I think you can do it, you just need to make fictional positioning an important factor in resolution - so that if it's missing, you can't proceed with resolution. It'd be like taking away the die roll: if the system calls for a die roll to determine success or failure, and you don't make one, you can't resolve the action. Replace "die roll" with "the character's action". It's somewhat tricky and relies on judgement calls but you can do it.
One way to do it (which I use) is to replace the skills with backgrounds. You can say, "I Intimidate him" and ignore the fictional positioning and gain your success/failure; you can't say, "I Guild Thief him" and proceed, because we don't know what action to resolve.
In non-combat resolution, the skill challenge chapter in the DMG certainly suggests that it should proceed as Lost Soul describes: GM states situation, player declares PC's action in fictional terms, a skill is then settled on and resolved, and the GM narrates consequence having regard to success or failure, which also then reframes things for the next check. If you follow this procedure you can't lose the fictional positioning, because the GM can't narrate/reframe if s/he doesn't know what the PC actually did in the fiction.
Yup. I (of course) agree. I was intimating what LostSoul states here:
4E is supposed to work this way (statement of action determines skill; skill determines modifier; modifier + roll determines success/failure of stated action) but it's easy to skip over the action and proceed with skill checks and success/failure alone.
I see people regularly dismiss 4e's analogue (the Skill Challenge) to other systems' noncombat conflict resolution framework, call it
gamist, or "a gratuitous exercise in dice rolling." Unsurprisingly, they are performing the following tautology: "Because my group ignores fictional positioning when resolving Skill Challenges that means that fictional positioning is irrelevant to the resolution of Skill Challenges." Its a weird "blaming the victim" paradigm that should be self-evident.
If you have to convince the chamberlain to let you see the king and the chamberlain then challenges you to legitimize your authority to even request audience with the king (let alone have the audience granted), its only sensical for your approach to be constrained by the fictional positioning. Therefore, unless some contextual element of the fictional positioning is in play to warrant "using an Athletics check to exemplify your legitimacy by way of your might" (eg its a warrior culture, or the chamberlain sets you specifically against a champion, or he asks you to pull the sword from the stone, et al), it stands to reason that an Athletics check nets no forward movement (read: success) in your effort to achieve your sought ends (attaining audience with the king) and only serves to make the evolved fictional positioning absurd (or embarrassing to your character). For example:
GM: Surrounded by a contingent of well-armored pikemen, the stone-faced chamberlain appears unimpressed. He challenges you to legitimize your authority to even request audience with the king and his words echo off the cavernous, polished marble reception hall "I have a list as long as two men of respected Lords who are seeking audience with the King over land disputes. By what title, right, or precedence, beyond the frothing howls of the layfolk, do you demand the ear of the King?"
PC1: I use Acrobatics to run up the thin bannister and do a double backflip at the top, landing gracefully in a bow as I pull off my feathered hat in a single motion.
PC2: OH OH! I clean and jerk the nearest statue over my head with an Athletics check.
Another issue people seem to routinely blame the Skill Challenge framework for is the "failed check resulting in no reframe of the situation and no evolution of the fictional positioning." The old example:
PC: I use Diplomacy to convince him.
GM: Your Diplomacy check fails. You fail to convince him.
No fail forwards to move the scene forward. Then we get:
PC: I use Diplomacy HARDER to convince him MOAR!
GM: Your Diplomacy check succeeds. He seems convinced.
And then the GM follows up with absolutely nothing dynamic. No success with complications. Next PC picks a skill and rolls it.
Both of these examples of groups ignoring fictional positioning are routinely used to proclaim Skill Challenges as
gamist or "gratuitous exercises in dice rolling." My answer to that is "well...yeah...if you outright ignore fictional positioning, make a mockery of it, or don't even attempt to reference it and evolve it...then yeah, I suppose the resultant gameplay would produce your anecdotal experience. How that is supposed to convince me about some inherent flaw in the construct itself, I don't know."
Lastly, there is the supposition that mechanical resolution of nonviolent conflicts are "rollplaying not roleplaying", espousing that noncombat conflict resolution is only legitimate and "organic" if players reference the fictional positioning (imagine that...) and work to strategically position themselves to convince the GM to rule favorably on behalf of their plan/plea/power-play. This last is a perfectly legitimate way to play and the aesthetic can be quite pleasing...but it is not the only way to play.