Hey all, I'm rewriting my roleplaying rules and I'm trying to draft a list of 10 worded difficulties. It's basically your classic D&D Difficulty Check, but using words to convey the difficulty instead of numbers. The whole objective here is to remove numbers entirely. "That person is of below average strength." instead of "That person has 8 strength.". Here's the list I have so far: Elementary Simple Easy Straightforward Complicated Feasible Challenging Hard Hardly Possible Practically Impossible It's not too bad, but I'm sure a few improvements can be made. Straightforward should hover in the 4th or 5th position. As an extra requirement, the words must flow logically in a sentence when describing any situation. That computer looks practically impossible to hack. From that range, the shot would be challenging. Given the parts, repairing your car seems feasible. Rearranging the sentence on certain words is fine. "That computer looks challenging to hack" could be improved grammatically with "Hacking that computer would be challenging". "Mentally Stimulating" is an example of something that wouldn't work. "Jumping from that roof to the other one looks Mentally Stimulating". Just doesn't work. I've been playing with the thesaurus / dictionary for hours, but hopefully someone can come up with something better. Thanks.

Difficult? [I'd put somewhere around challenging]

CJM

Easy: Effortless, No problem, Painless, Uncomplicated, Undemanding

Possible: Achievable

Difficult: Troublesome, Trying, Uneasy, Demanding, Problematic, Tough

Impossible: Futile, Inconceivable, Unachievable, Unworkable

Just the result of a quick scan of Thesaurus.com's words. Of course, writing the game in esperanto would simplify things so incredibly much, you could always use the same words and they'd make sense... o_O

Seriously though, you'll probably be hard pressed to find an adjective that works in every situation. What I'd be tempted to do is write your system so that the adjective is at the end of the sentence, as such,
VERB(ing) (The) [Pro/]NOUN is/appears/... ADJECTIVE.

ADJECTIVE:
Easy:
easy
straightforward
uncomplicated

Moderate:
relatively easy
very possible

Difficult:
almost impossible
problematic
unachievable

...

Should work in almost every context, so long as you have a similar sentence structure.

You might end up with some semi-garbled sentences like:
Hacking the Computer appears uncomplicated.
Baking bread with the given ingredients is unachievable.

But you don't need to filter stuff out, and rearrange your sentences or whatnot to make things which you can read.

Also, you'd have to think up a similar system for sentences which have no verb [easy verb], like "That person has ... strength", to which none of your list items make too much sense anyways, but for me, no, pathetic, mediocre, below average, average, above average, excellent, superb seems alright.

[edit so as not to spam-post] I'd try "The strength of that person is/appears ...". [/edit]

Just some thoughts...

CJM

Great suggestions CJM. I'm building a stockpile of a list and will decide once it gets big enough.

I should of stated that this is for a roleplaying game run by a GM, not a computer game. So having an awkward sounding sentence is something to be fixed by the GM, not something that'll involve lines and lines of code.

Attributes are measured by a different list (Poor, Below Average, Average, Above Average and Incredible), as are skills.

Breeze: "Hacking that computer would be a Breeze"
Interesting: "Hacking that computer would be Interesting"
(as in moderate difficulty for those who like a challenge)
Annoying: "That computer looks Annoying to hack"
Horrific: "Hacking that computer would be Horrific"
Crazy: "Hacking that computer would be Crazy"
Psychotic: "Hacking that computer would be Psychotic"

You really shouldn't be attempting to adapt various kinds of entities and situations to one, small list of adjectives. Your content will sound just like it's stored.

The toughest categories should be "HOLY FUCKING SHIT" and other miscellaneous capitalised obsceneties.

Quote:

Original post by dgaf You really shouldn't be attempting to adapt various kinds of entities and situations to one, small list of adjectives. Your content will sound just like it's stored.

I wholly agree with your sentiment but there's nothing that can be done about that. I prefer to use descriptions in my roleplaying.

"Jumping that gorge looks hard" keeps an atmosphere that "Jumping that gorge has a difficulty of 8" doesn't.

Although I could put Hard, Difficult, Challenging all as the same level of difficulty, the players need to keep abreast of the situation they're attempting to defeat without memorizing 100s of adjectives.

Quote:

Original post by Doc The toughest categories should be "HOLY FUCKING SHIT" and other miscellaneous capitalised obsceneties.

I'm on the fence about this one. ;)

I absolutely agree that the point values need to be thrown out (or significantly changed) so that the genre can become much more marketable and mainstream-attractive (which helps to push innovation and expansion).

I would suggest a system that applied a specific sequence of qualifiers to events that can be made (simple, difficult, etc.) and another list for character traits (weak, powerful, etc.) and so on.

You should find an alternative to "feasible", as that word doesn't imply anything about difficulty.