After waxing mathematic on my wariness of the 4th Edition D&D skill challenge system, I ran across the DMG Errata. Oh look, they totally retooled the target numbers, number of failures, etc. Because there are so many changes, I’ll just put the relevant, updated text below:

What level is the challenge? What is the challenge’s complexity?

Choose a grade of complexity, from 1 to 5 (1 being simple, 5 being complex).

SKILLCHALLENGE COMPLEXITY

Complexity	Successes	Failures
1	4	3
2	6	3
3	8	3
4	10	3
5	12	3

Level and complexity determine how hard the challenge is for your characters to overcome. The skill challenge’s level determines the DC of the skill checks involved, while the grade of complexity determines how many successes the characters need to overcome the challenge, and how many failures end the challenge. The more complex a challenge, the more skill checks are required.

For an easier or a harder challenge, use DCs from the row that corresponds to a lower or a higher level, and assign the challenge’s level as the midpoint of that level range. For example, if designing an easier challenge for an 8th-level party, you could use the DCs from the “Level 4–6” row. That would adjust the challenge’s level to 5th.

Set a level for the challenge and DCs for the checks involved. As a starting point, set the level of the challenge to the level of the party, and use moderate DCs for the skill checks (see the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table on page 42).

Example: A complexity 3 challenge using hard DCs and cutting the number of failures needed in half increases this skill challenge’s level by four.

This modification, along with a revised pg42 Difficulty Class table (effectively reducing the difficulty of skill checks by 10), means that the death spiral of skill challenge futility now points in the opposite direction: characters that excel at a set of skills related to a challenge now stand an excellent chance of succeeding. The math now looks an awful lot more like “roll some dice, feel good about training a couple of skills, win” instead of “roll some dice, curse your dice, throw your dice at the DM, curse a lot, fail.” Probably a good thing, though they may have swung things a bit too far over.