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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5058875" data-attributes="member: 82106">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.</blockquote>

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