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Originally Posted by Xplo
Sounds like GURPS is a good system for your needs. It may take you a little while to find the right balance between "realistic" and "larger than life".
Does D&D 4 still use 1d20 for skill checks? If so, there's a game design issue here you may want to consider.
When you're rolling a single die, the probability curve is flat; you're as likely to roll any particular number as you are to roll any other particular number. And if your character was a pretty good diplomat, and had to roll an 8 or better to convince the king.. well, there's still a really good chance (35%) he could fail. What the skill challenge you describe does is favor an average. If that same character makes half a dozen rolls, he'll probably make more of them than he fails, meaning that he'll probably end up convincing the king.. which is fine, because that's what we'd expect. In other words, you're making the mechanic less "wild".
Since GURPS uses 3d6 to resolve these things, the probability curve becomes a bell curve. Anyone who's good at doing something will rarely fail, except when that thing is particularly difficult. Here, if your character was a pretty good diplomat, he'd probably have a skill of at least 13.. and instead of having a 35% chance of blowing his roll, he'd only have a 16% chance. (At skill 14, it'd be about 10%.) The means are different, but the result is about the same: people usually succeed at things they should succeed at, and usually fail at things they should fail at. There's no need to make multiple rolls to smooth out the results.
Having said that: it's up to you. And there are times when GURPS recommends making multiple rolls, usually when someone is undertaking a long, continuous action (such as a car chase through San Francisco, or struggling to hold up a heavy portcullis while people run through it).
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Yeah, D&D still uses the d20. Basically the point behind skill challenges is more for the car chase scene that you described and similar tasks which take some time. Instead of just being one roll and done like it would have been in D&D 3E, it takes several rolls.
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To touch upon why I asked about the missile weapon thread which is elsewhere on the forums: If at some point in a fantasy campaign I were to allow people to invent guns or if guns were to become available I'd like the damage from missile weapons to be built on the same scale as the higher TL weapons.