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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 8770636" data-attributes="member: 7030042">In point of fact, outside of professional team sports, it's usually considered disastrous if a trained person or team doing a difficult thing had a mere 25-40% success rate outside of the most extraordinary of circumstances.(For instance, this <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-healthcare-hospitals-survival-idUSKBN0M809D20150312" target="_blank">admittedly rather old article</a> suggests that hospitals of the day were falling short if their survival rate for replacing the heart's aortic valve - surely a challenging procedure at the best of times - was less than 95%!)If as a player you enjoy pro-team-sport-levels of success (where, for instance, converting 15-20% of your shots on goal into a goal in ice hockey is an amazing achievement), that's fine as far as it goes, but frankly it comes across as enjoying feeling lucky more than feeling challenged.[HR][/HR]To my mind, being challenged in RPG gameplay is first and foremost about testing your skills as a player, whether that's your system mastery, your care and attention to the description of the world around your PC and such deductions that you can make about that world as a result, your clever use of equipment and personal resources to bypass or resolve obstacles, your leveraging of social relationships in the fiction, and other skills besides. (Note that I stated being challenged, as opposed to feeling challenged, which of course is a matter of player psychology.)Insisting on challenge-as-low-success-rate strikes me as saying that being challenged is more like playing a game of, "You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well do ya, punk?” Go nuts if you want, but I just don't see the point.</blockquote>

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