Skill Checks Past 100

Here comes the hard part. I talked about scales for stats going past 100 on a BRP or the FCS. 1-99 is the A scale, 100-999 is the B scale and 1000-9999 is C scale.

It’s relatively intuitive to have a character with an Agility of 200 to go up against a character with a Reflex of 300. Both roll on a percentile (1d100) against the two most significant digits, in this case a 20 vs. a 30.

What about a character with an agility of 200 hitting a target? Obviously if it’s any kind of normal target the character should always pass. If there are negative modifiers to the number like extreme range (-50), fast moving target (-40) and darkness (-40) the base to hit would be 70 so that still is within the realm of comprehensible.

What about an Agility of 400? First of all, I can’t really imagine what an Agility of 400 would mean. To roll on it for a straight skill test (B scale) means that any task that a human could normally do would be easy as breathing. In fact the only thing that would be a challenge to such a character would be something roughly ten times the difficulty of what a human could accomplish.

Ten times is easily said but what would that mean? What kind of example would illustrate that? Remember this isn’t a task ten times more than a human normally does, this is a task ten times harder than a human could possibly do.

With Strength, that’s easy. Ten times stronger is easy to quantify, that would be about four tons, real superhero range. Constitution is similarly understandable. Numerically IQ (or intelligence) seems understandable, but what would it mean to be ten times smarter than a human could possibly be? Is that like putting ten people in a room and set them to a task?

Would then a person with a Agility of 400 have a 40% chance of being able to do what ten regular people could do in a turn? I suppose that’s one way of thinking about it but it’s still kind of strange. Remember it wouldn’t mean that this super human would ten times more, it would mean he was ten times more accurate.

In some ways the only way to give real world examples of that would be to use animals or machines as examples. It’s doable, just not intuitive. I’ve tried to wrap my head around that.

Any thoughts?

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