01-05-2018, 01:27 PM | #91 | |
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
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01-05-2018, 05:35 PM | #92 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
I think that the most realistic learning rate is 40 hours per week of normal studying. In the former case, I realistic human child can probably sustain 36 weeks of normal studying per year before they stop learning out of boredom and fatigue (any additional learning time is probably counterproductive and will probably result in rebellion). That level of studying is the equivalent of 1,440 hours of studying, which is 7 character points per year, or 84 character points from grades 1-12.
What allows a child genius to succeed in college is having a phenomenal IQ (IQ 14+ with a few levels in applicable Talents). The idea is that they study smarter, not harder, so they actually spend less time studying that their peers and often earn extra money tutoring their older peers. If you have a character with IQ 14 and Musical Ability 4, she will be a master musician in an instrument with just 200 hours of study, which means getting a musical degree will take very little time for her, even if she spends most of her time playing video games online. |
01-06-2018, 07:26 AM | #93 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
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It doesn't take all that much practice to reach a skill level of 11 or 12. You're looking at one thousand to two thousand hours of practice. Those are both big numbers, but they're easily achievable. Even at two hours a day of practice, you're only looking at three to six years. With both the means and a parent who pushes them to study, or the drive to do so on their own, any child could reach those skill levels quite easily. And those are the skill levels they're expected to graduate with. Their skill levels might be quite low going. How much of a genius is someone with a skill level of 9? That level is quite easy to reach. Shouldn't be more than around a hundred hours of practice. Note that I'm disregarding the GURPS learning rules. They're clearly incompatible with reality for reasons I go into in my learning house rules. Real learning doesn't take place at the linear rate the GURPS rules suggest. It is much more difficult to go from a skill level of 18 to a skill level of 20 than it is to go from a skill level of 10 to a skill level of 12. It starts off easy to increase your skill and then gets more and more difficult as your skill level increases. The times that GURPS is assigning to skill learning are all wrong. If you try to model real people using those rules, you're going to end up with nonsense results. It's just absurd to suggest that these children have IQ scores of 14 and Talent stacked on top of it. If that were the case, they would master their skills in basically no time at all. But that isn't what we see. What we see are children who put in the practice time and then reach the commensurate skill levels. This only seems odd because we aren't used to seeing children put in any meaningful time practicing a skill--in their many years of schooling they only practice a scant few hours toward an actual skill. I doubt there are fifty total hours of meaningful practice put toward any skills during thirteen years of schooling. Whatever the rest of that time is spent doing, it isn't practicing skills. Quote:
These children you're talking about are merely people who have put in the time. And it doesn't take all that much time to reach an impressive skill level with a musical instrument. In two years, you can have someone who can play an instrument quite well. This is what is going on with the "child prodigies." They aren't somehow special. They're regular humans learning as all humans learn.
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01-06-2018, 10:18 AM | #94 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
A doctorate is hardly skill 12, at least not in the USA. On average, you spend seen years getting your doctorate from a regionally accredited institution and you are already above average intelligence (a minimum of IQ 12, otherwise you are just not intelligent enough to get through a doctoral program in a regionally accredited institution in the USA). With an average of 3.5 years of classwork (36 hours of being taught a week) and 3.5 years of dissertation work (36 hours of self-study), you are looking at the equivalent of 30 character points of learning. That would get you to IQ+4 in one primary H skill and to IQ+2 in one secondary average skill (16 and 14 respectively).
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01-06-2018, 11:00 AM | #95 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
One important point in this discussion that I think may not have been sufficiently addressed is that "realistic" is not fully defined by the GURPS rules. For one thing, those rules can be used in campaigns that range from realistic to utterly epic or cinematic. There are rules that are called out as "realistic" or even "harshly realistic," but those are suggestions for how to achieve a desired effect.
The underlying concepts are concepts of certain styles of narrative or drama. (Note that I don't mean that the GM is "telling a story" to the players; rather, the story naturally emerges from what the GM and the players do together.) Part of the GM's role is to set parameters for what type of story will emerge. Rules are tools for accomplishing this, and the GM has to choose those tools. But when I say, "That doesn't seem realistic," what I mean is not "that doesn't follow this specific set of 'realistic' rules" but "I don't think that kind of character/event is suitable in a realistic story"—with the implied recommendation "If you want to have a realistic story, you probably shouldn't use that particular rule." The standard there is personal judgment of what makes sense as a story, and behind that of what can plausibly happen in the real world. So when I say that the proposed character doesn't seem realistic to me, I'm not saying that she violates some specific rule. I'm saying, rather, that if she appears in a story, I'm going to feel that that story is over the top—that it exceeds the tensile strength of my suspension of disbelief. The rules of GURPS don't stop you from creating such a character; they work perfectly well to define outrageously hypercompetent characters, if that's what you want to do, and there are even genres where such characters are standard—high-end space opera, supers, mythic fantasy, wuxia, and others. But I don't call those genres "realistic" either. Beyond that, there's a more basic concern of purpose: This character gives me the impression of being a cinematic figure in a campaign where the player characters are much more realistic. And that kind of mixture needs to be handled with caution. A character that capable can deprive the player characters of agency or, more basically, of their chance to be the stars of the show. Most campaigns should give the player characters a chance to be awesome. If you have a character this incredibly competent, over a range of fields (science, medicine, and business, at least), you risk their outshining any light a PC could possibly shed by their actions. This can be protected against by giving the NPC a delimited role, but your comment that the character might be a Patron or an Enemy or just part of the background doesn't seem to indicate that you have such a delimited role in mind. So I think you may be risking a campaign that's not "the players have their characters do cool or amusing stuff" but "the players watch in awe as the GM shows off the NPCs and the world." And a little of that goes a long way in rpgs.
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01-06-2018, 11:59 AM | #96 | |||
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Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
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01-06-2018, 03:32 PM | #97 | |||
Banned
Join Date: May 2017
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
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https://www.docdroid.net/usGdp3q/adam-sephard-2018.pdf https://www.docdroid.net/JQz8o06/eve-nought-2018.pdf You may note that their weight is a bit low, but that is because the source of their strength is not entirely natural. You may also note that they got some redundant advantages, such as Fit and Very Fit, but that is because they come from different modifications, applied at different dates, so they are there just in case I need to apply the template to other characters. What do you think? |
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01-06-2018, 04:39 PM | #98 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
Without searching for a quote, I'll say that Kromm has told us before that the rules for character points are for PCs and there's no need to worry about point values for NPCs. Give the NPCs the abilities they need for your story, then you can give them whatever back story you want.
It seems like the OP would be a lot happier not stressing out about "realistic point gains" when the story is clearly not realistic anyway. There's nothing wrong with that, though. |
01-06-2018, 06:53 PM | #99 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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01-06-2018, 06:56 PM | #100 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Realistic Point Gains
Alonsua: It's kind of you to quote my long post in full, but I don't think you've actually said anything that addresses, or responds to, the points I was trying to make. Did I not manage to make them clear? I'm willing to try to answer questions or comments, if you have any to make.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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