Game mechanic purupse of xd6 roles

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

The only explanation (though I'm not sure that you can really call it that) that we get from the author is the following text on pg 8 of In the Labyrinth.

GURPS chooses not to make a mechanical distinction between inherent and incidental difficulty, but many RPG systems do. Most of them set a target value (that the player rolls against) which is the measure of action difficulty and then will apply modifiers to that roll based on various factors like skill or enforced conditions. In d20 games, for example, you have AC or CR that you have to beat with a modified die roll. TFT and GURPS, on the other hand, make you roll against the character’s ability (usually DX), not the task itself.

I don't know if Steve ever explained his reasoning for dropping the add/subtract dice feature from GURPS, but I prefer the way TFT does it, TBH.

GURPS success rolls are made against a target defined by skill+modifiers, and those modifiers are very often negative. So, GURPS definitely uses situational difficulty.