Silburn, Luke wrote:
> >What I find interesting is that (ignoring the top line for a moment) the
> >table is quite tightly clustered around the base resistance.
>
I've noticed that, too.
>
> An 'out of the box' game starts the base resistance at 14 IIRC, so
> subbing that into the table gives you targets of 6, 8, 14, 20 and 3m
> (plus 14m2 for a 'nearly impossible' contest) against which starting
> heroes will typically have abilities in the 15-9m range - so a lot of
> contests are going to be resulting in marginal/minor levels of victory
> with major/complete levels of victory only really occurring if heroes
> are going up against the lower resistances in contests that utilise
> their core competencies (or vice versa - heroes attempting the harder
> challenges whilst using abilities that they have little or no experience
> with).
>
I seem to recall once upon a time an argument for why clustering around
marginal/minor levels of victory was a good thing. This was from some
debate long ago.
It is possible that this is a design feature Robin has thought about and
is explained in the book.
> The exception is the 'Nearly Impossible' line, which looks impressively
> cliff-like - although I will note that a focused starting PC (7m+2 in
> an ability which is suitable to the nature of the challenge) can pull
> off some kind of victory against the starting 'nearly impossible'
> resistance approximately one time in four (rising to 50/50 odds if a HP
> is deployed). These are mostly marginal or minor victories of course,
> but a victory is a victory...
>
Well, yes and no. It is my understanding that the book goes to some
length to explain how to interpret the different levels of victory so
that a "victory is a victory" isn't the end all of the issue. :)
Thanks for the summary.
LC