You are correct that there are no examples of players picking skills in the DMG -that said, there is only one example of play. And in the example of play in the Rules Compendium (pp 162-63) the playes either pick their skills, or declare actions for their PCs which then leads to the GM nominating an appropriate skill. (This is hiow my table did it, from the get-go.)
I think the DMG discussion is awkward. They are also not clear what their skill challenge writeups are for. The only coherent sense I can make of them is as "GM notes" - a bit like a roster and a tactics suggestion for a dungeon room, which gives the GM an idea of what's there and how things might play out but is not a substitute for the actual adjudication of play, so I assume that skill challenge writeups are a suggestion of the likely actions that players might have their PCs take when they come to the encounter, and suggestions to the GM on how to adjudicate those actions.
But obviously others read them differently (I'm not sure how they read them - as specifying a sequence of dice rolls to be made, perhaps, a bit like a combat in which the players have no choices? - but I think they read them differently.)
My method is not outside the RC - it simply departs from what it describes as "typical" and "usual". And, as I mentioned earlier in this post, the RC's own example of play involves similar departures.
That skill challenge is from H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth, in the Well of Demons. I've run it, and while my memory is pretty hazy I think it has big issues as written - mostly, a lack of opposition meaning that it's not really clear why the players are rolling or what their rolling is for. I can't remember now what I did to change it - perhaps I had the spirits try and possess someone, or something of that sort.
I can't remember if the Intimidate autofail thing came up, and if it did how I adjudicated it. I think it's significant that when this was written the rule was 12 successes before 6 failures, whereas by DMG2 this has become 12 before 3. I think that on its own makes a major difference to the importance of auto-fails.
There are other oddities around autofails too. The game is generally built around the assumption that players know the DCs they are aiming for (this is how interrupts can be used, for instance) but keeping autofails secret requires having secret DCs.
What are my views of the wider implications? They hadn't really thought through what they were doing, and also (as you note) they seemed to have some issues with Intimidation. How do I reconcile it? With difficulty. By the DMG2's lights it's a poor skill challenge for a lot of reasons, with the autofail just being one of them.
For me, this goes back to the question of what these write-ups are for. On the only sensible interpretation I can make of them, the injunction that Religion requires Insight has to be read as meaning that Insight (or some similar way of learning that there were no last rites) opens up a particular (and easy) use of Religion to perform them.
Anything else is asking me to interpret this one example in a way that is at odds with the general principles states on p 75 (of saying yes to player calls on applicable skills) and the instructions to players on p 179 of the PBH. Whereas I think the general guidelines are to be preferred over poor (or, at least, poorly worded) implementations of them.
As I've said multiple times upthread, I think that the Duke challenge is on the borderline: secret backstory that will affect fictional positioning and hence resolution, but an inbuilt mechanism for revealing that backstory. I think the Restless Dead, as suggested in H2 and DMG2, is basically hopeless. Not only has it got the Intimidate issue, but it has no opposition, and no suggestions from the GM as to how it might be framed so as to elicit any sort of engagement by the players.
What were they thinking, more broadly? I don't know. Why, in RC, do they give an example that departs from what they say is "usual" and "typical" (but which fits well with PHB p 179)? I don't know. I don't think they've really thought it through.
With both the ritual and the suggested skill challenge, you are correct that there is a lack of guidance to the GM as to how these are meant to be handled. Should you just spring it on the player after s/he has crossed off 140 gp worth of components? I think the natural implication, given other ritual descriptions, is that the GM should advise in advance, but no doubt others would read it, or play it, differently.
As I mentioned already, the main consequence of requiring a skill challenge will not be that it is mechanically harder to get answers (a Complexity 2 skill challenge is mechanically not all that challenging) but to change the pacing of the game, to make questioning the corpse a big deal. Another thing it does which I didn't mention is to give the GM the opportunity to push and pull the players in respect of their desired questions for the corpse, by revealing new information about the corpse and its situation as part of the resolution of the challenge. The game rules would be better if they contained advice on when this was or was not worth doing.
I've answered this question plenty of times on other threads, including ones that you have participated in. (I'm thinking especially of a long thread by Mercurius called something like "Why 4e is not as popular as it could have been".
Here are some reasons:
* Lack of process sim mechanics around healing and spell durations, making scene framing easier (because effects generally don't bleed across scene boundaries) and facilitating "fail forward" adjudication (this is basically the opposite of a system like RQ or RM, where crits impede fail forward and healing, spell durations etc mean scenes never come to a clean finish);
* Monster building charts, traps building charts, DC and damage by level charts, etc, all of which (i) make improv and adjustments very easy and (ii) contribute to reliable pacing and (iii) allow the GM to provide antagonism in a way which is broadly predicatable in its mechanical effects (so the GM does not have to hold back in actually playing the antagonists);
* Fortune-in-the-middle mechanics all over the place, which allow players to mechanically express their conceptions of their PCs (action points and encounter powers are obvius examples; healing surges too, though they are more a buffer than a direct expression of player protagonism) and which facilitate encounter building by the GM (solo/standard/minion; level-appropriate DCs; etc);
* A non-combat scene-resolution mechanics (skill challenges);
* A conflict-laden backstory (see the DMG plus the MM monster descriptions) in which the process of PC building will tend to inherently locate a PC - thus seeding conflict from the get-go;
* A loose backstory which focuses more on "vibe" and the conflicts, then on traditional world-buidling details, which suits the development of details in play using the inbuilt conficts as the skeleton.
* Monster building charts, traps building charts, DC and damage by level charts, etc, all of which (i) make improv and adjustments very easy and (ii) contribute to reliable pacing and (iii) allow the GM to provide antagonism in a way which is broadly predicatable in its mechanical effects (so the GM does not have to hold back in actually playing the antagonists);
* Fortune-in-the-middle mechanics all over the place, which allow players to mechanically express their conceptions of their PCs (action points and encounter powers are obvius examples; healing surges too, though they are more a buffer than a direct expression of player protagonism) and which facilitate encounter building by the GM (solo/standard/minion; level-appropriate DCs; etc);
* A non-combat scene-resolution mechanics (skill challenges);
* A conflict-laden backstory (see the DMG plus the MM monster descriptions) in which the process of PC building will tend to inherently locate a PC - thus seeding conflict from the get-go;
* A loose backstory which focuses more on "vibe" and the conflicts, then on traditional world-buidling details, which suits the development of details in play using the inbuilt conficts as the skeleton.
There are others too, but these are the most obvious to me. It struck me as obvious before the game was released, when all we had were design & development articles. Then there was Rob Heinsoo's interview. Then there was Worlds & Monsters. And then there was the game itself. The influence of indie games on the design just strikes me as obvious, from skill challenges to level appropriate DCs to encounter-based play to the way the GM's role was defined in the PHB (this is departed from in the Rules Compendium, as I think I've noted upthread) to the way monsters are presented in the MM.
That is all.
