101 Reasons why 4e DOESN'T suck


4th Edition

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Sissyl wrote:
What broke it for me was the bloody skill challenge guessing game. Let's see, we're trying to sway a ghost to give us the password without which we can't proceed. We already used diplomacy. Hmmm... arcana? No, that wasn't one of the skills you could use in this skill challenge, that counts as a failure. Now you need five more successes before one more failure or you anger the ghost and fail... WTF!!!???!!!

In my opinion, that sounds like a DM problem.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not ripping your DM. It took me a while to grok how to run 4E well -- especially skill challenges -- and I'm pretty sure I sucked as a 4E DM until I did. And unfortunately by the time I got it, 4E's popularity was already on the decline. But that's another story...


Sissyl wrote:

Fey-pact warlock was fun to play in combat. That is all.

What broke it for me was the bloody skill challenge guessing game. Let's see, we're trying to sway a ghost to give us the password without which we can't proceed. We already used diplomacy. Hmmm... arcana? No, that wasn't one of the skills you could use in this skill challenge, that counts as a failure. Now you need five more successes before one more failure or you anger the ghost and fail... WTF!!!???!!!

They are sometimes tricky to run and don't always work when played through. Still if your going to try and sway a ghost and the DM has decided that this is an encounter that one can fail and the adventure will continue I don't really see why this is such a bad way to go about it.

All that said my actual experience is that if its a social encounter the chances of it really just feeling artificial or not seeming to mesh very well are so high that I'll generally just ask for base role playing and maybe a couple of skill checks and then move on.

The Skill Check mechanism usually works better if your trying to sneak past a sleeping Dragon or are leading an army of slaves to break a siege to name the two I used in my last adventure.

Part of the reason I think their is a dichotomy on why a skill challenge tends to work for many tasks but rarely social interactions is because, for something like sneaking by a sleeping Dragon, you can get the players to tell you what they plan to do and then, when you've got a whole list of their actions, you can go back and tell the players in turn...you wanted to do X give me a Y skill check and tell me the result. Basically you can figure out what the players plan to do and then go through all their actions making a bunch of rolls and adjudicating the result.

That does not really work in a social encounter where it is all a back and forth and the checks tend to feel much more blatant - it always just kind of screams 'we are in a skill challenge - go look up your best skills and try and use them'. I've occasionally run them successfully even here but keep it to the small 4 before 3 skill challenges in this case and even here there is always a reason why I think I'm going to be able to get 5-7 rolls out of this social encounter. If I can't see how that will happen with this NPC I don't run a skill challenge here...more likely its really just a gimmie for the players - they can't actually fail.


It is fine that you can fail a social encounter. The problem is that the mechanism is "guess what skills the challenge includes". In the ghost challenge above, apparently athletics was one.


Sissyl wrote:
It is fine that you can fail a social encounter. The problem is that the mechanism is "guess what skills the challenge includes". In the ghost challenge above, apparently athletics was one.

As I expanded in my post this is sometimes a problem and especially with social encounters. Other encounters it is actually usually possible to do them in such a way that they players are really just telling you what they are doing and the rolling will, eventually, decide what actually happened.


The skill challenge is to 4e is as the racial level adjustment is to 3.x: The intent is clear, and it's an admirable goal. But sadly, it didn't turn out quite the way most hoped, and often requires a skilled DM to make it work smoothly. I never got good at running SCs, due to giving up after a few tries in favor of the ol' "Role play your character, and then maybe roll a check depending on the situation" way.

Luckily, the skill challenge system is a guideline rather than a rule, so I don't even have to institute house rules to avoid the issue!

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