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Originally Posted by whswhs
As for the rule of 20, if you look at defaults, a character with attribute 20 defaults to 16 for Easy skills, 15 for Average, and 14 for Hard. All of these are greater than ordinary professional competence. You're not quite looking at Clark Savage, Jr. or Bruce Wayne, but you're not far short. That's already pushing at the limits of believability. If it were up to me, the rule of 20 would change to rule of 16, with defaults of 12, 11, or 10—still pretty good, but not "trained professional" as default. But imagine letting it go higher—IQ 22 would make you the equally of a highly skilled professional at Artist, Diplomacy, Engineer (all specializations!), and Physician, among others. The limit helps lessen the strain on the players' disbelief suspension.
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If such superhuman general intelligence is accepted, then why would such exceptional defaults stretch suspension of disbelief too far? We would after all not say that basic lift doesn't improve for ST above 20 because it would be unbelievable for a human too be able to carry more than that. It is more reasonable to just restrict attributes to whatever is considered possible for the characters in your game.
Rather not getting better at defaults no matter how much your intelligence increase seems to me to run into far more problems with suspension of disbelief (one might argue that such general increases to intelligence should have the enhancement which makes the rule of 20 inapplicable, but such an argument leaves quite a lot to be desired, especially since the authors of GURPS books often don't bother to include it in templates and effects which improve intelligence).
Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
If you had a story where the heroes always succeeded at their main skills, and were defeated only by hopeless odds, that wouldn't make a very interesting narrative or drama, I think.
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In my experience that is actually very common in narratives. Heroes pretty much never fail in tasks which they are exceptionally skilled at unless the circumstances are such that the task is much harder than usual.