Quote from: Bren;853202Well, in CoC the characters with the 6% and the 17% must be from some primitive tribe since base for drive is 20%.

Well...from this thread's older brother...

Quote from: jhkim;548294Now let's take a native Pacific Islander - a player character from my last night's Call of Cthulhu game.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;853443Well...from this thread's older brother...

What fool let A'alona behind the wheel again?

Quote from: Moracai;853215As a player, I prefer GM saying 'it's not possible for your character' to my face, rather than him dishing out a number I have no chance to beat. I guess this could fall into 'don't roll if the result isn't interesting' category of thinking.

I find the number more interesting because, in most systems, there are ways to adjust the difficulty.

"You can't climb that wall."

"What if I borrow Becca's boots of climbing and use prestidigitation to attach a rope to the top of it?"

This is why I prefer to make consistent rulings in a system that produces consistent, logical results. Having to continually route around a system that produces nonsensical results by using GM fiat to overrule the system (which Bren suggests as his ideal) sounds like a frickin' nightmare.

It's like the guy who talks about how his 15 year old beater of a car "works great"... you just have to stop every 25 miles to let the engine cool down. I'd much rather just have a car that actually works.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;853664This is why I prefer to make consistent rulings in a system that produces consistent, logical results. Having to continually route around a system that produces nonsensical results by using GM fiat to overrule the system (which Bren suggests as his ideal) sounds like a frickin' nightmare.

:rolleyes: Yes a BRP-style system is too strange and weird for ordinary people, like Jason, to comprehend. Meanwhile, those of us who do understand and like that system will continue to use it successfully as we have for the past 36 years.

I have seen games where is your skill was sufficient relative to the task difficulty you could choose to take a low level of success automatically or roll accepting the risk of failure for a chance at a greater level of success.

Not entirely dissimilar to the "take 10" and "take 20" of d20 games.

Quote from: DavetheLost;853684I have seen games where is your skill was sufficient relative to the task difficulty you could choose to take a low level of success automatically or roll accepting the risk of failure for a chance at a greater level of success.

Not entirely dissimilar to the "take 10" and "take 20" of d20 games.

I've seen that where, for example, you could roll 6d6 or take 3 points per die. On average, you are better off rolling, but you might roll low.  That sort of choice tends to be more interesting if the player doesn't know the exact target number. Otherwise they will only roll when the default value isn't good enough. And in that case, the GM should speed up play by skipping the player 'choice' step by going straight to "you succeed."

This is one reason I appreciate GURPS; people who know a skill are competent.  The only time I've (reluctantly) tried d20 in the last twenty years involved my wife blowing her top because she failed her first aid skill to revive my (barely unconscious) character nine straight times.  Familiar with GURPS, where she'd never had a character with less than 87% to make a First Aid roll, she wanted nothing more to do with the system.

As one witty fellow said in a thread on the subject a few years back, in real life, a sailor who only managed to tie his knots 50% of the time would be pitched overboard halfway through the voyage.  

Saying something takes a minimum level of training/experience (and may be done reliably with the right level) is an old familiar thing in D&D, Traveller and other games.

Lords of Creation comes to mind as one in which the emphasis was very much on that, on what professionals at some level in field could be expected to accomplish, with cases of less than assured success pretty much being left to the GM.

Quote from: Ravenswing;853965This is one reason I appreciate GURPS; people who know a skill are competent.  The only time I've (reluctantly) tried d20 in the last twenty years involved my wife blowing her top because she failed her first aid skill to revive my (barely unconscious) character nine straight times.  Familiar with GURPS, where she'd never had a character with less than 87% to make a First Aid roll, she wanted nothing more to do with the system.

As one witty fellow said in a thread on the subject a few years back, in real life, a sailor who only managed to tie his knots 50% of the time would be pitched overboard halfway through the voyage.  

That's why we don't give able seamen a mere 50% chance in the games of my acquaintance, regardless of dice used when a toss is called for.

My bottom line:

wtf with all this ndx +/-y,  ad nauseum?

World First, Abstraction Last

Should you even be freaking rolling in the first place is the question. If you should, then realistically (which isn't necessarily the issue) some really impressive, headline-making blunders are freakishly rare. Whatever your real assessment of the situation, put that first -- and anyone who can write a fraction can make a randomizer if need be.

This isn't rocket science unless you've got the whole thing ass-backwards.

Quote from: Phillip;853978This isn't rocket science unless you've got the whole thing ass-backwards.

That made me laugh.

Quote from: Bren;854015 That made me laugh.

Well, I think it is astoundingly ludicrous that people have made their imaginations slaves to whatever abstraction rather than the reverse that is the real foundation of FRP.

Numbers and dice should be your servants not your masters, the expression rather than the dictators of your conception.

Before you can have abstraction of a something, you've got to have the something.

I think generally I don't want experts to perform >>> than non-experts,  because I don't want too much divergence in character abilities, realism notwithstanding. For me I'll say its probably most fun to have most rolls sitting at somewhere between 25% and 75% or the equivalent, say. (5E, Savage Worlds and Palladium being my go-to games currently).

Quote from: Phillip;854031Well, I think it is astoundingly ludicrous that people have made their imaginations slaves to whatever abstraction rather than the reverse that is the real foundation of FRP.

Numbers and dice should be your servants not your masters, the expression rather than the dictators of your conception.

Before you can have abstraction of a something, you've got to have the something.

Ideally you should decide  what you want the results of the system to be, then design a system that gives those results, and then use the system as an arbiter.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;854463I think generally I don't want experts to perform >>> than non-experts,  because I don't want too much divergence in character abilities, realism notwithstanding.

It should be possible for an expert to miss punching an amateur, and it should be possible for the amateur to land a punch.
Also it should be possible for the amateur to spot something hidden in the undergrowth which the expert missed.
However rolling every time a pianist performs Beethoven's Hammerklavier with the potential for an amateur to mostly fail abysmally, but occasionally play a stunning performance, would be ridiculous.
Similarly it might make sense for it to be impossible for a PC to climb something, but it should not be impossible (just very unlikely) for the expert to fail.

How to model such different situations though is tricky to do well.

I handle the situation by only calling for a dice roll where the outcome is uncertain, and the drama and fun of the game will be improved by letting the dice decide.  Sometimes it's just fun to roll the bones.