I'm curious. Is there any way to increase the chance of success AND increase the chance to botch? I was just thinking about it. MJ once told me that if I was trying to light gasoline soaked rags on fire, it would be REALLY bonused. However, your chance of lighting yourself on fire would ALSO be REALLY bonused. If I had a puddle of gasoline on the floor, and I tried to light it, I'd probably have a 99% chance of lighting the gas, AND a 50% chance of setting my shoes on fire (botch).
Yeah, it can be done. You give a sit-mod for the sum of the amount you think appropriate to increase the chance of success and the amount to increase the chance to botch, and then you give a die mod equal to the amount you want to increase the chance to botch.
What the die mod does is increase the read of the die. If I've got a +10 die mod, then when I roll 1-100 on the dice I read 11-110. Unless my chance of success exceeds 100%, rolls above 100 are going to be botches. If the the sit-mod equals the die-mod then the chance of success remains the same--if I've got a +10 sit-mod and a base 50% chance of success, then rolls which read up to sixty are going to be successful, which (with the +10 die mod) means rolls from 1-50, 50% of the actual rolls. If the sit-mod is +20, rolls which read as high as 70 are good, which means 60% of the rolls.
On the other hand, you can't have a 99% chance of success and a 50% chance to botch, because success and botch are mutually exclusive. You can have skills where botches look like success in critical ways--trying to start a contained fire can result in starting an uncontained fire, attempting arson on a building can result in setting yourself aflame--but these are not successes even if they also accomplish the desired outcome.
--M. J. Young
With some of my friends we tried to create a fire trail a la
Doc Brown's DeLorean in Back to the Future. We found that kerosene didn't burn that well, only made a small flame. And one other thing didn't hardly burn at all.
So we tried gasoline.
I got a bit of video with the firestarter standing calf-high in the midst of flame...
No, he wasn't hardly hurt, but it looked really dramatic.
Yeah, gasoline is real fast. I tried using it some years back to ignite a charcoal fire. Charcoal lighter actually burns incredibly slowly--and, I realized retrospectively, for good reason. I thoroughly doused the charcoal in unleaded gasoline and threw a match at it, and the thing went up in an instant, consumed the paper bag I was using to spread the fire, and went dark--and failed to generate enough heat for enough time actually to ignite the charcoal. Charcoal lighter fluid burns considerably more slowly, and although it seems to take an inordinate time for the flame to find its way from one side of the grill to the other, in the process the heat penetrates the briquets and gets them burning.
So gasoline is definitely a fast-burning fuel.
--M. J. Young
And the other thing is that eating off of a gasoline fire is poisonous.
That's not actually true. That is, the smoke from pure gasoline is not itself poisonous--it's the additives. If you buy "white gas", you can cook over it (that's the stuff they sell for certain camp stoves, notably coleman). In the days before unleaded gas was ubiquitous and anti-pollution additives were essential, you could substitute Amoco Unleaded. I don't know whether you can still use that or any other unleaded gasoline, but they still make a clean grade of gasoline for use specifically in camp stoves.
--M. J. Young