> The way I understood Greg to explain this at Convulsion (and yes, it
> made sense to me), having a Mastery means that under normal
> circumstances, you don't fumble. Maybe if there are exceptional
> circumstances, then yes, but not normally. So, he asked, in your nomral
> everyday work, that you get paid for, how often do you fumble? How
> often do you fail? Right. You're at about 10W.
>
> It's a bit difficult to measure fumbles and so on in being a pro. database
> designer. Results take too long to come back. But one thing I do quite
> often is cook a meal. A fumble would be, say, burning it. Burning the
> pan. Giving people food poisoning. I don't do this: not ever. So I've got
> at least one mastery in Cooking. A Failure would be that the result is
> edible, but not all that tasty. No-one asks for seconds, some gets left on
> the plates. This happens, but not often. But if you asked me to cook a
> hedgehog over an open fire: things could get messy!
<sorry for the long quote>
I don't think this holds.
When you cook you are backed up by our societys intricate and advanced infrastructure. You have excellent cooking equipment (at least +4 bonus), you have meat that is mostly prepared already (+4), you can be sure that the ingredients you get from the shop are disease and vermin free (no food poisoning and such possible)... etc.
So you don't need to have a mastery in cooking, and if you are like me, and mostly cook for yourself and don't pursue it as a qourmet artform you propably don't have a mastery.
When somebody says fumble, people tend to think of RQ, and cutting one's own head off with a poleaxe. Getting a fumble result is relative to the task at hand, and it's difficulty. A riding fumble doesn't mean your horses head suddenly explodes, nor does a cooking fumble mean that you manage to poison your guests.
Under normal circumstanses (in RL), if you fumble your cooking the food just tastes bad. Usually it is still edible, at least on the standards of a hungry person with nothing else to eat.
Did you people use the old RQ language and craft skills by rolling on the skills every time somebody tried to do some simple craftwork, or speak their native tongue? Hopefully not. 30% In ride was said to mean that you are capable of riding under normal conditions, and that you only need to roll under difficult conditions (such as trying to ride a strange and skittish horse).
Herding 12 is quite enough for somebody you send out to watch over the sheep. A skill of 12 means that he has experiense doing the thing, and knows quite a bit about it (it's not that hard). You really don't need a mastery in sheep herding.
I think Greg is just wrong, and hasn't really tought out what he said at the Convulsion.
> Looking at the Rules, p120 tells me that making a Jourenyman quality
> item starts at 1W: a Masterwork starts at 1W2.
I'd definitely say that one makes ones masterpiece at 1W.
> It sounds to me as if a skill that a PC has got well enough to be of value
> to the clan should be at least at 1W. Not the "everyone can do that"
> skills, but, say Brew Cider. Fishing. Cooking. Something that isn't that
> unusual, but not everyone is that good. Obviously I'm not going to list
> Walk 1W2 (or even Chew Gum 1W2), but there are people who can't
> cook, or fish, so it's worth mentioning it when someone can.
This is a well known RPG phenomenon called "inflation". We saw this with bad RQ character writeups at some published works, with NPC:s having 200+ skills and almost everybody having a DEX of 18+.
I recommend that you don't set your foot on that path.
-Adept
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