A. I like the general idea of formalizing the use of skills in certain situations that are especially challenging.

B. I think skill challenges should never have a blocking failure condition for the story, ie the continuation of the story should never depend on them. They can be a planned branching point however.

C. Winning a skill challenge should be rewarding in terms of story or material gain, losing one should either deny a reward or result in some kind of suffering (but not an “end of the road”)

D. I typically allow any skill to be used and I also award an automatic success for anything that simply seems like a great idea while even bad ideas can have a roll unless the encounter spells out an auto fail.

E. I don’t always stick to a hard number of successes. I’ll sometimes stop when it “feels like enough” but I keep the hard cap on failures. I find the published counts for 4e were too large and often half as many success/failures are better unless its a very complicated, multi stage skill encounter.

I think the take away from the mechanic is that sometimes more than one skill check to overcome an obstacle is fun, but if its too formalized it can break the flow of story telling.

What happens when failure occurs, other than the loss of two healing surges? The way it reads, there’s nothing to move the action forward besides trying the door again.

I think I would have preferred to see the party lose a surge as a guardian construct or creature was released–which jams the sally port door. The party can fighting their way to the door, simply defeating the construct, or making a run for it. This might also set off alarms inside the tower, alerting monsters to the intruders.

Regardless, the party pays a consequence for failure with the surge, has an opportunity for making meaningful choices with the combat, and still drives the adventure’s progress with the malfunctioning portal.

-Ben.

I am in a similar boat as you, Wolfgang. I have largely abandoned the official SC system as presented–and use skills more to advance the story in some fashion. While I still incorporate ‘Success’ and ‘Failure’–it is less rigid and more fluid. I award my players for ingenuity over all else. That being said, their effort in overcoming something non-combat related needs to be genuine.

“Okay, Matt, I use Acrobatics to bake the King’s pie!” –I never say “no”, but it might not be the best way of accomplishing the goal

Eventually I sort of abandoned them as not doing what I needed. OTOH… Love a creepy tower.

To add some danger to this, though, what about a foe approaching or the like, to add rising tension to the scene?