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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7343306" data-attributes="member: 82106">Eh, just because something may never be easy to do well doesn't mean you can't make it easier to do better.And, IMHO, this is simply a matter of good game design. 4e answered this question. As of the RC that answer is completely detailed. You run an SC, the GM has the liberty to set the complexity and the level of the RC (though in all fairness 4e doesn't actually discuss using SCs of a level different from the party one must assume this is a possibility and it is done in practice). Thus solving a mystery could be precisely defined in 4e as 'a Complexity 5 Skill Challenge of Level 7' for instance. That leaves the matter of the fiction open, and the GM still has choices about how and when to deploy the different easy/medium/hard DCs (but the number of each is fixed). Likewise the players have room to decide when and how to deploy their advantages, secondary skill uses, and any other resources they may want to expend, given that they still need to explain how their fictional positioning warrants their employment in each situation. I always thought this was a HUGE advance over the situation in all prior editions, and 5e, where its just "however many checks of whatever difficulty and type the GM feels like until he decides what happened". I always found that to be rather lacking...Sure, but this is why the players define the stakes and then make the wager against some narrative or mechanical reward they can presumably set a value on. This requires that the mechanics guarantee there won't be a GM presented "Oh, but too bad, you spent your potion and there's still no chance of success, what a bummer..." sort of thing. Again, blind wagers are always possible, but I'd say they pretty much always come in the context of a larger cost/benefit trade off by the player (IE I won't wait to be sure if this is a good idea because the cost in fictional positioning of doing so is greater than the added risk). There's also "I just want to do it, I don't care if I fail" which GMs should generally respect.Well, its a common technique in this sort of adventure to have a 'floor' at which the character gains the requisite information needed to proceed to the next step. This is, for example, the entire process in Gumshoe, which is a game all about investigations. It is how a good CoC adventure SHOULD work as well (and one reason why the Gumshoe-based Trail of Cthulhu is a MUCH MUCH MUCH better game than CoC IMHO). In fact, I ran a CoC mini-campaign a couple years ago. I honestly will never touch that game again. It is just antiquated. Even the latest edition, which tones down the worst problems somewhat, is still awkward and antiquated by comparison to modern story-telling games of all sorts. I just found it literally painful to run and try to sort out the mess of different overlapping skills and dope out how to deal with the constant failures and figure out why we were even bothering with skill checks at all (outside of combat anyway).</blockquote>

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