What about GURPS?

[Hey_I_Can_Chan]

That quote I used in the cooking example for -6 or -7? It's part of a list of examples for +10 to -10. Unless it's some sort of cake worth televising, wedding cakes are comparatively easy. People make them on a regular basis for a career, though it is somewhat of a specialty. That puts it somewhere in here:

+4 or +5 –Easy. Most mundane tasks, including rolls made by ordinary people at day-to-day jobs. Example: A Driving roll to commute to work
in a small town.
+2 or +3 – Very Favorable. Mildly risky tasks that most people would undertake without hesitation. Example: A Driving roll to commute to work in a teeming metropolis.
+1 – Favorable. Tasks that most people would hesitate at, due to the risk, but that a career adventurer would regard as easy. Example: A Driving roll to compete in a road rally.

It definitely wouldn't be one of these:

-4 or -5 – Hard. Tasks so challenging that even an expert will look for alternatives. A true “master” is still unlikely to feel challenged. Example: A Driving roll to keep the car on the road while shooting a gun out the window during a highspeed chase.

-10 – Impossible. No sane person would attempt such a task. The GM may wish to forbid such attempts altogether. Example: A Driving roll to steer a car with the knees while firing a bazooka twohanded during a chase through a blizzard.

So I get that you don't have the feel for the appropriate penalties, just like I don't have a good feel for appropriate DCs in D&D, but that doesn't mean such a thing doesn't exist.

This is bullshit. This is not a system. Baking a wedding cake means the GM must decide if that's analogous to commuting to work in a small town or commuting to work in a teeming metropolis. That's fucking weird. And GURPS expects the GM to make these kinds of judgments all the time.

That kind of commuting distinction must be made with the skills Accounting, Acting, Administration, Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Artist, and Astronomy. And that's just the As. Driving a car under increasingly insane circumstances is the only set of penalties that are actually thoroughly quantified, forcing the vast majority of skills in the game--in that much-vaunted extensive skill list--to be compared somehow to driving a car.

I get that everything in a generic system has to remain sort of vague--using the system to play Working Girl is different from using it to play Predator. However, the only real guidelines for penalties are deciding if something should be Automatic, Trivial, Very Easy, Easy, Very Favorable, Favorable, Average, Unfavorable, Very Unfavorable, Hard, Very Hard, Dangerous, and Impossible, and those aren't very helpful in the abstract. That the game then leaves those for the GM to define--other than when comparing them to the only concrete example of driving a car--makes providing such guidelines meaningless and insulting.

[momothefiddler]

That quote I used in the cooking example for -6 or -7? It's part of a list of examples for +10 to -10. Unless it's some sort of cake worth televising, wedding cakes are comparatively easy. People make them on a regular basis for a career, though it is somewhat of a specialty. That puts it somewhere in here:

+4 or +5 –Easy. Most mundane tasks, including rolls made by ordinary people at day-to-day jobs. Example: A Driving roll to commute to work
in a small town.
+2 or +3 – Very Favorable. Mildly risky tasks that most people would undertake without hesitation. Example: A Driving roll to commute to work in a teeming metropolis.
+1 – Favorable. Tasks that most people would hesitate at, due to the risk, but that a career adventurer would regard as easy. Example: A Driving roll to compete in a road rally.

It definitely wouldn't be one of these:

-4 or -5 – Hard. Tasks so challenging that even an expert will look for alternatives. A true “master” is still unlikely to feel challenged. Example: A Driving roll to keep the car on the road while shooting a gun out the window during a highspeed chase.

-10 – Impossible. No sane person would attempt such a task. The GM may wish to forbid such attempts altogether. Example: A Driving roll to steer a car with the knees while firing a bazooka twohanded during a chase through a blizzard.

So I get that you don't have the feel for the appropriate penalties, just like I don't have a good feel for appropriate DCs in D&D, but that doesn't mean such a thing doesn't exist.

This is bullshit. This is not a system. Baking a wedding cake means the GM must decide if that's analogous to commuting to work in a small town or commuting to work in a teeming metropolis. That's fucking weird. And GURPS expects the GM to make these kinds of judgments all the time.

That kind of commuting distinction must be made with the skills Accounting, Acting, Administration, Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Artist, and Astronomy. And that's just the As. Driving a car under increasingly insane circumstances is the only set of penalties that are actually thoroughly quantified, forcing the vast majority of skills in the game--in that much-vaunted extensive skill list--to be compared somehow to driving a car.

I get that everything in a generic system has to remain sort of vague--using the system to play Working Girl is different from using it to play Predator. However, the only real guidelines for penalties are deciding if something should be Automatic, Trivial, Very Easy, Easy, Very Favorable, Favorable, Average, Unfavorable, Very Unfavorable, Hard, Very Hard, Dangerous, and Impossible, and those aren't very helpful in the abstract. That the game then leaves those for the GM to define--other than when comparing them to the only concrete example of driving a car--makes providing such guidelines meaningless and insulting.

Oh, please. Is it a tiered cake? What flavor is it, or flavors, if it's marbled? Does it have layers of filling? How detailed is the decoration? Are the flowers different colors? How much detail do you need on your "Baking a wedding cake" difficulty chart?
Generalizing difficulty from examples is in no way an unusual thing; hell, earlier in the thread we got the accusation that GURPS doesn't do that:

To model a cooking challenge in d20, I can eyeball the difficulty of something like climbing a rope. and climbing a rock face without tools, and other examples that have already been modeled out for you. A 25 is "A rough surface, such as a natural rock wall or a brick wall." A job for a professional climber? So a 25 for a professional cook might cover something that takes both artistry and experience, and takes longer the less experienced you are, like a wedding cake.

Tell me, where's the wedding cake on this list? [/td][td]Item[/td][td]Craft Skill[/td][td]Craft DC [/td][/tr]

Acid	Alchemy	15
Alchemist’s fire, smokestick, or tindertwig	Alchemy	20
Antitoxin, sunrod, tanglefoot bag, or thunderstone	Alchemy	25
Armor or shield	Armorsmithing	10 + AC bonus
Longbow or shortbow	Bowmaking	12
Composite longbow or composite shortbow	Bowmaking	15
Composite longbow or composite shortbow with high strength rating	Bowmaking	15 + (2 × rating)
Crossbow	Weaponsmithing	15
Simple melee or thrown weapon	Weaponsmithing	12
Martial melee or thrown weapon	Weaponsmithing	15
Exotic melee or thrown weapon	Weaponsmithing	18
Mechanical trap	Trapmaking	Varies
Very simple item (wooden spoon)	Varies	5
Typical item (iron pot)	Varies	10
High-quality item (bell)	Varies	15
Complex or superior item (lock)	Varies	20

Even within the generalization, is a cake an iron pot, a bell, or a lock? That doesn't seem much closer than driving to work in a small town or teeming metropolis.

[Username17]

Why would anyone think it was a good idea - or even acceptable to handle an opposed roll in 3 comparisons instead of 1? That is serious THAC0 bullshit, and it's not OK.

(Roll + Skill - Penalties) vs. (Roll + Skill - Penalties)

If you make anything that is mathematically equivalent to that, but uses extra steps, go fuck yourself. You don't deserve a thorough rebuttal. You're a fucking AD&D hack and no one has any business taking you seriously.

-Username17

[Sakuya Izayoi]

How about looking at the words BEFORE pot, bell, and lock: Typical, high-quality, Complex or Superior item. Extrapolation isn't hard: typical would be something a short order cook might make, like a meal at a sit-down chain restaurant. High-quality would be something made to order, like the wedding cake, not the hardest thing in the world to prepare, but will result in slapstick comedy if you do it incompetently. Complex or superior, well not quite a wedding cake as you said, so perhaps one of those meals you make on a television show where a guy screams at you if you do it wrong. Fugu might be a 25: you'd want a master of the knife preparing it, as to not have the dish kill you.

To me, pot bell and lock is an easier metaphor than navigating traffic. That's my opinion, though.

[Antumbra]

Unless I am missing something obvious, that is a contested roll framework that produces no information beyond success or failure, unless you compare margins of success and/or add a success threshold that you compare them to.

If you just roll dice and look for the highest number you can tell if one did better than the other, but only one can fail.

In Regular Contests, which are longer competitions that end when one succeeds and the other fails, MoS isn't even used - only success or failure counts.

The time taken for those extra comparisons is also extremely small.

[Nihnoz]

I still have the Speed/Range table memorized. It's a scar I'm never going to heal.

[momothefiddler]

Why would anyone think it was a good idea - or even acceptable to handle an opposed roll in 3 comparisons instead of 1? That is serious THAC0 bullshit, and it's not OK.

(Roll + Skill - Penalties) vs. (Roll + Skill - Penalties)

If you make anything that is mathematically equivalent to that, but uses extra steps, go fuck yourself. You don't deserve a thorough rebuttal. You're a fucking AD&D hack and no one has any business taking you seriously.

-Username17

(Skill - Penalties - Roll) is not more steps than (Roll + Skill - Penalties). It's more subtraction because it's a roll-under and roll-under is less mathematically intuitive for no real gain and we've covered that.
If your issue with GURPS is that it's roll-under and you refuse to play games with such an idiotic mechanic, great. That's a stance I can understand. For a long time I refused to play M&M because damage was so disconnected from reality, and I didn't care to consider any other aspects of the system because it didn't matter because, as I saw it, a core component of the system was dumb.

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How about looking at the words BEFORE pot, bell, and lock: Typical, high-quality, Complex or Superior item. Extrapolation isn't hard: typical would be something a short order cook might make, like a meal at a sit-down chain restaurant. High-quality would be something made to order, like the wedding cake, not the hardest thing in the world to prepare, but will result in slapstick comedy if you do it incompetently. Complex or superior, well not quite a wedding cake as you said, so perhaps one of those meals you make on a television show where a guy screams at you if you do it wrong. Fugu might be a 25: you'd want a master of the knife preparing it, as to not have the dish kill you.

"Typical", "High-Quality", and "Complex or Superior" don't have any meaning for me until clarified with examples - pot, bell, and lock. At that point, no, extrapolation isn't hard. I don't actually see a problem with that; I was using it as a counterpoint to Hey_I_Can_Chan's argument that "Automatic, Trivial, Very Easy, Easy, Very Favorable, Favorable, Average, Unfavorable, Very Unfavorable, Hard, Very Hard, Dangerous, and Impossible", each with only one example, is not extrapolable to a wedding cake.

To me, pot bell and lock is an easier metaphor than navigating traffic. That's my opinion, though.

Perhaps. And 3.5 does have 36 examples of DC 15, not just one. On the other hand, many of those are magical, giving no help to the general sense of difficulty, and others contradict each other to the point of leaving me with no sense of difficulty at all (doing a pull-up and making a crossbow are the same DC, for instance, and making a 2-foot standing jump is slightly harder than giving first aid).

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Unless I am missing something obvious, that is a contested roll framework that produces no information beyond success or failure, unless you compare margins of success and/or add a success threshold that you compare them to.

If you just roll dice and look for the highest number you can tell if one did better than the other, but only one can fail.

In Regular Contests, which are longer competitions that end when one succeeds and the other fails, MoS isn't even used - only success or failure counts.

The time taken for those extra comparisons is also extremely small.

The margin of victory is sometimes important, generally in resisted spells and such. But yes, generally the info you want in a contest is binary.

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I still have the Speed/Range table memorized. It's a scar I'm never going to heal.

I think the Speed/Range modifiers are super cool? But if you're never gonna play GURPS again I guess it's a waste of brainspace.

[erik]

I still have the Speed/Range table memorized. It's a scar I'm never going to heal.

I still can recall many Rifts skill base and per level percentages. I feel your pain. Why can I not forget shit like Radio:Basic is 45% +5%/level and Pilot Automobile is 60% +2%/level?

Dammit!

[Antumbra]

I found the speed/range table to be pretty straightforward. It's not really any more complicated than, say, Shadowrun's visibility modifier table.

I never memorised it, but I just have printouts for those kinds of references.

RIFTS skills values on the other hand, ugh. The few times I've made characters for it, that was the worst part. I regret ever trying to figure out how to effect mechanical repairs.