Take 10/20 hate

[Kaelik]

And I never said anything about having PCs fail some pressureless task...I just think it should be possible to fail, sometimes, is all. Some things should be beyond player ability, sometimes, above and beyond some number written on a page. I'm not sure why this concept is so offensive.

You mean like:

1) The DC is too high for them to be able to do it.

2) It's a skill that doesn't allow retrying.

Never said anything of this sort, either. Putting an arbitrary chokepoint in an adventure with an arbitrary cutoff like that is a bad idea. Obviously.

That's your explicit example. You want there to be lock that they can either miss or make, and then, if they mis the open lock check, they can never get the treasure. That was your explicit example.

Well, they really wanted the copper, apparently. I can't even remember the contents of the chest, to be honest. But, hey, now they got to have fun playing in a side adventure that can't happen under a "I can always roll a 20 eventually" scenario.

a) They didn't know it was copper, so they couldn't have wanted the copper, because they didn't know what was inside.

b) That's a boring shitty side adventure that can't happen even if you DM cock slap your PCs with a no taking 20 rule. Because it takes one damn round to break the chest open with a fucking sword. It only happened at all because your players are completely fucking retarded.

And I fully conceded that wanting options is merely a matter of opinion; I can make no compelling argument as to what someone else's opinion should be. If you don't want options, that's fine with me.

No dumbass retard. You are the one removing options. You want shitty options, so you are removing good options and adding one shitty option.

Possible results of no take 20 rules:

1) They open the door quietly in six seconds.
2) They break the door down in 12 seconds.
3) They fail to open it, don't want to break it down, and leave with nothing.

Possible results of take 20 rules:

1) They open the door quietly in six seconds.
2) They open the door quietly in 120 seconds.
3) They break down the door in 12 seconds.
4) They fail to open it, don't want to break it down, and leave with nothing.

Take 20 rules objectively add more options, than your attempt to declare that no skill check can ever be retried.

[Doom]

>>If it's a single move, then you take 20, and the +5 guys simply comes up with a better move than the +4 guy. <<

Awesome, that's the key point!

And then back to thinking it's a game. Back to just not understood at all, despite the repeated "not a game" statements. At least you get that, indeed, the guy with the +5 can take 20 and always get a better move. You're fairly close, but it's ok to give it up already, it's not that important, really.

[Kaelik]

Let's have some more fun with another approach at considering what "take 20" means in a world:

Case (1) What can happen is completely determined by character ability.

In this situation, suppose a character of a certain ability has a 5% chance of kicking down a particular door when he tries to do so. Under "take 20", he just kicks repeatedly until the particular door collapses, and take 20 makes sense here.

Case (2) What can happen is completely determined by the structure of the universe.

In this situation, suppose 5% of doors have structural defects so that a character of a certain ability can kick them down, and doors are either defective in this way, or not at all. Now, if I use "take 20", the character is actually manipulating the fabric of the universe with each kick, eventually getting a universe where the particular door he's at is of the defective sort. This, to me, is ridiculous. When he tries to kick the door down, and makes the roll, he's fixing the universe, and should have to deal with the universe, rather than manipulate reality. In my opinion.

Now, in both cases, when a character comes up to a door, he has a 5% chance of being able to kick it down in one round (please, for the love of all that's holy, let's not bring in battering rams or whatever, and instead focus on the actual example).

Both of these cases are equally ridiculously extreme, and the reality is, worlds are a mixture of these two cases, but 'take 20' assumes case 1 is all there is.

In my opinion, I prefer a world where character abilities matter, but not to the point they bend all reality around them. I prefer a rules system where whether a person can kick down a door depends on the person, AND the door, and I want that person to sometimes have a chance, not necessarily 0 or 1, which are basically the only options of the take 20 system. (note: there are absolutely situations where 0 or 1 are reasonable probabilities, I just like sometimes to have other numbers, although I concede I have no compelling reason why you should do so as well).

A 'take 20' system makes it all about the person, and makes the chance either 0% or 100%, with nothing in between.

The initial idea of this thread was to discuss why people can have 'hate' for take 10 and take 20, and that's what I've been addressing here. Take 20 drains randomness, causes weird quirks that don't jive with reality, and, ultimately, changes the nature of the game in ways that some people don't much like.

Or, if you want their to be a 5% chance that the door is fucking unbreakable, roll a goddam percentile die and 5% of the time you can set the fucking DC to infinity.

Once again. When someone rolls a d20, they are not setting the world around them, they are setting their own actions. The world around them already exists.

When a Fighter rolls an attack roll, he's not rolling to see if his sword is capable of hitting his opponent, he is rolling to see if it does right now. It doesn't magically set the AC of his opponent at the moment of his swing. The AC already exists, and sometimes you hit it, and sometimes you don't.

The DC of picking the lock is set, and sometimes you get it, and sometimes you don't. But failing to get it doesn't change the DC, and it's possible to retry, because that's what "retry: Yes" fucking means.

>>If it's a single move, then you take 20, and the +5 guys simply comes up with a better move than the +4 guy. <<

Awesome, that's the key point!

And then back to thinking it's a game. Back to just not understood at all, despite the repeated "not a game" statements. At least you get that, indeed, the guy with the +5 can take 20 and always get a better move. You're fairly close, but it's ok to give it up already, it's not that important, really.

No if it's a single move, you can't take 20, because you can't tell the difference between a successful move and a failed one without waiting for your opponents move.

YOU CAN'T TAKE 20 ON A FUCKING CHESS MOVE YOU DUMBASS!

[Doom]

Absolutely, which is why I don't bother with that, either. If it's a sure thing, it's a sure thing, just do it and move on already.

How is this any different from "I take 20?"

The difference is, instead of sitting for five seconds and staring at the players until someone says "I take 20, durrrr," I just say "You can eventually open the lock if you want", and we get back to playing the game if it's an 'eventually openable lock'.

I never said "take 20" as a concept is completely without use and should never be used, not sure why this keeps coming up.

[Sashi]

The difference is, instead of sitting for five seconds and staring at the players until someone says "I take 20, durrrr," I just say "You can eventually open the lock if you want", and we get back to playing the game if it's an 'eventually openable lock'.

I never said "take 20" as a concept is completely without use and should never be used, not sure why this keeps coming up.

So the difference is that if the DM forces the player to Take 20 that's cool, but if the player asks permission to Take 20 he's a Retard?

Man, this is getting into "how to be a good GM" thread territory.

[Quantumboost]

The difference is, instead of sitting for five seconds and staring at the players until someone says "I take 20, durrrr," I just say "You can eventually open the lock if you want", and we get back to playing the game if it's an 'eventually openable lock'.

I never said "take 20" as a concept is completely without use and should never be used, not sure why this keeps coming up.

Doom. The entire point of taking 20 is that you will eventually succeed on the eventually openable lock. The only difference between that and your described way of doing things is that taking 20 actually has a basis in the core rules and actually gives a length of time.

You are literally saying "don't do X, do X without actually knowing how long it takes". That is strictly inferior.

[violence in the media]

So now we've moved to the point where you, Doom, assert that it is power-tripping on the part of the DM to let the players make the choice between taking more time to accomplish a task or trying a different tactic that may work faster?

That's really your refutation?

Anyway, how many times do you fail at things in your regular daily existence? Do you have a lot of tasks that you just plain fuck up and leave a mess lying there for someone else? Does 1 in 20 attempts at doing the dishes simply end in disaster? Do you get in the car to go to school or work and some days just turn around and go home because there was roadwork or an accident or whatever?

I'm just trying to get a handle on your frame of reference here. Because in my world, if people have the time and the resources for it, they get things done to the best of their ability. It might take longer than normal and might result in ruining some materials and having to start over; but nobody throws their hands up and declares the machine unfixable, or the report unwritable, or the house uncleanable simply because they didn't successfully accomplish it at this specific instant. The only time people don't simply do what they're nominally capable of doing is when there's a deadline or some inability to retry.

You know, kind of like with the Take 20 rules.

[Doom]

Dang broken quotes, but the short of it is: three bad quotes and deliberate misreadings in a row, combined with pure confusion make continued attempted discussion pointless.

[RobbyPants]

>>If it's a single move, then you take 20, and the +5 guys simply comes up with a better move than the +4 guy. <<

Awesome, that's the key point!

And then back to thinking it's a game. Back to just not understood at all, despite the repeated "not a game" statements. At least you get that, indeed, the guy with the +5 can take 20 and always get a better move. You're fairly close, but it's ok to give it up already, it's not that important, really.

So that's how you simulate chess? Every freaking move? How do you even decide the end game? Why not either play the game for realsies, or just do one roll for the whole game?

That doesn't even make sense, Doom.

[Zeezy]

Why is chess being used as an example for Take 20? Taking 20 in an opposed check is rarely allowed.

I... Wish I had noticed that earlier. I feel dumb.

Case (1) What can happen is completely determined by character ability.

[...]

Case (2) What can happen is completely determined by the structure of the universe.

D&D does not have the capacity to simulate case 2 in the manner you're suggesting. Saying that it does is like saying all swords have a chance of being sundered based on two degrees of freedom (their attack bonus vs. yours). This leaves case 1: all doors of the same make and model are sufficiently similar such that a character with Strength X can break it down Y% of the time on any single attempt.

Yet another aside with the Adamantine Master Key™: besides that, a Fighter could seriously tunnel around stone walls inside a dungeon. It would take a while (average about 11 minutes for a level 1 Fighter to tunnel through 3' of hewn stone, or 18 minutes for 5' of unworked stone), but his greatsword can be employed as a makeshift mattock. This is outside the take 20 rules, and is silly to take into action, but if you're going to arbitrarily cockblock your players, then the fighter's going to carve the party an entrance they can actually use.

Anyway, how many times do you fail at things in your regular daily existence? Do you have a lot of tasks that you just plain fuck up and leave a mess lying there for someone else? Does 1 in 20 attempts at doing the dishes simply end in disaster? Do you get in the car to go to school or work and some days just turn around and go home because there was roadwork or an accident or whatever?

No, no, and no, because I tend to take 10. He's stated that taking 10 is fine.

[Kaelik]

Dang broken quotes, but the short of it is: three bad quotes and deliberate misreadings in a row, combined with pure confusion make continued attempted discussion pointless.

The only commonality in all your problems is you.

[Zeezy]

I never said "take 20" as a concept is completely without use and should never be used, not sure why this keeps coming up.

No, you just said it should be handwaved. From what I understand, one of the following cases is your platform. If the players want to take 20:

• Case 0. The players will succeed based on their bonus and the DC. This is the normal Take 20 rule; hence, it is case 0.
• Case A. The players will succeed based on their bonus, the DC, and the DM's capriciousness.
• Case B. The DM sees if it's something he intended for the players to be allowed to do, and lets them do it based on that.
• Case C. The DM disallows it, because the DM decides when the player succeeds at a given task when the player doesn't want to roll a die. I see this as a highly unlikely worst-case scenario, but am adding it for completion's sake.

Only, in all of these cases, you seem to anticipate the players wanting to take 20, and simply tell them whether they can succeed based on case X. This is probably because taking 20 is prefaced by taking 10, to see if that works (because if it does, they just saved a bunch of time). I don't understand what is being preserved with this approach. You see it as empowering your players, I see it as jumping the gun. I suppose that is simply a difference in opinion, because from my point of view, your approach is very silly, but I can't figure out why.

Even so, it's... strange. You seem to dislike taking 20 because it's unrealistic (as evidenced by you attempting to give several erroneous examples where it wouldn't make sense to take 20), but you let your players succeed seemingly arbitrarily in lieu of this. It's puzzling.

[Psychic Robot]

The only problem with taking 20 is that retards think it's reasonable to take 20 on every single Search check. There's no way a group of adventurers is going to sit there quietly for two minutes while the rogue searches a ten-by-ten section of hallway.

[Zeezy]

The only problem with taking 20 is that retards think it's reasonable to take 20 on every single Search check. There's no way a group of adventurers is going to sit there quietly for two minutes while the rogue searches a ten-by-ten section of hallway.

QFT. Hell, my group finds it unreasonable for the rogue to spend two minutes taking 10 to analyze a 50'x10' stretch of hallway (that one foray into the Tomb of Horrors notwithstanding).

[Kaelik]

The only problem with taking 20 is that retards think it's reasonable to take 20 on every single Search check. There's no way a group of adventurers is going to sit there quietly for two minutes while the rogue searches a ten-by-ten section of hallway.

Technically, it's two minutes for 5X5, so it's actually 8 minutes for 10X10.

But yes, the only problem with take 20 is that people think that people will take 20 when they won't, and so ban take 20 in situations where it does make sense in order to avoid having it happen when it wouldn't happen anyway.

Alternatively, another problem is that some people like Doom are retards, and think that it's disempowering to give players the option to take 20 to get through his DM cockslap locks. And it is empowering for the DM to take their choice away, tell them they get it, and then make up an amount of time that it took, without letting them choose a different faster method.

[RobbyPants]

The only problem with taking 20 is that retards think it's reasonable to take 20 on every single Search check. There's no way a group of adventurers is going to sit there quietly for two minutes while the rogue searches a ten-by-ten section of hallway.

That's the basic problem with D&D's trap paradigm. These types of traps, overcome by Search and Disable Device checks aren't interesting. They're tedious. If a DM insists on using these types of traps at random places in the dungeon, then there are three possible outcomes:

1) The group bumbles through the traps, and either never searches or only searches obvious things like doors. This option is the PCs being stupid.

2) The group searches everything always either by taking 20 or rolling several times. This is the PCs being smart, but this is boring and uninteresting. It will also offend old-school DMs.

3) The group resorts to interesting alternatives like rolling barrels or sending summoned critters down the halls. This is also smart and may or may not offend the DM.

[Maj]

it comes from RPG games, where a 20 succeeds

It's not that a 20 succeeds. It's that 20 is the biggest number you can roll. If adding the biggest number on the die to your skill bonus still doesn't make the DC, you don't succeed.

You may think this is stupid, but surely it's understandable, no?

No.

When you give an example of emptying every object out of a drawer (taking 20) yet failing to find your keys, but there is a possibility of putting everything back and taking it all back out again and mystically finding them, you've gone past the boundaries of reality into some alternate reality where keys go quantum and objects are not where they are.

I totally get doing a shoddy job of searching someplace and not finding what you're after till the second or third try. BUT if your keys are in the drawer, and you go through every item in the drawer and take all of them out of the drawer, you will not fail to find your keys.

It's not 'stupidity' to toss 'take 20' when it leads to automatic success.

IF you also counterpoint this with something akin to, "You try to open the chest, but it's just too difficult for you," then I'm totally willing to say that it sounds like you use the take 20 rule all the time, but saying "you take 20" or having the players say "I take 20" is somehow a problem.

The thing to watch out for here, though, is making player decisions for them. The difference between what you're saying and having a player declare that they take 20 is an issue of control. And while your players might not have a problem with it, sometimes there's a subtle railroading that happens. When you describe a given situation, you narrow down the possibilities that the players come up with on their own.

Saying something like, "You come across a chest that's too hard to open," implicitly states that they tried to open it. And it's possible that maybe they wouldn't have tried (for whatever reason). Further, it gives the suggestion that maybe there's a reason that they should try, when a perfectly acceptable alternate use of the chest may be to prop one of those oh-no-it's-closing secret doors open.

[Doom]

Because I'm not actually talking about a chess simulator? You seriously think this thread is about chess simulators? Allow me to give a hint: it's not about chess simulation, even though that's the entirety of your response.

There're obviously a number of trolls here; if anyone really thinks any of this is worth further discussion, we can take it private, to avoid the continued deliberate misinterpretations.

[RobbyPants]

I don't really want to take this to PMs, so I might as well drop it.

I guess I don't see the problem with discussing taking 20 in a thread about taking 10 and 20.

[Sashi]

The only problem with taking 20 is that retards think it's reasonable to take 20 on every single Search check. There's no way a group of adventurers is going to sit there quietly for two minutes while the rogue searches a ten-by-ten section of hallway.

That's the basic problem with D&D's trap paradigm. These types of traps, overcome by Search and Disable Device checks aren't interesting. They're tedious. If a DM insists on using these types of traps at random places in the dungeon, then there are three possible outcomes:

1) The group bumbles through the traps, and either never searches or only searches obvious things like doors. This option is the PCs being stupid.

2) The group searches everything always either by taking 20 or rolling several times. This is the PCs being smart, but this is boring and uninteresting. It will also offend old-school DMs.

3) The group resorts to interesting alternatives like rolling barrels or sending summoned critters down the halls. This is also smart and may or may not offend the DM.

You can fix this so easy by making search checks vs. traps a reactive rather than active check: reach out to pull a trapped lever? Roll search vs. the trap's search DC. Success means you saw the plate and can choose , failure means you blithely trigger the trap.

I made the rogues trapfinding ability replace other people's search modifiers for this roll when out of combat and in the same area (which is nifty) rather than taking the ability to find traps with a DC higher than 20 away from everyone else (which is stupid).

[Archmage]

You can fix this so easy by making search checks vs. traps a reactive rather than active check: reach out to pull a trapped lever? Roll search vs. the trap's search DC. Success means you saw the plate and can choose , failure means you blithely trigger the trap.

Once the party triggers the first trap, they're going to want to check everything in the rest of the dungeon that might be trapped very carefully before they do things like touch it. How do you handle that? All you've really done here is make Search a retry: no skill.

[Sashi]

Under the current system, if you aren't aware of a trap you automatically trigger it, which means that traps in D&D are by default a tedious Gygaxian horror where the DM is waiting for someone to move onto the Special Square without saying the magic words "I search for traps" so he can drop an anvil on them, so traps are a pretty bogus concept to begin with and hard to deal with.

The basic answer to your question is that I can't force players to stop being paranoid about traps, but by removing the game of gotcha, the game doesn't devolve into the tedium of vigilance in fear of my dumping them into a pool of acid the first time they make a mistake.

[RobbyPants]

I don't know if I'd call that a fix.

[Archmage]

The basic answer to your question is that I can't force players to stop being paranoid about traps, but by removing the game of gotcha, the game doesn't devolve into the tedium of vigilance in fear of my dumping them into a pool of acid the first time they make a mistake.

Except that it does, because now they have no way to determine whether traps are present or not without first accidentally triggering them. You've just turned the character's Search modifier into a saving throw bonus.

[Sashi]

That makes no sense. You make no sense. The only way a player can be absolutely sure there isn't a trap is if they take 20 to search, and then only if they assume I'm not a fucker who put the search DC higher than they can achieve or played some kind of bullshit semantics game where saying "I take 20 searching the statue for traps" doesn't find the trap because it's in the pedestal the statue is sitting on. Anything else requires a severe case of metagame thinking like "whoops, rolled a 4 on my search check, I think I'll avoid that square"

There are basically three types of traps:
1) Traps the searcher can find and disable if they take 10. Worth mentioning only in passing if the party can take 10 ("in this room there are some skeletal remains and a tripwire that triggers a hail of arrows"), and possibly an interesting challenge during a tense situation where you can't or as foreshadowing for a more deadly version of the same trap later.
2) Traps that cannot be found by taking 10, not even with an assist.
3) Fuck You traps that are either GM-enforced plot devices ("The door slams shut behind you"), or stupid and adversarial psychological nightmares designed to fuck you over ("You try to jump over the pit and are stopped by an invisible wall, you fall into the pit and die.").

Type 3 isn't actually a trap, but GM-railroading, and should be treated as such (use only sparingly and with purpose). Type 1 is usually a nonissue but sometimes can add flavor to an encounter or trip people up if they choose to avoid a trap rather than disable and then have to retreat through that area during combat.

Type 2 is the real issue, because the only way to be safe is to tediously trawl the dungeon with Take 20 checks, or roll barrels full of chickens down every corridor before walking it, or or some other logistical nightmare that gets in the way of stabbing things in the face. The way I saw it, there were only two options to deal with this:

1) Never ever include traps in anything, because they're stupid.
2) Give the players an actual mechanical way to avoid getting fucked over by traps without turning into the Anti-Trap Commando Squad of Twenty Taking and Chicken-Barrel Rolling. I settled on the idea of letting them use their search skill as a preliminary saving throw to head off even triggering the trap, and it has worked well enough that I felt like sharing.

If I'm to be honest, I also don't include traps in the standard D&D way of just being speedbumps that chip away at your HP if you don't pass the search DC. They're usually the D&D equivalent of a car bomb, or an Indiana Jones type challenge that makes a bad situation worse and/or gives you a new puzzle.