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Originally Posted by Sven Norén
What I would do is ask for a straight roll from the sneaker. If he fails he can be spotted by anyone looking in the right direction. If he succeds it takes a succesful Spot roll to spot him, and if he scores a critical success it takes a critical Spot to discover him.
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The problem with this system, as I believe several people have mentioned, is that it places huge weight on whomever the GM has arbitrarily decided is the "defender". Basically, if the defender succeeds, he succeeds, and the attackers roll and skill doesn't much matter. I could have a 200% hide, but if the defender rolls under his 25% skill, he spotted me no matter what.
Now that might be ok, but isn't really a good "opposed roll" system IMO.
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If you want skill levels over 100% to make a difference, then borrow from the (optional?) combat rules: Any attack percentage over 100% acts as a penalty to parry, such as if you attack with a skill of 120% then the defender gets a -20% penalty to his parry skill.
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Yeah. This is still basically the same as "subtract roll from skill" method. If you have to do subtraction anyway, why not just do it once? Obviously, if you never allow skills over 100 in your game, the simpler "success-level, then high roll within tied success level" method works great. Once you have skills over 100%, you end up having to do some subtraction.
That's why I've always preferred the "subtract roll from skill" method. It tells you how much you made it by, and gives you an immediate measure of success. I actually don't worry about crits and specials much either. Aside from roleplaying, it's not that important (ie: You *really* snuck past that guard!!!). Ultimately, with opposed rolls you want to know if this guy wins or that guy. How well he spotted you, or how well you hid from him isn't that important at the end of the day.
The benefits of this method is that there's no change to the methodology, no matter what the conditions. Skills over 100%? No change. You're just subtracting from a higher number is all. Modifiers to skills present? Same deal. You just have an additional subtraction or addition to the initial skill level.
The big advantage to this method is that as a GM, it allows you to resolve multiple things at one time. Let's imagine that your character is trying to sneak up on an enemy encampment. There is a guard on duty, as well as a group of people sitting around a campfire. However, unknown to you, there is also another NPC trying to sneak up on the same group of bad guys. Additionally, there is a terrain feature that you're using to advantage that blocks the site of the guard, but not the folks at the campfire and only partially blocks the view between you and the other sneaker. Using traditional rules, this situation is *incredibly* complex to resolve. You basically have to roll for each comparison, and the fact that the GM asks you to roll three times will hint to the player that there are three things that might spot him.
With a subtraction system, the modifiers all simply roll into the subtraction. The player simply rolls his hide/sneak/whatever and tells the GM how much he made it by. The GM then applies that as a modifier to each group trying to spot the player, adding additional minuses based on terrain and whatnot. Once you adopt the idea that degree of success can be equated to a skill modifier for an opposed roll, this makes gaming incredibly simple.
It also means you can use the same mechanism for non-opposed skill rolls as well. If a player is trying to pick a lock, he may not know how difficult it is. But if he just rolls and tells the GM how much he made it by, the GM simply determines if that number is greater then the difficulty of the lock and is done. Another advantage is that the player doesn't need to know he's making an opposed roll at all. Let's say a character is walking down a hall. You ask the player to make a spot roll. He does and as normal reports the amount he made it by. At the point, the player has no idea why he's rolling. Is there a trap? Someone sneaking up on him? Maybe just a GM making him nervous? He doesn't know. And as long as the mechanism used for opposed and non-opposed rolls are the same (to the player anyway), he wont ever know.
And that's a good thing...
Opposed rolls
January 11th, 2008
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