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beyond their basic character class, without taking on the guise of an additional class. This is prevalent in games such as Millennium's End, West End Games original Star Wars RPG, Shadowrun, Aliens, and Last Unicorn's Star Trek. This gave players the freedom to decide where best to go next, how best to develop their character to complement the group and/or achieve the ends they'd developed for their characters over time. This became complex for GMs because players could choose to develop skills above and beyond the limit the GM could compensate for in the game system, or allowed players to develop skills and abilities in their characters the GM didn't want available, such as a skill/ability/talent for Sixth Sense.

Where the game systems are at, now, in their most perfect form to date, is a level or power cap to all skills and abilities in the game. Millennium's End is a perfect example of this capping, in that initial character development skills are set at a maximum of 55 -ME is a percentile-based game- and sub-skills are set at a maximum of one-half the level of the governing skill. This allows players to have a maximum starting value -with Talent Bases in place- of 87% on any given sub-skill initially, although main and sub skills may be built up from that point. This leaves a 13% margin of error, again initially, for characters to fail around, although the game system allows for successes in certain situations, even with these caps in place.

The Game System becomes important for dealing with the aspects of the game that require arbitration of actions, attacks, spell throwing, and all manner of incidentals the GM may not be able to arbitrate without dice becoming involved. Generally, a good system of mechanics, the engine on which the role-playing game runs, consists of skill, combat, magic, psionic, and healing resolution rules, as well as perhaps religion and economy rules, devised to fit within the universe of the game itself. The way in which these aspects of the game may be resolved, whether they actually enhance game-play or not, are varied and many between all manner of role-playing games.

I will use skill resolution as my example, as that is the most commonly used set of resolution rules in a game, anyway. Most games, such as Torg: Role-Playing the Possibility Wars, Earthdawn, and Shadowrun use a target number resolution system. In Torg and Earthdawn you have to beat a benchmark number the GM selects, or that is a set number based on your opponents

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