help designing a skill challange [4E]

[Kol Korran]

howdy folks! been quite more active in the forum these past few days.

anyway, in a gaming session or two from now, my party will probably be looking for a lost temple through a swamp. the temple however is protected by a powerfull enchantment that makes those who seek it... to forget it. (the main reason it hasn't been found so far). the enchantment circumvent simple measures such as writing the place name on paper (you'll just foirget what the name means, or "intentionally" forget to look at the paper). however ,there may be ways around it. i just haven't figured them out yet. it's supposed to be sort of "test of will/ devotion/ mind power". i wanted to treat this as a skill challange. i wanted your opinion and advice.

it will be a long skill challange, 12 succeses, 6 failures. moderate difficulty to begin with, but the DC scales as the challange progresses.

success: the party reaches the temple (and the enchantment no longer works on them)
failure: the PCs enemies sent a few of their own mooks and so on who reach the temple before the party, and set out an ambush.

every four rolls (successes or failures) you roll for a "swamp encouter", the chance being the sums of all the successes and double the sum of failures on a d20 (for example- 3 succeses and 1 failure is a 5 in 20 chance). if an encounter happens, the count starts at zero again, if not, it scales. (the party can't afford to rest, because they are on a race to the temple, so each encounter takes it's toll on their resources, which they will need at the temple itself)

every turn, apart from other skills used to succeed, two characters must roll for two tests. these tests are taken first:
- navigation test: this could be done with nature, or history (by the numerous ruins in the swamp).
- memory test: either straight intelligence (easy-mediocre difficulty) or insight, history, religion skills. (mediocre- difficult). however, each time you succeed on the test, it gets more difficult (+2 i think)

other possible usefull skills: athletics, arcana (some usefull spell or such, maybe against the charm?), endurance, perception, stealth (success in the last reduces the chances of encounter by 1.).

so, what do you think? good? bad? i'd love to hear ingenious ideas of how to combat the memory spell.

thanks in advance, Kol

[kc0bbq]

For such a long challenge you may want to add in a circumstance or two that if the players are creative enough to get to and make a check for they don't provide a success, but remove a failure. There's some precedence for this in WotC material, and it's can give them some hope if things aren't going well.

Maybe a way to interfere with the mooks who are also getting to the temple.

[Kol Korran]

interesting idea, but might you have a concrete example? i'm all for the player's actions influencing the world in different ways, but i don't realy have an idea on how yo remove their failures, other than a realy high nature checks (signifying the found a fast way through the swamp). actually that might just count as two successes.
i'll think about it just more, i have a feeling that two immediate succeses isn't that good game wise.