Paradox RPG...

Quote from: Zak Arntson

I see that there's a history behind your genericized rulebase. My take on generic rpgs is identical to that on generic boardgames. Me, I want Risk 2210 when I want to focus on futuristic conquest, Settlers of Cataan for a great trading strategy game, and so on. You can't make a generic boardgame more Risk than Risk; providing the ability to play Chess, Draughts, Civilization, and the Game of Life with the same boxed rules set won't work.

I have the same knee-jerk reaction to generic RPGs. I know people like the idea and try hard to write them, but I think a game specially tailored to a specific type of play will always be more fun and absorbing than a game that could be used for anything under the sun.

That said, I'm finding myself interested in Darksmith's Paradox. There seems to be not only a motivation behind the universality of his system, but some attractive qualities of his approach. I too have worked on a percentile system (which also screams for heavy rework, like Paradox) and there can be a number of issues. With the approach you have chosen, let me throw out one problem.

You say attributes and skills are the ranges of human capability. So a 100% is the absolute best an unmodified human could do and 50% is the average of what an unmodified human could do. The catch is in the application of average. Take lockpicking without tools. The average human is probably 1% likely to open a lock without tools or training. But the average burgalar might be around 20%. While the range of ability is just as large as any other skill (0%-100%), there is a nonstandard distribution of ability such that 99.999% of people fall into the bottom 1-2%. The question is do you normalize the scale so that the difference between "better than 20% of the population" and "better than 60% of the population" has no significance, or do you normalize the scale so that the % is the chance of success, where everyone starts out with very low numbers instead of "average" numbers in that skill?