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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lacyon" data-source="post: 4191929" data-attributes="member: 63046">Choosing to do nothing is a failure.There's no good reason why not.9 actions worth, at most. If there are 3 PCs, this is 3 rounds.Depends on the situation. See below.Adjust the number of successes and/or failures required based on the number of PCs involved. "Problem" solved. See below for an example.Each round spent not doing something productive is one failure per PC. Easy peasy.A round conforming to a single, constant unit of time is probably unhelpful in the context of a system this abstract. The same system can represent days of work as easily as minutes or seconds.The party has, in total, 9 chances to act. If five of those chances to act do nothing to avert or postpone the crushing walls trap, they will be unable to escape it. Contrariwise, if five of them succeed, the trap will be unable to crush them. How long each of those chances takes need not be consistent from one activity to another, nor necessarily within a single challenge. I won't complain if there's a standard, but it's not required.To answer your question of how long it takes the walls to crush: 9/N rounds, where N is the number of PCs in the group. If you want it to be a constant 3 rounds, extend the number of rolls allowed when there are more PCs such that X + Y = 3N + 1.If you want to be simulationist about it, you'll probably only want to increase the failure threshold - five successes should be sufficient for this trap even when you have 10 PCs, so it becomes 26 failures before you can't beat it. Likewise, if there's only 2 PCs, they still need 5 successes to disarm it and thus a mere 2 failures makes the end goal impossible to achieve in time. A single PC can't possibly accumulate enough successes without help.But that probably isn't an appropriate challenge for those 10 PCs (or the 1). If you were to design a skill challenge that was appropriate for them, it would probably involve something closer to 18 successes/12 failures. That doesn't match up to 3 rounds exactly, so if that bothers you chunk an extra one success/failure onto the total system.If you're in a situation where it makes sense in-game for one character to do all the work, just have them do it.I've never had a problem with pixel-bitching myself. Whenever the DM wants a particular skill, he calls it out, and we roll it. If we have an alternate skill we'd like to roll, we ask and abide by the answer.No system will ever prevent a DM from inserting pixel-bitching if he wants it.Good on you.If you say so. Most of what I've been doing is asking the group for the highest X roll and telling the PCs what happens.</blockquote>

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