Well I was reading quickly and trying to pick out the key points. But there's a passage on using the class-performance rating system from the training rules. Honestly I think my time is better spent taking in the recycling bins so I'm going to bow out as gracefully as I can manage on this tangent.

Quote from: Marleycat;768753I should have known it was mostly a non-issue made up by people that don't actually play the game. It's something I never understood given they made complete sense to me just from a readthru.

Maybe cancer is mostly a "non-issue made up by people who don't have it," but for those who do experience it, it can be a pretty big issue.

When I played 4e, "skill" challenges were B O R I N G. Why? Because the players were nothing but dice rollers. If I had wanted to play Craps, I'd have wanted something more engaging!

... relating like or dislike of game mechanics to having _cancer_?

Fuck you.

Many nerdgasms to ya. Fact is, a problem is a real problem -- not "just made up" -- regardless of how many people it affects. Belittling real people to the extent of denying their existence is not just dishonest but egregious.

Distraction based on the content of an analogy: informal fallacy.

Take it back to RPGnet. Oh wait, you can't.

I couldn't tell anyone to go fuck themselves on rpg.net. It's a virtue of this forum that when people have climbed up their own assholes and pitched a tent you can actually say so.

To put the skill challenge issue in perspective, consider 4e fans' response to a rules set that seems to reduce combat to nothing but "roll to hit, roll for damage."

I've actually encountered that in 4e in boxed-in slugging matches. Those took an hour to resolve, vs. a fraction of an hour in old D&D. The old game was designed to get such affairs over with quickly; 4e to prolong fights that were expected to provide plenty of opportunity for players to explore interesting tactics -- not just to be dice-rolling robots.

On to the actual point, where I actually agree with Phillip (just without the utterly crazy analogy):

Quote from: Marleycat;768753I should have known it was mostly a non-issue made up by people that don't actually play the game. It's something I never understood given they made complete sense to me just from a readthru.

From the vast consensus I've seen, the original rules don't actually work very well. There's a lack of guidance, and the numbers don't work well.

There's a corrected set that came out later but, again, not a lot of actual guidance.

Personally, I like the idea of skill challenges, but then I start imagining Fate, which handles 'content agnosticism' a lot better.

I think for skill challenges to work really well it'd be good to have some toothy 'consequences' system to incentivize risk and reward, even if some risk and reward is 'you find the backdoor to the dungeon' or other high level stuff.

Otherwise, it's a step up from 3e's 'you can totally do noncombat scenes, too. Somehow'
But only a small step.

Paizo has a 'performance combat' system that can be tinkered with to provide other noncombat conflicts.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCombat/combat/performanceCombat.html

Quote from: CRKrueger;769167Oh but a Dragon Article proves the mechanic was present and always used in AD&D didn't you know?

Yeah, there's that schtick. What the "new school" does not get is that people like me think the more the merrier as far as modular options and local variations. What's annoying is the attitude of shoving something into the game as The Official Rule, the more so the more it really is tightly integrated with lots of other components so that hacking is a drag.

AD&D wasn't really much of a system, although of course nothing was perfectly isolated from everything else. The "tournament rules" talk had more effect than the reality of a consolidated and edited OD&D hodgepodge. The "renaissance" of an attitude more really appropriate to that -- signs of which I saw back in the early 2e period -- is at odds with stuff that actually is what Gygax only claimed for his rules set.

So in an attempt to drag this on yet another tangent, what do people think of 5e's answer to skill challenges, the Group Check. Basically, everyone in the group makes the ability check. If at least half the group succeeds (Round Down), the whole group succeeds. Otherwise, the group fails?

Quote from: jadrax;769991So in an attempt to drag this on yet another tangent, what do people think of 5e's answer to skill challenges, the Group Check. Basically, everyone in the group makes the ability check. If at least half the group succeeds (Round Down), the whole group succeeds. Otherwise, the group fails?

As with s.c., I'm not about to toss my hat and huzzah over an opportunity -- never mind an "officially official" encouragement -- to replace interesting decision-making with dull dice-rolling.

And there's what I think is the real key to encouraging role-playing: interesting decisions and consequences in the activity itself.

Make the game itself fun, so people want to play it -- just a crazy old-fashioned idea that can't work today?

When I was tinkering with something like Skill Challenges pre-4e, one of my ideas was that players could contribute productive skill checks (which gives a lose framework for anything), or just contribute a particularly interesting/clever idea.

The second part was a good way to get people involved who might not have 'the right skills' and discouraged siloed play (aka the SR Decker problem).

Another idea I toyed with is something like 'the first successful skill check someone contributes is worth double' to encourage involvement and discourage Skill Guy from filling the spotlight.

Quote from: jadrax;769991So in an attempt to drag this on yet another tangent, what do people think of 5e's answer to skill challenges, the Group Check. Basically, everyone in the group makes the ability check. If at least half the group succeeds (Round Down), the whole group succeeds. Otherwise, the group fails?

I liked it but it obviously needs work. You don't want to use it all the time (and I don't think the rules say you have to) but as written it sounds like it would work well for something like getting through a swamp.

What needs to be recognized is that situations differ based on a whether participation is optional and whether it's better to have more people or a group that's more skilled on average.