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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6284721" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is fine as it goes but doesn't go to the heart of the issue.A simple example from actual play in my game: the dwarf fighter/cleric of Moradin has the dwarven engineers in the town, plus his mage PC friend, reforging the warhammer Whelm to turn it into Overwhelm, a two-handed dwarven battle hammer of epic proportions (in 4e called a mordenkrad).This is being resolved as a skill challenge - 4 successes required before 3 failures. The fighter/cleric had succeeded at Dungeoneering (the closest in 4e to an engineering skill) and Diplomacy (to keep his dwarven artificers at the forge as the temperature and magical energies rise to unprecedented heights). The wizard had succeeded at Arcana (to keep the magical forces in check). But the fighter/cleric failed his Religion check - he was praying to Moradin to help with the process, but it wasn't enough. I described the artefact glowing red hot in the forge, and vibrating and resonating with magical energies to such an extent that the artificers could not properly grasp it with their tongs to work upon it. So the player - realising that while his character is not an artificer, he is the toughest dwarf around - said "I want to stick my hands into the forge and hold Whelm down so they can grab it with their tongs. Can I make an Endurance check for that?"In RQ, or RM, or 3E, there is no simple answer to that question. For instance, there is no rule that tells you that an Endurance bonus of a certain amount is tantamount to having the Resist Elements spell. To answer the question you have to look at the chart of Endurance DCs, find something analogous to grabbing a red-hot artefact sitting in a Forge, set the DC and have the player roll. Apart from other features of this process, it has a tendency to cause people to go running to encyclopaedias or the internet to establish facts about temperatures, specific heat, heat conductivity and the like - none of which are really what I want to have as the focus of play.Whereas in the genre/drama approach, the first question is, Does that make sense within genre and dramatic expectations? I thought the answer was pretty clearly Yes, and so then went on to set a DC - a level-appropriate Hard DC. The player then made the roll and succeeded, as the PC shoved his hands into the forge and held down the hammer with brute strength! His hands were burned and scarred, but the dwarven smiths were finally able to grab the hammer head with their tongs, and then beat and pull it into its new shape. (The wizard then healed the dwarf PC with a Remove Affliction (using Fundamental Ice as the material component), and over the course of a few weeks the burns healed. Had the Endurance check failed, things would have played out much the same, but I'd decided that the character would feel the pang of the burns again whenever he picked up Overwhelm.)I tend not to assume that the weather, geology etc of my fantasy worlds works on the same physical principles as operate in the real world. Avoiding such issues is, for me, part of the rationale for favouring a genre/drama-first approach.That's not to knock those who go the other way (as I myself have in the past). It's just to try and clearly explain the rationale for my personal preference.</blockquote>

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