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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5190469" data-attributes="member: 4937">In fact, the published rules very much get in the way of this.When the 4e design team first started talking about 'skill challenges', I said, "I've been doing this for a while now."  An example for me would be a chase, in which the PC's are expected to accumulate a certain number of success to catch their quary, and if they accumulate a certain number of losses they lose the quary.  (Not coincidently, one of the better 3e third part supplements, 'Hot Pursuit', has mechanics that boil down in their essence to exactly that.)  That sounds like a skill challenge on the surface, but in practice its something very different from what 'skill challenge' has come to mean.When the 4e design team talked about running a 'Temple of Doom' style mining cart chase, not only did I think, 'alright!', but I felt there was a direct correlation between how I would have ran such a such a scene and what they described.But the key difference between that and what the 4e team ultimately came up with is that the 4e design team came up with the idea of what amounts to a subsystem with an entry point and an exit point, and, while within the subsystem the rules no longer seem to interact with either the game world or the rest of the game rules themselves.  Running a 'skill challenge' for me meant running a situation where skill ranks were important, but for which there was many entry and many exit points and each die roll equated to some quantifiable game state.   The 4e skill challenge seems to only have quantifiable game states at the beginning and end of the skill challange, and everything within is simply a mechanical state of the challenge.  Or in other words, each individual action within a skill challenge is meaningless.  It renders the whole system nothing more than meaningless dice throwing.  Rather than a skill challenge meaning 'every few rounds you must make a skill check that has an important effect on the current game state', they... I honestly don't know what they think that they are doing.  I don't believe it would have been possible to design a worse system if you'd set out to try.  A skill is nothing more than a mechanic for determining whether a risky player proposition succeeded or failed.  The results of either should be more or less immediate and each result should lead to some clear game state that the PC's can interact with and which is the obvious result of their choice in the prior game moment.  A series of these cases is a 'skill challenge', but it lacks all the completely arbitrary system first, game second, artifacts of the 4e rules set.  If you actually abandon the 'skill challenge' mechanics, you actually get much closer to making skills matter than if you had them.  To place great difference on the results of choosing one course of action over another is to abandon the skill challenge mechanics.  The solution is to just drop the damnable things and frame them, stick them up on a wall in the RPG hall of shame, along side FATAL and Spawn of Fashan as an example of how to do everything wrong, as an example one of the worst designed game mechanics of all time having completed failed in every single one of its stated objectives, and not just failed, but having somehow moved beyond failure to a state that is worse.</blockquote>

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