> > Even inconsistency can be more realistic. If the difficulty for
> > tracking through grass are different in your table than the ones
> > a narrator made up, maybe it's because the grass is longer, or
> > thicker, or wetter. Is all grass going to be equaly difficult to
> > track through?
>
> You are right. But in short: These numbers are not going to
> be printed _but_ are design guidelines for official
> scenarios. I'd like to have consistent numbers which may be
> influenced by scenario needs, but are not solely based upon
> them. No player is going to understand, why it's very hard to
> read the tracks of a camp (when the narrator feels, that the
> outcome isn't important or worse, doesn't want to be
> distracted from his story line or doesn't want to make
> something up at that moment) and the pursuit of the main
> enemy through waters and creeks to the place of the final
> showdown is comparably simple or same target number.
Well, I think this is partly down to how the Gm approaches this problem. I think the issue is not that the ratings aare disociated from the symptoms, but that the GM should take on the duty of justifying to the characters/players why the difficulties are inconsistent. Frex, if characters track regularly, and have a good ballpark idea of what tracking difficulties should be, and then the GM ups the difficulty radically for story-driven reasons at a particular point (say the GM wants an NPC to get away and haunt them later) then I feel it is the GMs responsibility to justify this change through narrative methods. The GM should not merely rule that the difficulty happens to be higher, they should explain why this situation is mopre difficult - by description of terrain, circumstance, surroundings etc. As people have pointed out, the sequence is rewversed by comparison to simulationist styles: instead of looking at the circumstanceand judging a difficulty, in HW you decide a difficulty and justify it through narration after the fact.
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