>I'm a little confused here. You don't like how it takes both practice
>and "real world" experience to improve a characters abilities, and
>that experience comes from doing things that people notice and talk
>about. All they've done is add a metric that says, once you've gained
>x amount of experience, y number of people will have heard about what
>you've done. Thats a really cool concept.

But why? Unless the things you've done to gain X experience are the kinds of things that would make a big splash, you can become VERY experienced and NOBODY will know who you are. This has been an ongoing theme in many of my campaigns. The only game I've found that ties fame into ability gain properly is Werewolf; first of all the different Changing Breeds recognize different kinds of reknown, and, second of all, it *makes sense*. Since you learn Gifts from Spirits or from other members of your Breed/tribe/sept/pack, you have to prove that you have the wisdom/bravery/cunning/innovation/whatever to handle that ability.

>I like the different levels of success available with Earthdawn. You
>roll dice to hit a target number, but if you do significantly better
>than that number, then you hit your opponent better. The better you
>get with an attack, the easier it becomes to exceed that threshold
>because you roll more or bigger dice. I don't know about GURPS, but
>in Champions, everyone has the same chance to do a critical hit as the
>target for that is ALWAYS 18 (6s on all 3d6).

Critical successes in GURPS vary. Generally, you're shooting to get UNDER a target number, so a 3 is always a critical success, unless the task or circumstances somehow preclude a critical success. You may be able to get a critical success on something higher than a 3, depending on your effective skill. Similarly, a roll of 18 is never a success, no matter how high your effective skill (and, remember, you only roll if there's a possibility of failure); it's also almost always a critical failure, and if you have a very low effective skill, a roll of 17 or even lower might also be a critical failure. Since 6^3 is 216, that means that you have a .47% of failing despite all odds, or you have a .47% of succeeding.

Another thing is that, depending on the skill or circumstances, the degree by which you succeed or fail can matter a great deal.

-- Sean --

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