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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tonester" data-source="post: 4353580" data-attributes="member: 71788">Opinions1) Skill Challenges: I think the Skill Challenges are fine.  The issue is that DMs don't have a ton of experience running them, but more importantly, creating them.  Designing Skill Challenges takes much more work, imo, than designing any other aspect of an adventure or campaign.  The DM almost needs to think like a conditional software designer - looking at several branches of possibilities, finding ways to tie them all together somehow, and most importantly, finding a way to let people with very different skill sets participate.  Often times, Skill Challenges break down into the Cha, Wis, and Int based skills (interaction with people) without allowing the more combat-oriented classes to participate.  I'm in the process of writing a tutorial on designing skill challenges - I suggest using XML, Powerpoint, or some other Flowchart system for designing them.  More on that later.2) Keywords:  I agree that the Keyword system is a bit confusing in the PHB.  After reading it several times and after designing some back-end DB stuff for Character/Skill calculators, I feel I have a pretty good grasp on them.  Again, I'm in the process of writing up some Power/Keyword stuff which includes examples, inheritence and more.  For now, I'll say this:Powers have tons of keywords.  Usage Keyword, Source Keyword, Damage Keywords, Effect Keywords, and Accessory Keyword.  The Usage Keyword tells us how often we can use a power.  The Source Keyword has little value (imo).  The Accessory Keyword merely specifies if a power requires a weapon or benefits from an implement.  The important (and confusing apparently) keywords are the Damage and Effect keywords.  These are also the ones which inherit from their Accessories (weapon or implement).  The Damage/Effect keywords at the top of the power are kind of used as "tags" which quickly give someone an idea about the pool from which this power draws from (Poison, Fire, Teleport, Radiant, Reliable, etc).  For Effect Keywords, these are used when interacting with other Powers or Effects (a power which blocks all Reliable powers for 1 turn would block the use of any power with the Reliable effect keyword for example).  For Damage Keywords, this is where it gets a bit hairy.  The fine print in the PHB basically states that the REAL keyword used for damage is always specified in the details of the power (below all the keyword stuff).  I don't know why they did it this way, but they did.  So, even though a power has the Fire keyword at the top, you need to actually read the hit/miss/effect section or whatever to determine if the power actually does Fire damage.  This is getting into too much detail so I'll quit for now on the subject.</blockquote>

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