> I don't think your conclusion here is correct. I'm no statistician
> but you do seem to presuppose that players will focus their HP
> spending on a narrow group of specific skills.
The rules do (elsewhere) say that this is quite likely. Obviously it won't be true of all players - clearly it isn't in my case, from the figure I quoted! But since the rules do say elsewhere that players are prone to doing this, I don't think we can assume that the rules on the base resistance aren't taking it into account.
> Maybe your players
> are the sort to try to keep ahead of the base resistance; I seem to
> remember that Robin has thought of
> that and has suggested that in this case the base resistance can
> increase more.
What it says is that you should increase the base resistance if the players succeed with "frustrating regularity". Different GMs will find different things frustrating, I presume, so its not obvious (at least to me) that an effective increase of +2 per 3 sessions is necessarily deemed undesirable. It *might* be, but we can't take that for granted.
Anyway, the rules say that individual GMs should figure out what rate of advance works best for them, so the intent of the specific table provided is of academic interest, rather than practical, I would have thought.
> Whatever the book says about it I think that such an arms race would
> be against the spirit of narrative gaming.
Possibly true. Although by that argument, you might not need "experience points" at all (a suggestion that the book does actually make).
> If you do get into that situation I'd suggest it's because the
> contests you are getting into allow the same old skills to be used
> again and again. If
> you vary attention between a wide variety of abilities then the
> desire to
> increase just a few will become more obvious and also be less
> attractive.
Can't argue with that. (Although I'm sure many groups won't see it as a bad thing, the range of tastes being what it is).
-- Trotsky Gamer and Skeptic ------------------------------------------------------ Trotsky's RPG website: http://www.ttrotsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ Not a Dead Communist: http://jrevell.blogspot.com/
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