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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Empirate" data-source="post: 5393439" data-attributes="member: 78958">First off: if an 8th level Wizard has no better way of getting up a 30' wall without dying than making three climbing attempts w/o Feather Fall, then said Wizard is better off dead. Gosh, isn't Intelligence supposed to be really important for a Wizard?On to your question: I have modeled environmental challenges as encounters before, but if only the PCs are making any checks, it's not really an encounter. In order to assess EL and XP rewards, I'd try and make it a real 'encounter' with the mountain.If you think Redhorn Pass in LotR (the Caradhras fiasco), then there is a direct opponent who uses the mountain environment to indirectly attack the heroes: he/it first uses freezing cold and mist, then heavy snowfall, and finally tries to cut off the heroes' retreat. This can easily be modeled as 'attacks' in D&D, such as by extraordinary abilities that cause cold damage over time, make terrain and sensory perception difficult, and set up something like the effect of a Wall of Ice spell, or setting traps in the form of hard-to-see cliff edges.The heroes basically make Climb checks to progress at all, Fortitude saves to resist cold damage and exhaustion, Reflex saves to not fall into hidden chasms (Jump checks to get over them), and Str checks to wade through deep snow. They can also use spells or other abilities to counter any specific attack, once or even for a longer time. Endure Elements, Overland Flight etc. are good candidates.There's no way the heroes can 'kill' the mountain, but they can still 'defeat' it (by getting beyond its reach), or 'lose' to it (by giving up and climbing down again, which you shouldn't make too hard on them). You could even model the mountain's resistance to the heroes' scaling attempts by giving it HP. Just think about some easy rules to judge how these can be reduced - something like: a successful Climb check deals 1 point of 'damage' to the mountain per 5 points it's better than the DC; a usefully employed spell deals as many points of 'damage' as its level; a usefully employed piece of equipment deals 1 point of damage; etc.You can play out the encounter in 'climbing rounds' (instead of combat rounds), which might each take 10 minutes or an hour or so. Each round, the heroes get 'attacked' once and must either come up with a way to foil the 'attack', or take the damage and move on. They can also do their thing 'to' the mountain by climbing, using spellcasting etc. You can track their progress by tracking the mountain's HP.This way, you should be able to come up with a fitting CR for the mountain encounter, I think.</blockquote>

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