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Old 07-22-2010, 10:06 AM   #7
Kromm
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
Default Re: Standard deviation on Stat distribution?

Quote:
Originally Posted by jeff_wilson View Post

I'll be the first to agree that adventurers are not a representative sample of humanity, but I don't see how it is supportable to disclaim the statistical meaning of the canonical statements that a score of 10 represents the human average and that most normal humans have scores in the 8-12 range without also discarding their meanings as commonly understood by non-statisticians.

Once the authors assign abstract quantities to represent individual qualities and make statements about how common they are among a group of such individuals, how are they not practicing statistics?
You're making the huge and incorrect assumption that we're using "human" and "average" rigorously to refer to the real-world human population and the mathematical concept, respectively. We aren't! We're using "human" as code for "adventurers with the 0-point human racial template" and "average" to mean "the value everybody gets for free." But those concepts take more words to express, and economy of words is vital when you pay for printing by the page and shipping by the gram. All the Basic Set is saying is that in the absence of points spent to have a different racial template and/or dramatically high or low scores, you get 10s. Then it's defining "dramatically high or low" well enough to help you create suitable adventure heroes. Reading any more into it is being unnecessarily legalistic or pedantic . . . one of those.
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