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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5069573" data-attributes="member: 22424">Under normal circumstances, it's not an issue. The PC is giving up one of their very limited spells for the day (or a one-use scroll, or a charge of a wand, or...). It's just that in the case of a long-term Challenge like this, the PCs are likely to rest immediately after it is complete, so anything that doesn't have a GP or XP cost associated with it effectively costs the character nothing.You could allow the PC to use a spell like this to substitute a Spellcraft check for whatever other check the PC would 'normally' make for the action (so Spellcraft instead of Craft to miracle up a building; Spellcraft instead of Bluff to use dancing lights as you described, and so on). You can justify it by saying that although the magic will do the 'heavy lifting', a lot of the fine work is going to depend on how well the character casts the spell.In general, it is my feeling that most spells should actually give a bonus to the related skill, rather than simply being automatic. There are little hints of this here and there (eg find traps), but it should be the general case. Amongst other things, this would help avoid the spellcasters rendering the Rogue obselete as the party gains levels. But, again, another conversation for another day.#1 is covered above. There is definitely an issue that players would expect their high level spellcasters to be able to do these things quickly and easily; I'm not 100% certain there is a good fix for it.#2 you'll probably find isn't as much of an issue as you suspect. The players will find ways to apply their best skills to the Challenge. If they don't, they'll probably look for other ways to contribute - just be flexible in allowing these and you should be fine.I think #3 is best tackled by describing the partial successes and failures as you go. It's perhaps worth building in opportunities for the PCs to work with those to gain extra successes or negate failures. (But be careful - if you make it too easy to negate failures, you might as well just give them an automatic 'win' on the Challenge as a whole. It's usually best to give out an extra success or two instead.)I'm very much in favour of telling the players the base DC at the outset, especially if you're then willing to let them accept a +5 DC penalty for the shot at a "double success". That really puts them in control of what they're doing, and lets them make interesting choices.(For a 'chase' Challenge, I might allow the two parties to bid for specific DCs, representing more difficult but faster routes/maneuvers. But I haven't yet thrashed out all of the details.)Good move. Even better if you don't tie everything down ahead of time, so can be extra flexible - players have a habit of surprising DMs. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />If you find one, let us know. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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