Taking 20 Too Often

[Pbartender]

Taking 20 does not take away the risk of failure and doesn't give away "meta-game" information. Even if you take 20 on a Search check and don't find anything, that doesn't mean there's nothing to find...

...Same thing for other skills, such as Use Rope. I can quickly tie someone up in 6 seconds and hope that I do a good job. Alternately, I can decide to take 2 full minutes to check the ties, tighten the knot, and verify that I've done the best that I can. Certainly, if I want to spend more time verifying the quality of my work, the quality of my work should be better. The tradeoff is time.

I think that taking 20 is a brilliant mechanic that helps to speed along gameplay. Maybe it would help to think of it, instead of "taking 20", as "taking as much time as I need to so that I'm confident I couldn't have done a better job."

That's exactly what I'm trying to get at. A failed Take 20 on a Search check means one of two things... either the object you were looking for isn't there at all, or the object you were looking for is there but too well hidden for you to find. Either way, it's now up to the PCs to assume one or the other -- how confident are they in that 30 Search result the party Rogue got when he Took 20?

 

[ruleslawyer]

Is it (re)stating the obvious to mention once more that taking 20 is a direct analogue to rolling the dice 20 times on a skill check?

Sure, if one were to actually roll those 20 times, there would be a 37% chance of failing to come up with a natural 20. But, a) the PCs might succeed on a 19, an 18, a 17, etc. anyway, so the 37% really only illustrates a border situation, and b) that's not really what taking 20 represents anyway. Taking 20 represents the amount of time it takes for you to know you've done your best, within your abilities. The analogy is less to a person searching for his keys and more to someone getting a phone call on the morning after a party from a friend who dropped an earring somewhere the previous night. The friend could have dropped the earring in a taxicab, down the sink, or on the street. You're not precisely sure what the earring looks like. BUT there's a difference between just glancing around your house to see it's there and actively moving every piece of furniture out of the way, shaking out the carpets, rooting through the garbage, and unscrewing your drainpipes to see if it was dropped down a sink. If you've done that, you can be sure that if you could have found the ring, you would have. That's taking 20.

 

[Pbartender]

The analogy is less to a person searching for his keys and more to someone getting a phone call on the morning after a party from a friend who dropped an earring somewhere the previous night. The friend could have dropped the earring in a taxicab, down the sink, or on the street. You're not precisely sure what the earring looks like. BUT there's a difference between just glancing around your house to see it's there and actively moving every piece of furniture out of the way, shaking out the carpets, rooting through the garbage, and unscrewing your drainpipes to see if it was dropped down a sink. If you've done that, you can be sure that if you could have found the ring, you would have. That's taking 20.

A much better analogy. Thank you.

 

[Li Shenron]

For those who hate Take20, don't get carried away by the RAW...

Take20 exists because some checks would make very sense to be possibly tried over and over and over.

Think of Search: without the Take20 rule, a Rogue player could make a roll and get a 5, the DM tells him he finds nothing. Then player knows he rolled too low, and can be tempted to try again, eventually until he gets a 20, and knows he cannot do better. This is of course if the DM considers it appropriate to roll in the open (some DMs do, by the assumptions that a character should be able to guess how good it was at something).

Another DM may choose to roll the Search hidden. Still, the Rogue player could always just say "I search 5 times" to increase his chances. Not seeing the result, he can never be truly sure he rolled a 20 at some point, but still he could choose as a tactic to e.g. always Search 10 times to have a 40% chance of rolling a 20, or 20 times to have a 65% chance, etc...

The PHB just wants to avoid that kind of thing, which is increadibly boring for everybody else at the gaming table, and just say "forget about it, if you are just going to keep rolling, cut it short and Take20".

The "penalty for failure" thing is only an addition to help gamers remember that sometimes you just can't try the same thing over and over. If you are jumping over a pit of lava, you can't go back unharmed every time. But of course if you don't die at the first failure, you CAN swim out and try again

Then of course there are cases where it simply doesn't make sense, such as when retries don't depend on you: a repeated noise (e.g. someone talking in another room, the sound of a distant waterfall) can be heard by Take20. An instant noise cannot (e.g. a single gunshot, a specific name being mentioned by someone in the other room).

 

[Rykion]

As has been mentioned, I generally wouldn't allow someone to take 20 on a listen check. When people take 20 searching they face the risk of more wandering monsters, and I give creatures in adjacent rooms a listen check for each 5x5 square searched. The group is tearing apart a room when they take 20 searching and that can't be done quietly, especially by people in metal armor. Take 20 searches are a good way to guarantee that opponents are never surprised, and the party will be constantly walking into ambushes.

 

[Mistwell]

The hours in the day are all wonky for typical D&D adventurers as it is. We tend to find that we are ready for a full nights rest after an hour of adventuring. At least taking 20 to search stretch things out to closer to three to four hours. I like taking 20.

 

[Thad Enouf]

Why are the players rolling spot, listen, and search checks? My position when DMing is that any check for which failure is non-obvious to the character should be handled by me, in secret.

No offense meant, but I let the players roll. It's their character, their skills, their dice. If they want to search, then they roll for it. Why _would_ I roll for their search? I provide the DC. They either beat it, take 20, or move on.

Failure will always be obvious to the players if they search and don't find anything, regardless of who is doing the roll or whether there is a trap or a macguffin about.

Otherwise, I feel I am playing by myself by rolling my players' skills versus the DC I set up. Meanwhile, I believe the players are simply "chewing the scenery."

Edit: The players I play with can also DM...maybe that makes a difference with players rolling checks. I dunno.

Rolling a d20 a couple of times every now and then at random points during the session (for no reason at all) also helps keep the players off-balance.

This is something I do, as well. I love watching their eyes get big.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

A couple of questions need to be taken into account here:

- Is the complex/building they are in inhabited by living beings that move around? And if so, could they discover the party while the PCs stick in one place?

- Are the PCs under any kind of time pressure?

- Do they have the resources and supplies to camp in the complex? (If neccessary, ask them where they will go to the lavatory - and emphasize the smell if they do so somewhere in the open...)

If the answers to all of these are "no", then just let them search at their leisure and record the time they are spending on it. Though you should point out how nice it will be getting back to civilization after they have spent a week or more in a dank dungeon...

 

[Fathead]

Keep in mind - disarming magical traps only bypasses it for a certain amount of time. If they disarm it and then spend an hour combing the room, it will reset itself.

You can also put more time pressure on them with wandering monsters, guards, etc.

 

[Rykion]

The hours in the day are all wonky for typical D&D adventurers as it is. We tend to find that we are ready for a full nights rest after an hour of adventuring. At least taking 20 to search stretch things out to closer to three to four hours. I like taking 20.

How does taking 20, which makes an action take 20 times as long, increase the amount of real life time before the characters need to rest? Or are you saying rolling dice tires the players out and they want to quit after an hour?