Hence the need for descriptions of what critters are. I know that a lion is a lot more physically powerful than a coyote and that an elephant is more powerful still than a lion. So if I had each of these in the pass/fail cycle, I'd say a really hungry mean coyote is maybe a moderate opponent, a lion is a Very Hard opponent, and to kill an elephant with my spear is Nearly Impossible. If the order of encounters is somehow fixed before hand and the elephant ends up being Moderate, I have some mental justification to do (in this case, perhaps the elephant is calm and friendly and easily befriended - only Nearly Impossible if there is a fight).
> But, what if you don"t have that knowledge? How do you describe an "appropriate" Low Resistance encounter with a death lord as opposed to a trollkin? You need some kind of baseline understanding of the "standard power level" of a critter in order to be able to satisfactorily narrate a Resistance "X" conflict with it, even if that baseline understanding is the fruit of many years gaming with explicit stats, or of pages of comparative description saying things like "armwrestling dark trolls is harder than humans". Otherwise there's no foundation for any kind of credibility test. In the real world it's not so much a problem - people don't routinely bench-press a BMW, for example. But what if my great troll tries to bench press an ox-cart? What's the basis for the credibility test there?
Descriptions of the creature combined with your own personal story-style. A great troll weighs over 500 pounds (and described as "far larger and stronger than even a dark troll"), so I'd have little trouble with a player's great troll character saying, "I try to lift that ox-cart" using my Great Troll keyword.
> But what happens when your PCs are twice as powerful as when they first started? Griffin Grab Victim attacks aren't any easier to defend against, as they're tied to the base resistance. I get that the GM is supposed to tailor the encounter to the PCs' power level, but this again presupposes a prior knowledge of "reality" which probably comes from a prior acquaintance with Gloranthan critter relative powers derived from other games' stat blocks :-)
Remember, a specific rating might become twice as high during the course of a campaign, but that does not mean that it is twice as good at overcoming obstacles (since the base resistance increases). Over the course of a long campaign, player's specialties become far more useful at overcoming obstacles, but their blind spots become even more apparent.
The difficulty posed by a griffin - an inherently fantastic creature - is whatever it NEEDS to be. A griffin can be little more than a lion with wings, talons, and a beak, or it can be something far more heroic - frex, as the guardian of Dara Happan temples and high nobility.
Jeff
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