't be so vital.



If your PCs are killing monsters too easily, why not just use higher level monsters?



Huh? I've never heard of "scry buff teleport" in 4e.



They do "patch constantly." That's why there's 73 pages of errata. Are you saying you would prefer if they didn't patch, and just let the problems persist?

The thread title is: what does it do NOT well.

So i am gald that 4e is BAD at those hings I listed

 

[KarinsDad]

4E does not do magic well from a flavor POV. It doesn't feel like magic. It feels the exact same as any other powers. Yes, this is an old rant, but after playing the game for hundreds of hours, it hasn't changed. Most of the magic in combat is an attack just like any other attack and most of the magic that is not an attack doesn't seem like it does anything that special.


I wanted to figure out what parts of the game are mostly ignored by the players because to me, if the players are not using game elements, then there are probably some issues with them.

1) Rituals. Although other people might have varying experiences, I have played with a few dozen people and have only seen a ritual performed once in a blue moon (actually three since the game came out IIRC, Disenchant Magic Item a few times to get rid of unwanted items, Hand of Fate once to make a decision, Transfer Enchantment once to move a favored magic to a more powerful weapon). Granted, my players have never played Paragon (that actually starts tomorrow in one of my campaigns), but the Heroic rituals were meh to the players. I suspect that it is because of the ritual cost, but I don't even think this is it. My one group has probably 20 rituals in their kit and they really don't use them.

2) Potions. As a DM, I've handed out quite a few potions. Probably 20 or 30 since the game came out. I've seen one Potion of Healing used in a game I DMed. I've seen one Potion of Healing used in a PBP I play in. Many potions are just so lame. A Potion of Healing seems to be a Potion of Last Resort because of the healing surge. An Elixir of Fortitude has a set 25 for a single attack. Although for some PCs a Fort of 25 is good at mid to late heroic, it's a single attack. Someone could easily drink it in an encounter and then never use it because that PC does not get attacked with a Fort attack, or if he does get attacked by Fort, the Fort attack doesn't hit by the 3 or 4 needed to successfully activate the potion. On the other hand, Gravespawn Potion is better designed, although I handed a few of those out and they were not used either.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

How long do you plan to make the "your DM sucks and can't do skill challenges right" excuse. It's been about two years now and the mechanical framework listed in the DMG and errata still does not work. The flaws are fundamental to the system and cannot be fixed. Here are the basic problems as I see them:

A. Skill challenges were billed as bringing the strategy of combat to non-combat situations. They don't. The mechanical strategies that skill challenges reward do not involve meaningfully working together or taking advantage of the situation described. All skill challenges reward the exact same strategy: Find the best guy to roll the required skills. Aid him if permitted to (and Mike Mearls podcast on skill challenges indicates that he at least thinks that you are permitted to aid other in skill challenges by the rules--so if those of us who think that is the case are deluded we're in good company). If you have to do something, try to talk your way into using your best skill. Never ever ever roll a skill that you are not good at.

That's it.

The analogous combat would be one where monsters had 17 different defenses and your job as a party was to guess a defense and attack it. Eventually you will win as long as you don't miss three times. It would be a lame system for combat. It is a lame system for non-combat challenges too.

B. Skill Challenges remove the players from the in-game situation.
Each character participating in a skill challenge participates individually. Consequently, the relevant question for a player in a skill challenge is not, "how do we work together overcome a concrete obstacle in the game world?" but rather, "how can I individually find a way to use a skill that I'm good at?"

There is no reward for coming up with a comprehensive plan that addresses the particular situation. (Ok, we'll go into a nearby shop and scout out the section of wall that we'll be climbing over--those of us who are good at it will haggle with the merchant over small items to give the rest of you an excuse to stand around and observe. Then, when we've figured out the guard schedule, you distract the guard a block down the street and we'll climb over the wall while they are busy. Then you wait five minutes and teleport to the top when the guards have gone past. We'll catch you when you jump. That way, we won't have to worry about how Sir Stoneshoes will sneak past anyone in his armor). Instead, the rogue who is good at stealth says, "OK, I'm super stealthy so I sneak up to the wall." He rolls a stealth check. One success. If he's clever, Sir Stoneshoes may pretend to be in on the story and say, "I'll climb over the wall" and roll an athletics check quickly before anyone asks him how he sneaked up to it. The wizard isn't any good at sneaking or climbing but he's an illusionist and has good bluff thanks to multiclassing, so he says, "I'll distract the guards" and rolls a bluff check. Only one more success needed, thinks the cleric: "I'll roll a perception check to figure out the patrol schedule." Oops. He rolls a 1 and fails. Apparently he miscalculates the schedule so someone is caught climbing over the wall (it must be Sir Stoneshoes because he's the only one who actually tried climbing). But it's only one failure so the challenge isn't over yet. Ever resourceful, the rogue thinks, "I'll light the inn across the street on fire so the guards have to run to put it out and let us go." So, he makes a thievery check and the party beats the skill challenge. But the only reason that it works at all is because the scenario was not really imagined, but rather was glossed over. If the scenario had been fully imagined, all failures would not be equal (failing to climb the wall might result in falling, but getting caught while sneaking up to the wall would require some quick thinking if it wasn't going to result in the failure of the entire enterprise). Likewise, if the scenario had been fully imagined, some of the rolls would have been unnecessary (the rogue wouldn't need to sneak if there was no-one there to see him and the wizard wouldn't need to distract the guards if they weren't there either). Finally, if the scenario had been fully imagined, the players would have not been able to avoid rolling some skills they would rather not make. The wizard either needs to teleport, fly, or climb up the wall--he wouldn't get over it just because the fighter rolled an athletics check.

C. The presumed scaling for DCs either leads to ridiculous results (the super-athletic high level fighter still fails to climb a simple brick wall 30-50% of the time) or prevents the use of certain types of role-playing scenes (it would be an interesting role-playing challenge to see how the high level fighter with minimal social skills tries to talk his way past some indifferent guards, but that does not fit in the concept of a skill challenge). The former situation occurs if you try to use scaling DCs for things that the designers would probably argue no longer constitute a proper challenge for high level characters. The latter situation occurs when you have decided that things that should be simple for competent high level characters are no longer appropriate material for skill challenges. Outside of the skill challenge format, the fighter would pit his low numbers against the low fixed DCs in order to resolve the latter situation, but once you have established the ground rules that say certain challenges are not worthy of a skill challenge, that situation doesn't qualify. Skill challenges have to be keyed to characters who are good at the relevant skills in order to work. So you they don't work to describe situations that are only challenging because they address a character's weaknesses.

D. The default model of the skill challenge is "Failure does not get the PCs off the railroad." In other words, players should not fail to move to the next scene of the adventure for failing a skill challenge. Rather, they should suffer some kind of penalty (surprise round for the enemies, lost healing surges, etc) and move on. This aspect of core rules skill challenges minimizes the significance of the non-combat aspects of the story. The players can't ignore all the clues and never find the malefactors of the story. All they need to do is fail enough times and they'll get where they wanted to go.

E. Therefore, the primary effect of skill challenges as described in the DMG is to gloss over the non-combat exploits of the PCs. While they were sold and advertised as a means of mechanically handling non-combat situations, what they actually accomplish is to provide a way to quickly get non-combat situations out of the way by rolling a few dice and glossing over all the messy details.

If skill challenges were to be successful, they would need to abandon the one-size fits all situations mechanics found in the DMG and errata and create a custom mechanic to model each non-combat situation as it arose. They would need to ask the PCs to work together to overcome concrete obstacles where different tasks required different resolutions and entail different consequences for failure. The successful mechanical resolution of non-combat situations that I have observed in 4e has done that. But despite usually being called a skill challenge, they have (correctly) discarded nearly every part of the DMG skill challenge mechanic--most especially the "name any skill you want", the "three strikes and you're out" aspect, the "all DCs scale to player level on a 5/10/15 scale" aspect, the "all skill checks entail similar consequences for failure" aspect, and the "failure still moves you to the next scene in the story" aspect.

Skill challenges were an admirable attempt to come up with a unified and interesting system for resolving non-combat encounters. It failed completely and utterly and on every level.

Way to illustrate my point entirely. If this is the way you're running skill challenges it makes my head hurt. Complaining that this is a "bad system" is like saying that an ancient red dragon ate your 10th level party and thus the combat system is borked.

I see no evidence in the rules that Aid Another is allowed by default. With all due respect to Mike Mearls he's just got his own misconception about what is actually in the book. Read it, its informative! lol. If you are allowed to use AA then pray tell why are there secondary skills (with much higher DCs than AA which is always 10) listed for virtually every skill challenge that do nothing more than add +2 to some other character's skill check? What fool would use those options if he could use AA? Obviously the people that wrote most of the SCs are either utter idiots or guess what, AA isn't an option!

The same is true with this mythical idea that characters are allowed to just stand around and not make checks. There is simply nothing in the rules which supports this notion. Its quite reasonable to say that in some types of challenges it wouldn't make sense to force every PC present to roll constantly, but equally in the majority of them it would be impossible for a player to come up with some reasoning as to how they bowed out unless they want to just abandon the party and remain behind.

As for your issues with immersion this is a DMing issue, not a rules mechanical issue. Some practice is simply required. When I started running 4e and using SCs it seemed awkward. I too tried projecting the mechanics of the SC to the players and what did I discover? It feels awkward and tends to break immersion. Instead simply thinking of the SC system as the DM's way of keeping track of the party's progress towards a solution of the conflict generally works much better. Thus say a party needs to climb down a cliff stealthily. They will generally know the applicable skills and all you need to do is describe how the rolls they make affect the situation. When a player makes a suggestion for a particular stratagem to use either its something you considered in the SC design in which case you have already defined a way to measure its impact or it isn't and you simply need to decide what impact it might have. Its really not all that much different from how you would do things simply using skills except you have a way to tally overall success/failure.

In some "puzzle solving" sort of SCs it will make sense to make the SC mechanics more transparent but I recommend doing it by presenting the challenge in a way where it documents itself. For example characters navigating a maze may realize when they fail a check that they've doubled back to a spot they were at before and have only one path to proceed by now. This gets the message across that they're having difficulty. It could even be more explicit with say a complex arcane trap that shows signs of activation when failures are tallied. You could then tell the players in detail how each check either defeats a piece of the mechanism or not and give them the skill checks they will need to overcome the next piece.

The example you brewed up is a bit difficult for me to analyze because the situation is not fully described but it seems to me that you're falling into a trap where the SC isn't focused on an attempt to resolve a single specific conflict. This is the main area where the SC discussions in the DMGs have issues. The DMG1 is actually better here since its examples are pretty tightly focused. Some of the DMG2 examples OTOH I feel are a bit too generalized and should probably be broken up into more than one challenge.

My advice is to keep an SC very focused. Never try to have it encompass more than one activity or goal and never structure it such that it deals with more than one plot point or obstacle. In your wall example I don't really see anything fundamentally wrong with the concept but the focus of the SC should have been dealing with the guards. Perhaps it should be 2 independent SCs, one to deal with distracting the guards and one to deal with scaling the wall itself. Because the two are confounded together you ran into a problem where you're tallying successes/failures against 2 different goals. Of course this didn't work because how many people have climbed the wall really doesn't relate to the guards spotting someone. It could also be fudged over by saying for instance that with the rogue at the top of the wall the fighter can be hauled up quickly and quietly and if a failure happens at this point its not the guards spotting someone but just noticing that something is funny (they hear a sound, etc) but they haven't gotten suspicious enough to raise an alarm yet (unless its the 3rd failure). Also you're kind of ignoring the secondary skill use mechanic here where the cleric's roll could simply grant a bonus to another skill check if he succeeds.

In any case I am fully confident I can handle this scenario using SC mechanics and have it play out smoothly.

As for the consequences of skill challenges being relegated to secondary status I also don't see this as an issue with SC mechanics. Its perfectly feasible to have SCs that have life and death consequences or be entirely key to the success of an adventure. Any argument against this will doubly apply to mere single skill checks. The reason it isn't the most common thing is that PCs tend to be fighters. They don't generally give up until they're defeated and ultimately they're almost always willing to resort to violence. It usually feels cheap to have them defeated when they still have that option. That being said if the focus of the adventure is investigation or intrigue etc then it makes perfectly good sense for an SC to be the key to success. Again I think the DMGs can be criticized for not delving into this a bit more but the rules do definitely tend to focus on a classic style of play where the major plot resolution mechanism is usually fighting.

I guess the final question has to be if the SC mechanics are so miserably horrible as you contend then exactly what sort of mechanics would you have imagined would work better? I know as a fact the existing mechanics WILL work if they are applied well. I have yet to see someone propose ANYTHING substantially different. The most we've gotten are some variants like Obsidian which aren't really all that different in the final analysis and at best work a little better for some types of SC and a little worse for others (having used Obsidian I can say this with a fair amount of comfidence, its a good system but it really doesn't demand any less of the DM than the DMG system). Personally I'm always interested in hearing suggestions but I'm not holding my breath. So far the 4e system seems to be about as good as it gets. Kind of hard to say 4e does SCs badly when it does them as well as anything ever written.

 

[ValhallaGH]

One thing that 4E does not do well is to be even close to a decent economic simulator.
... [Stuff I find boring]

Wow. You really care about how well the base rules simulate economic systems.
I guess that explains why you've been so passionate and forceful about this point; it doesn't explain why anyone else should care, but that's an entirely different and irrelevant concern.

So, I guess the real question is whether or not failure as an economic simulator is reason enough to chuck the rest of the game? Given your in-depth reading of and general attention to the rules, I suspect that your answer is "No, but I am annoyed by it."

... But we have these PCs that are filthy wealthy at somewhat moderate levels and none of them retire or take up a less hazardous profession.

Question for you. Have you ever known a special forces operator, a world-hopping adventurer, professional high-end thief, or professional spy? (No need to share the answer.)
I ask because all of those people are in high-risk professions, and many of them are wealthy enough to do something much safer for the rest of their lives. However, when asked, most of them will admit that they find their jobs extremely interesting and enjoyable and wouldn't stop if given the chance.
Obviously not a universal opinion, but it is an extremely common one. (Surprisingly common, to most folks.)
Why would the professional adventurers of D&D be any different? Men and women that, when choosing a career, chose to take up arms and challenge the most horrifying beasts, demons, traps, dungeons, and extra-planar threats that the cosmos can provide. Why would more than a handful of these people choose to stop their exiting, interesting, and fully-engaging careers to do something they'd already rejected doing? Why would someone that desires the life of a wandering adventurer want to retire and become just another blacksmith, carpenter, jeweler, tavern-keeper, or indolent noble?

Greed is an easy motivation to latch onto and focus on. It is very rarely the actual motivation behind those that put themselves into the path of grievous harm as a matter of profession.

 

[KarinsDad]

I see no evidence in the rules that Aid Another is allowed by default.

Actually, it is.

Group Skill Check. DMG page 75. And update:

On checks that aren’t described as group checks, consider limiting the number of characters who can assist another character’s skill check to one or two. The goal of a skill challenge isn’t for the entire party to line up behind one expert but for the entire group to contribute in different and meaningful ways.

For example, one PC is talking to the merchant with Diplomacy and another PC also uses Diplomacy to sway the conversation.

What good is the skill if it cannot be used?

It's my turn. What am I doing? I'm doing Aid Another of Fred's next Diplomacy:

"Yes Sir Duke, I have heard of your daughter's death. You have my most sincere condolances."

This diplomacy check doesn't convince the Duke of anything, but it helps put the Duke in the proper frame of mind for Fred's Diplomacy check a moment later in the encounter.

With all due respect to Mike Mearls he's just got his own misconception about what is actually in the book. Read it, its informative! lol. If you are allowed to use AA then pray tell why are there secondary skills (with much higher DCs than AA which is always 10) listed for virtually every skill challenge that do nothing more than add +2 to some other character's skill check?

Where are the rules that a secondary skill check only adds +2? I cannot find any such rules. As far as I can tell and I looked in both the DMG and the update, the secondary skill check can be whatever the DM wants.

He can make it a +2 bonus to a different skill. But, the typical default appears to be that he make it another skill challenge completely. The DC is higher, but the success is a success and a failure is a failure.

The only place where it indicates that a secondary skill can give a +2 bonus is in the example. It doesn't say anywhere that I can find that this is the default use of a secondary skill.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Actually, it is.

Group Skill Check. DMG page 75. And update:



For example, one PC is talking to the merchant with Diplomacy and another PC also uses Diplomacy to sway the conversation.

What good is the skill if it cannot be used?

It's my turn. What am I doing? I'm doing Aid Another of Fred's next Diplomacy:

"Yes Sir Duke, I have heard of your daughter's death. You have my most sincere condolances."

This diplomacy check doesn't convince the Duke of anything, but it helps put the Duke in the proper frame of mind for Fred's Diplomacy check a moment later in the encounter.

Yes, that is correct, in a Group Skill Check a character can make a check to give the lead character a +2. Group Skill Check is a specific sub-system that a DM can use within a skill challenge, it isn't an automatic thing where the players can simply say "Oh, we're using Group Skill Check now". GSC is a mechanic that the DM presents to the players as an option when he wants it to be available and thus presumably its use is factored into that SC. There is NO rule that states any character can use AA for any arbitrary skill check in an SC.

Where are the rules that a secondary skill check only adds +2? I cannot find any such rules. As far as I can tell and I looked in both the DMG and the update, the secondary skill check can be whatever the DM wants.

He can make it a +2 bonus to a different skill. But, the typical default appears to be that he make it another skill challenge completely. The DC is higher, but the success is a success and a failure is a failure.

The only place where it indicates that a secondary skill can give a +2 bonus is in the example. It doesn't say anywhere that I can find that this is the default use of a secondary skill.

It doesn't matter. The general SC rules indeed don't touch on this, but the point still stands. Why would the example SCs provide for secondary skill use that gives a +2 bonus to another check if AA was available? Very low level PCs aside AA would virtually always be a better option since it has a fixed DC of 10.

I just don't see anywhere in the DMG where it states that AA is allowed in an SC. It may or may not have been the designer's intent but the ONLY evidence in favor of that whatsoever is that podcast, which is not part of the rules in any way shape or form. Furthermore allowing AA really borks the whole SC system so why would you assume its available and then criticize the system for the result? If some combat power can be interpreted 2 ways and one is obviously broken you don't go with the broken interpretation. Its fair enough to complain that the point should be clarified but it doesn't indicate that the mechanic itself is bad, just that the way its explained isn't good. In terms of SCs I've said from the very start they could be explained better so I don't see where we would need to disagree here.

 

[KarinsDad]

Wow. You really care about how well the base rules simulate economic systems.
I guess that explains why you've been so passionate and forceful about this point; it doesn't explain why anyone else should care, but that's an entirely different and irrelevant concern.

There are several in game reasons why it is relevant to me (and yes, thanks for sharing that it is irrelevant to you, that does not make it a fact that it is irrelevant):

1) The designers have to hork the magic items so that low level items cannot be used at high level, otherwise, the high level PC carries around the bag of magic items. Examples where the designers succeeded and failed at this:

Potion of Clarity. Failed. "Drink this potion and spend a healing surge. You do not regain hit points as normal. Instead, once during this encounter as a free action, you can reroll a d20 roll you just made, gaining a +2 bonus on the reroll. You must use the result of the reroll." At 200 GP, every PC can be quaffing one of these every single major encounter from levels 15 on and in many n+4 encounters from levels 5 on. This effectively gives an average bonus of +5 (+2 for bonus, +3 on average for reroll) to many Daily powers and is relatively cheap at the price of a healing surge. It is definitely worth a feat at high level to get 2 bonus healing surges, just so that Potions of Clarity can be used day in and day out when a Daily power is needed.

Elixir of Accuracy. Partially succeeded, partially failed. "Use this power after your drink the elixir. Once during this encounter, you can use a free action to gain a power bonus to a single attack roll equal to 5 minus one-half your level.
Special: Consuming this elixir counts as a use of a magic item daily power." It succeeded in that the item becomes worthless at higher levels, but it also failed in that the item is still basically worthless at lower levels (it's really only helpful at levels 1 to 3 and at that, it is a major part of a parcel, but it is costly to use because it take a magic item daily slot). By the time the PCs can craft one of these, the bonus is +1 and it is basically worthless.

With such a steep slope, the designers have to go way out of their way to make low level magic items like potions and some wondrous items unappealing, otherwise, high level PCs carry around the "golfbag of items". When the slope is less steep, players have to pick and choose more wisely what they want to craft/buy because although the lower level items can be more useful, they also represent a greater percentage of a PC's wealth.


2) Selling / disenchanting items. Players don't want to do this at a 20% return. They feel like they are getting cheated. They are disincentivized to sell or disenchant items. And eventually, they cannot even sell them anymore in a reasonable campaign because nobody can afford to buy them.

And, they are really disincentivized to sell old items (let alone currently found items). When the PC at level 8 finds a +3 and sells the old +2 one, they get 360 GP for it. That's about 25% of a parcel at that level. It's hardly anything. This wonderful item that was good for 4 levels is now relegated to the pocket change.

So the 4E solution is to have "wish lists" so that the game campaign totally revolves around the PCs and items they find should be ones appropriate for them.

As a DM, I find this unpalatable. It just seems wrong that the treasures of the world should revolve around the PCs and if they don't, the PCs cannot even acquire the basic "big 3" sufficiently to adventure because of the sell and craft rules.


3) Purchasing / enchanting items. I haven't seen players do this in 4E since it is so expensive.

With a less steep magic item cost slope and with a higher sell price (like 50%), I can as a DM hand out more items that the PCs can sell or disenchant. The PCs can, if so desired, craft more magic items. As is, it seems cost prohibitive to have PCs purchase or craft magic items. An entire aspect of the game that we used to have fun doing sometimes is now relegated to a side thought at best.

For example, the average first through third level PC gains 600 GP (assuming just gold was handed out and not things like potions). He can craft a single level 1 item at level 4, possibly a single level 2 item if he did not gain potions and did not have many normal expenses. At level 4 when PCs are acquiring level 5 through 8 items, level 1 and 2 items look fairly weak. Now, this does improve as the PCs gain levels.

Granted, they do get to the point in Paragon where they can craft a same level item, just using the money they have gained at the current level. So at lower levels, the PCs can rarely enchant. At higher levels, they can carry around golfbags full of lower level magic items. Course, they wouldn't carry the worthless ones around (see potions above), they would carry around boatloads of the worthwhile ones (e.g. bag of holding).


4) Plausibility. This is a major thing for me. The game has to flow. It has to feel quasi-realistic. Implausibility jars the game. Having low level items that are totally worthless (not even including bonus items) at moderate levels feels implausible. Having items worth so much that no merchant could ever afford them, but the monsters have them in their back pockets and in their lairs feels implausible. I have no problem with a Dragon having a major treasure hoard. This creature has been plundering merchant trains, towns, other smaller dragons and other creatures for decades or even centuries. But why exactly does the Ogre have 5000 GP in his lair? Who the heck could he have gotten that from way out in the wilderness? I have no fricking clue.


To me, this is an unbalanced aspect of the game system. The designers have to use a lot of due diligence, just to make sure magic items are balanced. As is, not even including bonus items, many low level items are pretty much useless at even moderate levels.

If the slope of magic items was lowered, it would make the designer's job a lot easier to both make items worthwhile for more levels, to allow for magic item crafting easier (especially at heroic levels where many games are played), and to balance the magic item system and to more easily explain why the monsters have so much fricking treasure.

The slope cannot be too low, but an 8700 to 1 ratio is too high.

 

[KarinsDad]

Yes, that is correct, in a Group Skill Check a character can make a check to give the lead character a +2. Group Skill Check is a specific sub-system that a DM can use within a skill challenge, it isn't an automatic thing where the players can simply say "Oh, we're using Group Skill Check now". GSC is a mechanic that the DM presents to the players as an option when he wants it to be available and thus presumably its use is factored into that SC. There is NO rule that states any character can use AA for any arbitrary skill check in an SC.

Re-read the update. The update explicitly allows non-group skill checks to be boosted via group skill checks.

On checks that aren’t described as group checks, consider limiting the number of characters who can assist another character’s skill check to one or two.

By definition, group checks (i.e. Aid Another) can be done on non-group check skill checks.

It doesn't matter. The general SC rules indeed don't touch on this, but the point still stands. Why would the example SCs provide for secondary skill use that gives a +2 bonus to another check if AA was available? Very low level PCs aside AA would virtually always be a better option since it has a fixed DC of 10.

I just don't see anywhere in the DMG where it states that AA is allowed in an SC. It may or may not have been the designer's intent but the ONLY evidence in favor of that whatsoever is that podcast, which is not part of the rules in any way shape or form. Furthermore allowing AA really borks the whole SC system so why would you assume its available and then criticize the system for the result? If some combat power can be interpreted 2 ways and one is obviously broken you don't go with the broken interpretation. Its fair enough to complain that the point should be clarified but it doesn't indicate that the mechanic itself is bad, just that the way its explained isn't good. In terms of SCs I've said from the very start they could be explained better so I don't see where we would need to disagree here.

Re-read the example. The History secondary skill check does not only add a +2.

It also adds a success to the total of successes.

You are confusing the +2 bonus that DM gave out with some strange notion that all secondary skill checks give out a +2 bonus. They don't. There are no rules for that, the +2 bonus there is the "DM's best friend" for a creative use of a skill check from the Running a Skill Challenge section. DM's best friend is not limited to secondary skill checks.


Sorry, but you are mistaken here and mislead by the example. Secondary skill checks are the same as every other skill check. They are just slightly more difficult skill checks that the DM did not consider when creating the encounter.

Aid Another can be done, the update says so and the DMG does not contradict that.

 

[Garthanos]

Play tested official releases - POTG's evidence, teh amount of changes they make.

Some of the updates like hybrid rules and alternative rewards... are just new good stuff. Most fix updates are minor and not necessary (if you arent playing with game hackers )

I think it is funny how modern advantages like easy access to the web and updating and clarifying rules, gets re-interpreted as sign of a problem.