My reasoning is that if you are twice as good as someone else, you should be twice as likely to win (66.7% vs 33.3%), ceteris paribus.
So, my point was that if you have a 12% of winning, your opponent has an 88% chance of same. Since he wins about 8 out of 9 contests, while you win 1 out of 9, he is 8 times better than you.
So, re: The 100% skill guy vs the 10% skill guy. I'm not saying that he's 10 times as good. I'm saying he's more than 160 times better since the 100% guy is 165-171 times more likely to win than the 10% guy. He wins 85.5% of the time and the 10% guy wins 0.5% of the time (assuming that rolls over 95 automatically fail) [I'm ignoring crits vs succ and fumble vs fail here]. If we ignore/reroll the ties he wins about 99.4% of the time. So he's more than 160 times better than his lower skilled opponent, who'll have to carefully chose a good moment to contest his suprerior opponent and have a decent chance of winning (to put it mildly).
>If someone is twice as strong as me,
>then they will beat me at arm-wrestling every time. Not 95%, EVERY time.
>Even if they are only 10% stronger, they will probably beat me 85% of the
>time. I will have to catch them at a bad moment, get them drunk, wait until
>they have arm-wrestled five other people first, etc. in order to have a
>good chance of winning.
This is somewhat different, since it's also a matter of how well one can utilize one's strength.
>I still maintain that you are misunderstanding "mastery" and taking the
>name too literally.
I just think that the game works better when the human norm is rated 1-20, and that people with abilities rated above 20 are extraordinary.
-- - Mikael Raaterova [.sig omitted on legal advice]
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