The other significant change to Skill Challenges in the "errata" is that it's now fixed at three failures, independent of number of successes. This makes it exactly the "Complex Skill Checks" system from Unearthed Arcana (p81, or p85 for the maths, if you've got the hard copy).
The other thing to come out of the En World threads of extreme longness on the subject was that "Aid Another" is incredibly important: a few aid anothers on a Skill Challenge very rapidly change it from "no chance at all" to "sure thing", which is the reason for the paragraph about this in the errata.
It's the second thing which is why this is still problematic for me: the - graph is much steeper for Skill Challenges than it is for normal skill checks, which makes it very sensitive to any bonuses or penalties which the players may have at the time: while normally a +2 bonus means a 10% greater chance of success (not much, but good to have), on a skill challenge, it means much more than that (how much depending on the challenge). This is going to make Skill Challenges a very hard thing for DMs to get right when using in their adventure, especially if WotC aren't going to give any sort of table indicating chances of success in the DMG.
Wed, 07/23/2008 - 4:20pm
The other significant change to Skill Challenges in the "errata" is that it's now fixed at three failures, independent of number of successes. This makes it exactly the "Complex Skill Checks" system from Unearthed Arcana (p81, or p85 for the maths, if you've got the hard copy).
The other thing to come out of the En World threads of extreme longness on the subject was that "Aid Another" is incredibly important: a few aid anothers on a Skill Challenge very rapidly change it from "no chance at all" to "sure thing", which is the reason for the paragraph about this in the errata.
It's the second thing which is why this is still problematic for me: the - graph is much steeper for Skill Challenges than it is for normal skill checks, which makes it very sensitive to any bonuses or penalties which the players may have at the time: while normally a +2 bonus means a 10% greater chance of success (not much, but good to have), on a skill challenge, it means much more than that (how much depending on the challenge). This is going to make Skill Challenges a very hard thing for DMs to get right when using in their adventure, especially if WotC aren't going to give any sort of table indicating chances of success in the DMG.
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