Melkor said:
Thanks for the info guys.
I was all set to ignore the Player's Guide PDF, and run with a two roll system until I realized a flaw, and slapped myself in the forehead.
Criticals. What if the attacker rolls a critical with the first roll, but not with the second. What then ? Two rolls works fine in the case of fail/fail because it's still a hit...but it's messed up on the critical end of the spectrum for the attacker. For some reason, I didn't notice that until last night.
That is why I think the orginal intent was to have the first roll be an opposed roll and the second one determine the qaulkity of the success. I spsupect Mongoose was going to use thier poosed system for everything, but spotted a flaw and did a last minute change.
Notice the phase "Attack succeds
and becomes critical hit on the combat matrix. That makes sense if it followed an opposed roll. SO does the attacker scoreing damage on "failed" attacks. It even makes the parring damages more sensible, since a "real parry" would have meant
that the defender had one the oppsed rolls and was goinhg to suffer no damage.
My pet theory, and it is just a theory is that as the ramifications of skill having became known opposed rolls were taken out of combat. I believe that it occured in the "13th hour" rather than the "11th", pretty much everything is the game becomes consistient, inclduing the examples of play if one assumes that two rolls was the way Mongoose was going with combat.
ONe problem with both the opposed roll/no crits concept and my theory is grappling. In the book it states that once an attacker hits, an opposed roll is made and results matrixed on the table. And on that table are critcal results.