Odd Rulings That Become Rules (Mythras vs. BRP)

 I was recently weighing Mythras Imperative against Basic Roleplaying (spoiler - BRP wins by a modest margin, but I will convert a lot of Mythras stuff over to BRP) when I noticed this odd rule on skills, regarding situations where the PC can attempt the skill a second time: in essence (to paraphrase) the Mythras rules indicate you can do so at a increased step penalty, because per the writer of the rules (for I disagree that there is any universal agreement on what is stated here), the PC will be too shaken and off balance during the second attempt. They give two examples where this could happen: climbing and picking a lock.

I had to mull this over a bit in my head. Climbing I could imagine a scenario for being more difficult a second time after a first failure; you may be rattled, shaken by a near-fall event or even just fatigued from the first try. But lock picking? It's almost certain that after a first failure you will actually go in to it a second time even more certain of the action because you have already tried and failed a certain approach, which thus narrows your range of options down to more likely vectors of success. Many skills might fall into this category. 

A lot of what is written in Mythras has a semi-unspoken rule of "decide on what makes sense, realistically," and that could hold true here. But the very two examples given are such that I feel the rule could have been written to say, "If common sense says the second try will be harder, then make the difficulty harder. But if trying a second time is informed and improved by the first failure, then don't penalize it." And the two examples given would support such a notion, I feel. 

Anyway, it just struck me as odd.....the certainty of the author in the rule that a second try will always be at penalty due to the character being rattled by the first failure seems inherently contradictory to so many scenarios where that simply is the opposite of reality that I was surprised at the boldness with which the statement was made.

Just a thought! Sometimes maybe a specific notion on how something works may not be the ideal arbiter of a standard rule. This leans slightly into my main pet peeve about Mythras, which is that the specials in combat come as a happenstance after an attack, rather than being a goal of the attack. That, however, is perhaps a gripe for a different post!