This is the problem. It isn't you doing the action. It's your character that's doing the action. And as such, your character might have a chance of failing even if you don't. You're roleplaying by taking the role of the character- that means the character's abilities and skills. If it was based around the player and not his character, it wouldn't be roleplaying at all.

The percentages are a representation of chance. If I roll a dice, don't I have a 50% chance of getting a 4, 5, or a 6? In this case it's also to simplify an overcomplicated action. If my character attacked someone with a sword, the amount of damage done would be related to the speed of my swing, the sharpness of the sword, the angle at which it hits the person, the location in which the person is hit, how much protective clothing the person is wearing, etc. Instead of doing a million calculations for a single action, why not just make it a percentage? 15% chance to do 10 damage. 50% chance to do 6 damaged. Whatever.

The chance is there not just for balance, but because it means combat can take unexpected turns. Having it work 100% of the time doesn't do that. Even if you could balance it, it wouldn't make for as interesting an experience as the 15% chance would.

You'd need more variety in combat moves to do that...

Well, that's how you define an RPG, but that's more suited towards a turn based style. If we were to go with your model, we wouldn't have real time combat. We'd still be stuck with the Morrowind style of fail combat that everybody adored, right? O.o ...

If you ask me, the chance is there because the developers couldn't think of anything better or couldn't implement anything better. Otherwise we'd be stuck at having Block be a percent based function because that was so exciting in Morrowind! Oh yeah!

To me consistency is far more interesting. Give me consistent tools to work with in combat over any percentage based function any day. Like how Bethesda made shield bashing a consistent tool that you can actually use in combat consistently instead of it being a percent based chance that happened randomly at the whim of a virtual dice roll.

Even that was flawed because you had to aim at a guy to hit him, but the game still decided to use character skill to determine whether or not you actually hit him. And I admit some compromises must be made, but in the original topic of the lockpicking mini-game, it doesn't matter whether or not it's turned based because the game time is paused...

Reposting my edit for your reading (in case you missed it):

The percentages are a representation of chance. If I roll a dice, don't I have a 50% chance of getting a 4, 5, or a 6? In this case it's also to simplify an overcomplicated action. If my character attacked someone with a sword, the amount of damage done would be related to the speed of my swing, the sharpness of the sword, the angle at which it hits the person, the location in which the person is hit, how much protective clothing the person is wearing, etc. Instead of doing a million calculations for a single action, why not just make it a percentage? 15% chance to do 10 damage. 50% chance to do 6 damaged. Whatever.

einstein's insanity quote fails when applied to all because rarely, if ever, are things in this world "the same" over and over again. rarely, do we have the ability to forever control the environment we live in.

in an einstein lab, yes. real-life, no.

that quote has been incorrectly applied for years.

Why not make it a percentage? Because it makes things inconsistent. Things are far better to me when they're consistent tools to be used by the player. Think of Blocking. Think of shield bashing. Both used to be inconsistent tools. Now they're not. I like where this is going.

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