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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6829815" data-attributes="member: 1465">You need to be careful however in how allowing this as a default may devalue the Rogue's Reliable Talent ability.Personally I do not allow older Take10 and Take20 rules at all. I use passive checks freely but typically on things that are not important.The problem is that we don't really understand what this kind of stuff really means to the game <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />We're talking about rules that tell when you are supposed to roll, and when you are not supposed to roll. If you have to roll it means that the outcome will be random, and if you don't have to roll it means it will be DM's decision. But in addition, many times the real matter is whether the player's decision has an influence in the first place... and that typically happens before the DM even decides whether to ask for a check or not (after that, the player may also decide if the stakes are high enough so that it's worth expending some resources to improve her chances on a check). The you have stuff in the game with very different consequences of success/failure. You might have:- critical points, where success/failure on a single event directly mean success/failure on the whole quest, PC death, or similar consequences- major points, where the consequence implies significant adjustments to the story (e.g. being captured, having to retreat, popping up a required side quest)- standard points, consequences typically increase/decrease your chance of success later (e.g. getting an extra encounter, finding a shortcut, gaining important information, being significantly wounded or impaired, having to expend permanent or daily resources, gaining bonus items or treasure)- minor points (e.g. minor injuries, minor treasure, gathering non-critical information, build up world knowledge and NPC relations not directly tied to your quests)Personally I think that it's worth to decide your mechanics while keeping an eye on the consequences. I like randomness because I like the story to unfold in ways that neither the players nor the DM (nor the book!) knows in advance, so I would always use checks when dealing with "standard" points, but as the stakes get higher, I might want to decrease randomness and use rules that guarantee you either succeed or you know you can't do it and have to find another way. Similarly, for "minor" points, randomness is fine but sometimes it's not worth even rolling and you can just go for some automatic result (chosen perhaps to counterbalance the recent group's luck/unluck). For example, I generally like to sprinkle hints and bits of knowledge of the world or future things to come in the story, and in that case I would just let the players know, as if they are doing passive knowledge checks with low DC all the time.</blockquote>

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