Quote Originally Posted by Talakeal View Post
Its not that the situation is bad; its just that the way the mechanics worked meant that it dragged on.

Basically, the ship had a condition track, every success moved it up one step, every failure moved it down one step, and it had to get ten points in either direction for the challenge to succeed / fail. And since we all had right around a 50% chance to succeed on any given skill test, we basically spent an hour just going back and forth around the middle.
As the first thing in an adventure, this probably wanted some kind of mercy feature. Something like only two consecutive failures move you down the track, the first one you just don't make progress.

Fundamentally something like that has to be designed to assume success because, well, if you don't then the game doesn't happen.