Skills, Socialization, and Stories

I had a chance to play GURPS recently, and it got me thinking about critical failures.

The basic rule for skills in D&D: Roll a d20, add a skill bonus, beat a target number. In GURPS, 3d6, under your skill, with difficulty modifiers. In Shadowrun, you roll 1d6 against a target number, for each point you have in the skill. These all work pretty well for determining the success of things, but again, it's the critical failures I'm talking about here.

General rule for every RPG ever made: When making a skill check, if you get all ones, it's a critical failure, and the GM does something horrible to you. Now, to put this into perspective for you, here's an example. We have someone who has spent his whole life training as a chef. For the sake of argument, let's say his skill levels in these three systems are 20 20 and 6 respectively.

• Iron Chef D&D will sever his own thumb one 1 of every 20 times he's cutting up carrots.
• Iron Chef GURPS will sever his own thumb 1 out of every 216 times he's cutting up carrots.
• Iron Chef Shadowrun will sever his own thumb 1 out of every 46656 times he's cutting up carrots.

It's pretty clear that D&D makes those failures entirely too often. GURPS doesn't look too bad, until you stop to think how often a chef has to cut up carrots. Let's say you're using that cutting board 3 times a day. We're now cutting off an average of 1 thumb per week, 1 thumb every month and a half, and 1 thumb every 42 years. Shadowrun is a good deal more realistic here. It's also the only one of these to factor your skill level into the chance of a critical failure. If you only had a 3, you'd have the same odds as in GURPS, a 2 puts you pretty close to D&D, and if for some crazy reason you only had a 1 in your knife skill and couldn't default to something reasonable, well, the hospital is going to become very familiar.

Anyway though, let's move on before I get people whining at me how no sane GM would make you roll for that sort of thing, or insisting I list the stats for Whitewolf games. Besides, I've never gotten past character creation there, so I don't KNOW the Whitewolf skill rule.

Last week, in an effort to kill boredom and get some sort of confirmation people are still reading this page without my plugging it in Q&A columns, I reminded people of the existence of this message board and the irc channel I finally ended up registering (irc.esper.net #google).

This brought a respectable number of people out of the woodwork, as I expected, but the problem is, it brought them all out at different times. So while there were enough people in the IRC channel to justify keeping it around, no more than two people I'm not used to seeing have been in there at a time. Not the critical mass needed to start a decent conversation that.

So, in an attempt to kickstart things in this area, how's this sound? Everyone curious about the degree of overlap between people reading this, and people willing to sit around an irc channel, pop into the afforementioned #google let's say... Thursday night, around 8 PM EDT. If nothing else, it'll give me a chance to test my theory that everyone who reads this is eerily polite and shy. At least compared to, say, Sharkey's readers.

Oh yes. I promised a third S up in the title didn't I. OK, in response to how much everyone liked that little trilogy from last week, here's my first legitimate attempt at actually doing horror. Enjoy.