>The open-ended, non-linear difficulty systems mentioned suck.
Off to a good start. I think he might be talking about Ghostbusters/Star Wars here, from what follows.
>They are very dice intensive ...
This statement assumes that being dice intensive (or too dice intensive) is bad. Says who? If Hrut the Thirsty gets 3d6 and Grunt Gurk Who-Raided-Heaven gets 36d6, that shows in a very physical way the difference of scale. So I say, so what?
>...and expect GMs to assign difficulties when there is no way they can be
expected to >work out the resultant probability of success on the hoof.
Again, so what? How would you assign a "realistic" probability to the chance of some heroic being accomplishing an astonishing feat, whether or not it's possible in the RW? A GM familiar with the system can fudge a reasonable difficulty level by knowing how many dice the character has and thus figuring the average and range. You don't have to know the probability to three significant figures, or even two, to GM effectively. When in doubt, defaults and your story needs are your best bet, anyhow.
One thing that needs to change, though, is skill doubling from "Hero Points" or anything else. Nothing should add more than 3d6 to a skill in 99% of circumstances, otherwise things get too easy for powerful characters.
Another *valid* complaint about Star Wars (and every other RPG system I know of, except Pendragon) is that it doesn't provide for partial success. That's easily remedied, however, by having failures within some number (the number of dice you rolled, frex) count as a partial success, the closer to your success number the better. With that system, you'd have less chance of partial success as your difficulty reached either end of your range, but so what?
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