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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6284672" data-attributes="member: 42582">Completely correct.There is no textual evidence to support this. I have no personal play experience to support it either.I will defend it. (Not the DCs, which had problems, but the basic framework.)The following paragraph is composed only of text taken from the 4e DMG (in the skill challenge section: pp 72-75) and the 4e PHB (in the section on skills and the section on encounters: pp 179, 259):Whatever the details of a skill challenge, the basic structure of a skill challenge is straightforward: the goal is to accumulate a specific number of victories (usually in the form of successful skill checks) before getting too many defeats (failed checks). The DM determines the level and complexity of the skill challenge; the players describe their PCs’ actions and make checks until they either successfully complete the challenge or fail. More so than perhaps any other kind of encounter, a skill challenge is defined by its context in an adventure. The DM sets the stage for a skill challenge by describing the situation (including defining the PCs’ goal), describing the obstacle(s) the PCs face to accomplish their goal, and giving the players some idea of the options they have in the encounter. The DM then describes the environment, listens to the players’ responses, lets them make their skill checks, and narrates the results. Depending on the success or failure of a player’s check, the DM describes the consequences and goes on to the next action. It’s up to the players to think of ways to use their PCs’ skills to meet the challenges they face. In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that the DM didn’t expect to play a role. When a player’s turn comes up in a skill challenge, let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. Try not to say no. As long as the player or DM can come up with a way to let this secondary skill play a part in the challenge, go for it. This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth. However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. The DM should ask what exactly the character might be doing. Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge.Both the DMG and PHB also make it clear that actions other than skills (eg using powers, using rituals) can help achieve successes, though the DMG2 does add more advice on how to manage the mechanical aspects of this.I reckon that what I've got in that paragprah sets out a pretty good system. It is one in which the players "figure out the best way to reach the objective with the party's skillset and minimal risk of failure and then execute said plan, adapting to failures on the fly." It is certainly not one in which players "repetitively rolling dice to gather enough points to proceed without any plan or intend to actually work towards the goal, with everyone rolling the highest skill s/he can get away with over and over, it doesn't matter what". The biggest single error in the second quoted description, which is utterly belied by the rules text I have set out, is to ignore that "what a player can get away with" (in terms of declared skill and declared action" is utterly dependent upon having a plan and intention that work towards the overall goal.Probability transparency is an issue, as it is in any dice-pool system. The most basic way to handle this, present in the system from the beginning, is "fail forward" - meaning that for the players the stakes of estimating the maths correctly are significantly reduced. That requires adopting a non-Gygaxian attitude towards skill and challenge resolution, but skill challenges already require this anyway, so it's no big deal.Since then there has been a further development on probabilities. The Rules Compendium, in addition to once again revising the DCs, also introduces a rather ad-hoc and under-explained mechanic called "advantages", which is basically a species of "plot point" that the players can use, subject to some GM oversight for genre credibility, to manipulate the DCs. The more complex the challenge, and so the more successes required, the more "advantages" the players are entitled to. This makes complexity of challenge not so much a proxy for difficulty, but rather for "how much time and effort is this worth spending on at the table" - which I think is closer to the initial DMG intention.I'm not sure what the problems are that you have in mind with on-the-fly assignment of consequences. This is an element of the system, but I'm not sure it's an undesirable one. The game has pretty good advice on level-appropriate damage, healing surge taxing, etc, plus the disease track as a further model. Story consequences can be worked out in the same way they are in any "fail forward"/"genre logic" resolution system. In practice I haven't generally found this to be a big deal, but I'm interested to hear more.As to active particpants: the system handles active opposition in the sort of way that   [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] mentioned upthread, namely, via the GM narrating in such opposition as the context in which success has not yet been achieved and hence further checks are required (and unlike Balesir I don't find this makes things static rather than dynamic - the number of required rolls is static, but the sorts of checks that might be required, and how best to frame them, are rendered dynamic by this approach).But when it comes to (say) two parties competing two achieve a common goal, the system isn't as strong. There is a model in the DMG2 for how to do this, which assumes that the PCs are helping different teams, based around tracking successes for each team. I suspect that still isn't helping with the sort of scenario you have in mind, though.For me, I see this feature of skill challenges as a limiting one, but it's a limit that to me is reasonably compatible with D&D's overall very strong focus on party play.I use them for all these things. Because of the sort of story elements I enjoy as a GM, and therefore frame for my players, the in-combat skill challenges most often involve closing gates or breaking through wards or other "cosmologically" flavoured sorts of things. I really don't enjoy overland travel/hex-crawl style play at all, and use skill challenges to compress this and resolve it neatly at the table. (I know   [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] likes to do more adventurous stuff along these lines - like the (now infamous) gorge episode!)My favourite skill challenges tend to be social/negotiation challenges (sometimes in combat, like when the PCs redeemed the fallen paladin in "Heathen", but more often out of it). I very much like the structure, because it provides a mechanical device for keeping the scene open long enough for interesting things to happen while also ensuring an ultimate closure, without making that dependent upon GM fiat.EDIT: I missed this example:I think the Rules Compendium does a better job of explaining the setting of DCs as a metagame-driven rather than "realism"/"objectively" driven process (eg checks by default are Medium, but repeated uses of the same skill by the same PC are Hard; etc). This helps make the probabilities of success more independent of particular choices based on class ability/interest; and it correspondingly thereby plays up the story significance of making those different sorts of choices. (Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion; I like it for the reasons given in my post before this one, discussing "drama and genre"-based resolution systems.)Also, I think that skill challenges don't need "writing up" any more than combat encounters need "writing up". In preparing a combat encounter you might make notes on likely monster choices in response to predictable player choices for their PCs, but in the end as GM you are not bound by those prior notes. And the players are not bound to adhere to any predictions the GM might have made about their action declarations for their PCs! Likewise in a skill challenge: the GM's preparatory notes are guidelines on how the situation might unfold, but once actual play starts the GM should be setting DCs and adjudicating in response to what the players actually do and what makes sense in the unfolding situation, keeping in mind the relevant metagame constraints. Sticking to some sort of script would be as irrational here as it would be in adjudicating any other episode of play.</blockquote>

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