Contests, Opposed Rolls, and Tasks -- Feedback, Please?

[Chris Rice]

Originally Posted by KevinJ

Do you mean in the form of offensive roll vs defensive roll?

That would be one solution but would involve more dice rolling. The way I dealt with it was to compare the two Attributes to arrive at a required success score.

Situation 1. Fighter A, DEX10 v Fighter B, DEX10. The opponents are evenly matched so it's reasonable to make the assumption that each is equally likely to win. And that's what the rules allow; each has a 50% chance to hit. That's seems logical and fair.

Situation 2. Fighter A, DEX10 v Fighter C, DEX14. Fighter A still has a 50% chance to hit, but the more skilled Fighter C has a 90% chance to hit. That seems a bit less reasonable but perhaps acceptable.

Situation 3. Fighter C, DEX14 v Fighter D, DEX14. Each has a 90% chance to hit each other. This is where things have become silly. Are we to believe that the more skilled a warrior becomes the more inept his defence becomes?

It's obvious looking at these examples that in a contest Attributes should be compared in some way and not absolute.

What I did was create a table where equal attributes were at 50% success (10 on 3d6). A one point difference was +1 for attacker, a two point difference was -1 for defender, etc. So in Situation 2 above where there is a 4 point difference, Fighter A would be at 8 DEX (-2) and Fighter C would be at 12 DEX (+2).

I suppose there might be problems in larger combats with multiple engagements and I can't claim to have playtested it thoroughly but it seems to make logical sense.

Apologies for hijacking the thread!