This came up in a discussion with another DM today and got me wondering.

Where did the mechanic of taking 10 or 20 start in D&D? I could have sworn it started in 2e. But a glance through the PHB and DMG did not see it. My friend believes it was first implemented in 3e.

Closest found was in 2e where it states that taking your time may add a bonus to the check in some cases. And that some skill uses are automatic if given enough time and all the tools and materials needed.

In terms of RAW, I'm fairly certain taking 10/20 was first codified in 3e.

Though given the community around here, I fully expect some octogenarian to leap down my throat about not having read a particular article in a Dragon magazine from somewhere in the 2e era that obliquely gets at the concept and claims that that was the first instance of it.

Pretty sure it was a 3e thing, it's part of what warped the game into a min/maxing nightmare.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1119975Though given the community around here, I fully expect some octogenarian to leap down my throat about not having read a particular article in a Dragon magazine from somewhere in the 2e era that obliquely gets at the concept and claims that that was the first instance of it.

Thought I allready did that? :rolleyes:

Dragon articles don't count for this really. I know the general concept of taking your time to do a task increases the chance of success goes back to 2e. But its very open ended there and was never defined far as can tell.

Quote from: Omega;1119980I know the general concept of taking your time to do a task increases the chance of success goes back to 2e. But its very open ended there and was never defined far as can tell.

If it's not well-defined, then it probably didn't see consistent use at a majority of tables.

3e codified the idea of "taking 10" and "taking 20" in a way that made it something probably used more often and with more regularity.

The whole point of the mechanic is to take less table time for action resolution. As 3e went on, more ways to use it were introduced: I played a character for awhile who could take 10 on caster level checks, which I used in combination with a bunch of other nonsense to be able to pretty much automatically counter any spell cast within 60 feet cast by a 16th-level caster or lower (the character was 10th level at the time). If you wanted to argue that that's an abuse of the mechanic, I wouldn't disagree, but that was part of the problem with the power creep of 3e as the edition aged.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1119984If it's not well-defined, then it probably didn't see consistent use at a majority of tables.

I remember in a 2e game where I would just roll over and over and over and over until I either succeeded or rolled a 20 and failed. Then the DM would add up the total number of rolls to determine the time it took. A complete waste of game time (but, to be fair, we had much more time then than I do now).

After that experience I happily used Take 20, Take 10, and the rarer Take 0 in my own 3e game. I still haven't seen an OSR rule that addresses these same issues in a satisfactory manner, so I continue to use them in my OD&D game.

Quote from: Doom;1119976Pretty sure it was a 3e thing, it's part of what warped the game into a min/maxing nightmare.

How does this even make sense? It's a rule that saves a lot of time, because in the past, you could simply re-roll over and over until you got a 10 (or 20). There are a lot of problems with 3e but this is not one of them...

Quote from: JeremyR;1120047How does this even make sense? It's a rule that saves a lot of time, because in the past, you could simply re-roll over and over until you got a 10 (or 20). There are a lot of problems with 3e but this is not one of them...

That is ironic as the conversation with the other DM that kicked off this thread started with them recounting a player doing exactly that in 3e. Using the take 10/20 over and over and over and over.

Quote from: Omega;1120051That is ironic as the conversation with the other DM that kicked off this thread started with them recounting a player doing exactly that in 3e. Using the take 10/20 over and over and over and over.

If you dont succeed when you take 20 then what would you gain by doing it over and over?

Quote from: JeremyR;1120047How does this even make sense? It's a rule that saves a lot of time, because in the past, you could simply re-roll over and over until you got a 10 (or 20). There are a lot of problems with 3e but this is not one of them...

Who says you get to reroll infinitely often?

A simple example, from 2e. A really tough door might have a -10% penalty to have the lock picked. The thief would have perhaps a 70% chance...and that's it. If he fails, he fails, the players will have to figure something out. Well, maybe there's a backup thief in the party; he'll have maybe a 50% chance.

In 3E? Well, now all locks have a DC 35 or whatever. If you're not min-maxed to handle that, then you have no chance at all, thanks to "take 20" forcing all DCs to be high so that only dedicated characters can handle them. And that's pretty much how you have to set all DC skill rolls, to the point that only min-maxed characters have a reasonable chance.

It's not so much a "waste of time" as "you don't get automatic I win buttons," which I know isn't a popular idea around here. But it is what it is.

Quote from: Doom;1120062Who says you get to reroll infinitely often?

A simple example, from 2e. A really tough door ...

And of course you pick one of the few examples from earlier editions that has a specific callout of "you can only try this once per level."

QuoteIn 3E? Well, now all locks have a DC 35

You know how I know you're full of shit?

"Take 20" explicitly takes twenty times as long as a single check, and IIRC an Open Lock check in 3e takes 1d4 rounds (though that might be Disable Device, but talking about that in conjunction with Open Lock is a whole other can of worms).

Not to mention: who gives a shit if a mid-level rogue can burn through a mundane lock with zero fucks given? How are doors even still a problem at 6th level or higher? There are dozens - if not hundreds - of magical workarounds to doors available to people by those levels. Oh no, the mundane character can actually do something useful and kind of cool every now and again... fuck's sake.

Quote from: Doom;1120062Who says you get to reroll infinitely often?

You can only Take 20 if the DM rules that you can retry indefinitely. If the DM rules that you only get one chance then you can't Take 20. In effect, there's no difference between 2e and 3e in this regard.

QuoteA simple example, from 2e. A really tough door might have a -10% penalty to have the lock picked. The thief would have perhaps a 70% chance...and that's it. If he fails, he fails, the players will have to figure something out. Well, maybe there's a backup thief in the party; he'll have maybe a 50% chance.

What if the party puts the locked chest in their bag of holding and takes it back to their base? Can the thief retry it then?

There really is no set rule for when a character can reroll and when they can't. Take 20 simply gives a quick way of resolving a skill check when there is no danger or time pressure. If a DM abuses that, then it's the DM's fault. Just the same as if a DM allowed a thief to reroll his Open Locks check in 1e/2e.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1119975In terms of RAW, I'm fairly certain taking 10/20 was first codified in 3e.

This is correct. It first appeared in the 3.0 Player's Handbook and DMG.

Essentially they were meant to be (as I understand it) nods to both timesaving and realism. In reality most people perform at a set result level for a task of a given difficulty pretty consistently, and when you can take as long as you can take on something it just makes more sense to assume you'll roll the maximum possible result eventually without wasting five to ten minutes on the rolls. (While in principle a GM should always be able to call halt to this and players should be mature enough to take such calls in stride, practical gameplay, I think, should include a nod to the reality this won't always happen.)

Quote from: GnomeWorksAs 3e went on, more ways to use it were introduced: I played a character for awhile who could take 10 on caster level checks, which I used in combination with a bunch of other nonsense to be able to pretty much automatically counter any spell cast within 60 feet cast by a 16th-level caster or lower (the character was 10th level at the time).

This I never heard of because I didn't stick with 3.5 gaming long enough, and yes, I agree with you: this strikes me as one of the permutations of the mechanic which amounts to breaking the game with a sufficiently clever combination of interacting capacities. I've used analogies to the "take 10" and "take 20" rules in several systems I've designed, and one point I've always kept is that you can't use them for anything where success and failure have direct, significant stakes -- and combat and magic should always have significant stakes or they lose their impact and engagement.

Quote from: Shasarak;1120052If you dont succeed when you take 20 then what would you gain by doing it over and over?

No clue? I do not know 3e enough to say. But from the description given it sounds like the player was using it to try again and again. Or using it over and over in about every situation to effectively get a guarantee success whenever possible. Probably the second one more than the first? I'll ask if get a chance.

There's a lot of misunderstandings re: how Take 10 and 20 work, which feeds into complaints about how it's used.

It is meant to save IRL game time, by not needing you to roll 50 times to achieve a task that you would get anyway by rolling until you pass. If you roll enough, you'll get an average roll. That's a 10. So you just say you took the time to make your 10 rolls, skip forward a minute, assuming you failed until you got the 10, and move on. This doesn't work when you 1) don't have time to do that, or 2) one failure botches the whole attempt. The same goes for Taking 20.

I'm not even sure how one could Take 10 to counterspell, for example, unless it was some weird feat that made it happen.

In 5e there is no Taking 10, but there is Passive Skills, and the game just tells you to just let them succeed and move on if there really is nothing stopping them from doing so.