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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6244545" data-attributes="member: 87792">Possibly  from the rulebooks themselves?  The ones that say that you are meant to  set the skills that can be used in advance?  Possibly from the skill  descriptions that say what the skills actually do?Yes, it is  good when planning a skill challenge to set it up so that a wide range  of skills can be used (just one reason skill challenges are not complex  skill checks).  You'll also note that one of the possibilities for  secondary skills is that they don't provide a success towards the skill  challenge - just a bonus to subsequent skills.And I  think that you've committed the fallacy of the excluded middle there in  misreading the intent of the DMG.  The goal of skill challenges is that  everyone should be able to contribute.  And that people should be  rewarded for finding creative methods of using skills that would not  normally be relevant.What causes the problem is DMs neither  using the rules as written (which, in the initial example, don't allow  Intimidate to be used on a persuasion skill challenge, instead making it  an automatic fail), nor the rules are intended (which very much intend  the GM to use common sense about what is plausible).If everyone needs to always contribute equally then we are in the land of <a href="http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html" target="_blank">Harrison Bergeron</a>.  We wouldn't have roleplaying statistics - all statistics would be exactly equal.  We certainly wouldn't have the fighter with three skills, and the rogue with six while the wizard has Ritual Caster.   The idea that "everyone needs to always contribute equally" is nothing  but a straw man and I wish people would stop making this blatantly  obvious straw man because it undermines any belief I have that they are  both discussing things in good faith and have even the most basic  understanding of what a character sheet, skills, powers, and attribute  scores actually are.What 4e has is the idea that everyone needs to be able to contribute.   That there should always be something constructive that they can do,  and the best plan shouldn't be for the rest of the party to just sit  down and keep mute while the bard is talking.  This in no way means that  the bard isn't the star of the social interaction.What it means  is that, to use an analogy, the bard is the lead singer in 4e for that  specific song and the rest of the party for that period are effective  backing singers, drummers, or guitarists.  In more normal models the  bard would instead be a soloist where the best thing the rest of the  party could do would be to sit down and shut up rather than join in the  improvised jam and possibly produce some excellent riffs of their own.</blockquote>

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