As a bit of background:  The game that really showed me about reduced randomness was Greg Porter's CORPS, although Wujcik's Amber Diceless is also worth mentioning.  

Another eye-opener was seeing just how outrageous the consequences of high-randomness systems are - esp. systems with open-ended rolls like Rolemaster, Torg, Ars Magica, etc.  I remember someone once figured that in Torg, if you got a few hundred people jumping up and down for a while, one of them was bound to literally jump to the Moon.  By comparison to that, the scale of Interlock/Cyberpunk is quite moderate.  

The thing is, I've played games with open-ended systems.  They're not unplayable at all, despite the wacky logical consequences of the rules.  With a GM applying common sense on top of the rules, those logical consequences don't break play.

Quote from: jhkim1) Skill Zero and required minimum skill

Here you're effectively lumping a wide range of abilities under a single number. For example, someone with skill 0 has 0% chance whatsoever at a task, but when they get to skill 1 they have an 80% chance. In reality, there should be a range between 0% and 80%. This works if you don't care about distinguishing among low skill levels. However, I think would be more straightforward to have those extra skill levels.

A similar issue appears in minimum skill level for a task. The result is that someone with below the minimum has zero chance, but when they get the minimum they jump up to a higher chance.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;548668Another fix you see in some systems is benefits/hindrances that apply further modifiers.
If you were playing Savage Worlds for instance (I doubt you would like the system given the increasing-variance-with-skill level problem as mentioned at Darkshire but anyway...) then Lila would have untrained Drive [d4-2], Rico would have perhaps a d6, and Koko would like Lila be untrained [d4-2], but might have a disadvantage - for instance All Thumbs, which would give him a 25% chance (1 on the skill die, irrespective of wild die) of breaking the car when he used it. Conversely, a driving expert might have not just a high skill rating but an Edge e.g. Ace, which would give them a further +2 to their check.

On the one hand, there is something more flavorful about being an "Ace" rather than just having a higher skill rating.  On the other hand, it still seems to me like it's a fudge.  If the point is for you to be better at driving, I think having a higher Driving skill is the simplest and most intuitive approach.  

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;548668I have similar objections to taking 10 (as seen in the other thread) - agree with you here.

GDW's house systems often handled difficulty by doubling/halving the skill score for easy or difficult, which at least handles  the English conversation problem but is still very unsatisfying in other respects i.e. only three levels of difficulty.

Other than than either modifying the dice rolled or having as you say a wider range of skill values would perhaps be the way to go. Anyway, thanks, I've found this interesting since I hadn't considered that side of the d100/roll under thing before.

Doubling/halving in a linear system is tricky.  Doubling is effectively broadening the skill scale, which handles the English conversation problem as you note.  However, halving is effectively narrowing it.  Under halving, you can't have a task that is automatic for an expert, but difficult for moderate skill.  

For example, there are a lot of questions that would be easy for a top professor in English to answer that would be nigh-impossible for me - even though I'm an educated English speaker.  Likewise, I can do many math problems with no chance of error that are guaranteed to stump people who got all A's in their high school math.

Not familiar with CORPS, regrettably. For TORG, from what I know of it, the problem sounds like the a combination of open-ended rolling and its logarithmic system for handling real-world measurements.
 
On adventages - As you say, I suppose advantages like 'Ace' are something of a kludge because they could just be represented with higher skill.
 
(Just as an aside, in SWs case I think they work in the context of the system, since they fix the basic math  - a +2 bonus meaning that a skill check against a routine TN 4 will fail only on a critical failure - and allow characters to bypass the normal soft cap on skill increases - where raising a skill becomes double cost after the rating exceeds the character's attribute. I can't say that they're the bestest way to handle the problem, though).
 
I do believe Disadvantages are a good way to handle extreme cases of skill inability, though, if only because having 0% represent hilarious levels of incompetence makes this a trap for people unfamiliar with the system, who didn't know that they needed to put X points into it just to reflect an unremarkable level of ability.
(as an example, I have fond memories here of a mortal Storyteller game years ago where another PC, a doctor, bought an expensive luxury car, then realized it was a manual and he couldn't drive it with only 1 dot in Drive).

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;548999I do believe Disadvantages are a good way to handle extreme cases of skill inability, though, if only because having 0% represent hilarious levels of incompetence makes this a trap for people unfamiliar with the system, who didn't know that they needed to put X points into it just to reflect an unremarkable level of ability.

(as an example, I have fond memories here of a mortal Storyteller game years ago where another PC, a doctor, bought an expensive luxury car, then realized it was a manual and he couldn't drive it with only 1 dot in Drive).

I agree that there is a common problem about forgotten or skipped skills - and that defaults are one step to handling the problem, though it takes a lot more to handle that.  

I like best when defaults are explicitly a part of your background.  So driving is a skill that should be normal for a 21st century American.  It isn't nearly as standard for a 1920s American, or a 21st century Egyptian.  The HERO System made this explicit through "Everyman Skills" - where the campaign setting defines a number of standard baseline skills.  Call of Cthulhu has default numbers also - though they are only different for the era, not for background.  

I think that's a better approach than the approach taken by some games that skill zero is whatever the "normal person" has - because the normal person varies a lot with time and place.  

Skipped skills is a big problem, though.  I agree that tiered skills like Driving to Stunt Driving can handle the range of real-world ability.  However, when skills are subdivided finely (i.e. aerospace engineering vs. structural engineering), then it can be really hard to cover the full range of a person's skill - and hugely unwieldy to handle exceptional heroes like Indiana Jones.  

Covering expected skills becomes even harder in a point system where players have to choose between putting points into cooking vs. points into sword skill.  I used to deal with this by giving out a number of points explicitly for non-adventuring skills.  More recently I find it's been less of an issue, especially with broader skills.

Good points.

I found a GURPS character sheet for Indiana Jones...

http://web.archive.org/web/20020203184536/http://members.fortunecity.com/azurian/dr_jones_hero.html

...that's alot of numbers. Occasionally you see systems with variable skill widths (e.g. having expensive wide skills plus 'skill specializations', or LegendQuest lets a character pick up either a 'genre skill' that encompasses most melee weapons, or a specific sword skill) that might better handle omnicompetent characters like that, I suppose, but it could be a problem.

I hadn't thought of Everyman skills, but yes those are good - then characters might have the option to take an alternate package or 'sell down' a skill rather than needing a disadvantage, which is pretty neat. I would still trust PCs to find character concepts that need modelling with some sort of skill below the regular zero rating, though.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;549018Good points.

I found a GURPS character sheet for Indiana Jones...

http://web.archive.org/web/20020203184536/http://members.fortunecity.com/azurian/dr_jones_hero.html

...that's alot of numbers.

The character was created in HERO and then translated to GURPS.  327 points is a bit over the top though for a guy with a whip and a gun.