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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6673043" data-attributes="member: 85870">Well, in a certain sense, you COULD simply conflate "margin of success" as being equivalent to the "target number" in GURPS. In other words, some challenges are a "Simply roll under your skill, regardless of how much you succeed"; some might be "Roll at least 2 under your skill"; some might be "Roll at least 5 under your skill." That makes sense. This also directly scales with skills, since the higher a skill rating, the more likely you are to succeed by the required margin of success.This is essentially the same as "lowering" the player's skill in the background without telling them. "Okay, normally they have a 16, but for this check they have to roll below 13." But even then there's a problem, which is that the more skilled a PC you are, the more punishing the penalties are. A PC is penalized MORE heavily by coming from outside the second standard deviation of the bell curve back to the middle. A character with a 16 skill is penalized exceptionally more by having their skill rating lowered to 13 than someone with a 13 skill is penalized by having their skill lowered to 10. And that's just screwy. Because now to do skill penalties right, the GM has to adjust the penalty differently depending on where the character's rating is within the bell curve. It becomes a massive headache trying to even visualize the "relative" difficulty of any given task, instead of simply saying, "A task has difficulty X, roll your dice and see if you meet or exceed it." The problem is too, by default GURPS doesn't seem to tell GMs how to consistently apply this, or even if they should. I do recall GURPS explicitly telling GMs not to make players roll all the time, and to be judicious as to whether a roll is called for at all, but I don't recall anything directly relating to degree of success. I've only read the GURPS 4e rulebooks all the way through a couple of times, so maybe I'm wrong about that, but I don't recall any explicit mention of degree of success except for critical success/failure.  The place this most bugs the living daylights out of me for this is active defenses. It feels completely wrong that a defender doesn't have to account for an attacker's margin of success, they simply have to make a standard success against their own fighting skill. So a guy with a 16 skill can roll a 6 for an attack (for the uninitiated, rolling lower is better in GURPS) and a guy with a 12 can roll a 12 for his defense, and the clearly far less skilled defender still successfully parries. With two opponents in the upper limit of skill range (15+), winning a fight basically comes down to sheer luck. "Attack." "Parry." "Attack." "Parry."  For round, after round, after round. As a side note, I also hate that when you act in a round is purely a construct of your speed rating. Fastest guy ALWAYS goes first, the end. There's no element of chance, no potential for a narrative of, "You get distracted for a split second and the opponent gets in the first attack this round." To me this also detracts from the teamwork aspect, because you can never really plan moves based on your combat order unless you're the guy who goes first. I would absolutely use the Savage Worlds initiative mechanic in GURPS, giving a bonus to people whose speed reached a certain rating (i.e., with a speed rating of 6.75 you automatically re-draw any cards 4 or lower, etc.).If you don't use degree of success at all, GURPS to me is basically incoherent, because at that point your skill level means nothing other than your skill level. It provides zero meaningful information about the nature or difficulty of a challenge, meaning the player cannot make rational decisions about what to do. It's basically reverse dissociation---the character would know perfectly well in the fiction how difficult a challenge appears to be, and how likely he or she is to succeed at a task, but the player can't visualize that information based on what's on their character sheet. Without accounting for degree of success, you're basically playing a game of "Schrodinger's challenge rating." The actual difficulty of the challenge isn't known until AFTER you resolve the dice throw. And heaven help you if a player ever has to ask, "How does that actually work?" in GURPS. Because the answer will be scattered across four different supplements, and will require a half-dozen rolls each from the player and GM to resolve. (This is somewhat better in GURPS 4e, since the core rules contain all the previous 3e compendia. But in 3e, it's pretty much EXACTLY like this.)</blockquote>

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