Modifiers without modifiers

[Christoffer Lernö]

The average human is able to detect changes of around 2%.  Our minds(and senses) Look at things within 2% of one another and judge them "equal."  This is why I prefer percentile resolution systems - given a base of 50%, a one-point change is a 2% difference.

I might give you 2% in ideal circumstances, but I don't see the same happening in more chaotic circumstances. For example, let's say one character has 2% higher chance of doing advanced maneuvres on horseback. If this was an actual statistic fact. How easy would that be to tell from observing the OUTCOME of two persons fighting from horseback? Their actual skill might be possible to figure out at a better than 10% precision from visual clues (one has a little better posture, recovers a little faster and so on), but the actual outcome would not be affected much by these details.

Quite a lot of kendo matches comes to mind where one person shown quite superious bearing and skill but gets a little unlucky or simply fails to totally exploit their chances. Although their skill is almost instantly detectable, the situation and the attitude and such varying factors weigh in on the situation (which is why I like to seperate difficulty from performance in skill rolls).
I think it's important to make it obvious what the capabilities of the characters are and to let the players know if their failure was due to the difficulty of the situation or because their character's performans was sub standard. This is rarely clearly defined.

In fact many games include heavy randomness to cover the fact that the situation too is unknown. So in effect the die roll is situation+performance. This means that the roll might mean: you jump over the cliff and WOOOO, you discover it was 7 meters across and that's why you plunge to your death, and not because you tripped.

I want to separate out those effects. One method is this:

Difficulty might range from 1-10.

So the GM simply ROLLS the difficulty with a D10. (Or maybe Dx+mod, whatever...)

The Players are then informed about the general difficulty of the task and can make an educated guess of if they would succeed or not.

If they decide to act, they do so by rolling against that target number.

Why is this useful? Well, because in the course of many RPGs there are situations like "do I manage to climb the wall" where the GM doesn't really know the difficulty, or simply don't WANT to decide.

Usually this is done with a "roll % to succeed" or something similar. No matter how good you are you usually have a good chance to fail to make the game more "exciting"

My version (or not really, I didn't make it up) let's the GM make half of the roll "How difficult is it approximately" and the player the rest. That gives the player a fair chance to evaluate his/her chances before making an attempt, and still allows the GM to keep things random when he/she wants.