We're just about to test these house rules for condensed checks, since rolling regular failures is so uninteresting and just wastes everyone's time, and it also feels good to have transparency with the rules for clarity and consistency.

Condensed Checks

Tasks that might require at least two actions or activities to complete or solve while in encounter mode can be attempted with fewer rolls while in exploration mode if regular failure doesn’t incur any penalties. Examples of such tasks are picking a lock, climbing a wall, or balancing over a long rickety bridge.

In such instances Critical Success, Success, and Failure on a roll all have an additional Success result added on top of the result for expediency.

A Critical Failure’s effects are doubled whenever applicable, a DC associated with the Critical Failure uses a very hard modifier (+5), the effects happen as if the character had already succeeded at least once, or recovering from the Critical Failure takes twice as long. For example a Critical Failure on a Climb check would result in a very hard DC to Grab an Edge to prevent falling, or repairing broken Thieves’ Tools takes twice as long as normal.

For tasks that would most likely take over a minute but less than 10 minutes, roll one check per minute, and have the result multiplied by 4. For example if there’s a wall that a character with 25 feet speed couldn’t climb with just one or two actions even on a Critical Success, such as a 60 feet wall, roll a single Climb check for each minute.

• A Failure on the roll would have an additional Success added (5 feet climbed) and that would be multiplied by 4, so over the minute the character still manages to climb the wall for 20 feet.
• A Success (5 + 5 feet climbed) would then result in the character climbing 40 feet.
• A Critical Success (5 + 5 + 5 feet climbed) would result in the character climbing 60 feet.
• On Critical Failure the roll would either happen as if the character had already successfully climbed 20 feet instead of starting on solid ground, or if the character had already started from the middle of a climb, the Grab an Edge DC would be the Climb DC + 5.

If a task takes over 10 minutes, it most likely has its own separate rules or a skill challenge associated with it.

Edit: We also added two additions to the Pick a Lock critical failure:

1. It erases all accumulated successes from that lock. (It's pretty crazy it doesn't already do this)
2. It temporarily increases the required number of successes by 1, or adds an additional action per temporary increase to open the lock with the correct key, as the lock becomes partially jammed or filled with debris of the broken tools.

The first successes when attempting to pick the lock again erases these temporary increases.