Even though The Grimm Window emphasises the natural way to describe a character's abilities and skills there comes a time when some structure has to be imposed in order to be able to determine who can do what and how likely. Therefore different 'degrees' of adjectives are mapped onto a Competency Ladder. [ TAB(competencyladder) ] In the middle of the ladder sits Mr Joe Average. He is your average driver, surgeon, guitar player, biologist and he has average intelligence, strength and so on.

The difficulty of a given challenge or task is measures as seen by Mr Joe Average and for the relevant skill. So, the difficulty of flying a helicopter from A to B in nice weather with no wind might be described by Mr Average, who is an average helicopter pilot, as 'trivial'. To hold the helicopter hovering just above ground while two refugees try to climb on might be 'easy'. Dodging incoming missiles might be 'hard' or 'very hard'. You get the drift.

So both the adjectives that describe a character's skills and attributes, and the adjectives describing the difficulty of a challenge, is categorized onto rungs on the Competency Ladder.

The relationship between a level of skill and attribute should read naturally as "A person with a given skill or attribute level should perform on that level and be able to deal with challenges on the same level most of the time, sometimes a rung higher, sometimes a rung lower. On exceptionally cases, even two rungs higher or lower."

For example, a person who is a bad helicopter pilot should be able to do easy flying most of the time, although sometimes he fails even that.