ledpup said:Do characters improve without boundaries? I'm suggesting that whatever we may believe, it's the dice (in RPGs) that create the boundary. When you have a skill of 220%, I'm not entirely sure what that could mean.
It means your chance of a special success is 44% for a start, which is not too shabby. If you start from the perspective that most characetrs will have their best skill a bit over 100%, this frees you up to be more free to apply hefy modifiers to tasks. I think this is a realy good thing as it makes the challenges the characetrs face more varied and interesting. Instead of every lock having the same basic skill chance of being picked, this one was made by a master craftsman and you're at half chance, but that one is a crude old-fashioned model and you're at +30%. IMHO most skill rolls should have modifiers of this kind, it makes the game world feel a lot more inetersting.
This is one reason I liked the Elric variant of the BRP game system. In Elric, 220% sword skill means you can attack twice per round at 110% chance each, or three times at 73% chance. You also get bags of parrys. The new BRP core book has inherited some good ideas like this for scaling skills.
One disadvantage MRQ has is that in moving to Mongoose a lot of the accumulated experience that Chaosium had in tuning and extending the BRP system was lost in the change of publisher. Loz has a solid BRP background and brought a lot of that experience back, but while MRQ2 is a solid game there is still plenty of scope for iterative improvement in areas like this.
Simon Hibbs