I see this method as being mostly goal oriented. That is, you pretty much have to accept that powerful people are going to be able to do stuff within their specialty by just saying "I do it!" meaning that if you want to provide them challenges, you have to go farther afield. So what you set up is Goals, that require a specific number of successes to achieve.
Simple examples might include:
The Mechano-Hydra
It's a huge device made of clockwork and powered by a boiler full of poisonous bile! It has seven heads which swing wildly around like a
toy wooden snake fighting a chicken. It's a potentially very difficult challenge. It's Difficulty 7, but there's no real mandatory method of achieving victory, s there's no mandatory skill attempt. Plausible methods of achieving a success:
- Engineering. If you can figure out the secrets of its workings, you can make defeating it easier.
- Maneuvering. If you can draw it into a confined space or dangerous area, you can help break its power.
- Alchemy. It runs on boiling poison bile you say?
- Combat. If all else fails, smash it!
And so on. The concept is that providing methods for foiling the mechano-hydra gives the entire party a jump on the battle against it. Players nominate methods to try to defeat it, and make their checks, and so on. If players have enough relevant skills and plans, they can rube goldberg the mechano hydra to death without fighting it at all. Maybe the team Jester gets it to chase him onto a floor that the team Gadgeteer has determined can't support it while the team Druid has arranged for a bunch of sandy grit to be on that floor so that during the collapse the joints of the mechano-hydra will be damaged, and the team Malefactor has got a bucket of non-flammable oil to douse the boiler with... and so on and then the plan goes through and the mechano-hydra ends up grinding to a halt and falling into a ravine.
Or maybe the entire team doesn't care and they just fight it out with the hydra, beating on it head after head until the damn thing stops working.
-Username17