AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Interesting, but the question that IMMEDIATELY sprang to my mind is 'why'? I mean, what work are mechanics doing in HeroQuest if the speeds of horses and men are rated on completely different scales and given different names? AND THEN GET COMPARED TO EACH OTHER!!!! lol. It appears to be the same activity, physically pushing yourself to a faster speed for the horse and the man. As an engineer and tinkerer with game systems, HQ seems broken to me! Same with the Hulk/Jane Grey example, the mechanics are flawed! This is what they are FOR is to tell us this stuff. If we have to 'fudge it', then OK, its a poorly designed game (mechanically) and I can live with that, but I bet that gets a lot of negative feedback!Here's another take on it: does the resolution process in a RPG system need a "credibility test" as part of the framing of action declaration and resolution?
In HeroQuest revised and MHRP/Cortex+, the answer is yes. Robin Laws's example in the former involves a cowboy trying to outrun his horse: while, for reasons to do with respective builds, the cowboy PC might have a Fast Runner ability rated at 17, while the horse has a Galloping ability rated at 12, that doesn't mean the player can make a test to have the PC outrun his horse. Because that makes no sense in the fiction.
MHRP has the same consideration: mathematically, it is possible (not very likely, but possible) for (say) Jean Gray's arm wrestling dice pool to beat The Thing's. But that doesn't mean she has a chance of beating The Thing in an arm wrestle (other than by using mind control or TK to beat him). Again, we first have to pass a credibility test before then building our pools and resolving the opposed check.
In Burning Wheel, on the other hand, the notion of "credibility tests" has no work to do in these sorts of scenarios (it might have work to do in some knowledge or discovery cases, as per other threads we've been party to). The obstacle is set and the dice are rolled. What is credible, or possible, is a downstream consequence of action resolution, not an input into it. AD&D and Rolemaster also work pretty much like this; so does Classic Traveller. (That last one, given the technical scope it covers, might have some cases where minimum stats are needed to try something - but that is still credibility/possibility is read off the mechanics, and is not an input into framing before any stats are consulted and applied.)
As per my post upthread about sealing the Abyss, I think that 4e needs credibility checks as a precursor to framing. Page 42 of the DMG suggests as much. This is another reason I think of it as falling on the HeroQuest revised "subjective" side of this methodological divide, rather than the Burning Wheel "objective" side.
IMHO 4e doesn't have an urgent need for credibility tests. Maybe there's a limited sense in which the thematics of Epic is so different from Heroic that it tends to outstrip the DC chart a bit. I'm not entirely sure. My feeling is that the INTENT was that skills, by themselves, would simply be backstop kind of ways to do things. That is, they would represent relatively mundane or straightforward applications of a character's SKILL or whatever. This is another case where 4e kind of started out as one sort of game, and evolved into another sort along the way.
So, HoML also addresses this. 'Skill' is taken more as 'governing approach'. The fighter with Athletics proficiency approaches problems as physical challenges of strength and raw power. Via the use of powers (not to delve into the current terminology much, lets just say powers) he can apply this approach to things outside what would typically be thought of as athletic challenges. He might be able to intimidate people with his strength, or perform 'wire fu' or whatever. So, to 'Seal the Abyss' so to speak, this strength-based approach would require some sort of 'power' to bind it to the fiction. This could be improvised, it could be enabled by means of paying some other resource, etc. Those means simply wouldn't be available to a Heroic character, so the attempt wouldn't happen. Even the wizard, with his Arcana skill simply doesn't possess a power that can bring it to bear against an epic (Mythic) grade challenge.
I consider this a 'fix' for what in 4e is, IME, a pretty minor issue. It is just that I wanted more emphasis on the progression. There was a tendency for people running 4e to treat Paragon and Epic as just "Heroic with bigger numbers" and miss the POINT of it. You cannot miss the point of it in my game! lol.