Quote Originally Posted by Beoric View Post
I think "here's the situation, what do you do?" works if you are flexible about the number and type of skill checks that are necessary to accomplish the goal, because you never know what clever ideas the players will come up with that really shouldn't take as much die-rolling to resolve as you might have had planned. At which point, is it really a skill challenge as contemplated by the rules, or is it just an ordinary situation that you are resolving by a combination of fiat (when the approach will obviously succeed or fail), or checks (if it isn't obvious)?

In other words, what you are describing seems identical to how a situation might be resolved before the invention of SCs, and I don't see what SCs bring to the table.
Precisely.

And that's usually how these SC debates end up, i.e. with the conclusion that SCs are really great, as long as you ignore the restrictions in the DMG, and run them like you'd run a non-combat encounter in pretty much any other RPG