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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8652398" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can't comment on BitD. But in Apocalypse World characters are rated by their degree of affinity/skill in different areas: Hard, Cool, Hot, Sharp, Weird. It's a deliberate feature of the system that sometimes a character with -2 Cool (a possibility for a starting Hardholder) will have to Act Under Fire (and thus will need to roll 9+ in order to avoid a hard move from the GM); or that a character with -2 Hard (a possibility for quite a few playbooks) will need to Seize something/someone By Force to get what they want.BW likewise has different degrees of character aptitude, more finely grained: all characters have six stats (Agility, Speed, Forte, Power, Perception, Will) and at least two attributes (Health, Steel; some characters have more - eg Thurgon has Faith), and some skills from a selection of dozens (for me, the skill list is reminiscent of the Rolemaster list). Even the "litest" system I know, Cthuhlu Dark, modulates the difficulty of resolution rolls by reference to PC attributes (add one die to the pool if the task is humanly possible, and another if falls within your PC's occupational expertise).Where BW differs from AW and Cthulhu Dark is in also modulating the difficulty of tasks by reference to elements of the fiction beyond the character's aptitudes.Vincent Baker discusses this possibility in relation to AW (p 268):Here’s a custom threat move. People new to the game occasionally ask me for this one. It’s general, it modifies nearly every other move: Things are tough. Whenever a players’ character makes a move, the MC judges it normal, difficult, or crazy difficult. If it’s difficult, the player takes -1 to the roll. If it’s crazy difficult, the player takes -2 to the roll. Several groups in playtest wanted this move or one like it. All of them abandoned it after only one session. It didn’t add anything fun to the game, but did add a little hassle to every single move. So it’s a legal custom move, of course, and you can try it if you like, but I wouldn’t expect you to stick with it.In Burning Wheel, the modulated difficulties are part of the fun of the game. It is intended to be a gritty game (as declared by the author on p 19 of the Revised rulebook. BW also has many ways to add to dice pools - advantage dice from circumstances or gear, Help, FoRKs, artha - that AW does not.</blockquote>

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