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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8654522" data-attributes="member: 16814">Skill challenges are a thing that's going to different depending on whether or not you're approaching it from one agenda or another.&nbsp; If you're trying to use it to simulate the world, to in effect mechanicalize the cause effect of the world, it's going to clunk, hard.&nbsp; It's going to clunk because it's, at the start, not at all aligned with the world.&nbsp; The idea of X successes before Y failures to succeed at the goal is utterly divorced from any consideration of cause and effect in the world.&nbsp; So, if verisimilitude is a priority for you, skill challenges clunk.&nbsp; And we see this clearly in much of the criticism.If your agenda is one of gamism, or leveraging the system and resources in a skillful way, then yeah, skill challenges work.&nbsp; They're clear, understandable minigames where you can push hard and use your resources to succeed.&nbsp; This doesn't rarely engages fiction first, though, because the agenda only cares about the fiction as secondary to the game parts, and so is fine doing after the fact alignment of the fiction to what happened with the game mechanics.If your agenda is Story Now, well, skill challenges offer an interesting option.&nbsp; You can declare them on the fly, follow each resolution into a new challenge, with each individual success moving forward to a new wicket based on what just happened and each failure yielding a new complication or closing an avenue of approach so a realignment needs to happen.&nbsp; This fully follows and engages the fiction, and uses scene framing techniques to create linked scenes along the path as needed.&nbsp; It's not improv, because there's a clear structure to how you do this, but it shares some similarities.&nbsp; And I link this to Story Now because these are the same techniques you use for all play in that agenda -- follow the play, create new play off of current play, and always drive to the action (even if the action is conducting a tea ceremony properly).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 8654522, member: 16814"] Skill challenges are a thing that's going to different depending on whether or not you're approaching it from one agenda or another. If you're trying to use it to simulate the world, to in effect mechanicalize the cause effect of the world, it's going to clunk, hard. It's going to clunk because it's, at the start, not at all aligned with the world. The idea of X successes before Y failures to succeed at the goal is utterly divorced from any consideration of cause and effect in the world. So, if verisimilitude is a priority for you, skill challenges clunk. And we see this clearly in much of the criticism. If your agenda is one of gamism, or leveraging the system and resources in a skillful way, then yeah, skill challenges work. They're clear, understandable minigames where you can push hard and use your resources to succeed. This doesn't rarely engages fiction first, though, because the agenda only cares about the fiction as secondary to the game parts, and so is fine doing after the fact alignment of the fiction to what happened with the game mechanics. If your agenda is Story Now, well, skill challenges offer an interesting option. You can declare them on the fly, follow each resolution into a new challenge, with each individual success moving forward to a new wicket based on what just happened and each failure yielding a new complication or closing an avenue of approach so a realignment needs to happen. This fully follows and engages the fiction, and uses scene framing techniques to create linked scenes along the path as needed. It's not improv, because there's a clear structure to how you do this, but it shares some similarities. And I link this to Story Now because these are the same techniques you use for all play in that agenda -- follow the play, create new play off of current play, and always drive to the action (even if the action is conducting a tea ceremony properly). [/QUOTE]

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