The narrator decides what is going to happen in the event of total victory or failure, then assigns a resistance that is challenging to someone using the ratings that the PC possesses, then you work out - based on the test result - what happens (the varieties of success and failure allowing for mixed results based on the pre-decided maximal and minimal outcomes). I am afraid I don't see the importance in making sure that the resistance for Run Ten Miles Fast in your game is the same as it is in my game? I'm as wargamery as the next person (well maybe not the next person in here, but I am pretty wargamery!) but I don't see rigid tables being very important. Perhaps people in Narrator A's game can perform feats of speed that are almost impossible in Narrator B's; I don't find that this has much impact on either game, to be honest. What is important to me is "Did the hero make it in time?" not "Did the hero make it in time? + I sure hope I properly modelled the distance the hero ran and assigned the correct resistance according to the objective standard".
Personally I tend to avoid a lot of hard distances. To steal from another RDL game "the map is not your friend". I don't use it this strongly (I *like* maps!) but I rarely put absolute scales on my maps for my non-Gloranthan HQ game: people can look at the map and know its twice as far from Paws to Jhelom as it is from Britain to Paws, but they don't know how many 'measurement units' it is. Similarly I don't tell people how much things cost in absolute terms, I just say "your credit is good here" or "you will need to town to visit your goldsmith before you make any more serious purchases".
> They need to *be* consistent, that's the entire point.
> So if ten miles in 4 hours is difficulty 14 today, it
> needs to be 14 tomorrow, as well. Doing it in 2 hours
> should be harder. So you have a conversion table.
So long as it is consistent within the game it doesn't matter if its 14 or 14W5; provided it produces entertaining results for the game.
-- John Machin "Nothing is more beautiful than to know the All." - Athanasius Kircher, 'The Great Art of Knowledge'.
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