So wich one is the correct rule for near miss?
They're both
optional rules and, IMO, both are wrong.
IMO, Picking Locks and Disarming Traps should be Percentage skills, not All-or-Nothing. The maneuver is resolved by rolling repeatedly over successive time-intervals until a cumulative total over 100% is reached - with the "time interval" being the amount of time required to work on the maneuver before another roll can be made made.
Furthermore, the time interval for complex tasks like picking locks should start at 1 round for Mundane locks/traps and
double for each difficulty level above Mundane. This is
NOT how long it takes to pick the lock or disarm the trap, it's how long you have to work on it before you can roll to add to your cumulative % total. It may, and often will, take multiple rolls and multiple time intervals before you reach 100%.
For example (NOTE: just to be clear, this is NOT an official rule):
| Difficulty | Modifier | Time Interval | |
| Mundane | No Roll Required | 1 round | |
| Routine | +60 | 2 rounds | |
| Easy | +40 | 4 rounds | |
| Light | +20 | 8 rounds | |
| Medium | +0 | 16 rounds | ~ 30 seconds |
| Hard | -20 | 32 rounds | ~ 1 minute |
| Very Hard | -40 | 64 rounds | ~ 2 minutes |
| Extremely Hard | -60 | 128 rounds | ~ 4.3 minutes |
| Sheer Folly | -80 | 256 rounds | ~ 8.5 minutes |
| Absurd | -100 | 512 rounds | ~ 17 minutes |
For example: to pick a Medium lock, a character would roll after 16 rounds (32 seconds) of work. If the result of their roll (on the Percentage column of the Maneuver table) was less than 100%, they can continue working on the lock for another 16 seconds to roll again. Success is achieved, as normal, when the cumulative total is 100% or more.
The character can choose to abandon their work on the lock at any time. If they abandon the attempt, they can try again later - a generous GM might even give them a small bonus to the first roll or reduce the difficulty slightly.
The goal here is to a) stop treating Locks & Traps as an All-or-Nothing maneuver, and b) allow for the time it takes to pick or disarm difficult locks....and while the time intervals may seem large in terms of combat rounds, they're ridiculously low in terms of seconds and minutes. IMO they're a reasonable compromise between realism and playability. Medium and easier locks should be easy & quick to crack, but even the most skilled thief should be sweating about the time it takes to pick the Absurd lock on a shop-keeper's door - if the town guards patrol every half hour, you don't want to spend too long trying to break in.
The time intervals in the table above can be adapted to other uses and can (and should) be modified for situational factors. e.g. a Light lock that's hard to get at and manipulate might use the Light +40 modifier, but Hard or worse Time Intervals. or vice-versa.
There are a lot of All-or-Nothing skills in HARP that would be better treated as Percentage skills, especially if the time interval is based on a reasonable approximation of the time required to complete a task being a Medium maneuver, and then increased or reduced for each difficulty level lower or higher than that.
