I'll agree that that should never be a skill challenge - though, if it _were_ part of a skill challenge (say a single scene with a group check as part of a larger skill challenge), your example is a tragic misuse of the system.
Uhh...how?
"I set up ropes and grapples"
"Okay, good call. That (gives you a bonus or reduces the DC, as appropriate"
"I teleport up to the top"
"Great, you auto succeed"
That's certainly one way to do it. You can get bonuses from using ropes. Though it doesn't invalidate any other part of what I said. The point is there is a disconnect between a normal roll to climb and a roll to climb because the skill is in a skill challenge. A normally climb roll might be DC 10, but since it qualifies as a success in the skill challenge, lowering its DC decreases the difficulty of the skill challenge and should be worth less XP.
No where in my example did anyone teleport to the top. Someone made a sarcastic comment about teleporting to the top since the skill challenge was over and the DM just let them get up without a roll.
"Hmm, you're all across - so congratulations for succeeding at the skill challenge, here's your XP."
The point of a skill challenge is to succeed a certain number of times. If you succeed less than that number of times, then you haven't finished the skill challenge yet. Yes, you can hand waive it away when you realize that they reached the "end" of a skill challenge before they get enough successes. But according to the rules, it isn't done yet. In fact, the point is to make sure the narrative doesn't describe them as having finished before they get enough successes. Which is hard to do.
The point of a skill challenge is to provide a mathematically sound framework to give out XP. It explains this in the book. Basically, they sat back and said, "with the DCs as listed, the average PC of that level will succeed at a skill check in a challenge X% of the time. The likelihood of a PC with that percentage chance of succeeding getting 8 successes before 3 failures is Y%. Since the PCs only have Y% chance of succeeding in a skill challenge, their success means something and therefore it is worth XP. The lower chance they have of succeeding, the more XP it's worth."
If you give out free successes, then it should give less XP. Unless it's an encounter or daily power that was used in order to get a free success. Then at least you are giving something up. A rare free success for saying or doing just the right thing is likely fine as well. At least there was skill involved in coming up with the right thing to do or say. But free successes simply because you happened to narrate yourself into a corner seems counterproductive.
I'll note that it's technically possible to have similar misuses with combat mechanics.
This is not the same at all. I did not break one rule of Skill Challenges in my example. Yours breaks a bunch of them.
Sure, some people have developed their own, personal set of guidelines to make sure skill challenges run smoothly...but none of them are in the book.
The skill challenge I wrote up is about equal to every skill challenge in every written adventure for the first 2 years of 4e. Also, the same quality as the ones my DM made up and the ones in all the Living Forgotten Realms adventures.
"Okay, your level 30 PCs are fighting the god of dragons. Along the way you run into a hit squad sent by h(im/er): let's see, level 30, so I get about 150,000xp to build an encounter. So, 50 adult brown dragons (Level 10 solos, 125k xp) and 60 bloodfire harpies (Level 9s, 24k) should be a level appropriate fight. Combat starts, the harpies are all flying 20 squares out, and the dragons are all burrowed under the ground. You start your turn, take 5 fire 60 times. (Everyone goes, some people have resist, some don't, some get back up when reduced to 0, don't, etc.)
According to the rules for encounter creation:
Levels of Individual Threats: Choose threats
within two or three levels of the characters’ level.
Threats in an easy encounter can be as many as
four levels below the party’s level.
Threats in a hard encounter can be as many as
three to five levels above the party’s level.
Unless you are just going to break those rules entirely or you assume that "considerations" can be ignored. Then I suppose that's perfectly valid. I also agree that auras stacking is a BAD idea. They didn't used to. They were errata'd to stack which causes this problem.
Either way, you managed to find 2 other bad rules and exploited them. A dragon with a move action blind without an attack roll was an equally poorly thought out rule. The vast majority of monster combinations wouldn't cause nearly this problem. My point is the vast majority of skill challenges are horrible. It's kind of the reverse.
Wow, great combat so far - who is alive cause they had resist 10+? Cool, now just work through the 25,000 hp of enemies and we'll be ready for the next combat! Hmm, we might have to roll this one out, cause 3d8+3 might sometimes get past your (resist 19).
Ironically enough, most level 30 characters would still survive this encounter with almost no damage. Even with the stretching of the rules.
