... the DM can ... put a third door and make you roll the dice. Take20 takes the third option away, or force the DM to have a battle or a storm around to justify the call for a check.
The DM shouldn't be deciding whether or not players roll the dice, anyway.
The DM should be determining what challenges and obstacles are present in the world, assigning them sensible mechanics that are sensible in terms of the world in which they are placed, then simply present them as such to the players.
the DM's pre-made decision of your success/failure is not less arbitrary as the dice. (In fact, sometimes I think IMHO that Gygax's love for randomness also had something to do with lessening the DM's responsibility for player's success or failure)
In the game I'm running right now, I could hardly tell you what level most of the PCs are, much less what their individual skill bonuses or various abilities are. As a DM, knowing that is not my responsibility - that's the player's job.
My job is to make the setting internally consistent, and to describe the world as they interact with it. If they decide to try to do something beyond them, that's not on me - that's on them. Things that are significantly more dangerous or difficult typically have signs indicating such, so they're unlikely to blunder into something they can't handle... but even if they do, this is not my fault nor my problem.
If I know that the party's Rogue is always going to open every lock with DC up to 20 and never going to open any lock with DC of 21 or more, why am I even putting those locked door in the adventure? I might as well put only open doors and walls.
Because the world exists beyond the PCs' sight-lines.
I know this is not very relevant for Take20 since normally you just can't retry interaction skills, it's just an example about skills where description matters a lot.
Relying upon the player's ability to explain the character's actions is a slippery slope that leads to treating characters as pawns and making mechanics obsolete in favor of who can fast-talk the DM the best. If the weakest person in the group can play a Str 18 fighter and cleave goblins in half, then the shy introvert should be able to play the Cha 18 faceman and convince people of anything, regardless of his/her ability - or lack thereof - to roleplay in the traditional sense.
Dannyalcatraz said:
In the context of a game system in which the world's most proficient warrior will fail to hit a stationary outhouse from the inside 5% to the time...
Yes. Say it with me: "the d20 is a horrible die, and I don't want to play games that use it anymore."
This discussion, while grounded in D&D, is not exclusively the purview of D&D. The notion of being able to "take 10" or "take 20," in whatever form, in various games is interesting, and this discussion speaks to those concepts even while grounded in the
lingua franca that is D&D.