Use the Rules Compendium Skill Challenge rules BUT instead of having clearly defined skill challenges, make entire sessions one big skill challenge, where you have some kind of binary change in the rewards given out (in terms of narrative, gold/whatever, and most notably XP) relate to how many skill successes they have.
Players then know that skill successes correlate to XP so they have a rules based incentive to use them.
Other than that, yeah, stick to not using skill challenges. If players want skills to be useful, I suggest you look at Skill Powers. I find that those do a pretty good job of encouraging characters to take certain skills. If characters aren't happy with skill powers because they're not good enough, consider giving every PC the ability to use one skill power per day (above and beyond their normal utilities) that's an encounter usage skill power, from the list of skills they have trained.
It downplays the effectiveness of item bonuses to skills and ability score bonuses, but it rewards different characters for different skill training.
Skill Challenges are just an abstraction of the type of combined skill checks you already did in every other edition. If you are an inexperienced DM it's a nifty mechanic to easily create set-pieces. And if your group tends to weigh towards dungeon crawling and powergaming they'll appreciate the abstraction into a non-combat encounter instead of roleplaying filler between combat.
But if you are an experienced DM and your group is more inclined towards roleplaying, it's better to just weave skill checks into the narrative and forget about the usual Skill Challenges. But even then you can do awesome things by abstracting really complex things (or repetitive tasks) with a Skill Challenge. The at-will blog has some cool examples
Would you have rather they simply left the undesirable elements without a word? Most of the errata is unnecessary but it's there if you feel so inclined to use it. Unless your group is fond of specifically hunting through Char Op boards you will likely never run into the sorts of combinations that become unbalancing and in that way they don't really need fixing. Compared to the way things used to be where once it was printed it was engraved in stone this is highly desirable. If you don't want to fuss with the online rules errata you don't have to. If you feel that's needed then by all means.
Well, this argument held water up until they fundamentally changed Magic Missile. Ever since Essentials I have very little good to say about D&D and that singular good thing is the Monster Vault. It's my firm belief that the quality of design has gone down the toilet since then.
Your mirth, sadness, attention to detail, apathy, and sense of victimization or self importance are highly unwarranted.On the topic of skill challenges, or anything else about the system, whether its 3 or 4e, you can house rule. I have used the house ruled skills challenge from the guys from Critical Hit, and it works well for me.
Personally, I have played both systems and enjoy 4e more because of its simplicity. The rest of my gaming group still likes 3.5 though. I think it may be due mainly to having their entire role playing experience in the 3.5 system.
Life sucks, get a helmetAdding a new voice, I prefer 4th ed Martial combat and 3.5/Pathfinder Magic, the combat is less "I full attack again" but the magic still seems more open, and well magical.
I despise skills, i tend to forget about them when I make a new character and as a DM I often just use ability checks, things like diplomacy and bluff are all up to player interaction, if a player can diplome* me as the DM the player can pass the encounter, similar with the physical challenges, if the character has some ranks/natural skill and the player has a plan as often as not I'll just allow it, no point disrupting the narrative because they have to roll another climb every 20ft (or how far it actually is).
Well my party make the switch to 4e to accommodate newbies, and for the most part it's for the better.
I don't like the fact that they threw out Vancian Magic in flavor of Ritual Magic. But other wise it's all right.
hashtagsarestupidNah, screw what those two said. Rather, you're the one with the positive position, and I don't see any support for it.
But, just to present an argument, think about it like this: Encounters aren't you, the character, taking a certain action. Rather, it's a narrative device of what happens with your attacks. So, you can swing your axe three times, but narratively, it's going to knock the enemy off their feat only once in any given five minute stretch.
And once you take issue with that, I ask "well, what about all those feats that let you do X? It's all just axe swings. Why wouldn't ANYONE be able to do that? Oh and hey, these over here, they have X/day powers. Isn't that precisely the same problem?"
Long story short, it's been my experience that objections to encounter powers for realism issues just don't hold up-using the same criteria, you'd basically have to dismiss 90% of 3rd edition too.
And some parts of high level AD&D for that matter.
The player characters are some of the biggest badasses in the world. They're masters at what they do.
There, justified.
OH GEE, I wonder why.
Could it be that just going "I power attack" every round is... boring!?
Shock! Awe!
Oh, boy.
"life or death fray" is a sure sign that you are simply against people having fun. Because "life or death fray" means "you must slowly and repetitively grind through this monsters HP. Oh woops, he critted you. Roll up a new character"
At least, unless you play the all mighty wizard! They're magic! They're allowed to have fun. There's no "life or death fray" there's just "I cast the latest encounter ending spell. Now we rest for 8 hours. Oh? What's that fighter? Ehhh.. I'll let you kill a kobold."
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Holy crap, strawman much? The idea that combat is supposed to be a fight for your life rather than "hell yeah, time to bust out the awesome moves!" is a legitimate one. Some people, shockingly, have more fun when there's risk involved — it makes them feel like they accomplished something difficult, rather than just rolling through yet another roflstomp.
Personally, I've thought for a long time that the lack of options between "fighting at full power" and "he's dead, Jim" was one of D&D's biggest weaknesses. There's precious little way to challenge a group without risking killing them outright. The optional damage conversion rules
help out with that a lot, though.
edited 30th Nov '11 3:07:28 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Well, if using a melee basic attack is more effective than kicking a wheelbarrow at someone, you're going to use a melee basic attack. And frankly, that's true in 3.5 even moreso than in 4E. In 4E, you have a finite number of encounter powers, so after doing the same melee basic attack enhanced three times, you're like "oh crap, need something else to do."
If you want terrain attacks, make them. The DMG 2 wildly underpowered the ones available to them, but that doesn't mean that a DM can't improve on them. But again, that has nothing to do with how powers work, and really has to do with how the alternatives to powers work.
Any objection to powers also applies to 3.x feats like Whirlwind Attack. Just sayin'
edited 30th Nov '11 3:49:28 PM by TheyCallMeTomu
Except that "hard combat" and "having interesting powers that are fun to play" aren't mutually exclusive.
Also, Dn D is a game. It's supposed to be fun. So if combat isn't reacted to with "hell yeah" then the DM is a failure.
Though my group went back to 3.5 after sampling 4th edition, I didn't have too much against the power setup. I can't say I fully like them, though, either. Sure, with magic, it makes sense, but why can a Fighter only hit super-hard once per day/once per encounter? What's stopping him from swinging it that hard again next round? It's little nitpicks like that.
I have never understood this complaint, as if rolling to hit is somehow boring. Wouldn't mages rolling to penetrate Spell Resistance be equally boring?
edited 30th Nov '11 5:52:44 PM by TriggerLoaded
Don't take life too seriously. It's only a temporary situation.

My players kept bugging me about implementing them. But I just couldn't figure out a way to make it work in a way that didn't involve a whole lot of hoop-jumping.