Attribute levels and their meanings.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Not if you design the campaign properly. When I have players who have skills at 20+, I tend to inflict massive skill penalties from circumstances that are impossible or difficult to develop techniques for. For example, having to pilot a helicopter through the wall of a Category 5 hurricane would be a -20 to skill (-1 for every 10 mph winds up to 100 mph and -1 for every 5 mph winds above 100 mph). There is no way that anyone can develop a technique to counter that penalty.

So why would they want to pilot that helicopter through the wall of a Category 5 hurricane to start with? The maximum penalty from circumstances is -10. At a skill level 20 that would mean 50% probability to success, and if you want people doing impossible things here and there, then let them buy off that penalty with an appropriate technique justified by things such as "piloting practises in hostile circumstances". Because that would be much better and more colorful than arbitrarily high skills all over the place, and would set some limits of what can and can not be done.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Not if you design the campaign properly. When I have players who have skills at 20+, I tend to inflict massive skill penalties from circumstances that are impossible or difficult to develop techniques for. For example, having to pilot a helicopter through the wall of a Category 5 hurricane would be a -20 to skill (-1 for every 10 mph winds up to 100 mph and -1 for every 5 mph winds above 100 mph). There is no way that anyone can develop a technique to counter that penalty.

Now wait a minute. If you can use your skill to overcome that penalty, how exactly are you doing so? Are you doing specific things to get you through that particular obstacle? If so, then it seems as if "doing these specific things" ought to be something that you can learn how to do without learning all the other applications of the skill, and that would be a technique. If there isn't a technique, then it sounds as if you're saying, "You can use your insanely high skill to perform feat X, but there is no identifiable action you can use your skill to carry out—you just perform feat X by being amazing." And I'm not seeing that as a plausible narrative.

I actually think I would say that the answer to that particular feat is more like, "You can't do it no matter how skilled you are." Kind of like, no matter how much skill you have, you can't fly by flapping your arms. There's no "flapping your arms" technique, but there's also no skill that's suitable.

If I were going to face players with that level of challenge, it would be in a campaign where their characters had superpowers, or high-end magic, or in some cases Cosmic abilities. I wouldn't ask them to do physically impossible tasks, assess huge skill penalties, and then let them buy skills up to godlike levels to counter those penalties.

I have played a character in a supers campaign who had DX and Per 19. She was already superhuman; she was the combat monster of the campaign and could do just way over the top things. Requiring tasks that need scores substantially higher than that is not my idea of designing a campaign properly.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Now wait a minute. If you can use your skill to overcome that penalty, how exactly are you doing so? Are you doing specific things to get you through that particular obstacle? If so, then it seems as if "doing these specific things" ought to be something that you can learn how to do without learning all the other applications of the skill, and that would be a technique. If there isn't a technique, then it sounds as if you're saying, "You can use your insanely high skill to perform feat X, but there is no identifiable action you can use your skill to carry out—you just perform feat X by being amazing." And I'm not seeing that as a plausible narrative.

I actually think I would say that the answer to that particular feat is more like, "You can't do it no matter how skilled you are." Kind of like, no matter how much skill you have, you can't fly by flapping your arms. There's no "flapping your arms" technique, but there's also no skill that's suitable.

If I were going to face players with that level of challenge, it would be in a campaign where their characters had superpowers, or high-end magic, or in some cases Cosmic abilities. I wouldn't ask them to do physically impossible tasks, assess huge skill penalties, and then let them buy skills up to godlike levels to counter those penalties.

I have played a character in a supers campaign who had DX and Per 19. She was already superhuman; she was the combat monster of the campaign and could do just way over the top things. Requiring tasks that need scores substantially higher than that is not my idea of designing a campaign properly.

Super agree with this.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Also (and this will get me screamed at nowadays) a rule of thumb from way back in The Day was to think of IQ as IQx10.

The standard deviation of a modern IQ test is defined as 15 points. Treating 3d an approximation of a normal curve, one standard deviation is actually very close to +/- 2.5, so if you determined IQ test results by rolling against GURPS IQ for the test (or better per question, since stacking up more rolls gets you ever closer to a normal distribution) the 6 GURPS IQ values 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 will span almost exactly the same stretch of a normal probability curve as scores of 85-115 on modern tests. +/-1 GURPS IQ point should be about +/- 5 Stanford-Binet IQ points (and apparently GURPS characters never have IQ 100, since 10.5 isn't an integer value)

No that doesn't agree with the cult of stat normalization well at all, but IQ/10 is little better.

It's worth noting that IQ tests (and pretty much all other kinds of tests) tend to be almost uselessly unreliable for anything more than 2 or 3 standard deviations from the mean. This is also about where 3d rolls break down (3 deviations from 10.5 falling at about 3 and 18) which probably has a lot to do with why such a simplistic mechanic actually gives reasonable looking results a lot of the time, and why it tends to be difficult to benchmark scores outside that range - you mostly couldn't reliably distinguish people outside that range in the real world either.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Now wait a minute. If you can use your skill to overcome that penalty, how exactly are you doing so? Are you doing specific things to get you through that particular obstacle? If so, then it seems as if "doing these specific things" ought to be something that you can learn how to do without learning all the other applications of the skill, and that would be a technique. If there isn't a technique, then it sounds as if you're saying, "You can use your insanely high skill to perform feat X, but there is no identifiable action you can use your skill to carry out—you just perform feat X by being amazing." And I'm not seeing that as a plausible narrative.

It could be that there's no single technique that one could train in. A significantly challenging situation might simultaneously require a whole body of techniques, so training to be in that situation is effectively training the skill up as a whole. The kind of situation someone says, "it took all my training and experience to get us out alive."

However, I'm not qualified to speculate as to whether "high wind experience" is a valid technique, thus whether it's a good example of such a situation.

[whswhs]

The standard deviation of 1d6 is about 1.7. Multiplying by the square root of three gives 2.96, or approimately 3. That actually supports taking 1 GURPS IQ point as being 5 IQ points better than your figure of 2.5 does.

But I don't think that "where you are on a normal distribution" maps reliably to "how likely are you to succeed at a given task." And the latter is what GURPS stat and skill rolls are used for.

[gruundehn]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Now wait a minute. If you can use your skill to overcome that penalty, how exactly are you doing so? Are you doing specific things to get you through that particular obstacle? If so, then it seems as if "doing these specific things" ought to be something that you can learn how to do without learning all the other applications of the skill, and that would be a technique. If there isn't a technique, then it sounds as if you're saying, "You can use your insanely high skill to perform feat X, but there is no identifiable action you can use your skill to carry out—you just perform feat X by being amazing." And I'm not seeing that as a plausible narrative.

I actually think I would say that the answer to that particular feat is more like, "You can't do it no matter how skilled you are." Kind of like, no matter how much skill you have, you can't fly by flapping your arms. There's no "flapping your arms" technique, but there's also no skill that's suitable.

If I were going to face players with that level of challenge, it would be in a campaign where their characters had superpowers, or high-end magic, or in some cases Cosmic abilities. I wouldn't ask them to do physically impossible tasks, assess huge skill penalties, and then let them buy skills up to godlike levels to counter those penalties.

I have played a character in a supers campaign who had DX and Per 19. She was already superhuman; she was the combat monster of the campaign and could do just way over the top things. Requiring tasks that need scores substantially higher than that is not my idea of designing a campaign properly.

High skill also implies, if it is not explicit, that you can recognize the details of a situation and react to the situation properly faster than someone with lower skill. If you absolutely MUST fly the helicopter in question, then your high skill would let you detect, if only at the subconscious level, the changing wind patterns, and rain patterns, and do what is needed to fly through, or avoid, the worst of them.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

High skill also implies, if it is not explicit, that you can recognize the details of a situation and react to the situation properly faster than someone with lower skill. If you absolutely MUST fly the helicopter in question, then your high skill would let you detect, if only at the subconscious level, the changing wind patterns, and rain patterns, and do what is needed to fly through, or avoid, the worst of them.

There is still such a thing as "Nobody is that good."

[ericthered]

I have to say I object to hard and fast rules for what attribute averages. I've seen too much variance, and different genres need different numbers. The average skill of an NPC is something I decide when building a campaign.



An skill or attribute score (with the exception of ST) is a percentage chance of something happening). Everything else is auxiliary. And I reserve the right to make the vast majority of my setting more or less competent as I see fit.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I have to say I object to hard and fast rules for what attribute averages. I've seen too much variance, and different genres need different numbers. The average skill of an NPC is something I decide when building a campaign.



An skill or attribute score (with the exception of ST) is a percentage chance of something happening). Everything else is auxiliary. And I reserve the right to make the vast majority of my setting more or less competent as I see fit.

Yes, you´re always free to play in unrealistic, fantastic and overpowered settings. What I introduce here is limited to realistic human beings.