Quote:
Originally Posted by Lazarus
One of the things about this review that strikes me is this: you continually assert that MRQ has a "default" leaning toward skills at 100%, yet I don't see you stating any reasoning for this. My read (admittedly, incomplete) of the book does not support that assertion - do you have anything to back it?
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Actually it is there in the review but it may be too buried and not clear enough. Let me sumarize why I think this:
The game sets an experience scale that goes up to Hero where hero is at the 125% skill and above (granted, in the set of the best skills of the character, those that define his fields of expertise that make him a hero).
Most Legendary abilities require skills of 90% or above, thus moving to Legendary levels is reserved to characters just below or near the 100% threshold.
Many of those legendary abilities provide bonus to the skill roll, moving the percentage further up, thus reinforcing the tendency towards ability rolls above 100%.
I tried to analyse the character's life cycle. By this I mean how long does he stay in each skill level in game terms (not in setting terms since game time and setting time moves at different paces). In other words, if one takes one character from the start of his career up to the day when he retires after a long, successsul and - most important - resilient life, how much time does he spend before reaching the 100% threshold and how much time does he spend afterwards? My crude analysis tells me that such a character will spend most of his time around or above 100%, not below that value.
Also take into consideration that there are rules to create more advanced characters, so a lot of players will not play grunts and unexperienced PCs.
The game mentions characters with skills in the multi hundreds. If one wants to achieve such high levels the time spend playing low level characters is even more dwarved. (I personally think that those multi hundred characters are a mistake; they look more like couch creations then like roleplayed characters.)
The issues with the rules for skills above 100% came fast after the game was released which shows that the players themselves got the message that thats where the cookies are.
On the overall I think that in MRQ the characters start to get interesting when one closes on the 100% range or moves past it because that's in the nature of the game.