It would indeed make a big difference. However, last I heard <insert other disclaimers of Mastery of Non-definitiveness>, it was 'roll below, and roll low', rather than Pendragon's 'roll below, but as high as poss.'. So it's statistically equivalent to the 'old' system, but reverseways, diewise and statwise. If you see what I mean.
As Andrew says, using a Pendragonalike convention would be one possible tweak, though it would mean that high target numbers are more of an advantage than at present.
Another tinker that occurred to me would be to substract the target number[*] from the die roll, when bumping up a failure. That is, you now 'succeed' by the amount you 'missed' the original roll with. This has the effect of making a Mastery slightly more of an advantage overall, and also making it a somewhat more consistent level of advantage, wrt different target numbers. It's moderately fiddly, though.
Or on the third tentacle (is anyone out there still awake?), one could dispose of the initial die roll entirely, and instead simply have bump-ups work in the following manner:
Fumble -> Failure,
Failure -> Success (Loser),
Success (Loser) -> Success (Winner),
Success (Winner) -> Critical
Which is still probably a little wobbly statistically, but makes a sort of intuitive sense, at least to my addled brain.
Slan,
Alex.
[*] If you want to be _even more_ mathematically pedantic than I, arguably target number - 1 would make more sense.
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