Take 20 on Aid Another?

[Jimlock]

[MENTION=12460]airwalkrr[/MENTION]!!! We've been defeated!!!!

RC p10:

AID ANOTHER FOR SKILL CHECKS
You can help an ally achieve success on a skill check by using aid another. In cases when a skill restricts who can achieve certain results, you can’t use aid another to grant a bonus on a task that your character couldn’t achieve alone. A character who doesn’t have the trapfinding class feature, for instance, can’t use aid another to help a rogue on a Disable Device check to find a magic trap.
When you’re able to aid another on a skill check, you do so by making the same kind of skill check, taking the same amount of time that the skill check normally requires. You must roll for the check—you can’t take 10 or 20. If the result of your check is 10 or higher, the ally you’re helping receives a +2 bonus on the skill check.

No matter my defeat in respect to RAW...

I STILL believe that:
Giving a +2 bonus to a guy being helped by another to complete a task with repeated attempts and without risk of failure is only natural....

I evoke p30 of DMG, I name this a "favorite circumstance" and the one being helped gets his +2 anyway...

 

[Greenfield]

The Take 20 rule presumes that if you rolled 20 times, you would get a 20 in there someplace. Mathematically that isn't guaranteed, but it's still the rule, and it's there to save player time (not necessarily character time). The character still has to take the time and try over and over again.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

I disagree with the assertion that taking 20 is twenty times more difficult. The task has the same difficulty whether you take 20 or not. The DC is unchanged.

Exactly.

"Taking 400" is preposterous, and has no bearing in the rules.

Taking 20 on Aid Another checks is perfectly fine, and if you do it while the person you're helping is also taking 20, it still only takes 20 times the normal amount of time.

 

[Arrowhawk]

Exactly.

"Taking 400" is preposterous, and has no bearing in the rules.

Taking 20 on Aid Another checks is perfectly fine, and if you do it while the person you're helping is also taking 20, it still only takes 20 times the normal amount of time.

You aren't understanding the basic math involved.

And FYI, I didn't say the task was 20 times more difficult, I said it's' 20 times more difficult for both characters to get a 20 at the same time.

You need to process what that means in terms of probability.

 

[Greenfield]

Exactly.

"Taking 400" is preposterous, and has no bearing in the rules.

Taking 20 on Aid Another checks is perfectly fine, and if you do it while the person you're helping is also taking 20, it still only takes 20 times the normal amount of time.

The person Aiding needs to "Take 20" once for each time the primary person attempts the check. Since "Take 20" presumes that you are, in essence, attempting 20 times, that's 20 x 20, or 400.

So yeah, in essence your time consumed is 400 times longer than a single check. Try it and see. Roll a D20 with each hand, and count how many times it takes to roll 20s on each at the same time.

On average, you'll get a single 20 once every twenty rolls. On average, you'll get the double 20 once in 400 rolls.

Now, let's assume that it's only the person Aiding who takes 20, and the primary worker isn't. The primary worker still needs to make a skill check once for each of the 20 checks in the "Take 20" of the aiding person. So the Aid might get his 20 on a check when the primary person rolled lousy. Dice work that way sometimes.

So it still takes more than 20 times as long. It takes 20 times as long *times* the number of times it takes for the primary to roll well enough to succeed with the Aid of another. And if they can't succeed without that +2, it means that they need a 19 or higher, so they're pretty much doing a Take 20 of their own anyway. Which brings us back to "Take 400". (You want to argue for "Take 380", I won't fight you. It's still ridiculous.)

But the whole thing can be simplified nicely.

The rules say you can't "Take 10" or "Take 20" when aiding another on a skill check. That should settle it. (Not that I believe it will, of course.)

 

[Arrowhawk]

I disagree with the assertion that taking 20 is twenty times more difficult. The task has the same difficulty whether you take 20 or not. The DC is unchanged.

And I am not arguing that it takes twenty rolls for two people to roll a 20 at once because I don't believe that the Taking 20 rule follows the assumption that any rolling is taking place at all. It simply follows the assumption that you are taking your time. As I said, if we were really talking about literally rolling until you received a 20, it might take longer or less time than taking 20. So the Taking 20 rule is there so you don't have to bother with the rolling or finding out how much time it takes. The task just takes twenty times as long.

To be clear, I assume we're talking about a situation where you need two characters to get a combined 40 (two 20's) on a skill check. This means you're needing them to both roll a 20 on the same attempt. If so, then you're off the mark on a bunch of things here. If not, then disregard.

1) Nobody said anything about DC. The DC doesn't change. Take 400 specifically is in reference to the situation were both people need the same result at the same moment in time ...in this case a 20. That happens on a 1/400. Hence the Take 400.

2) The Take 20 rule and the Take 10 rule operate under completely different mechanics. The T10 is about the result you get if you can focus without distraction. It has nothing to do with the time involved because you only perform the task once.

3) The Take 20 rule operates under the assumption you can retry the task as many times as you want. It has nothing to do with focus, but the ability to retry the task with no change to the conditions between each attempt. The T20 rule absolutely requires that you attempt the task 20 times because the time involved is equal to 1 attempt x 20 retries. If a single task takes 1 second...then it takes you 20 seconds to T20. If it takes five minutes, then it takes you 100 minutes to T20.

4) T20 absolutely follows the assumption that rolling is taking place. It's just an agreement to fast-forward the time index to the point after you've tried twenty times.

As I said, if we were really talking about literally rolling until you received a 20, it might take longer or less time than taking 20. So the Taking 20 rule is there so you don't have to bother with the rolling or finding out how much time it takes.

Exactly right. The game provides a shortcut so we don't force you to physically roll. If my math is correct there is a 64% chance of getting one 20 in twenty rolls ( and a 63% of getting two 20's in 400 rolls). So WotC says we'll trade you that 64% and physically rolling twenty times for a guaranteed 20.

Is it meant to be real life? No. It's an abstraction for playability. Players pay a little more in probability for a sure thing of not running into the situation where it takes them a lot more than twenty rolls to get one 20, and as Vegepygmy suggests, bores everyone to death. Believe me, Take 400 would be an even better trade off in exchange for two 20's, given a worse case scenario.

You wanna go for three 20's at the same time?

 

[Ranger19k]

If the conditions were right (no penalty for failure and all the time in the world), would anyone here really make both characters roll the dice 400 times to give them the success? My god that would suck. I hope you have a lot of cold beer around your table to keep folks occupied.

 

[Greenfield]

If you read the SRD, it makes it pretty clear.

Taking 20:When you have plenty of time (generally 2 minutes for a skill that can normally be checked in 1 round, one full-round action, or one standard action), you are faced with no threats or distractions, and the skill being attempted carries no penalties for failure, you can take 20. In other words, eventually you will get a 20 on 1d20 if you roll enough times. Instead of rolling 1d20 for the skill check, just calculate your result as if you had rolled a 20.
Taking 20 means you are trying until you get it right, and it assumes that you fail many times before succeeding. Taking 20 takes twenty times as long as making a single check would take.
Since taking 20 assumes that the character will fail many times before succeeding, if you did attempt to take 20 on a skill that carries penalties for failure, your character would automatically incur those penalties before he or she could complete the task. Common “take 20” skills include Escape Artist, Open Lock, and Search.

(Emphasis mine)
To Take 20 means taking 20 shots at it.

If two people are taking 20 shots at it, and they need to each get their 20 on the same roll, that's going to be an average of 400 rolls.

Am I going to sit back and make my players roll 400 times? Only if they're foolish enough to try.

A job with that level of difficulty should probably be handled by some means other than sheer stubbornness.

What I won't do is hand-wave a success where success is nearly impossible. There's a reason why some things have a high DC. They're supposed to be hard. If they aren't a challenge, then why assign CR's to them, and/or hand out EXP for them.

And if I plan to hand-wave a given challenge, I won't make the DC so high they need to "Take 400" to get past it. I don't punish my players for my poor planning, but I don't reward them for theirs.

 

[Arrowhawk]

. And I don't believe this part:

Originally Posted by Greenfield
"Take 20" theoretically means "take every number, including 1, to get a 20".

I don't think that is the theory of it at all. If it were, the rule wouldn't be logical.

At first I wasn't sure what Greenfield was trying to say here because of how he worded it...but I have a theory. Apologies to Greenfield if I'm wrong:

The Take 20 mechanic could be used with any single number when rolling one d20. For instance, if you wanted to roll a 13, for whatever reason, you could still use the Take 20 rule. Statistically, 13 is no different than 20. Both have exactly the same probability of coming up. So if you are taking 20, you are essentially taking any number you want and thus taking every number from 1-20. This is why he says you are "taking every number, including 1."

When you consider that "1" is one of the numbers we have to accept in the T20 rule...this means there can be no chance of "critical failure" with the skill check...because T20 would mean you suffered it.

Pretty clever Greeny. I'm going to have to keep my eye on you.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

The person Aiding needs to "Take 20" once for each time the primary person attempts the check.

Citation, please?

Or, rather, review the rules on taking 20. At the end of a Take 20 Aid Another attempt* (which takes 20 times as long as a single Aid Another attempt), you are treated as having rolled a 20 on your check to Aid Another.

If you are attempting to do something which takes a standard action, it therefore takes 20 rounds - 2 minutes - to Take 20 on that thing.

And Take 20 does not assume any rolling. Rather, it assumes "fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, ..., fail, result as if you had rolled a 20."

It in no way assumes that you, in practice, roll every number - elsewise, if you take 20 at something you would have succeeded at on a roll of a 1, why don't you automatically succeed after a single round?

And folks, I know statistics; let's not start waving math credentials around at each other. The 400 rolls thing is ridiculous.

* Putting aside, for the moment, the Rules Compendium change that you cannot Take 20 on an Aid Another attempt.