(With EN World down for maintenance, I was asked if this post existed somewhere else, so I've crossposted it here in order to share it.)

Gamehackery: a new column on Technology and Gadgets in Tabletop Roleplaying. Think of it as Lifehacker for RPGs. 

 I have two groups -- A Saturday group and a Sunday group. There's some player overlap, but the two groups have very different flavors and agreements.  

There was an excellent three-part article on the Escapist earlier this week on D&D -- It's Past, Present, and Future.  And, as a response to that Ryan Dancey, who was quoted in the article, wrote his own response (whcih turned into a long forum t

 Roleplaying encounters have always been a troubled fit for skill challenges. Many of the things that make skill challenges work to handle other game situations don't work very well in a roleplaying encounter. For one thing, it becomes very difficult to put the PCs into a position where they must take turns and give each PC a chance to act.

 Failure doesn't happen very often in D&D.  It's not really something we enjoy, after all.  Players feel like a combat encounter was close if one or two of the PCs was unconscious and dying for a round or so -- nevermind whether the actual outcome of the encounter was ever really in doubt.  

Here's another statistic from my trademarked "Bureau of Totally Believable But Made Up Statistics": less than 1% of all combat encounters of D&D that are played result in a true "failure", a TPK (Total Party Kill).