Hotpants Joe wrote:Valid. In my experiences, people either run them poorly (allow players to tea party too much), or they run them with good sense (only allow skills to be used that fit the given task within reason and limit the amount of tea party unless the explanation is exceptionally clever).
You have just made a fool out of yourself.
1) As has been said, stop saying poorly/well about things that are not that. You personally want skill challenges to perform certain functions, and you houserule the actual rules to try to meet your goals. Other people, including the 4e designers, have completely different incompatible goals.
The fact that you are explicitly ignoring the goals of the designers and the rules written by them is proof that skill challenges are not formulaic at all. And no amount of better DMing can fix the problem that Mike Mearls would seriously tell you to shove it up your ass and die if you told him it was wrong to allow the fighter to use athletics to show off his brute strength to help convince the king.
2) You are contradicting yourself. First you say, "only allow skills that fit the task" then you follow with "unless the explanation is really clever."
Have you ever played Exalted? They have these things where you describe something in a cool way and you get a Stunt. It is an actual fact that in all Exalted games ever, Every single attack ever made is made with a minimum 2 die stunt attached.
If you say only clever explanations allow me to use Athletics +15, instead of Diplomacy +5, I am going to come up with a Clever explanation every single damn time.
In a way. Most characters have 4 or 5 skills they're good at, and even usually focus primarily on a skill type (social, physical, mental). So when you have skill challenges that emphasize those three skill types at different parts, you are encouraging participation from multiple characters.
Most characters have 2 stats they are really good at, and maybe 3 they could possibly make but will never use when they can use the top 2, which is always.
Again, you want your skill challenge to be "The first success has to be Mental, then Physical, then Mental again." That's fine. That's also not what the designers want, it's not what I want. And it's not what the rules come even close to suggesting. All you really did was split the skill challenge into three new skill challenges which all share the same failure pool. Each new challenge has all the same flaws as the original. During the Mental parts, the fighter is just not going to roll. He will not even pick up a dice. And if he does, the Bard will get mad at him. During the Physical part, it is reversed, and the Bard is not allowed to play, and if he tries, he is actively sabotaging the party.
I would lump the bolded part in with point a. It's the inconsistency factor: some DMs will let tea party slide because they don't know any better. Some are wise enough to understand that it's more balanced to force variation in skill use. Still, it's not fair to say "every skill challenge is like this" because it has the potential to be.
Part a was about how no two people given a list of non combat challenges will even agree about which ones are skill challenges and which ones to teaparty. Part C is about how the skill challenge rules never can and never will make the Fighter want to use Diplomacy instead of Athletics. And he will jump through metaphorical and literal hoops to use Athletics, including actually jumping his Fighter through an actual hoop to impress the king rather than try to open his damn mouth.
And you again missed the point, it doesn't matter if you force variation in skill use, it is still exactly as balanced as when you didn't, it just fails a different goal. If you tell your players that jumping through hoops doesn't impress the king, that's not going to make the Fighter talk, it's going to make him go play Smash Brothers while the Bard talks. The Fighter is never going to roll a Diplomacy check in a skill challenge unless he actually just doesn't care if they succeed or not.
Elaborate on that if you would. I took saving throws as, "we want some guaranteed effects to happen every now and then" but I haven't analyzed that part.
I'm not going to talk about what saves where designed to do, because I think they were designed to be called saving throws and everything else was just shoehorned in. What they actually do is this:
1) They are a measure of duration.
2) They make that duration variable.
3) They create a 'fourth defense' such that some monsters could theoretically be easy to put to sleep but awaken quickly.
There are hundreds of better ways to measure duration. The most obvious one that also creates a variable duration of approximately the same general probability is to simply make all save ends durations require a new attack role against the monsters defense. This gives similar numbers to saving throws except in very odd conditions.
They only conditions that rolling a new attack is more than 10% away from "roll a saving throw" in probability of continued duration is Wizards. Wizards stacking save penalties is just straight up a flaw of the game, and the fact that they made the Phrenic Crown and Cunning Weapon after the initial Orb complaints shows just how dumb they are.
Saving throws are exactly like repeated attacks, except they make the mechanics have a different name, and give people a chance to screw the game up.
I read this part as being similar to 3e's one good/2 bad, 2 good/1 bad, 3 good save system depending on class.
1) It's not, because 85% of characters have 2 good/1 bad. It just happens to be a fuck you to one type of Fighter.
2) You missed the part where Wizards are just handed a big screw you because they use Int instead of Dex. And Paladins get a screw you because they use Str instead of Con. Ect. If all classes used Dex/Con they would be better than they are using Int/Str.
3) It also serves to make multiclassing suck more, but no one cares.
