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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5705899" data-attributes="member: 54877">I'd solve this problem by bringing in a few other related issues and doing a combined solution: Make a more robust, expansive form of skill challenges. This is worth doing anyway, but for purposes of this problem, the main addition is building into the skill challenge framework ways for combat use to serve directly as checks. That includes weapons, defenses, and spells. Next, redo the XP assumptions, advice, and adventure pacing to include lots of smaller fights. These fights don't use the full combat rules. Instead, they are skill challenges. But given the previous point, if the fighter wants to "swat goblins with my sword," he has something to roll to show generally how well he did. We aren't tracking hit points and the like in this fight. You smack the goblins around until they die or run off or get knocked unconscious or whatever. The details aren't important, only what resources got used, and enough direction from the participants to narrate what happened. Include in this expanded skill challenge more variety than a series of binary results. You need some kind of staged success, to make up for the fact that you aren't pulling off hit points bit by bit. ("Disposition" from Burning Wheel would be a good way to go here. It's a vastly simplified point system for two sides to whittle down as a group, based on the capabilities that each group brings to the conflict.) More nuance would be nice in regular skill challenges, too, and would allow for more variety in skill and feat use. Thus, these combats get handled in 15-20 minutes, but they aren't simply rolling ad hoc skill checks in the current skill challenge format. Having plate and shield, a big axe, and the ability to use it--matters. But if you want to intimidate or talk or whatever, you can do that too. There. Now most adventures are structured such that you get a hefty chunk of your experience from smaller fights and challenges. These smaller fights do use up some resources at times, but not always, and not much. Now you can have the main combat system built around the expectation that the party will only do one or two such fights per "day". These are the boss fights, and the occasional sub-boss fights when warranted. You get a lot of experience from each of these fights, of course, but they aren't the roughly 80% of XP, as with 4E now. Big fights will always seem more important and exciting, because they are tougher, narratively more important, and they take more time. Pacing has slowed to focus attention on each momemt in the fight, drawing attention to it.</blockquote>

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