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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6283459" data-attributes="member: 1465">I disagree as well with that, but I also disagree with the opposite i.e. that there should be an area of the game where you have no chance of failure/success. This is the problem of a rule such as Take20. Without such rule, the DM can still put a locked door and simply tell you "you succeed, you're a good enough Rogue", put another locked door and tell you "you fail, you're not yet good enough", then put a third door and make you roll the dice. Take20 takes the third option away, or force the DM to have a battle or a storm around to justify the call for a check.You say you don't like randomness, and that's totally legitimate. But just as you can say it's irrelevant to roll because anyway the result is binary, I could say that you might as well be required to roll because anyway the result is binary, and the DM's pre-made decision of your success/failure is not less arbitrary as the dice. (In fact, sometimes I think IMHO that Gygax's love for randomness also had something to do with lessening the DM's responsibility for player's success or failure)The problem with Take20 for something as blunt, description-less and binary as Open Lock, is that it makes me feel like my DM's work about that is wasted. If I know that the party's Rogue is always going to open every lock with DC up to 20 and never going to open any lock with DC of 21 or more, why am I even putting those locked door in the adventure? I might as well put only open doors and walls.Other challenges do not suffer from this because at least you can make the player matter. For example, pretty much all interaction skills require the players to choose what to say before asking for a check: then the DM can decide if the talking was so bad that it's an autofailure, so good that it's an autosuccess, or uncertain and let the dice decide (eventually using bonuses/penalties to steer the probabilities a bit). I know this is not very relevant for Take20 since normally you just can't retry interaction skills, it's just an example about skills where description matters a lot. Open Lock unfortunately doesn't typically benefit much from description (I suppose you can sometimes find a puzzle to represent a lock, although you probably also want to make the PC's own skill score matter) and that's what makes it so dull. IMHO at least some uncertainty of the outcome makes it a little bit more interesting.</blockquote>

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