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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9263966" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree with your assessment of how fortune should work in skill systems.For a system built around skills it probably has the worst skill implementation in the history of RPGs.  The problem here is that GURPS doesn't really have any notion of difficult.  You are generally rolling against a target number set by your skill and GURPS is rather leery of modified rolls because it knows just how much havoc they play with its 3D6 fortune mechanic.  The problem is not a problem if like DC 20 or D6 you say that things have difficulties, and that the difficulty of common tasks is so low that you normally only fail them when you are distracted by something else or otherwise under adverse conditions.  In both systems its reasonable to have the DC of taking off be 0 and of landing being 5, and then in both systems any reasonably competent pilot will not fail.  D20 takes it a bit further by allowing you to take 10 on anything you are skilled in provided that you aren't distracted.   Monte Cook spent a lot of time thinking about this casual realism problem like, "Under my system could a 2nd level Expert (pilot) reasonably expected to fly a plane?"  and "Under my system are the distances people can run or jump somewhat reasonable?"  It's one of the things that really impressed me about 3e.I judge a skill system by a lot of features (GURPS fails on all of them) but one of the things I'm looking for are "Does there exist ordinary tasks of the skill that a proficient person can perform reliably (without chance of failure) but a non-proficient person may not, and further does there exist tasks so difficult that a nonproficient person cannot be expected to perform at all (auto failure) but which a very skilled person might perform reliably or at least confidently?"  Because if we look at the world we see that tasks exhibit that sort of range - DC 5 to DC 25 in D20 terms. It's never possible to accurately judge the difficulty and chance of failure of tasks with just a bonus and a fortune mechanic, but RPGs aren't really trying to be simulators so much as throw out numbers and results that are believable over a wide range of skills and tasks.  As you note, the skilled pilot who Launchpad McQuack style crashes twice a month - the logical result of the GURPS system - fails that test.</blockquote>

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