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I didn't end up skipping a lot of combat in CR, but there were definitely times I wanted to specifically because of how narratively BS advantage/disadvantage and legendary resistance are.
Like I said, to me, it was getting too long... They barely damage whatever creature they're facing, they cannot cripple / debuff them accordingly and the Legendary Resistance is just a way to piss players at this point.
If it was a P2E rule, it would likely have been Flat Checks for the creature to roll.
The worst part about it was listening to the players try their best to pretend they're roleplaying when they're obviously engaging in a meta-game battle of wits against the GM, by throwing out weaker spells hoping to bait Matt into spending all the legendary resistances on those before landing the big one. It took all the fun out of it when you could tell they knew their spells weren't going to land.
Also, Caleb using his turn to light up a cave but it makes absolutely no difference to anyone because they all had other ways of getting advantage to remove the disadvantage of darkness.
Legendary resistances are such a profoundly bad ability. I've legitimately no idea who thought they were a good idea. If you don't want your bosses taken out by save-or-suck spells then don't have save-or-suck spells!
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Legendary resistances are basically the 5e solution against incapacitant spells.
This also shows the difference of how 5e and PF2 handles this situation:
The main difference between both solutions is that 5e puts all the decision into GM shouders making the thing completely unpredictable to players once that depends from GM to choose or not if will put a creature with Legendary resistances into the game and when and if it will use this ability.
While in PF2 the decision was in game design. The players already knows what abilities are Incapacitant and may choose to invest or not into these abilities, also theres a way more predictable situation where when players are facing an encounter with a pretty low number of creatures or a stronger creature with a number of weakling minions they can already suspect that theses stronger creatures will have a level higher than the players and probably Incapacitant effect won't work well against them.
Hrmmm, I'm aging, and I haven't played any of the following since like '07 so maybe I'm misremembering but it seems to me like TORG, GURPS, and Palladium's d% systems all had these things with regards to skills. I'm confident that almost all of the editions of HERO had this for skills. All of these games serviced the fantasy genre, they simply lacked the brand monolithism of D&D. IMO 4e was actually reacting to other game systems that preceded it. Ultimately, the introduction of feats in D&D3 likely galvanized this (along with making everyone realize that some levels were dead levels). One you have a systemic mechanic like feats, the design possibilities increase exponentially (as does the danger of breaking things).4e was the first with a skill system that was not a complete mess and with skill challenges at least attempted to provide a framework for resolution. Each skill had a basic, but non-exhaustive) list of clearly defined uses, with a listed action cost if also useable in combat.
There were some feats locked behind being trained in a skill, but also depending on skill levels you unlocked utility powers you could take. Oh, and you had the 5 knowledge skills with which you could use knowledge checks, of which Monster Knowledge checks were a subset.
Beyond the defined out-of-combat applications of the skills...
Hoo boy, if you guys think that's special, take a gander at The Dark Eye...