Taking 20 on Forgery

[Dog Moon]

Something just irks me about Forgery and taking 20. It is an out of combat skill, so time isn't vey important. Creating a longer/more difficult document takes 1d4 minutes per page. If it was something important a person didn't want discovered, then why wouldn't someone take 20? Okay, so at 4 minutes per page, it takes 80 minutes per page, if it's really THAT important, I would take the time.

For example, in one campaign us PCs investigated a house owned by a necromancer. We killed the necromancer and I decided that I liked the house. I found out the information on who owned the house, all the documents, etc. Then, I forged documents pretending that the necromancer had sold his house to me, conveniently dated shortly before his death. The DM made the check in private, as the PHB says to do, but I said, why can't I take 20? I wanted to make sure the house would stay mine. He looked it over and finding nothing that went against it, agreed that it could be done and I took a 20.

Also, why couldn't someone take a 20 investigating a document. There is no length assigned checking it over, so I would assume that it normally takes 2 minutes to look it over well if you're taking a 20. If it's something important, you would WANT to look it over that carefully.

It seems that Forgery is a skill that should basically be set at a DC of 20 with modifiers of skill ranks and other miscellaneous things which add to it, for both Forging and trying to detect the Forgery. I was thinking about making it a skill that cannot be taken 20 on, but I don't know if I like that. If someone is very careful and spends a lot of time on it, they deserve a 20 and who would want to be sloppy in Forging something?

I could this is a little ranting, but I'm also wondering if anyone uses Forgery and if so, have they come across this same predicament, or am I just missing something?

 

[diaglo]

so can the opposition take 20 to read the forged document. i mean time isn't an issue.

 

[DanMcS]

You can't do it.

The Forgery check is made secretly, so that you’re not sure how good your forgery is. As with Disguise, you don’t even need to make a check until someone examines the work.

The check isn't made until someone actually looks at it. Since it's in secret, you don't even know how well you did. Taking 20 would require making 20 copies of the document and giving them all to the person you're trying to trick, which would sort of ruin the effect.

In addition:

Try Again
Usually, no. A retry is never possible after a particular reader detects a particular forgery. But the document created by the forger might still fool someone else. The result of a Forgery check for a particular document must be used for every instance of a different reader examining the document. No reader can attempt to detect a particular forgery more than once; if that one opposed check goes in favor of the forger, then the reader can’t try using his own skill again, even if he’s suspicious about the document.

You can't take 20 unless you can try again. Trying again is meaningless in the case of this skill. The only way I could think that would let you take 20 would be if you were trying to put a forgery past someone with no recollection, so you actually could try again and again on the same target with old trials not affecting the new trial.

Incidentally, that same passage rules out taking 20 on your forgery check to discover a forgery.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

Well I, in general, dislike take 20 and discourage my players from using it at anytime. In this situation I could see your PC taking 20 on Forgery but I would allow anyone who wants to investigate this to take 20 as well. Also any personal friends of the deceased necromancer would get bonuses to detect this (ranging from a minimum of +5 all the way to +20) depending on how close they were to the person. Again if this house is in a city you then run into problems with taxes, land transfer 'fees' etc. Forgeries of offical documents can easily be detected if the city is smart enough to use different offical seals and change them regularly (ie if you capture a royal seal it may work for a short while but once its theft is detected it would be worse tha useless).

Forgery is a great skill but just because you make a perfect likeness of a document doesn't mean that everyone is going to believe it. It doesn't exisit in a vacuum, unaffected by things and events around it.

 

[Mouseferatu]

I don't think you can take 20 on Forgery. If you read the description, it's the DM who makes the roll, not the player, precisely because you aren't supposed to know how well you succeeded. The fact that the result is supposed to be hidden from the player certainly implies to me that you can't take 20; I'd argue you can't even take 10, though I'll admit that's a much more quesitonable assertion.

 

[Sheng Long Gradilla]

Read the description for the Forgery skill and the rule of Taking 20. A Forgery check is a secret roll like disguise. You never know how good you did the document, so you are not entitled for a retry. Taking 20 works only for skills that allow retries and don't waste anything if the check is failed.

 

[Jacen]

How about makin several forged documents and then using forgery to check how good them are. And all rolls done dy DM secretly? And because it is know that they are forgeries could there even be some bonus to detect forgery check? By this I mean that if you think it looks real one who doesn'tknow you wrote it have to get +5 more in his (detect) forgery check.

Efficiently this is not as good as taking twenty and one must be sure to distroy other trie.

So one is "practising" by writing many similar documents and comparing them in this case to original ones.