All skills cap at 18, you can not have higher than that.
Atm i'm just going "if nothing is listed that can be used to calculate attributes, default to a value of 9", considering the base skill chance for npcs on untrained skills is a 5.
It gives the players a slightly better chance to succeed (55%) but it gives especially mages reasons to spend more wp on spells that requires the target to make a roll.
Being pedantic I didn’t have a skill greater than 18 - the bear’s HP indicate its CON attribute is 20 and I treated its STR the same - and while that is above the PC level it is probably reflective of a bear’s relative toughness and STR. In keeping with the you ‘can’t have higher than an 18’ however, it would fail a resistance roll on a 19-20.
The problem with just defaulting to a 9 where there is no obvious way of calculating an attribute (as is the case with most of the common animals) is that it can create nonsense situations. For example, something clearly stronger than an average strength PC/NPC (eg a bear) has the same chance of succeeding on a roll to break free of an Entangling spell than a creature which is clearly weaker in terms of what STR represents. Just assuming a 9 means the bear has the same chance as a goblin, which just seems weird and could easily be resolved by providing the attributes.
Meant attribute, sorry! But it is still a point they can't be higher than 18, so it would in this case be better to just set it to 18 instead to say "It's a twenty, but they fail if they roll 19/20"
But while a fair point, i think that could in that case be easily fixed by just giving the bear, or other stronger animals, a damage bonus die. You give the idea that the animal is stronger than other animals, and the system still works.
Page 24 states that PCs can’t have an attribute greater than 18 but there’s nothing to say animals (or NPCs for that matter) can’t. It actually makes sense that some creatures (bears, dragons etc) might well have attributes greater than 18 and other systems that have an ancestry in BRP, including ones like Pendragon which also uses a d20 instead of a d100, quite clearly have creatures with attributes greater than 20. That’s part of the problem with not listing attributes for NPCs and creatures - while some creatures, like bears, would clearly be stronger than most PC races, we have no way of determining how much stronger as the system doesn’t give us that information, and doesn’t provide guidance on how to resolve situations where that might be relevant. TBF, Dragonbane partially solves that problem by having true monsters which would have high attributes (like dragons) immune to some effects (some spells, poisons), but it doesn’t address opposed rolls (what happens when the burly STR 18 knight is challenged by a Minotaur to a contest of STR? Minotaurs are clearly strong, but how strong?) or resistance rolls for the common animals, assuming they act more like NPCs then true monsters - they roll attacks like NPCs and presumably could be affected by magic spells like Entangle?
TBH, my solution would be to allow animals/monsters to have an attribute greater than 18 and give them a bonus die on any opposed or resistance roll, plus an extra bonus die for every extra 10 points above 18, noting that they still fail on a 19-20. That of course means having an understanding of how much more powerful they are which pretty much requires attributes.
Edit: the conversation clearly went on without me, but I agree with Ravencloak.