Question on Taking 10s & 20s

[theForce017]

I am new to DMing but I have changed one rule. Taking 10s and 20s. I don't like the idea of this. If there is a class or race ability that states they can, I will allow it. Ex. a water creature is allowed to take 10 on swim due to experience which is alright in my eyes.

Is this just weird or what? Should I allow it? Suggestions please.


Also: Part of the reason I am bringing this up is the fact that one of my players wants to disguise himself in front of the party and due to the fact he has more time to "change" he can take a 10 or 20. I don't feel as if this is fair because the party will not get to take anything (10/20) when trying to distinguish him from who he really is. I am a little confused and don't want to make anybody mad. Thanks for the help :smallsmile:

[hivedragon]

Taking 10 on a check as fine as there is nothing that draws there attention away from the task like bad guys and severe weather. taking 20 means they are making 19 mistakes to it takes much longer, again this is fine as long as there is nothing that draws there attention away from the task like bad guys and severe weather.

when a monster gains +8 and always can take 10 I usually don't bother making checks for such creatures.

The disguise skill is poorly conceived, no matter how high your disguise check you cannot get a portly dwarf to look like an elven maiden. You need a spell or play a changeling.

[aquaticrna]

the whole point of taking 10 or taking 20 is simply to cut down on the "i spend x turns doing the same task over and over until i get a 20 then i stop" while taking 10 means "i'm trying this really quickly w/o pressure and should get average, so assuming a perfectly average roll this is what i'd get" if they can do it by taking 10 they probably would have done it that round if they can't they then have to try more times which leads to you the taking 20 argument. Now if he's trying to disguise himself while people are watching or while in a hurry then it becomes questionable as to whether or not he even can take 10 or 20.

so basically i'm against it, because you'll just end up with people rolling turn after turn till they get a 20, or spending an extra round or two to do something that they weren't going to have any trouble with anyways.

[dgnslyr]

The idea of "take 20" is that you are attempting a task with no penalty for failure and you have enough time to try 20 times. This is just a convenience, as opposed to the tedium of having to roll until you roll a 20.

As for "taking 10," it assumes an unstressful, unhurried task, and is, again, a convenience, letting you take an average roll for a check that shouldn't pose a problem.

These options are conveniences, time-savers, and if you decide to get rid of taking 10, it shouldn't make a huge difference over the long run, in theory at least. Some players' luck puts the theory to the test...

As for abolishing taking 20, there's the event that somebody wants to but is unable to (ex. disguising) and will just roll the dice until a 20 comes up.

Regarding that specific example, if you don't let him, he could just keep retrying until he gets a 20, and the disguise "feels right." Maybe he could have some little trinket that lets him identify himself to the party? If his disguise is perfect and the two are identical, it would appear to be the ideal situation for a hilarious day when the impostor and the real deal play who's who.

[Curmudgeon]

You can usually "take 20" on a skill which allows retries, but not Disguise.
Taking 20 means you are trying until you get it right, and it assumes that you fail many times before succeeding.
You get only one Disguise check per use of the skill, even if several people are making Spot checks against it. Since you only get one check and must fail repeatedly with 19 prior efforts if you "take 20", that's not an available option for this skill. You can "take 10" with Disguise, though you won't know what circumstance modifiers the DM has applied.

You don't need to abolish the "take 20" option; you just need to know when the rules don't allow it.

[ffone]

Definitely don't ban taking 20 for the reasons the last poster gave. The result of banning it will be you'll spend a lot of time watching people roll dice over and over until getting a 20. The distribution of the number of rolls this will take is a so-called geometric distribution with p=1/20, which has mean 20, which is why taking 20 takes 20x as long. (If one guy spends a day taking 20 over and over and another spends it rolling, they will get the same number of 20s on average). If you have access to the right kind of random number generator you could sample geometric(1/20)s I guess.

Taking 10, in many cases, leads to more verisimilitude. Think about swim checks. When most people swim in calm water, they go at a pretty steady pace (And gradually get tired). They don't flounder for 3 seconds, then go fine for 3 seconds, then fine for another 3, then flounder for 3...

[Gnome Alone]

Taking 10, in many cases, leads to more verisimilitude. Think about swim checks. When most people swim in calm water, they go at a pretty steady pace (And gradually get tired). They don't flounder for 3 seconds, then go fine for 3 seconds, then fine for another 3, then flounder for 3...

Ohhhhhh. No wonder they don't let me come to the pool at the YMCA anymore.

[Taelas]

There is no reason to ban this. It is purely a method of convenience, and as both methods are limited to specific situations, banning them is just more work for you.

By the way, water creatures usually have swim speeds, which means they do not need to make swim checks.

[Yuki Akuma]

Why would you even want to ban this? Your example doesn't even work.

[theForce017]

Thank you for all the help and I do see the point in which rolling over and over will happen and get irritating soon enough. I will more than likely change back to the way it is suppose to be done except in certain situations. Thanks again.

[Zaq]

Taking 10 also is a good way of providing baseline competence. If you'd succeed on a 3, and nothing's getting in your way, by all rights you SHOULD succeed. It's just protection against that stupid nat 1 coming up (no, nat 1s do not autofail skill checks, but they still suck). You're a hero. You should be able to leap a 5' pit with a running start. It's not that hard.

Honestly, I take 10 whenever I get the chance. I don't trust my dice. A big loss usually hurts more than a big win helps.

[KillianHawkeye]

Just learn which things you can and can't take 20 on.

[myancey]

Ohhhhhh. No wonder they don't let me come to the pool at the YMCA anymore.

That's pretty funny. Nice.

[Heliomance]

Definitely don't ban taking 20 for the reasons the last poster gave.

For disguise? You really should stop him taking 20. You only get one disguise check per disguise, and technically the DM ought to roll it for you - you don't and can't know how good your disguise is until it's tested. The only way to reroll a disguise check is to take it all off and try again from scratch. And the only way to know if you need to do that is if someone sees through it.

Taking 10, on the other hand, simply represents putting an average amount of effort in, and is absolutely fine as long as the character isn't rushed and/or pressured.

[DonEsteban]

I think the original question has been answered sufficiently. So it might be okay to derail it a little bit more:

Yes,

You get only one Disguise check per use of the skill, even if several people are making Spot checks against it. The Disguise check is made secretly, so that you can’t be sure how good the result is.
...but there's also:

Try Again: Yes. You may try to redo a failed disguise, but once others know that a disguise was attempted, they’ll be more suspicious.

So you could get someone to help you by spotting weak points in your disguise, then retry until you get a good result. In practice, this could result in something like "Take 18 or so" (not 20, because the check is made secretly, so you can hardly do it perfectly). Of course, this could also be handled, mechanically, by an Aid Another action. Now basically the DM has to make a judgement as to how many people are allowed to aid another character's Disguise attempt. I wonder what you would allow.

[Ashtagon]

Take 20 is irrelevant with Disguise anyway. Disguise is always an opposed skill check (vs. Spot), and you can't take 20 on an opposed skill check.

[KillianHawkeye]

Take 20 is irrelevant with Disguise anyway. Disguise is always an opposed skill check (vs. Spot), and you can't take 20 on an opposed skill check.

I don't see anything specifically about opposed checks in the rules....

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.

[DonEsteban]

That's true, but opposed checks almost always (if not always) "carry penalties for failure", so as a consequence you cannot Take 20 on Opposed Skill Checks.

[Kojiro]

Would those penalties apply here, though? You're putting on and taking off a disguise until it's right; it isn't opposed until you go wear it in front of the people you're trying to fool. Your only penalty for getting wrong in your room is knowing how stupid you look with that bad disguise on.

Not arguing that you should be able to take 20 on a Disguise, by the way; there are a few things that confuse me there. However, to me, the above doesn't seem like a reason you wouldn't be able to.

[elonin]

I've got two ideas for this topic. First the taking 20 in 20 rounds is a misuse of numbers. The rules seem to take into account that someone will roll the same number twice in the same sequence. Maybe a better idea would be to take 20 in 30 rounds. It works well enough to keep the game moving with searches. Even that seems like metagaming to me.

For the premise of the OP I'd allow the spotters to use the aid another action using spot instead of disguise for this. "You'd be the first elven maiden that I've ever seen wearing that style of mustache".

[Absol197]

As long as the character has both A) enough time; and B) someone helping him, I've always allowed taking "20" on Hide and Disguise. If you have someone pointing out to you the problems in your disguise/hiding place, you can keep redoing and retrying until they think you've gotten it right. However, the characters helping you can only get so high on their Spot checks, even with the bonus for knowing exactly where/what to look for. So basically, I give the lowest die roll that prevents the helping observer from beating your check. If she has an abysmal Spot modifier, and you have a sky-high Disguise/Hide modifier, you get a lesser result, because you don't have to try as hard before your friend can't see you anymore.

That's just me, though. I never actually thought about the aid another action. However, I'd say for that to apply, the assisting character would need to actually be helping apply the Disguise or setting up the hiding place, not standing back and saying," no, your face still looks wrong," or ,"I can still see your hand!"

[Kyberwulf]

Someone pointing out the problem's in your disguise... is just "Aid Another"
so he would have to make checks against your disguise every time you make a disguise check.

[Lapak]

I've got two ideas for this topic. First the taking 20 in 20 rounds is a misuse of numbers. The rules seem to take into account that someone will roll the same number twice in the same sequence. Maybe a better idea would be to take 20 in 30 rounds. It works well enough to keep the game moving with searches. Even that seems like metagaming to me.Actually, you're more likely to roll a 20 before hitting twenty rolls than not. Your chance of rolling a twenty, before starting to roll - well, it's actually easiest to figure out when you're likely to have rolled one by figuring out how likely it is that you haven't:

1st roll, chance of not rolling a 20 yet: 19/20 or 95%.
2nd roll: 19/20 * 19/20, or 90.25%
3rd roll: 19/20 ^ 3 or 85.74%

and so on. You pass beyond better-than-even odds of having hit a 20 on the 14th roll; after the 20th roll there's almost a 2-in-3 chance you've rolled a 20 by now. It's by no means certain, but it's more likely than not. Extending it to 30 rolls only improves things to an 80% likelihood, so if it's near-certainty we're shooting for you'd need a heck of a lot of rounds spent. 20 is a fine compromise, and 'feels' right to boot.

[ffone]

Actually, you're more likely to roll at 20 before hitting twenty rolls than not. Your chance of rolling a twenty, before starting to roll - well, it's actually easiest to figure out when you're likely to have rolled one by figuring out how likely it is that you haven't:

1st roll, chance of not rolling a 20 yet: 19/20 or 95%.
2nd roll: 19/20 * 19/20, or 90.25%
3rd roll: 19/20 ^ 3m or 85.74%

and so on. You pass beyond better-than-even odds of having hit a 20 on the 14th roll; after the 20th roll there's almost a 2-in-3 chance you've rolled a 20 by now. It's by no means certain, but it's more likely than not. Extending it to 30 rolls only improves things to an 80% likelihood, so if it's near-certainty we're shooting for you'd need a heck of a lot of rounds spent. 20 is a fine compromise, and 'feels' right to boot.

Yeah. the geometric distribution is 'right-skewed', meaning its mean is greater than its median. In other words you have a >50% chance of getting a 20 in 20 rolls or less, but the mean is still 20.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution

IMO the mean of 20 is the 'right' factor to use for taking 20, rather than whatever the closest integer to the median is because 1. it's simple 2. you already are getting the advantage of reducing variance and knowing how long it will take (usually a good thing, Hail Marys are more rare) 3. it gives you th same rate of 20s in the long run as some guy who's actually rolling.

One common fallacy is for people to say 'taking 20 should take 10 or 11 rounds, since when you have 20 numbers that's the average of where the 20 will be.' The fallacy, of course, is that that would only be true if you couldn't get the same result twice (you took the numbers 1 to 20 and shuffled the order.) In fact this is one of those cutesy math problems - that it's 'better' for you if each number can only come up once, and that you'll only have to wait about 1/2 as long that way (it's sometimes done as a word problem with a bus station where you have to wait for a bus). I think in Elonin's post above he's referring to this same phenomenon (although he seems to think that you get the 20 rounds result when you *forget* about repeated numbers).