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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6653213" data-attributes="member: 42582"> <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">There are a few assumptions built into this. One is that retries are permitted. 4e is a bit ambiguous on this, but there was a Save My Game column some years ago now advocating "Let it Ride" for 4e, and that is pretty clearly how a skill challenge works, because every retry costs you a failure, and three failures bring the challenge to an end. Another is that the player is somehow unaware that the ingame situation is a fiction constructed by a referee. Because if the player is aware of that, the player is equally aware that whether or not there are sufficient mechanical and/or in-fiction resources available to overcome the DC is something that has also been determined by the referee - especially if [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]'s philosophy of super-strong GM force is being applied. Another is that the choice to tackle a challenge, even one which the PC can overcome without needing a lucky roll, carries no interest or cost in itself. That is often true in traditional dungeon-crawling play, but often isn't true in the sort of high adventure, high bathos drama towards which many games are oriented (and which 4e tends to support fairly well). For instance, if opening the lock is easy, but opening the lock will free your father's killer, then the agony of choice isn't in trying to roll a 20 on the die; it's in deciding whether or not to open the lock at all. The flipside to this, presumably, is that 5e throws back to the pre-4e game-centred philosophy of disposable characters? Or perhaps there is a more neutral way of describing the difference in approach between the two games? This fails to describe any difference between 4e and 5e, given that in 4e, just as much as 5e, marshalling resources to boost success chance - both in PC build and in action resolution - is a pretty important part of the minutiae of play. As is "bypassing" the lock, whether by using acid (a move in the fiction that opens up Dungeoneering rather than Thievery check in the challenge) or a crowbar (a move in the fiction that opens up a a STR or Athletics check rather than Thievery), or taking the back door. Here we again see that assumption about stakes and costs. If the thrill of the game is whether you cross the bridge or die trying, that suggests one approach DCs. If the thrill of the game is located elsewhere - for instance, in story development or story consequences - then traditional low-level dungeon crawling DCs, with a high chance of TPK in every encounter, aren't very advisable. There seems to me to be a degree of tension between these two passages. If you're not "gating off" content, how are you nevertheless not "removing consequences"? What form does "consequences" take, if not the generation of fictional content that (ipso facto) precludes conflicting content? Speak for yourself, and your PCs! The PCs in my game have had a pretty broad range of powers for dealing with rickety bridges for pretty much the whole game, and especially from upper heroic! Like [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], I don't see this at all. Traps that in 3E would be Reflex saves against a DC are, in HARP, Acrobatics checks against a DC. In 5e, some spells requires saves and others (Illusions and Web, from memory) require ability checks. These are differences that carry mechanical baggage with them, but not in my view any sort of dramatic baggage. This looks like either projection (of your own unsatisfactory RPG experiences onto others) or theorycrafting. Look at the actual skill challenge posts that abound on these boards and you'll see that many of use are not experience "bland, predictable gameplay"! Here are <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?309950-Actual-play-my-first-quot-social-only-quot-session" target="_blank">a</a> <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312367-Actual-play-another-combat-free-session-with-intra-party-dyanmics" target="_blank">few</a> <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?353496-First-time-godslayers-PCs-kill-Torog" target="_blank">favourites</a> from my own game.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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