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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jasin" data-source="post: 3378949" data-attributes="member: 7531">Taking 20 on the bedpost takes 2 minutes. Taking 20 on even a 10' x 10' room (a rather smallish room, as rooms in D&D go) would take 8 minutes. In a game where powerful spells last in minutes, it is very much worth the effort.Of course, you could just clear out the dungeon/temple/cave/whatever completely and then systematically take 20 everywhere, but then, you can do that even with descriptive searching. "They're all dead. We search everywhere. Everywhere."Do you think it works like that in the real world? Do you think a secret service agent or a career criminal couldn't hide something so well that an ordinary person simply couldn't find it, because it's not a skill they live by?And D&D characters are like secret service agents and career criminal and better.I agree, but even though having a skill for everything does encourage the abstract approach, ultimately, if the DM and the players want the game to be more descriptive and less abstract, they should be more descriptive and less abstract.For the specific cases, "I bluff the guard" is too much for me. Tell me what you say, and your roll (modified if appropriate) will decide whether he buys it."I search for traps" is just fine, since I don't expect people I play with to know the first thing about searching for traps, and neither do I. But if someone wants to get more specific for colour, that's great. "I slowly tap on the door from top to bottom listening for" &c. &c. won't let you find the trap without a roll, but hey, it won't get you killed without a roll either because I decided that's the wrong way to go about it, so I guess that's even."I solve the puzzle" is something I have never, ever seen allowed or expected. We've had a great puzzle last week in our first Savage Tide session (Dungeon adventure, so one would guess this is as close to "default" D&D as possible) and while knowledge skills possibly could have provided more information/clues, ultimately the puzzle had to be solved by player thinking. But then, that was a great puzzle, one that's obvious and puzzling at the same time, so anyone can reasonably solve it, rather than something that's hard for the players, but is just an application of a skill. With a "puzzle" like that, the DM shouldn't be surprised when the players expect to use the skill in question to solve it.</blockquote>

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