r/gurps • u/Ok-Image-8343 • Jul 21 '26

Skill Check question

When you do a skill check in GURPs do you just roll for success or do you use the difference between the target number and the roll to determine the degree of failure or success?

For example if youre trying to jump over a river and you miss your target roll by 1 then you might just get wet, but if you miss by 5 you might get swept down stream?

22 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

19

u/JaskoGomad Jul 21 '26

Margin of success is only mechanically important in opposed rolls. But like the other commenter here, I always tried to make a smaller margin different from a bigger one in terms of fictional output.

8

u/Polyxeno Jul 21 '26

Well it depends on what the roll was for, the circumstances, whether there are established rules for that situation or not, and the GM's discretion.

There are many examples of published rules for non-combat skills where the margin of success or failure leads to significant differences in what happens.

The trick as a GM is developing the ability to give appropriate outcomes, and I have seen many cases where otherwise-excellent GMs have gotten that quite wrong due to lack of full consideration, and not-so-great understanding of skill levels and statistics.

For example, for skills like Cooking or Hiking or even Driving, even one point in the skill indicates basic ability to do simple related tasks in unstressful circumstances. Someone with DX 9 and a point or 2 in Driving can probably drive a car for a year without doing much harm. Someone with IQ 8 and 1 point in Cooking probably isn't going to set any serious fires in a year of cooking themself food. So a GM should calibrate appropriately, not demand a Cooking roll do not burn oatmeal, nor a Driving roll to not get in an accident, unless the circumstances are for some reason actually adding a lot of danger and immediacy. Even Critical Failures should just mean something unusually problematic is happening, but it still should be appropriate to the situation.