Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
A horse is not a human, but they are both mammals (and animals, and have bilateral symmetry, and...). I think, so long as we have words to explain both the differences and the similarities and to uniquely identify the individual items, it should be fine.
Here my argument is roughly: A brick wall is not a brick.

Now, before we move on, the example here (4e's skill challenges) is actually... it has been a long time, so if it doesn't actually work like this than this just applies to systems that do match this description. But as I recall the skill challenge just combines the results of skill checks made during the challenge. It might give you some rules about when to make them but the difficulty is still largely decided in the same way it would be for any other check and your ability to do them is. So you could replace the skill check with any non-DC-based check that outputted success or failure and it would work the same way. You could use the Powered by the Apocalypse's moves even.

In other words, it seems that the DC is actually involved only incidentally in the skill challenge it seems strange to call it DC based. The connection seems to be one of transitivity; a brick in a brick wall, but here we could use stones and get a very similar wall out at the end.