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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5058464" data-attributes="member: 82106">Actually I don't see anything that indicates participating in a skill challenge is optional at all. "When a player participates in a skill challenge" in no way implies that has to be a choice the player makes. There are some types of SCs that logically you can't really FORCE every character to participate in, but if they are reasonably well designed then even in those cases lack of participation has implications. Aid Another is ONLY referred to as an option in the Group Skill Checks section. Nothing in the SC rules even suggests that it is an option available in all cases. Group checks are a specific sub-system the DM can employ for certain types of challenges where all the PCs are engaged in the same activity and one PC will be designated as the "point man" for that activity with the others allowed to use skill checks (it actually doesn't even state this is an instance of Aid Another) to assist.The "Cooperation" section of the Skills chapter (PHB p179) discusses this as well and it is quite clearly stated that this works "In some situations" and doesn't specifically say anything about skill challenges. This is a set of widely held misconceptions about the SC system. Actual study of the rules however indicates that these issues don't specifically exist in general and would only be issues due to the design of a specific SC (and presumably in those cases the designer intended the challenge to work in this fashion and planned for it). It IS tricky to run good SCs and its fair to say that the SC section of the DMG was not 100% entirely baked out of the box. At least they did make some pretty significant errata. I'd also totally agree that the authors of the DMG (and to some extend DMG2 as well) seem to have issues coming to grips with certain key factors that make or break SCs. Perhaps they need to run more of them... Its hard to really consider that a "design flaw" in 4e as SCs are pretty generalized in format and good ones don't particularly have to step outside of the framework to be good. I think the fairest thing to say overall would be that 4e so far has not been all that adept at communicating the best way to run an SC. From the comments I've seen people make about them pretty consistently its readily apparent good SC execution techniques aren't widely known by DMs and a lot of what they do know seems to be wrong.</blockquote>

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