Thanks for appreaciating my tweak. I wish I could use it in my campaign, but the players might rebel since they are already at third level ...
I like the idea of rolling 2d10 instead of d20, at least for skill checks. Your cautionary words are well taken. What I might do is make it a player option for some skills (like taking 10). Or I might make it mandatory for certain skills, optional for some, and disallowed for others.
My rationale is that some skills might realistically be "more random" (for lack of a better phrase) than others. For instance, JUMP is, in reality, NOT a very random thing. Usually you're going to jump about the same distance, give or take a few inches. But other skills, like OPEN LOCKS, might be considered more random, because every lock is slightly different. (I don't know anything about locks ... but you see my point.) So, it makes more sense to do 2d10 for JUMP, and d20 for OPEN LOCKS -- maybe.
But the best way might be to just to make it a player option in most cases. The advantage of this would be that it allows the player an additional level of strategizing. It would allow the player to decide either to play it safe or gamble more wildly.
As for the idea of rolling three d20s and taking the middle roll, I might use that once in a while, but the thing that makes me cautious about it is that you would practically never get 20 or even 19. I don't know much about statistics, but my hunch is that you would get an even more extreme bell curve effect than with 2d10 (more numbers in the middle range). Might be worth using on occasion though.
