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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8669126" data-attributes="member: 7026617">There's a couple of things you have to keep in mind.1. The fact that most combat sports are not extremely realistic matters; among other things, they usually try to minimize some of the factors that dice represent because, honestly, they can easily get you hurt.  SCA is a little better than some because they'll do actual outdoors fighting in the like, but how often did you fight somewhere where there was a lot of low hanging branches?  Muddy patches?  Loose gravel?  I'm betting even in the Wars there was some avoidance of bad footing and similar things, and in regular indoor bouts.  Same with trying to avoid issues with weapons and armor.  Most of the time people in real combats have a lot more trouble avoiding these sorts of things, but when they show up is, if not literally random, is well below the level that is going to be managed manually by a GM (if, even, they should).  A lot of that significant but low level clutter is handled by dice rolls.2. Being random doesn't mean some differences in capability can't pile up.  One of the issues with big linear die roll systems like D20 and D100 resolutions is that they overemphasize the randomness.  You have to have really massive differences in capability before its always obvious how much those differences actually matter can come in.  This was very obvious to me early on being both a RuneQuest and Hero System convert early; while I loved both games, RQ's percentage system meant you could sometimes end up with a lot of, well, crap rolls that made the gap between you and less skillful opponents seem less than it was.  It didn't mean you still didn't win a lot of fights, but it overemphasized the outliers.  On the other hand in Hero, if you had one guy with an 8 CV and one guy with a 3, the chances the latter guy would ever even get a hit in before he went down was--pretty slim.  That's because the 3D6 resolution could push the probabilities to where the chances of failure were pretty minuscule.  That wasn't what you expected most fights to be, but it could occur, and you'd still have room for outliers but have them be genuinely outliers.  Some die pool systems can produce a similar result.   Even in more modest differences, the probabilities can be more more slanted because they aren't going to produce a linear set of steps (you could get that result with a percentile system by messing with tables, but tables are usually a bad word in the hobby, so...)</blockquote>

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