This is one of those sleep-deprived middle-of-the-night ideas which I'm reasonably likely to regret posting in the morning once I really wake up - but which, at least at the moment, thinking on my more-corrupted-than-standard hardware, seems like a cool idea.
Most role-playing games have a system for determining whether or not certain actions are successful or not. Most of the time, these can be described as setting a target number, and rolling one or more dice, with various modifiers - eg, you might have to roll a 13 or higher on a twenty-sided dice to correctly answer the sphinx's riddle, and having your handy Book of Ancient Puzzles to refer to may give you a +3 bonus to your die-roll.
How insane and awful an idea would it be to have an RPG system whose core mechanic wasn't based on linear probabilities like that... but, instead, on decibels of Bayesian probability? For example, instead of a bonus adding a straight +3 to a d20, or increasing your odds by 15% no matter how easy the task or how skilled you are, the bonus adds +3 decibels: changing your odds from 50% to 66% if you started out with a middling chance, but only increasing it from 90% to 95% if you're already very skilled.
(And now, back to sleep, and to see how much karma I've lost come the morning...)
That's a 49.995% chance of failure, and a 50.005% chance of success. Also 0.49995 is much closer to 50% than to 49%.
In any case, it should be nowhere near 50%. Increasing the log probability by log(2) would approximately halve the probability of failure if you're very likely to succeed, but it would double the chance of success if you're very likely to fail.
To answer the earlier question, an alteration which halved the probability of failure would indeed change an exactly-0% probability of success into a 50% probability of success.
If one is choosing between lower increases for higher values, unchanged increases for higher values, and greater increases for higher values, then the first has the advantage of not quickly giving numbers over 100%. I note though that the opposite effect (such as hexing a foe?) would require halving the probability of success instead of doubling the probability of failure.
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