Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 1831390" data-attributes="member: 3424">Another thought about taking 20, from the perspective of certainty and uncertainty in a game. Uncertainty usually adds to the tension and enjoyment about a game. Sometimes, however, it drags the game and makes the players bored and irritable.The examples I can think of are parts of dungeons sealed off behind secret or locked doors. Once the players have explored everywhere else, are you going to make them roll until they can get past the lock or find the secret door? To my mind, I'd rather skip multiple iterations of: "I rolled [number from 1 to 19], do I find anything/pick the lock?" "No, do you want to try again?"and get right to the action. I don't see that it accomplishes anything but wasting time.This is especially bad if the player doesn't know whether he's failed because the DC is too high for him to ever accomplish, and he should try something else, or if he's just suffering from a run of terrible luck. Before 3e introduced the take 20 mechanic, I had far too many games descend into a spiral of boredom because the players just weren't sure.Finally, from a game design perspective (as a DM) I put things in an adventure for the PCs to find and interact with. If the PCs miss out on something because it's behind a secret door that they flubbed a Search check for, the time I spent designing it was wasted, in my view. I recognize that not everyone would share my philosophy, though.</blockquote>

Verification