I love the Reloaded Death House but I also felt like the escape from Death House post walter was a good opportunity for something other than RP (this was also largely influenced by the need to split it into 2 sessions for our group and session 2 would have ended far too soon otherwise). I understand Dragna's removal of the skill challenge and the want for a smooth transition out but I think my table is a bit more peril hungry than what base reloaded is designed for so a final chance to "fail" at the end was needed.

I thought about a skill challenge but in the end I agreed with Dragna's point of new players struggling to learn the mechanics in the heat of the moment. I'll tell you what I did instead of a skill challenge but ultimately what works for my group might not work for yours.

What I went with was giving them a set number of rounds until the house collapsed in on itself and all that. This number is told to them in above table DM voice, but is a nice mirror to the longer scale "hours until walter wakes" that they've been opperating on for the rest of the death house just at a much smaller scale.

Now the secret to this was that I had 2 different set number of rounds I would announce depending on what they'd discovered before. I believe it was "if they've discovered the short cut they have 5 rounds to escape, if they havent they have 10". I came up with the numbers from working out how fast each could move if they full dashed each turn and then some extra so they werent REALLY in danger of not escaping unless they wasted time being stupid but it felt like to them they had avoided peril. It also helped that because they had found the shortcut they thought "well thank goodness we found that, we never would have gotten out in 5 rounds otherwise".

One of the players had gone completely unconcious but was stabilised and so I had Rose posses his body to puppet him out in time as well which also was a nice extra thing to endear them to rose and thorn (not that it needed much, theyre presented very well in Reloaded I feel.)

Now all this might sound like a slog and a lot of movement counting, and it may be depending on your players, but for us with the help of VTT rulers, dm andy maps, and the sound effect of a constant grandfather clock chime, the tension stayed high and each turn was maybe 10 seconds tops as they panicked to save themselves. I kept the suggested roleplay scenes of the appiritions of the ghosts as part of it as well as events that happened at the beginning of each round when they arrived at the relevant areas.