>People have been talking about levels of mastery/expertise etc with Eric
>saying that WWW doesn't come close to being a superhero (okay so I
>paraphrase). What I want to know is does that mean a person with one WWW
>skill or a person with a range of skills/abilities at WWW. Using RQ terms
>would characters, one with 90% in listen and the other with 90% in
>perception both be considered 90% characters? (Using 90% as a corollary for
>WWW)
Doesn't really matter. 90% in Listen itself is meaningless, really,
and not a corollary for anything. In RQ it is arbitrarily set in terms
of actual ability by the GM for each case. Think about it and how it
actually works in game play. Does 90% mean your chance of hearing a
conversation between two others a few feet away, a dozen, in the next
room, in the next county? It means what the GM wants it to mean. This
makes comparisons of strength meaningless because they are actually
set by the GM/narrator, not by the system. HW and all RPGs suffer this
same problem to some degree, but HW will at least attempt to give
solid guidelines for narrator arbitration.
The bottom line is that things like 90% and 4E3 (E=expertise level)
are tools for the gm/narrator to use to fit their estimate of the
probability of successful player actions, with the benefit of
comparisons between players or characters for the same act being
consistent and thus not arbitrary decisions by the gm like most rolls
really are. In RQ this consistency breaks down at higher levels, in HW
it does not.
Eric Rowe