Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="TKDB" data-source="post: 5878392" data-attributes="member: 6690697">If you're looking to increase player involvement, I'd say set a limit on how much you can take 20 on at once. Rather than just saying &quot;we search the room&quot;, make them narrow it down to &quot;we search around the north wall&quot; or &quot;we search by that funny-looking statue&quot;. Taking assists into account also can help -- a lot of players tend to forget that's an option, so if you set the DC above the result of a take-20 but below a result of taking 20 with a couple of assists, that can help increase player involvement.Also, it's important to really emphasize the tremendous amount of in-game time it takes to thoroughly search a decent-sized room by taking 20. For instance, looking over the dungeon map I drew up for the one-shot I ran a few months ago, it would have taken the PCs over 20 hours to search less than a quarter of the entire dungeon, assuming they were trying to maximize the check result by relying on the one with the highest modifier and everyone else using aid another to boost the check.Even when the party isn't particularly under a time crunch due to story factors, it isn't really reasonable for them to spend whole days scouring every square inch of the dungeon. If the players really insist on doing it anyway, you could require concentration checks for every X amount of time spent on the search -- if they fail one, then they can't take 20 (or even retry a search check for a given area) for the next so many minutes/hours. In-character, there's no way that amount of tedium wouldn't start to wear on you after awhile.Removing the take-20 rule entirely would just ruin the atmosphere in the opposite direction, by making the finding or not finding of things entirely up to the luck of the dice. Or dragging out the game by making the players roll over and over again to repeat the search until they get a nat-20 (which is what taking 20 is meant to represent). It might sound like it would build suspense to have them do that, but in reality it would just get really tedious after the first couple times.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="TKDB, post: 5878392, member: 6690697"] If you're looking to increase player involvement, I'd say set a limit on how much you can take 20 on at once. Rather than just saying "we search the room", make them narrow it down to "we search around the north wall" or "we search by that funny-looking statue". Taking assists into account also can help -- a lot of players tend to forget that's an option, so if you set the DC above the result of a take-20 but below a result of taking 20 with a couple of assists, that can help increase player involvement. Also, it's important to really emphasize the [I]tremendous[/I] amount of in-game time it takes to thoroughly search a decent-sized room by taking 20. For instance, looking over the dungeon map I drew up for the one-shot I ran a few months ago, it would have taken the PCs over 20 hours to search less than a quarter of the entire dungeon, assuming they were trying to maximize the check result by relying on the one with the highest modifier and everyone else using aid another to boost the check. Even when the party isn't particularly under a time crunch due to story factors, it isn't really reasonable for them to spend whole days scouring every square inch of the dungeon. If the players really insist on doing it anyway, you could require concentration checks for every X amount of time spent on the search -- if they fail one, then they can't take 20 (or even retry a search check for a given area) for the next so many minutes/hours. In-character, there's no way that amount of tedium wouldn't start to wear on you after awhile. Removing the take-20 rule entirely would just ruin the atmosphere in the opposite direction, by making the finding or not finding of things entirely up to the luck of the dice. Or dragging out the game by making the players roll over and over again to repeat the search until they get a nat-20 (which is what taking 20 is meant to represent). It might sound like it would build suspense to have them do that, but in reality it would just get [I]really[/I] tedious after the first couple times. [/QUOTE]

Verification