Attribute levels and their meanings.

[Boomerang]

I'm prepared to give in game experts a fair amount of latitude as to what they can attempt because a) it makes the game more fun and b) experts often have insights that lay people are not even aware of. For all I know there may be a trick to navigating a hurricane that an expert helicopter pilot could use in an attempt, although it is risky, that a lay person would not consider.

I've been following formula one racing for about eighteen years. Formula one drivers are generally regarded as the best in the world and they need to be. Formula one cars are undrivable for mere mortals even under ideal conditions, they are cramped and hot with poor visibility a ludicrously sensitive throttle and a ridiculously stiff brake pedal. These guys don't just drive the cars they race them through narrow street circuits, sometimes in the rain with poor grip and no visibility while adjusting the car settings through the steering wheel and chatting to the pit lane on the radio. They push the cars to the limit so they have to be aware of tyre wear, fuel consumption, brake temperatures, tyre pressures plus a host of other things normal drivers don't worry about. They make the impossible look easy to the point that you don't even realise how difficult the task really is.

[hal]

Originally Posted by khorboth

I'm really mathy, so I like numbers as well. When I need to relate things to the real world, I jump through a couple of hoops.

ST: Basic Lift is how much you can lift from the ground to over your head in one second with no extra effort. It's also how much you can carry without noticing any encumbrance whatsoever.

IQ & DX: Look at some defaults that a person is familiar with.
Boating defaults to IQ-5 or DX-5, so someone with IQ 15 has about a 50/50 chance of figuring out how to work a simple sailboat with no training whatsoever. Likewise, someone with DX15 has a 50/50 chance of managing it even though they don't really know what they're doing.
Thrown Weapons default to DX-4, so someone with DX12 has a 26% chance of hitting a target (simplified, assuming penalties for range cancel non-combat and aiming bonuses)
Law defaults to IQ-6, so someone with an IQ 10 should be able to successfully navigate the complexities of a lawsuit about 2% of the time.
Pick something the player knows which has a default, and relate it to an untrained person with natural attribute.

HT:
This one's harder. At about 12, odds are in favor of combat death being due to damage rather than a failed HT roll (shock). I would think that something around 16 would be necessary for reasonable odds of staying standing through the kind of grueling punishment necessary to die on your feet like what led to the standing 8-count in boxing. I haven't run the odds, though, as it would depend a lot on how long the fight went on and how many rolls for consciousness need to be made.

What is perhaps being ignored in all of this, are the adjectives used to describe events in terms of "reality" and in terms of a math based game system.

To wit: Task Difficulty table on page 345. If something is relatively easy to do, you might have a player character rolling at default, with a penalty of -5 but a bonus of +6 for Very Easy. Net result, a roll versus IQ+1 to see if they can. If someone has a skill at 12, and gains a +6 bonus, that works out to an 18+, thereby avoiding a critical failure on a roll of a 16 - and also succeeding all too well.

Only when we get into the difficult terrain of "unfavorable" or worse does it much matter whether or not your character is deemed to be trained at professional or better levels of skill.

As for using Techniques to describe those things that most normal people never master - there is something to be said about that. Case in point: Driving a car in Buffalo New York is largely a normal thing right? But when the snows first lay on the ground, we have a fair number of "ooopsies" and fender benders. But given a couple of days, and our old "Snow driving habits" come back to the fore and accidents due to driving conditions start to ease up. It isn't that we're better drivers per se - we just spent time learning the techniques required to avoid accidents in winder driving. And to illustrate this further? My wife and I drove down from Buffalo to Charlotte NC - stealing a march on the time required to drive that far - by leaving work after 5 PM, driving to a town in Pennsylvania, and then travelling the rest of the way to Charlotte. The funny part was? Although PA had less then 8" of snow covering the ground, they thought we were insane to be driving in the snow. In Buffalo, 8" is hardly anything.

So yes, it is better to assign a technique value to something instead of raising a skill to a 12 or 13 claiming that it represents a better more capable driver. Could we race in a race track, specifically engineered with banked curves, good visibility, and a good surface just like the pros? I'd dare say "Um, no."

But the point being made about "you can't get 10 GM's to agree to the same definition" is a valid one. All that we can agree to is that 10 is supposed to be the mythical average human as far as ANY stat goes.

The truth is, with the exception of ST as far as lifting weights is concerned, and body building techniques go - it is the one stat in which relatively rapid increases in capabilities do arise. It generally takes someone with a huge amount of will and dedication, to approach levels of body building as seen by some in weight lifting contests, body building contests, and other feats of strength that most normal (aka near 10 stat) people can't begin to achieve.

Do I try to use that task difficulty table? As much as I can. I still recall the one time, a player was emulating a Three Musketeer as far as finding a paramour was concerned. I had ruled "Your plusses are so extreme, that the only way you can fail in your moment of passion, is if you roll an 18". To this day, the roll of an 18 after my comment was greeted with hilarity of immense proportions (gotta keep this a G rating folks - but the Crit failure had to mean that an elbow went where an elbow should never go in the mind of a paramour!)

In the end? When you get right down to it - it is up to the GM to have a vision of what is happening, and transmit that vision to his players. If 20 is fine in your campaign world, then FINE it is. ;) If you think that 20 as an attribute should only be applied to one individual in the entire history of a race's existence, then that is what it means to THAT GM.

Me? I try to keep things intuitive. My wife doesn't have to read a rules book to play in the game at the table (something she's done since 1986). Why? Because she has faith that I will try to keep things reasonable and realistic. I'm not going to make every villain have an IQ 14+, or enemy archer have a DX 14+ or what have you. More often than not, I simply work off of "12 is professional" and if the villain's henchmen aren't supposed to be professional soldiers, then they won't have professional level skills as a rule. It makes life easier for me as GM, and certainly makes it easier for them as players.

For the record? The only time I was ever really SHOCKED at how an encounter went, was during a CYBERPUNK campaign in which a player character got pulled into an underground fight (ie illegal fight) under a bridge at the City. He had a skill of 14 or so in brawling, and had martial arts skills at a respectable level. His opponent? Had a skill 9 in brawling in no small part because he had grafted muscles instead of natural ones, and was essentially a HULK of a fighter with ripper claws. Sad part was? The guy was feeling the effects of one too many operations, too much drugs, and a low IQ. All that fighter could do was aim for his opponent's face because the crowd loved it every time. He'd make telegraphed blows aiming for the face, with a 5 to hit, +4 for telegraphing the attack. You'd think the player character with what amounted to a +2 bonus to defenses, could win that fight right? Um, no. Them there dice are the fates to which characters live or die sometimes. Net result? One crit success to the face, destroying the eye orb and caving in the sinal cavity with three nasty reinforced polymer blades and one dying player character.

So, in deference to the Moderator saying "don't let this creep into personal territory" as far as comments go - I try to keep at the front of my mind one simple thing...

If you respect the GM and enjoy his games, who cares whether his philosophy matches yours 100%?

[weby]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

The maximum penalty from circumstances is -10.

That is not true. It is is fully possible to get penalties over -30: -10 for doing an insane task, -10 for doing it "instantly", -10 for No equipment and then things like skill based specified penalties, TL penalties and so on.

To give a fully silly example: Picking a lock in an Alien TL 11 super high security lock in the dark with no tools to escape the flying saucer when you have only a second or so to do it. -10 for super high security, -15 for TL difference, -2 for familiarity, -10 for instant use, -10 for no equipment, -5 for dark= -52 total.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by malloyd

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.

Originally Posted by 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.

That's all... actually quite fascinating, and nothing that I would ever have bothered to figure out on my own. And I knew it! I do have IQ16! :)

But, yeah, that's a decent argument to inflict upon the stat normalizers. Of which I am a moderate example, so that's saying something. My general rule has always been "cap attributes at 15 or so if you don't want to be getting ridiculous." And yes, ST in particular can break that- I'll make exceptions.

Hmm. I'll have to rethink a lot of my templates...

Originally Posted by weby

That is not true. It is is fully possible to get penalties over -30

In Horror, fright checks are a canonical example that can easily exceed -10 when you are dealing with TMWNMTK.

[hal]

Originally Posted by weby

That is not true. It is is fully possible to get penalties over -30: -10 for doing an insane task, -10 for doing it "instantly", -10 for No equipment and then things like skill based specified penalties, TL penalties and so on.

To give a fully silly example: Picking a lock in an Alien TL 11 super high security lock in the dark with no tools to escape the flying saucer when you have only a second or so to do it. -10 for super high security, -15 for TL difference, -2 for familiarity, -10 for instant use, -10 for no equipment, -5 for dark= -52 total.

Um - what Alonsua mentioned is factually true when you look at the Task modifier's table. This is what it has to say...

"Impossible. No sane person would attempt such a task. The GM may wish to forbid such attempts altogether. Example: A Driving roll to steer a car with the
knees while firing a bazooka twohanded during a chase through a blizzard."

In the example above, the driver could have a skill 20 in driving, and find that the task is deemed too impossible to achieve at all, and thus be ruled "no, you can't make a driving roll to drive with your knees while using two hands to fire your bazooka during a chase through a blizzard." This despite the fact that mathematically speaking, Skill 20 less the -10 penalty, is still a 50/50 chance of success statistically speaking.

The only real exception to that guideline that comes to my mind, is that from combat with respect to ranged combat. There, it is possible for a character with a skill 18, to fire upon a fleeing horseman moving at a speed of 12 yards per second at 1,000 yards distant, to be engaged by carefully prepared/loaded musket (+1 to hit bonus) aiming for 3 seconds (+2 bonus) with an accuracy of 3 (for the musket itself) with a -17 (combined speed range of 1012 yds) for a final to hit of 18+3+2+1-17 or a modified to hit of 7 on 3d6. For most shooters, that is an impossible shot. For this particular expert, he has a roughly 1 in 6 chance of hitting his target for 4d6-1 halved damage, rolling on the random hit location table due to the range being outside the half damage range.

So, aside from combat, Alonsua's comment is valid. Anything beyond -10 may well (note MAY, not SHALL) be treated as impossible and not worth considering for examples of values worse than -10.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by hal

Um - what Alonsua mentioned is factually true when you look at the Task modifier's table.

Which is cherry-picking one phrase from a gigantic pile of material. And that exact section mentions that it is a guideline for the GM, not some kind of rule that anything beyond -10 is specifically disallowed. "The GM may wish to disallow such attempts altogether." (My emphasis.) It is also clearly meant to be somewhat realistic (rather than over-the-top) by way of making the explanation about how difficult tasks can be.

I mentioned the canonical counter-example which disproves that penalties in general are all capped at -10: fright checks. Otherwise why would the table go up to 40? So now we're just arguing about skill checks specifically, and it seems ridiculous to cap penalties at -10 when one is discussing ridiculous skill levels. (For anything approaching realism, sure, I'm with you.) But Supers and over-the-top stuff like Monster Hunters comes to mind. Firing a bazooka two-handed while driving with your knees through a blizzard would seem to fit the theme there. And, frankly, I think that the penalties would stack worse than -10.

I'll also mention that UMs often get interpreted as condescending. It gets mentally translated as "Gee, you missed something so obvious that I'm actually embarrassed for you, you moron". Communicating via interwebs is difficult that way, so I advise avoiding writing styles like that. Try "Well," or just "IIRC" instead.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Which is cherry-picking one phrase from a gigantic pile of material. I mentioned the counter-example which disproves the statement that penalties are all capped at -10: fright checks. So now we're just arguing about skill checks specifically, and it seems ridiculous to cap penalties at -10 when one is discussing ridiculous skill levels. (For anything approaching realism, sure, I'm with you.) But Supers and over-the-top stuff like Monster Hunters comes to mind. Firing a bazooka two-handed while driving with your knees through a blizzard would seem to fit the theme there.

Not to mention that UMs are kind of condescending. I advise avoiding writing styles like that.

I meant to treat only realistic stuff in this thread.

[weby]

Originally Posted by hal

Um - what Alonsua mentioned is factually true when you look at the Task modifier's table.
(snip)
So, aside from combat, Alonsua's comment is valid. Anything beyond -10 may well (note MAY, not SHALL) be treated as impossible and not worth considering for examples of values worse than -10.

Except that Modifiers part says "Modifiers are cumulative unless
stated otherwise." and "See Culture (p. 23), Language
(p. 23), Tech-Level Modifiers (p. 168),
Familiarity (p. 169), Equipment
Modifiers (p. 345), and Task Difficulty
(p. 345) for discussions of common
modifiers."

Task difficulty is just one of the modifiers.

and further under task difficulty "If the GM feels that a success roll
should be easier or harder in a partic-
ular situation, he may assess a difficul-
ty modifier. This is separate from mod-
ifiers for the culture, equipment, lan-
guage, tech level, etc. of the person
attempting the task, in that it applies
to anyone who attempts the task. It is
cumulative with all other modifiers."

[Celjabba]

The various people performing emergency self-surgery come to mind for real example of cumulative penalties likely to exceed -10 before bonus ...

[weby]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

I meant to treat only realistic stuff in this thread.

But it is fully realistic that you may come upon door with fine lock (-5 to pick HT p 203), have only improvised tools(-5) and be forced to work by touch(-5).

Those are fully realistic things. Of course the GM can just say "you cannot do that" and move on. But the fact is that even with realistic things there are situations where the sum of the negative modifiers can get really high.