Barbarians of Lemuria: The Doom of Tyrus: Difficulty Guide
As the rulebook does not go into detail concerning what different difficulties properly represent, I will be using the following rules of thumb:
- Very Easy (+2): Things that anyone could reasonably pull off with a bit of talent or luck, with only the most minimal of instructions or training. May not even be worth rolling for unless I'm feeling particularly sadistic. (roll Strength+Worker+2 to raise a brick wall that won't fall over, at least not immediately)
- Easy (+1): Basic competence. A task that someone with some training and experience should reasonably be expected to pull off. (roll Appeal+Merchant+1 to bribe a no-skuzzier-than-average city guard)
- Moderate (+0): Top of your game. This is the sort of accomplishment that you'd expect from one of the leaders in their field - not the leader, not the one who's head and shoulders above the others, but definitely one of the top authorities. (roll Mind+Physician to diagnose a rare disease)
- Hard (-1): If you ever saw it, you would stop and stare. This is still the kind of thing that you can imagine seeing in real life, but not terribly often - it's the peak of reasonable human ability. Barrack Obama is this good an orator. Albert Einstein was this good a phycisist. (roll Mind+Hunter-1 to walk naked into the Qush jungle and emerge out on the other side a few months later, dressed, healthy and having packed on a bit more weight along the way)
- Tough (-2): It still looks realistic if you take a step back, squint and don't think too hard about it. (alternate name: things nerds on the Internet tend to believe, against all evidence, that they could totally pull off if they really wanted to ) This is where pulp heroes like Fafahrd and the Gray Mouser live, as well as ridiculously competent but still technically human characters along the lines of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. (roll Agility+Thief-2 to sneak into the royal palace undetected)
- Demanding (-4): Ridiculously improbable, but not actually physically impossible. This is things that are so impressive that it's starting to look a bit like a parody of super-competence. Xena Warrior Princess and Lord Havelock Vetinari can routinely pull off this level of feats. (roll Appeal+Beastmaster-4 to not only get a lion to decide not to eat you, but to get onto its back and convince it to carry you in the direction you want to go)
- Formidable (-6) and Heroic (-8): Honestly, I'm drawing a blank here. The only examples in the book for those modifiers is for casting the kind of spells that can lay entire cities in ruin, and I'm finding it hard to come up with mundane equivalents of that that aren't, as experts like to put it, Bloody Stupid. So mostly I think I'll just use those for doing things that are at lower difficulties under especially trying circumstances - catching an arrow might be Demanding, but catching an arrow while you're blindfolded might be Formidable, for instance.
