Anyone else hope the rules for taking 10 & 20 see some revision?

[Storm Raven]

What if the DM were your best friend? What if the DM were your brother?

Neither my best friend or my brother is fool enough to ignore simple, time-saving rules in a game.

What if every single game, the group laughed its ass off several times a session because of the enjoyable people there?

Such a group might be found who wants to fritter away their time rolling wads of dice when the game doesn't need them. Mostly they would just bore me to tears.

This is an extremist attitude. There are a LOT of other considerations which would keep me in a game. This is way too trivial of an issue to make such a stink over.

If you don't understand or use such a trivial rule, I don't expect you to be much of a DM, so I don't want to waste my time confirming my impression. I could go and find gamers who do use rules that make the game flow quickly and easily, and game with them.

Oh wait, I already do.

Note: A DM could rule that Take 10 does not apply in that circumstance since the PC is distracted (i.e. worried about being spotted). Would you leave under that circumstance as well? Is your interpretation of the rule better than the DM's?

Given this question, I am left to wonder if you have actually read the Take 10 rules.

 

[Nifft]

This is where you go wrong. You put the DC at 20, they have a 100% chance of finding it. You just have to waste a bunch of time rolling dice to get there.

"I Search"
Roll. "You don'f find anything"
"I Search again"
Roll. "You don't find anything"
"I Search again"
Roll. "You don't find anything"
"I Search again"
Roll. "You don't find anything"
"I Search again"
Roll. "You don't find anything"

And so on, until the players feel certain that they rolled a 20.

90 rolls will give you a greater than 99% chance to have rolled at least one 20.

Hope whoever likes this method has a lot of dice.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Taralan]

This is where you go wrong. You put the DC at 20, they have a 100% chance of finding it. You just have to waste a bunch of time rolling dice to get there.

"I Search"
Roll. "You don'f find anything"
"I Search again"
Roll. "You don't find anything"
"I Search again"
Roll. "You don't find anything"
"I Search again"
Roll. "You don't find anything"
"I Search again"
Roll. "You don't find anything"

And so on, until the players feel certain that they rolled a 20.

The problem you are having is that you think that setting the DC to 20 somehow gives the players only a 25% chance of finding something. It doesn't. Under the circusmstances you describe, they will always find it, you just have to go through a lot of useless die rolling to get there.

I was waiting for that counter argument (which I recognize is a valid one). In fact this is why take 20 was created as mentionned by a previous poster. But this was the worst sort of meta gaming under the old edition that any Dm worth his salt would have never allowed. A few retries.. perhaps.. but never to roll until a 20 was found. Even rabid players would never roll until they get a 20 on every 5' step of a corridor.. they would be slapped by the other players..while on the other hand its very easy to just say that you take 20 all the way through the dungeon if time is not an issue.

At any rate replacing a problematic way of playing (I am not going to call it a rule since that was never one.. heck we did not even have a true skill system under the old editions) with a "better" rule that just codify the problem and now ENTITLES players to claim they can do this is hardly a solution.

No the real problem was always to find a way to simulate that you should have a better chance of succeeding if you have all the time than if you take only 1 rnd... but the way to do it is certainly not by transforming the game into an all or nothing proposition.

 

[KarinsDad]

Given this question, I am left to wonder if you have actually read the Take 10 rules.

Wonder away. You'll just hurt yourself.

Given this response, I am positive that you have never actually read the Take 10 rules.

When your character is not being threatened or distracted, you may choose to take 10. Instead of rolling 1d20 for the skill check, calculate your result as if you had rolled a 10. For many routine tasks, taking 10 makes them automatically successful. Distractions or threats (such as combat) make it impossible for a character to take 10.

Since threats are specified as Combat, each DM has to decide what distraction means. The rules do not specify it.

 

[KarinsDad]

Really, it's only a problem if you make it one.

Good math is fundamental to good rules.

 

[Slife]

I was waiting for that counter argument (which I recognize is a valid one). In fact this is why take 20 was created as mentionned by a previous poster. But this was the worst sort of meta gaming under the old edition that any Dm worth his salt would have never allowed. A few retries.. perhaps.. but never to roll until a 20 was found. Even rabid players would never roll until they get a 20 on every 5' step of a corridor.. they would be slapped by the other players..while on the other hand its very easy to just say that you take 20 all the way through the dungeon if time is not an issue.

What do you mean metagaming? If you want to find your keys, for example, you're going to search again and again until you find them or are absolutely convinced you have looked everywhere.

Do you spend at least a minute per 10x10 room in your house?

 

[Lanefan]

What do you mean metagaming? If you want to find your keys, for example, you're going to search again and again until you find them or are absolutely convinced you have looked everywhere.

Do you spend at least a minute per 10x10 room in your house?

This is a useful analogy.

If I need my keys and glance around for them, that's a roll - I either find them or I don't.

If I start doing specific things to find them e.g. turning out pockets, checking down the sofa, etc., those could be individual rolls by action (preferred) or some sort of Take X, and could take a minute or so each. (the rule stating that Take 10 is the same as a casual search is horrifically badly thought out...a casual search is a luck-based event, and logic dictates that to remove the luck factor takes time...Taking 10 removes some of the luck factor, so should take more time than a 1-roll casual search)

Doing everything I can think of, in total, is a Take 20 and could take quite some time. But here's where the problem comes in: what if the keys are sitting right out in the open (i.e. normally a DC of about 2) and despite all my searching I idiotically don't see them? I've taken 20 (I'm absolutely convinced I've looked everywhere), and my search skill is higher than -18, but I still missed 'em. In other words, no matter what I do I can never remove *all* of the luck factor. The game needs to be able to handle this!

By the same token, there needs to be a mechanism to handle the opposite effect: finding something by sheer luck that you'd never normally be able to find were you actively searching for it e.g. a dumb-like-post Fighter with no search skill going through the motions anyway; the hidden trigger that opens the secret door has a DC about 12 higher than this Fighter could ever hope to match, but he's still the guy who blunders on to it.

Lanefan

 

[LostSoul]

What is relevant is whether a given DC for a given task always succeeds or always fails (in the case of Take 20)

How about this:

The PC can make the check, or not, based on the choices the player makes.

Rogue has Search +8. DM sets a trap at DC 30. DM also puts a book in a library in the dungeon that gives the Rogue +2 to Search to find traps in this dungeon.

The Rogue takes 20 on a door and fails to find a trap. It goes off. The players complain. The DM says, "Don't worry, I wouldn't have put traps in the dungeon that you couldn't find. There's a way to find these traps."

So they get into a fight and capture one of the mooks and ask him where the traps are that he knows about. The Fighter makes an Intimidate check; success, mook tells him where the traps are.

The DC 30 trap was missed the first time but found later on. That's not the same as "always succeeds or always fails".

Unless, of course, we're talking about pure numbers and not actually playing the game.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

How about this:

The PC can make the check, or not, based on the choices the player makes.

Rogue has Search +8. DM sets a trap at DC 30. DM also puts a book in a library in the dungeon that gives the Rogue +2 to Search to find traps in this dungeon.

The Rogue takes 20 on a door and fails to find a trap. It goes off. The players complain. The DM says, "Don't worry, I wouldn't have put traps in the dungeon that you couldn't find. There's a way to find these traps."

So they get into a fight and capture one of the mooks and ask him where the traps are that he knows about. The Fighter makes an Intimidate check; success, mook tells him where the traps are.

The DC 30 trap was missed the first time but found later on. That's not the same as "always succeeds or always fails".

Unless, of course, we're talking about pure numbers and not actually playing the game.

Oh come on, you and me both know that roleplaying the search for anything, be it traps, secret doors, or treasure, is nothing but "Mother May I" in a slightly less obvious guise.

(Kidding, hopefully obviously )

 

[FireLance]

Doing everything I can think of, in total, is a Take 20 and could take quite some time. But here's where the problem comes in: what if the keys are sitting right out in the open (i.e. normally a DC of about 2) and despite all my searching I idiotically don't see them? I've taken 20 (I'm absolutely convinced I've looked everywhere), and my search skill is higher than -18, but I still missed 'em. In other words, no matter what I do I can never remove *all* of the luck factor. The game needs to be able to handle this!

By the same token, there needs to be a mechanism to handle the opposite effect: finding something by sheer luck that you'd never normally be able to find were you actively searching for it e.g. a dumb-like-post Fighter with no search skill going through the motions anyway; the hidden trigger that opens the secret door has a DC about 12 higher than this Fighter could ever hope to match, but he's still the guy who blunders on to it.

Personally, I don't think the game "needs" to handle this, any more than it needs to handle any other event of extremely low probability. It's possible that a meteor falls from the sky right in the middle of the PCs while they are on their way to the dungeon, but do we really need to dice for that? I find that the most interesting probabilities tend to be between 20% to 80%, anyway - not so low that the players get tired from rolling to succeed, and not so high that success is all but guaranteed. I suspect that this is part of what makes the math "work right" at the middle levels - the success rate for most tasks for most of the PCs fall within this range.