Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6245174" data-attributes="member: 2067">All I can really say is that the way the book is written and the way I've had SC's play out, I've never seen anyone have to sit one out or rely on untrained skills to contribute (and even when I've seen the occasional untrained roll as a one-off, successes have all been roughly equal). This makes sense to me, given that 4e learned good lessons from some of 3e's problems: things like rogues being unable to do their usual thing in an encounter with golems or undead, for instance. One of 4e's goals seemed to me to be that everyone should be able to have their moment in the sun in each encounter, SC or combat, because these encounters were meant to be the meat of the game (it's an encounter-based game, after all!), and sitting out an encounter would be like turning D&D into a spectator sport for a big chunk of time for someone who didn't have something they could do to shine. Again, this isn't even necessarily badwrongfun, it's just not what I'm really looking for in my D&D. It's a trade-off. That's been my world since 2008. But...Like I said, they're a bit of a Rorschach blot: people certainly haven't been locked into the DMG advice for SC's. According to the DMG, the DM should be making it so, regardless of the skill choice, every party member has a chance to shine.Again, makes some sense: if the thing is going to last an hour, you don't want the Fighter having trouble contributing to it, you want to give him ways he can help, because an hour is a long time to sit with rolling at a -5 penalty in comparison to everyone else. Again, not really what I'm looking for in D&D: I want it to be OK that Samwise never, ever shines when he's fighting a dragon, because that's not the kind of hero his player wants to be, and sucking at something is often an important part of how we define our roles and our hero-types. I want it to be OK that Throg the barbarian makes more enemies at a tavern than friends, because he's a weird intimidating foreign guy. I want it to be OK that Foppish McPrincely the noble gets heatstroke when everyone else is barely breaking a sweat, because he's a pampered lazy noble. 4e just ain't the best at supporting that. Which brings me to balance: balance, to me, is not that everyone gets a chance to shine in every encounter, but rather that everyone gets a chance to shine maybe once every 15 minutes or so, over the course of an entire game session/adventure. If, in your game, that means they have to contribute to every encounter, you should probably re-examine the required encounter length for your game, if you want me to not whine about it on message boards. <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=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification