Re-rolling failed checks.

[ErichAD]

The rules for rerolls are pretty straight forward, typically you just take the same action again and get a new try. My players quickly discovered this part of PF2, and have begun just bulk rolling dice. With some things, like recall knowledge checks, they are hoping to succeed before they crit fail, and for others it just ticks down a timer. I'm uncertain why I'm having the players roll on something in which they are assured eventual success particularly if the bonuses and result are more or less random or eventual success is required.

[Captain Morgan]

Huh, you know I didn't notice that there's nothing stopping you from retrying recall knowledge like in PF1. That seems off. Wonder if there's a rule I missed.

OK, yeah, page 338 days that "after a success, further uses of recall knowledge can yield more information, but you should increase the difficulty each time. Once a character has attempted an extreme difficulty check or failed a check, further attempts are fruitless."

But it says this specifically about monster identification. I think having it apply to all Recall Knowledge is pretty reasonable though.

[Mats Öhrman]

My co-player in our two-player playtest campaign has a rogue as primary character.

That rogue has started to carry a big bag of old bent nails to use as improvised lock-picks. At negligible cost each, a critical failure basically no longer cost anything, except time. And even if using an improvised pick carries a penalty, a natural 20 is still always success.

Lock-picking is a one-action activity. Doing three attempts per round for 10 minutes, i.e. 300 attempts, would be fatiguing under the current Exploration Mode rules. But if you stop short, let's say at 299 attempts, and then rest a little, it is not.

My co-player's reasoning is that if he just keeps on rolling, he will sooner or later get three nat-20s sufficiently closely grouped to unlock the lock. He just has to keep trying... "I've got a big bag of nails and I am not afraid to use it."

My GM caved. He did not want the player to try 299 times, agreed that he would probably succeed, and let the rogue unlock the lock in a ten-minute Exploration Mode period without rolls...

...

So, if you can get rid of the failure penalty for an activity, you can go natural-20-fishing for automatic successes in Exploration Mode. You just have to be willing to spend time to roll a lot.

We sorely miss the old "take 20" rule.

[Tridus]

Mats Öhrman wrote:

We sorely miss the old "take 20" rule.

Yeah. The entire point of take 20 was to skip these kinds of situations by saying "since there's no failure penalty, I will just keep rolling until I get a 20, so lets skip the rolling and get to the point."

It was a great thing to have.