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I think any objection to using healing surges as cost for failure are really because it's usually somewhat flat. It doesn't offer much fiction or suggest additional complications other than, "We're down slightly on resources next encounter." A lot of DMs don't offer much beyond "lose a surge." A failure is an awesome opportunity to up the ante in an interesting way in addition to losing a surge.

This is why I prefer the format I use:

Complications: Fear of Rhashaak, Ill Omens, Impossible Demand, Limbic Brains, Potential Challengers, Racial Enmity, Shamanic Opposition, Test of Worth

Consequences (player choice): Curse of Scalerot, Head on the Block, Mark of Rashaak, Vicious Beating

I never write a single skill down in my skill challenges. (To be fair, I used to.) To me, that's suggesting to the players how they should solve their problems and this doesn't fit with my style. I create challenges, not the solutions to those challenges. I hit them with a Complication in the larger context of their challenge. It's up to them how they deal with it and what skill they use. I think it's cheap to call for things like group Endurance checks or Athletics checks to overcome a given challenge. Maybe that's not how they want to deal with that given fictional complication. By confining their choices to a given skill ahead of time, I am taking away their agency in some regards. If I do call for a group check, it's because they've indicated they're working together on a given Complication to resolve it and I would still not confine it to a single skill.

As for Consequences, I don't usually write down what the mechanical penalty will be either. I just write some ideas, as above, that the player can choose based upon the fictional context at that time. Failed to deal with Shamanic Opposition? Well, now you've got the Curse of Scalerot. What does that mean? I don't know. But I bet the player has a good idea if it means a loss of surges or not. And if he suggests that, then I know I've got buy-in.

Of course other PCs can take the hit by using alternative skills, but that only increases the problem Centauri and Isertith describe. Not only did they make a boring skill check that leads to a boring result, but now they made that roll for nothing since their fellow PCs would automatically remove the penalty anyway.

Just to clarify, just like Iserith I don't remove the healing surge penalty completely. When it makes sense to remove a healing surge on a failed check, such as for example when crossing a river and failing an Athletics check, I still do so. I just add something more exciting to it as well.

Note btw that I have never been a big fan of wilderness track skill challenges, especially when there is no time preasure. With stuff like bags of holding and rituals like Create Campsite and Endure Elements the terrain must be dangerous indeed for to pose any realistic challenge to a prepared party. Furthermore, environmental challenges can usually be avoided if you have the time. Even if the PCs get lost, it could take days before the PCs get into any serious trouble and while in RL the consequence of failing survival is death, I rarely run the type of campaign where I want my PCs to die to dehydration, hunger or disease If I want to expand the journey a bit beyond a three line description I might add an encounter or two (random or otherwise) that have individual consequences but not towards any overarching goal of survival.

Feb 7, 2013 -- 5:11AM, babcock3030 wrote:

If I have a challenge that requires 8 or 10 successes, does that mean I need 8 or 10 separate obstacles? Or can I say, "well 3/5 players passed the check, so that's 2 successes." Or would it be 3? How do you tend to handle that?

Personally I don't care about defining the exact number of checks beforehand. In my experience that only results in DMs and players looking for checks even though narratively the challenge already reached its conclusion or DMs and players cutting the challenge short even though there are still obstacles to overcome. Still, a good guideline in my experience is that the complexity of a challenge roughly equals the number of distinct scenes to keep the narrative and pacing appropiate with potential repeating intermittent group checks counting as 1 scene. In other words, if you want the trip to be difficult and taking a lot of time, you could pick a Complexity of 4 and then design 3 distinct obstacles to overcome during the trip and add a generic group check after each distinct scene. In general, overcoming a challenge would require about 2 to 3 checks which results in a total of 8 (more or less depending on the number of failures).

Mind you, I don't use experience anymore and hence never start an encounter design with defining the complexity of a skill challenge. Instead, I look at what makes narratively sense. For example, some time ago the PCs kidnapped/freed a kid and fled with him while being chased down by the local thieves' guild. A look at the map of the city and its surroundings showed that it made sense to detail a scene/obstacle for each distinctly different "neighborhood" (and this included not just city neighborhoods but also a bay and a stretch of wilderness). There were three logical paths, each four neighborhoods long (including the starting palace district). PCs picked a path they thought fitted their skills best. Individual obstacles had their own direct consequences, including a potential fight or two with the thieves hot on their trail, but also potentially long drawn out negotiations with the Captain of the Guard, nearly drowning in the bay or causing an accident in the foundry and so on. If they screwed up completely, the thieves' guild would realize where the PCs were going, find the PCs' employee and it would result in a hostage situation. Players liked it. I gave them the map of the city, let them plan the route and they picked what they thought would fit their skills best simply based on my descriptions of the various neighborhoods and started dodging watch patrols and guild agents

Feb 7, 2013 -- 5:11AM, babcock3030 wrote:

If I have a challenge that requires 8 or 10 successes, does that mean I need 8 or 10 separate obstacles? Or can I say, "well 3/5 players passed the check, so that's 2 successes." Or would it be 3? How do you tend to handle that?

I tend to give one success for a group check, when they make a group check, which I generally detest anyway.

Not every success has to involve a separate obstacle. One scenario I like to run is a pair of concurrent skill challenges representing travel trough a dungeon and avoidance of the denizens. When I've run that, several checks will generally be spent on a single obstacle scene, but not all of them.

Obstacles are good to throw out when (or just before) the scene has gotten stale. If someone's trying to figure out what to do, or how to describe a roll, make something happen in the skill challenge. Describe the environment, give them ideas. What seems like an obstacle might seem to them to be an opportunity.