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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TKDB" data-source="post: 5879477" data-attributes="member: 6690697">The reason for this is that most other things you'd try to do with a skill aren't the sort of thing you could plausibly retry over and over again. The take-20 rule is simply a shorthand for what you could do roll-by-roll in such cases (and which players absolutely would do if taking 20 wasn't a thing). When there's no penalty for failure, there's no reason you couldn't keep trying over and over until you've done the best you can possibly do, provided you have enough time to do so.My reason for saying it's silly is that there's no good reason that PCs shouldn't be able to bring their absolute best effort to bear in certain instances. If that means that they'll find things that only their best effort could uncover, then so be it. Furthermore, the complaint here isn't really that you can't hide things -- if you really want something to be hidden, you can set the DC arbitrarily high -- but that whether something remains hidden or not is a function of player choice rather than luck. Why should this be based on luck? In combat, it makes sense that chance is a significant factor -- combat is hectic, chaotic, unpredictable. But searching for hidden things? If you have the time to be very deliberate and thorough, there's no good reason that some cruel twist of chance should ruin your efforts.My policy isn't "hide nothing"; my policy is that the game world should make sense. If something is there, it can be found. Because it exists, it can be found. It might take a lot of effort and skill to find, but if somebody has those skills and the no-pressure conditions necessary to bring their absolute best effort to bear, then they will find whatever's hidden. It only makes sense.Now, I'm all for fatigue systems to keep players from just taking 20 to search the entire dungeon from top to bottom. It makes sense that going through such a tedious exercise for such an unspeakably long time (again, we're talking multiple days for even a modest-sized dungeon here) would wear on you, and from a gameplay standpoint it helps to increase player choice and involvement by making them think carefully about what to do. But even still, this is simply a mechanical codification of plain old common sense, and while I think something of this nature would be a useful addition to the rules, I don't think it's a necessary one.</blockquote>

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