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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8669769" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Even something as simple as fighting on gravel can change the certainty of a process non-trivially.  Or the fact someone slept badly the night before.  Naturally when the issue is clear-cut enough this will be moved up a step and function as modifiers, but the GM is unlikely to micromanage things enough to represent the sleep example, or more limited versions of the gravel example (where there's loose patch on the mountain trail but the whole trail isn't loose).  That's the sort of below-the-radar thing a lot of randomness represents.That's usually more about the secondary mechanic of hit point elevation, though.  Hit point elevation isn't a model used much outside of D&D.  Set those two fighters at the same hit points (which, after all, could happen if the 4th level fighter just rolled consistently crappy as he levelled) and the differences are much less significant.  The 4th level fighter just isn't that much better that it can't get drowned out in the D20 swing.  The only reason he can be expected to do so reliably in the normal case is that the D&D hit point model actually emphasizes defense much more strongly than offense in progression (back in the day at least), so the 4th level fighter can take four hits to the first level's one.I didn't use RQ as an example by coincidence; you don't have a secondary process to hide behind in the system, and the range of capability is relatively compressed.  A fighting type with his relevant skills at 75% and his opponent at 50% (a fairly significant difference by the standards of the system) have about a 37.5% and a 12.5% chance of landing a successful attack respectively (because of the interactive nature of attack and defense).  In other respects they aren't likely to be radically different; the 75% fighter might have a couple more points of armor, but that isn't even a given.This isn't radically different from the model a number of games use, except that often there defense value is a flat one rather than a roll.  So my point that there's still a big difference between a linear die and a multiple die approach still applies.[Sometimes there's a different sort of secondary mechanism in the form of some kind of metacurrency, but how that's implemented varies so much that its difficult to say whether it makes the gap between skill levels more pronounced or less).</blockquote>

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