- Stop the fire and rescue folks: hit 8 successes (though it's a 'degrees of success/failure' kind of deal so getting 7 successes is not a total failure).
It reads more like a normal (interesting, clever) encounter design. So, you have 8 people (or groups of people) to rescue from a burning evidence hoard, you get a check to see it's a 5-round to totally engulf deal, the duke's guard with an elephant are there being ineffectual, some scared maids putting themselves in danger, a fountain at a corner, and the normal game mechanics should just cover it from there. Movement rates, skill checks, carrying capacity, fire resistance, summoned water elemental, whatever.
People don't need a unique failure schedule, because they'll be burnt, or arrested or beaten by the guard, with normal skill failures when doing those things. You don't have to lock skills, just ask players to describe how that helps, maybe they'll see something.
Like if someone gets dragged out on round five from a bit we missed, maybe medicine does come into it. By being resolved in concrete terms, such things become obvious.
But the design in general seems sound, because it can mirror that sort of complexity of options in not too many more words. In a situation lacking such urgency and pre-defined failure modes, like a complex social encounter across multiple NPC targets who get time to interact and compare notes off-camera between rounds.
There you might have N key people to convince, but each failure puts suspicion on that individual across everyone, and suspicion plus more failure means they lock you out of discussions. Each person can be dealt with via normal NPC interactions, bribes or payment, charming, blackmail, diplomancy, or whatever the players come up with. Give them time for investigation of what people respond to, forge things, even retrieve a quest item.
Not so much a separate mini-game, as a separately tracked overarching plot device on top of the regular game, driving forward a set of normal game scenes, only you still interact with it through standard game mechanics as much as possible.
The skills and how hard they are, that's all layed out to give answers to the players as they try to uncover a good course of action. What does the mayor respond to, the chief of police, what does batman want, how do you get the joker to play his part, there's really not many good guys to convince in Gotham is there, get the public on board, editor of the paper, local TV station executive. Something, something. Having the players suggest a few saves a lot of effort there.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.