I wasn't at Convulsion, but I assume it was similar to his comments at Tentacles. There he said that people tended to have a Mastery in *what they did for a living*. So I have Software Engineer 5W, or whatever. According to the rules I therefore do a great job a quarter of the time, an okay job most of the time, and mess up once in twenty. This seems about right, for normally difficult tasks.
>This is a well known RPG phenomenon called "inflation". >We saw this with
>bad RQ character writeups at some published works, >with NPC:s having
>200+ skills and almost everybody having a DEX of 18+.
>
>I recommend that you don't set your foot on that path.
It can't be inflation in the first edition of the rules - you have to inflate from somewhere.
Basically, any set of numbers can be balanced, providing both sides (PCs and NPCs) are of similar levels. Thus whether both sides have 17, 5W, or 10W3 as their best skill is irrelevant. In some systems, the rules were focused at a certain level, and didn't scale well. However, in HW a 17 vs. 17 contest is identical to a 17W5 vs. 17W5 contest. As long as we all use the same scale, the game is reasonably inflation proof.
Arbitrarily choosing lower numbers, and then claiming the original is inflated seems a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy.
Cheers,
Graham
Graham Robinson
gjrobinson_at_...
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