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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4526030" data-attributes="member: 2067">All that verbiage does very little if the game doesn't pay attention to it in mechanics, and 3e paid more attention to it than 4e does, thus encouraging it more (I outlined a few of the ways it did that above). Can you go a session or two or three or four without a Skill Challenge? Can you go that same length of time without a combat?There's also the point that the Skill Challenge is mechanically a bit unhinged, so that if you are using it a lot, you will start to notice imbalance. And that the open-ended nature of it rarely enhances the idea of a noncombat archetype, being that you can use many diverse skills to accomplish the same goal. All classes being effective and other skills being useful is kind of like giving all characters the healing powers of a Leader, the marking abilties of a Defender, the area-effect of the Controller, and the damage output of a Striker and saying everything is good.It's a valid design choice, but it lacks a certain variety that the defined roles contribute. A lack of variety in the rules implies that it isn't often to be used, because it's going to require more work to make it more interesting in repeated usage. And it certainly reduces variety (however flawed) from 3e, stepping away from these character details in favor of a sort of noncombat socialism of equally distributed skill. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />If I don't have mechanics for how my character performs these things I'm talking about, I'm less inclined to waste time talking about them. If spouting haikus is important for my fighter, I want to represent that without having to be a master of spontaneous haiku myself, while still having the detail that makes me feel like that is important.Basically, just talking about it isn't good enough, if it's important to me. I want to play the game, which involves using the mechanics, and if there's no "talk mechanics," then talking doesn't seem to be part of the game, and it gets ignored.No, I mean like allowing my negotiation skills to come to the fore several times in every session by weaving them into the fabric of the game like Sneak Attack does.Skill Challenge is okay if you don't look too closely at it, but if you try to make noncombat a big part of your game, it quickly shows itself to be in need of fixing, and lacking in variety and strategy.Unlike, say, combat, which works pretty well, and has a lot of variety and strategy.Also unlike 3e, which at least had mechanical variety in the kinds of things you could do outside of combat, and where I could make a fighter with Perform (haiku) who was truly made different by that skill. Why fix Sneak Attack but not Diplomacy, Craft, Perform, Profession, or a host of other skills? In my book, it's because they thought SA was more important. This leads to a game where SA is usually the better, more entertaining, more balanced option to resolve an encounter than Diplomacy is. A more combat-focused game. It's not a direct force, but it's something of an invisible, guiding hand. Which is part of why it doesn't fit me as well as 3e did, in the non-combat department (especially given that 3e had 8 years of development and 3rd party supplements to enhance this angle, while 4e doesn't quite have any of that, at the moment).</blockquote>

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