Laws raises the point that the characters in stories do not really "improve" over time. Does Kirk become better and scoring Green Skinned Babes?
The decisions you make as a Narrator have less to do with how "strong" the characters are than what their players would find interesting at a given point in time.
The basic challenges scale up as the average abilities of your party scale up. But Laws tells Narrators to set resistances based on story logic and not on any pre-set "objective" rating.
So if, by following Robin's rules, your characters should be facing a 5w challenge and your Zombie overlord has 17w in most of his ratings it is beholden upon you as narrator to explain why Zombie Overlord is off of his game.
Let's put LoTR in Heroquest terms. Frodo dodges the Ringwraith not because of some super-huge bonus provided by the Ring, but because at this point in the story his "Hide" ability of 17 was more than enough to overcome the moderate challenge that Laws' rules led the Narrator to set.
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