"Out of curiosity, what if it is the reverse:
Player 1: How far is guard?
GM: What are you thinking?
Player 1: I want to throw my knife at him.
GM: (Hmmm, I don't want this to be too easy, so I'll call it a hard resistance).
GM: He's about 20 paces away, a difficult knife throw, but not impossible.
Player 2: Okay, I pull out my bow, which makes it much easier, right?
GM: (Darn, time to fudge some dice rolls again . . .)."
The conversation probably wouldn't go like that:
Player 1: How far is guard?
GM: What are you thinking of doing?
Player 1: I want to throw my knife at him.
GM: Okay, to what end?
Forget all this "I can has skillz that haz well defined FX," it's more that "I can haz abilities that winz conflictz/overcomz obstaclez." It's all about framing the contests - make sure there's an objective in mind before even discussing how they're going to do it. Sure, explore the options but don't make the mistake that there's an implied stake. Trad RPGs get away with describing the mechanism first (as there is in every trad RPG, whether it's D&D, Hero System, GURPS, FATAL) as there's an implied stake of the looser dropping hit points.
So in this case the player's objective for the contest is to get rid of the guard without being detected. How the character does it may or may not have any bearing on how hard it is to succeed. Depending on how you want to run your game some possibilities are:
- It's hard 'cause that's dramatically appropriate and if the character fails something cooler might happen
- it's hard 'cause I can't be arsed and the pass/fail cycle is a pretty good crutch which I'm leaning on
- it's hard because I'm thinking in a simulationist mind set and I think a single throw kill seems to be hard, whatever the weapon he or she uses
...and there's loads more, there just three that sprang to mind while writing the mail.
Cheers,
Ash
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