Quote:
Originally Posted by frogspawner
Yep. Harder than not doing so anyway. And it's unnecessary. Why must there always be a winner, immediately? Ties happen.
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Because in the vast majority of circumstances that one would model via opposed skill rolls the outcome would be to the advantage of one side or the detriment of the other, if only marginally. Noughts and crosses (or tic-tac-toe) regularly ties - most situations one would be attempting to emulate in an RPG DON'T:
someone wins the duel, the guard spots the intruder or the intruder sneaks past the guard, one person performs the best poem in the bardic competition, one person catches more food...
And the opposed roll rule allows for ties with the rule as written anyway: both rolls fail, thus achieving the same degree of success...
Precisely the point about opposed rolls is that whilst one wouldn't use them all the time, there are some (relatively common situations) where the best description of what is happening is that there is a direct competition between two skills - and BRP has never (in any prior Chaosium edition) had an explicit generalised rule for resolving such contests of opposed skills. And whilst it may not be to some people's taste the rule in the new BRP looks remarkably serviceable to me (it is as I said a close variant of my own house rule) and is a fairly common "fix" to the "Dodge problem" in RQIII.
Cheers,
Nick Middleton