Taking 10, Taking 20: Passive Abilities and Repeating Skill Checks

Dungeons and Dragons has had many editions over many years. If you're new to the game, you may have come across mentions of "taking 10" or "taking 20" on ability checks, and you may not be familiar with the terms.

Consider this post a quick information public service announcement to explain it all.

Back in 3rd Edition D&D, we had these two new rules for dealing with skill checks that would eventually succeed, or skill checks which should be possible without a roll.

What Is Taking 10?

In third edition Dungeons & Dragons, if a character was performing a relatively easy task, and wasn't threatened or distracted, he could "take 10". This meant that the character could act as though he'd rolled a 10 and add his skill modifier. 

At this point, you may be realizing that this has been effectively replaced in 5th edition D&D with the advent of "passive" skill use, which is effectively the same thing. 

Generally, the only skill we think of in terms of passive is "passive perception", which is a character's perception skill plus 10. The intent of passive skills such as this is for the DM to keep track of the values, and then just tell players when their passive checks succeed, without the PC even needing to ask. Is your character's passive perception a 15? Then when that goblin who was sneaking past rolls a 13 on his stealth, the PC hears even though the player didn't declare that she was looking or roll dice.

Passive investigation does infrequently come up, but few others ever do. 

What Is Taking 20?

Back in the eighties when we played first edition D&D, there were times when we'd roll that 20 sider over and over and over again, knowing that we needed a 19 to succeed, even if all the players had to sit for five minutes waiting for someone to do so. Those were different times, and we were 13 years old.

In third edition Dungeons & Dragons, an updated rule called "taking 20" was introduced. This was a long slow process, where the character would try over and over, and be assumed to fail many times before succeeding. It took 20 times longer than the task would originally take, but the end result was a skill check of 20, although in this case it wasn't the auto-success that rolling a nat 20 might be.

In fifth edition D&D, this has been explained under the multiple ability checks section of the rules.

To speed things up, assume that a character spending ten times the normal amount of time needed to complete a task automatically succeeds at that task. However, no amount of repeating the check allows a character to turn an impossible task into a successful one.

So the difference now is that it takes only ten times as long rather than twenty like it did in third, but it's the same general effect - if you can try long enough, you can succeed at a task without needing to roll that die endlessly like we did in first edition.