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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5301586" data-attributes="member: 93119">I'll preface by saying that I feel die rolls are for suspense only. If you want the characters to climb the wall and cross the ceiling make the difficulty such that you can assume the weakest character can take 10 and get across safely. They should only roll a dice if the situation is dramatic and suspenseful, if the fail something really bad happens. Don't make them do a check  if the only penalty for failure is them taking some falling damage that they then need to waste a healing surge on or an action point to avoid.If you really want them to make checks maybe treat the whole thing like a skill challenge rather than simple skill checks. Doing so will be a little more forgiving of check failures yet be pretty suspenseful and dramatic. Allow aid another rolls for characters that are close by, e.g. a character slips from a handhold but a nearby character catches them and keeps them from falling.Also give the players some alternate but not immediately obvious ways of bypassing the pit. They might have the most athletic character climb across with a rope and then tie it off so everyone else can just climb across using that. Put some sturdy handhold in the ceiling (lest no one be able to make it across) that a character could loop a rope through and the rest could swing across.I've been in this exact situation before, I've come up with an awesome visual for a game and tried to implement it within the rules. Slavish devotion to the rules will too often dampen a cool idea. Getting too focused on what I wanted players to do meant I was just telling my players what actions they were going to take. This sucks for them because the only interaction they get is rolling their dice. I want to make sure my players are more involved them just being in charge of their dice rolls and keeping track of their character sheet. If that's all the involvement players have then I'm just reading them a story and we're not playing a game.</blockquote>

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