The World of Darkness game system has a similar spirit. Basically your abilities determine your dice pool, e.g. Intelligence = 3 + Academics = 2 gives 5 dice to try to understand a technical book. You then have to roll the dice and obtain at least one 8+ on 5 d10. Bonus/malus apply on the dice pool, e.g a noisy room is -1 die and access to google is +1 die. Of course incremental bonuses are less relevant the bigger the dice pool is.