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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8738839" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I feel like I did try to say that as clearly (if not concisely, because I'm quite bad at that) as possible. Someone once described my view as "player agency grows from the barrel of a gun" which I found amusingly appropriate. Agency is when you have an ability to force the game state to change in a known and specific way and you can leverage that to your benefit. High agency mechanics state declaratively what happens as a result of your action. In D&D's history spells have traditionally been very high agency, and skills have (when they've existed) tended to be low agency (and more so, if there's no way to push yourself off the RNG to achieve a given task, or we're using automatic success/failure rules on 20/1).A good example of a high agency skill check is the 3.5 Tumble rules around moving through a creature, or avoiding an attack of opportunity. There's a specific number you're trying to hit, and you get a specific and useful ability you can leverage against opponents if you do.I'm following, I would resolve this using actual time and distance as the limiting factors, not remapping those mechanics to checks as it goes.I think we're talking about Eagle's Flight? I'm seeing Overland Flight as an Arcana check and a fixed speed of 20, with no roll to activate. I don't have a problem with this, but I wouldn't measure this in successes, I'd measure in time and distance.I think we're kind of conflating two rituals here, Eagle's Flight specifies that a giant eagle spirit shows up to carry you, so I'm not sure how shapeshifting would help. I also don't really see a need to design new mechanics on the fly here, because we already know a distance and a fly speed.I would find this annoying. The ritual should do what it says it does. We already know distance, we already know fly speed, if I can get there, I can get there, if I can't get there in time I'm going to do something more effective with my time. Perhaps because I didn't know the distance and got the estimation wrong (a mechanic I think should probably fall under Survival?), then I'm going to be very disappointed after I've flown half that time, and come back in time to rejoin my friends, Ankheg-less. If I did know the distance, because we'd just walked from there, I'm scrapping this plan and coming up with something else to do before the encounter.I have pulled out my core 4e books (as far as I got) and I'm not entirely sure I follow that based on the rules listed there. There is no discussion of minor consequences, though there is a suggestion under Step 4: Other Conditions that there may be ongoing effects unrelated to your checks, and on page 76 a suggestion that other skill checks might come up that don't count as successes or failures, but influence other checks. The example skill challenges do suggest you might also lose a healing surge in addition to whatever else happens on a failed check, but it's a little strange that it's not listed upfront.There is also a side note about interrupting skill challenges that suggests encounters that come in to play between skill checks in extended challenges could add to success/failures on the check, but the implication is that these links are probably not causal, or part of the formal challenge structure.I can see how you would stitch this together into the structure you put above, but I can also see how it took several years to get there, if these rules were intended to produce the results you've delivered, particularly when reviewing the examples.All in all, I'm not persuaded this is anything like how skill challenges were routinely run until we got further guidance, possibly with the DMG 2? I will say, the rules are notable less...formal than I recall them being. There really isn't much scaffolding around the X successes before Y failures system, and a lot of that is more focused on how to fit skill challenges into the encounter budget and align them with rewards.But yes, I think we can agree I'm informed about the underlying structure of skill challenge presentation, and I think my criticisms around agency still stand.</blockquote>

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