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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6370685" data-attributes="member: 1465">I like that there is no official rule about this too.Personally I often think that allowing retries "because they are realistic" conflicts with the total lack of realism of skill checks being random in the first place. If you are trying to break down a door or solve a puzzle in real life, there is really no randomness in whether you are inherently capable of succeeding or not. What is "random" from your perspective, is rather external factors you have no controls over. External factors include for example mental distractions, physical intrusions, and variations of the target (i.e. "this one wooden door happens to be casually sturdier/weaker than how wooden doors normally are").Retrying cancels the effect of those external factors, so all you have to ask yourself is whether you want to have those factors in your game or not, and mostly it becomes a matter of narrative, because those factors randomize your story. This is what I believe was the original reason for including dice rolls in D&D 40 years ago: Gygax and Arneson decided they wanted the story to be (partially) randomized.So if you allow infinite retries, just know that you are removing randomness from that type of story element, being it "breaking down doors", "picking locks", "solving puzzles" or whatever (most likely, you are not allowing retries on everything, so other story elements remain random of course). If this is your preference, then really you can save time and effort by just using Passive Checks (i.e. Take 10 or Take 20) all the time, without even asking for a dice roll.Otherwise, if you do ask for dice rolls, it's better to disallow retries, and possibly even disallow other PCs to try the same thing. Once again, you'll save time and effort.Intermediate solutions such as "only N retries" or cumulative penalties don't really remove randomness, they simply increase success chances, which is something you can also achieve by lowering DC if this is the intent... but it's not usually the intent, so IMHO intermediate solutions are again a waste of time and needless complexity.Situational solutions instead can be good (e.g. conditioning retries to being unthreatened), but you have to really understand what you're doing, because inevitably you'll end up allowing these to some skills but not to others, and there are skills which you rarely use while threatened or it is at least uncommon to be threatened etc... That is just to say, you'll be effectively again removing randomness to some story elements while you still have it for other story elements! And that's what you really should think about in the end if you want to end with satisfying results: what parts of the story you want random or deterministic, and not "realism".EDIT: to rephrase my last sentence... you should ask yourself stuff like "do I want lockpicking to be a randomized part of the story, or do I want it to be deterministic?" and depending on your answer, see what rule you should use (do not instead ask your self "what is the most realistic rule for lockpicking")</blockquote>

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