A Time for Harvest Gameplay - Chapter Three

Taking 20 is a d20 term. You can use an extended period of time to guarantee a maximum roll on an attempt not in combat."When you have plenty of time, 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, if you a d20 roll enough times, eventually you will get a 20. 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 20 times as long as making a single check would take (usually 2 minutes for a skill that takes 1 round or less to perform).

Since taking 20 assumes that your character will fail many times before succeeding, your character would automatically incur any penalties for failure before he or she could complete the task (hence why it is generally not allowed with skills that carry such penalties). Common "take 20" skills include Disable Device (when used to open locks), Escape Artist, and Perception (when attempting to find traps)."

Interesting. Never learned d20 rules. Anyway, yes, outside of combat, some thing like that will fix itself sooner or later or someone more skilled will take the job and do it for you.

There's no rule like that which guarantees automatic successes in CoC 7E. In ToC and Delta Green, they've implemented various degrees of automatic successes depending on the context of the skill check, but that conceit hasn't made it over to the official CoC mechanics yet. In 7E, they only offer bonus dice, luck spends, and roll pushes as mechanical means of increasing success. Beyond that, it's encouraged for Keepers to let players automatically succeed at mundane activities, or investigative actions when there's no time pressure and a failure wouldn't add anything interesting to the story.

tl;dr - automatic success is Keeper's Choice in CoC 7E, but there's no "taking 20" or anything that players can do mechanically to guarantee it.

There's a couple of .45s, some nightsticks and the shotgun Bill carries.

father bill grabs two 45s and goes boondock saints on their ass.

Sanity checks all round please

Doc loses 1 also