Is the history of Skill Challenge failures anywhere?

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Is there any place on the internet with a quick, accurate summary of the history of Skill Challenge rewrites that came out over the course of 4e and how each of them failed to solve problems?

[Username17]

Is there any place on the internet with a quick, accurate summary of the history of Skill Challenge rewrites that came out over the course of 4e and how each of them failed to solve problems?

Not really. There's the anatomy of failed design of course, but most of the attempts to fix skill challenges were simply too vaporware to even bother going into detail about them. You can chum around here if you have D&D Insider subscriptions. But the long and the short of it is that most of Mike Mearls' ruminations on running skill challenges with completely different rules were just verbal meanderings to fill up some sort of wordcount quota.

It's not just that each revision failed to solve the underlying problem. Most of the revisions weren't even labeled as revisions, they were just Mike Mearls ranting about some way to do things that was totally not in the book.

-Username17

[CapnTthePirateG]

Someone correct me if I am wrong.

The essentials book, in the skills section, referred me to the Rules Cyclopedia (which I don't have and don't want) for skill DCs. Please tell me these aren't level based, because the Essentials book simply spoke of "moderate" DCs.

[tussock]

Of course they're level based, it's 4e. But there's also fixed DCs for a lot of things in the individual skills, and the level is based on the level of the item or target creature rather than the PC some of the time. Stuff like Intimidate sometimes uses the monster's Will as a DC.

It's extremely inconsistent. Exactly what you roll against, or how the DC is determined isn't just unique to each skill, it also varies by what you want to do with the skill, as does the action. Some tasks have extra costs, some results come up on other creature's turns, and on it goes.

And streetwise, or listen, that's just player level based. It's always harder to gather information or hear noise when you're higher level.


Quite amusing that they put an old argument I was part of in 2008 in there. You can't fix a broken wagon wheel in 4e, but you can with essentials: it's an Easy Thievery DC.


Challenges? Yeh, they gave up. First it's don't tell anyone it's a skill challenge, then

Each skill challenge has a goal. Completing a skill challenge almost always results in achieving that goal, regardless of success or failure.

So the following pages of noise mean nothing. Roll some dice, give out XP, maybe drain a single healing surge, then get on with your life.

[Windjammer]

Two things that to my mind sum up the early history of skill challenges are

- Keith Baker's blog in June 2008, heavily houseruling them http://gloomforge.livejournal.com/12135.html
- and Mike Mearls' post in early December 2008, discarding the system entirely in favour of what he calls 'stealth mode' (DM tracking successes behind the screen, not even announcing characters are in a skill challenge: http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php? ... ostcount=8

That's good enough for me that skill challenges were never used in-house by staff and (then heavily involved) freelancers.