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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5964793" data-attributes="member: 22424">Conceptually, I really like Skill Challenges, for many of the reasons the OP gives. In actual use, however, I've found them to be an almost complete failure - the use of a Skill Challenge has caused the scene to fall flat almost every time.As far as I can tell, there are four weaknesses with Skill Challenges, the first two of which should have been obvious at the outset:1) If a character has a directly-relevant skill, the player will proceed to make use of that one skill, again and again. This tends to be very dull. (And sure, the DM can restrict the spamming of a single skill, but very often this is, and feels, very artificial.)2) If a character does not have a directly-relevant skill, the player will either seek to step out of the challenge altogether, or at least will look very very hard for some way to minimise the damage that his PC does. That's really not fun for anyone.3) When preparing a Skill Challenge, establishing the structure of the scene was generally easy. However, I found that adjusting the scene as it went on, and especially adjudicating anything but the simplest results of PC actions, was quite difficult - in fact, this gained very little (if anything) over simply not using the mechanic. Ultimately, SCs proved to be more trouble than they were worth.4) The big one: Imposing the single Skill Challenge structure on very disparate situations (construction, diplomacy, chases...) tended to make the game feel very homogenous. Indeed, I found that the moment I uttered the words "Skill Challenge" this proceeded to destroy player immersion, as the game devolved into an attempt to find the "magic button" skills to get those requisite N challenges. The scenes worked much better if I didn't tell the players that was what was going on, but even then scenes tended to feel very artificial - whether because the players didn't realise they'd had too many failures or they didn't realise they hadn't yet accumulated enough successes.In the end, I concluded that Skill Challenges were a noble effort, but they tried to impose one solution on too many disparate problems. Instead, it was better to gut the system with a knife, and instead use the bits individually as they were required.Thus, when constructing each individual scene, rather than use the language of a Skill Challenge (with the N successes vs Y failures, key skills, etc), it worked better if I instead thought of the situation and built a custom solution, using the SC rules as nothing more than guidelines to that effect.(I don't know what that means for 5e. I think I would like to see some discussion of Skill Challenge-like mechanisms for resolving non-combat situations, complete with copious guideance for the DM in constructing such challenges. But I don't really want to see anything quite like the 4e/SWSE Skill Challenge rules - I just don't think they work as-is.)</blockquote>

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