I'll add a bit of contrast here by way of introducing another damn niche game folks likely haven't played. Feel free to ask for further detail!Just to add a bit to @Ovinomancer's reply:
Skill challenges being with the fiction: what is the situation? what do the PCs want out of it? Then each action declaration begins with the fiction: what are you doing to try and change the situation? what are you trying to achieve? Only then is it "mechanised" and turned into a skill check. The outcome of that check ends with the fiction: the GM narrates what has changed (for better or worse!) as a result of that PC doing that thing. And this provides the context for the next skill check. The GM's narration of the fiction is also having regard to the overall progression of the challenge, making sure that some final resolution is available in the fiction as it is emerging. (Parenthetically: in my view this is the single hardest thing a 4e GM has to do. It's harder than running a 4e combat. I think it's on the same difficulty level as managing the Doom Pool in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic.)
When the skill challenge reaches its conclusion, the GM narrates the consequences of that check, which are also a fictional state of affairs that reveal the challenge as concluded: either the PCs have got what they want, or they haven't and some new adverse situation has emerged instead.
Thus, both overall and within the challenge, we begin and end with the fiction.
4e skill challenges are basically defined by # of successes / failures that end the challenge, and an open list of skills that best apply. The players get to choose what actions they take in the fiction, which leads to the skill checks. Those might even be skills not on the list, if it makes sense to the DM how they would work.
Torg Eternity has a similar seeming thing called dramatic skill challenges (because drama makes things better!). In these, you have 4 ordered steps, labeled A, B, C, D, and each one has a specific skill that must be used with the equivalent of a DC to pass it. Sometimes a step will say you can use one or two alternate skills. Torg uses a deck of cards for initiative instead of dice rolls, and each card has some of those 4 letters on it; you can do a given step during the round only if that letter comes up on the initiative card. (Players have a hand of cards too, some of which can be played to manipulate the initiative card or allow for a given step to be performed.) Sometimes the challenge will describe what the skill test represents: for example, Find to discover a secret lever, Science to defuse a bomb. The whole thing is both rigidly scripted and defined overtly in terms of mechanics.
Torg Eternity does handle drama/story stuff in other ways, but its dramatic skill challenges work directly against fiction-first play and are clearly, as they say, gamist foremost, as is combat in general.
Edit: Added minor clarification.
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