Quote Originally Posted by Just to Browse View Post
First, the DMG2 is not the first word on skill challenges (that's the DMG1, with fixed initiative, forced action, lip service to rituals), nor is it the final word on skill challenges (that's the Dungeon Master's Book and the RC, with mandatory Advantages and nothing on utilities, rituals, circumvention). It's hard to say that the DMG2 rules are the true intended experience, because the designers chose to take this flexibility out of the system when given the chance to revise SCs again. As far any of us can tell, they may have considered automatic ritual successes just as much of a mistake as SC initiative.
DMG1 skill challenges no longer feature those things, as per errata. It also bears some consideration that DMG2 isn't a replacement for DMG1, but an expansion with further advice. DMB and RC on the other hand are new basic rulebooks for the Essentials line, and the SC sections are quite procedural. The advantages look like a good way of making a player's options more mechanically distinct and interesting, I don't really like that the norm for failure seems to have changed to "success at a cost" rather than a switch in directions (obviously the sensible thing is that either is possible depending on context), but with the way the Essentials line basically always strove to make everything as boring as possible I'm not surprised that they cook it down to choo-choo tracks. Also there aren't rituals in Essentials.
But to respond to the main point: there's nothing that makes DMG2 advice inapplicable to later SC rules.

Beyond that, the DMG2 applied a few of its own straightjacket requirements, arguably some of the most difficult straightjackets of all. In the DMG2, the designers realized SCs were pretty boring, so in the DMG2 guidance they ended up adding a ton of extra work for the DM:

Restriction 1


This actually inserts a dramatically larger amount of effort into designing SCs. No longer should a DM assume that the game will take "about 5 skill checks" like kyoryu does, where we roll and the DM does a quick narration, then we roll again. Instead, every skill check must change the context of the scenario in some significant way, even if one of the PCs is choosing to just use Nature three times in a row.
This is just saying every roll should be for actually doing something, though. Some of that might be preplanned, but equally it also just points back to the need for actions to be described in meaningful terms in-game. Especially the third one ("Grant the players a tangible consequence for the check’s success or failure (as appropriate), one that influences their subsequent decisions.") is basically a catchall saying actions should have consequences. To "just use Nature three times" doesn't make sense because you have not specified how or why you're using Nature.

Restriction 2


DMG2 SC rules require actually tossing out large swaths of what I consider common skill uses, because it leads to "logic [which] dictate[s] that one repeated skill check is the best", i.e. the DM should obfuscate the mechanics of the skill challenge to prevents players from flogging a single skill over and over when it would be mathematically optimal. Note that the result from the players side is mechanically the same (they roll Athletics), but the DM has to do extra work (they must define what Athletics is in an active way, or they shouldn't include the skill in the SC).
Your interpretation here is just strange, casting the entire text into some kind of adversarial vibe where the DM is trying to trick players into playing badly. It's just saying that framing the situation in a way where the PCs are proactive is more engaging and less likely to be repetitive than one where they're passive.
And yes, of course you should have an idea what the skills you're including at the design stage could actually be used for, that's just how it works. Likewise, it's not on the DM to say what the Athletics check means, the player should not be rolling if it's not clear what they're trying to do with that roll.

Restriction 3
The DMG2 also adds a bunch of structures on top of existing SCs to specifically handle certain scenarios. For example, if characters can "succeed in one of two ways", you are supposed to use a Branching Skill Challenge, which requires tracking two separate exclusive goals. For example, say you're in a diplomatic negotiation. If you praise a politician, bribe someone, write a moving speech, etc, you must pick one of the branching success conditions and apply your success to that (or the DM must do it for you). When one of the goals is met, the other goal is ignored, no matter how many successes were earned on it. If that seems totally ridiculous, consider that "diplomatic negotiation" is the first idea they bring up for a Branching Skill Challenge.
Okay, so first things first: it doesn't say anywhere you're supposed to do anything. It says you can use a branching challenge for a scenario with a multiple possible successful outcomes, and in such a one you simply track successes per outcome and whichever one happens first happens.
You would be choosing which side your success will be applied to when you choose what you're doing. None of your example actions make sense without a goal for your PC to succeed or fail at. Which politician are you hyping up? Who are you bribing to do what? What is your speech arguing for?
As for ignoring the other goal, I'll point to the Stages of Success section, as well as that the rolls for losing outcomes are still rolls that happened, and whatever was accomplished by those are still things that were accomplished. In this case the example specifically mentions either party's success is mutually exclusive with the other. That could be e.g. a dispute over which side a piece of land belongs to.

But the Examples Tho...
I can't read over these now, I'll try to take a look at them later in case there are any specific details worth discussing.

I think if we ignore the actual skill challenge advice in the DMG1, DMG2, DMB, and RC, and base our understanding of 4e SCs purely off the DMG2's example section, it sort of implies a combination of two flexible design tools: progress clocks and level-to-DC tables. And I'll agree that this is a good combination of things. The 4e DMG2 skill challenges, despite many of them being pretty boring, can be used to infer some useful gameplay systems.

But what I don't get is why this "makes it clear" what the designers were thinking. It requries (1) assuming the 4e SC rules were canonically correct in 2009, despite being overwritten within the year, and (2) ignoring the rules themselves, which at times contradicted the contents of the examples. I'll gladly praise Moving Through Suderham for being cool, but I don't think it represents Real(tm) SCs. I'd argue it showcases the weakness of SCs, because the designers had to perform a massive surgery on their core non-combat tool (getting rid of complexity, success-tracking, and XP rewards!) to create a compelling gameplay structure.
I think it makes it clear because they keep telling the DM to be flexible, consider various ways of structuring their SC, cautions to ensure that rolls are meaningful and sensical, that consequences are meaningful and sensical, and then provide a bunch of examples that play with those structures in various ways. You claim they're breaking the rules, I claim they show SCs are meant to be extremely customizable, which aligns with my reading of the preceding sections.

Bringing it Full Circle
I've harped on this point a couple times, but I think it bears repeating: there are already gameplay structures that deserve more credit for these innovations. Fate 2e had an actual, flexible gameplay structures in its Static and Dynamic Challenges back in 2003, when WotC was still working on D&D 3e books. BitD distilled the success and failure tracking systems into the far more flexible Progress Clock system 6-7 years ago. Whether you want to credit the progenitor of this idea or the game that did it best, 4e isn't on the list either way, and its legacy is sullied by the 3-4 functional variations on the system which ranged from literally unusable to frustratingly narrow by-the-book.
I assume anyone who thought 4e's were the first or particularly exceptional simply wasn't very familiar with games outside of D&D. I just think it's a flexible tool that has gotten an undeserved bad rap, and I want to spread my understanding of the game and the spirit of the rules.