tzor said:
Consider the following: You search the chest for traps. You do not find traps. Were you successful? Well, it was just as possible that you did indeed roll a 20 and there simply were no traps that you could detect at that level, or it could be possible that you just rolled another 1.
There is another problem with the taking 20 philosophy. It assumes that previous failures will have no impact on future attempts. Generally speaking that is false, although most of the times it is false in good way as in "well that didn't work so I'll do it differently this time." Searching, on the other hand, especially searching something you just searched is clearly not something where the fact that previously searching can be ignored or used to an avantage. If you missed something in the first search you will probably miss it again in a second search.
While I agree with this sentiment conerning Listen, I think Search is perfectly fine for Taking 20... Consider what a typical person does when they are almost late for work and have lost their car keys:
First, you go through the house, looking all the usual places... On the night stand, on the kitchen counters, on the dinner table, yesterday's pants pockets, and so forth. In other words, you Take 10.
You don't find the keys.
Next, you start taking a quick peek in the odd places... under the bed, in the sock drawer, behind the fridge, under the couch cushions. You now know that the DC to find your keys is higher than 10 + your Search bonus, so you roll the dice once or twice, hoping to succeed quickly with a natural dice roll that's higher than 10.
You still don't find the keys.
With no other option to ensure success, you systematically pull the house apart... You empty your dresser, drawer by drawer. You move all the furniture aside and sift through the dust bunnies. You hunt through the pockets of the dirty laundry one piece of clothing at a time. You even poke around in the U-bend of the toilet bowl. Just as you're about to give up and go out to the garage and start searching through your car, you find them hanging in the lock outside your front door. It took you almost all morning long and you're very late for work, but you finally found those keys.
That's the sort of thing that Taking 20 on a Search check represents.