I figured combat or challenge would fulfill mcroft's desire to be able to avoid combats in an organic fashion.
I'm not sure your intuition about what was developed at Wizards is correct; I mean, clearly good use of it both involves a high road/low road split rather than true success/failure (actually, that one made it into the published version, even if trap-related challenges tend to be very hr/lr). And clearly you really want to add more to the system to make it work; you want a race against time (so Aids are a valid strategic choice, but can be controlled some way other than a hard limit), or maybe a resource management mechanic with similar effects -- otherwise, optimal behavior ends up at odds with fun behavior -- the fundamental disconnect. And to a degree, the challenges Wizards publishes do follow these rules, even though their rules for making them up? Not so much.
But I'm not sure they've really articulated how this should work -- or they'd have coded something like it into the DMG version.
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Date: 2009-01-02 05:07 pm (UTC)I'm not sure your intuition about what was developed at Wizards is correct; I mean, clearly good use of it both involves a high road/low road split rather than true success/failure (actually, that one made it into the published version, even if trap-related challenges tend to be very hr/lr). And clearly you really want to add more to the system to make it work; you want a race against time (so Aids are a valid strategic choice, but can be controlled some way other than a hard limit), or maybe a resource management mechanic with similar effects -- otherwise, optimal behavior ends up at odds with fun behavior -- the fundamental disconnect. And to a degree, the challenges Wizards publishes do follow these rules, even though their rules for making them up? Not so much.
But I'm not sure they've really articulated how this should work -- or they'd have coded something like it into the DMG version.