Attribute levels and their meanings.

[AlexanderHowl]

Because the car is not a sentient creature with the appropriate training. It is very difficult to ride an untrained horse even when it is not fighting you, so it would be nearly impossible to use Hands-Free Riding since the mount would lack the training to understand the signals from your heels. Driving a nonsentient device is even more difficult, as an untained animal can at least guess your intentions, while a car just obeys the laws of inertia.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

The exception is that skills which are routinely performed under stressful conditions, or where there is no margin for failure, should be at level 15, while level 12 indicates someone who assists under such conditions, or who has limited training.

Example:

Nurse: Diagnosis-12, Pharmacy-12, Physician-12, First Aid-12.
Doctor: Diagnosis-15, Pharmacy-15, Physician-15, First Aid-12 (unless you're an ER doc or nurse, then it goes to 15).



This is still a pretty good rule of thumb, although you might change it to "order of magnitude" for IQ. e.g., IQ 11 = top 10% of population, IQ 12 = top 1%, IQ 13 = top 0.1%, etc. That gets you IQ 20 as top human IQ, with 1.0% x 10^-10 of the population. The curve isn't perfect, but I try to top out even my most intellectually impressive realistic or "semi-realistic" characters at IQ 15.

With Quad ST, ST ranges for humans get heavily compressed. ST 14 should be about the human maximum, with levels of Lifting ST and Lifting skill used to model weightlifting feats.

You do not really need more than ST 14 with a good enough Lifting skill. You could even use a perk for a limited +2 to skill if you do not want to raise Lifting over 18. You could also use a perk for +25% (or more) to the maximum weights as if it were half a level of Breath-Holding (which has been deemed as realistic). With ST 15 you would be able to surpass by large the current world records.

[AlexanderHowl]

Assessing realistic ST is difficult because people seem to think that competitors are willing to suffer crippling injuries when they only have a 10% chance of succeeding. My rule of thumb is that competitors will operate on the 75% rule, they will not attempt a level of performance unless they are 75% sure that they will succeed (it helps having lived with competitive athletes during my undergraduate years, so I know how paranoid they are about career ending injuries).

In the case of Lifting skill, that means that someone with Lifting-20 will only risk +40% above their BL for sustained events and +80% above their BL for one-off events. The world record for a two-handed lift is 1150 pounds and, using Lifting-20, that would mean that the competitor could two-handed lift 640 pounds without rolling. Since two-handed lift is 8×BL without a roll, that would make their BL 80 lbs, which is ST 20. I am quite fine with accepting ST 20 as realistic.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Assessing realistic ST is difficult because people seem to think that competitors are willing to suffer crippling injuries when they only have a 10% chance of succeeding. My rule of thumb is that competitors will operate on the 75% rule, they will not attempt a level of performance unless they are 75% sure that they will succeed (it helps having lived with competitive athletes during my undergraduate years, so I know how paranoid they are about career ending injuries).

In the case of Lifting skill, that means that someone with Lifting-20 will only risk +40% above their BL for sustained events and +80% above their BL for one-off events. The world record for a two-handed lift is 1150 pounds and, using Lifting-20, that would mean that the competitor could two-handed lift 640 pounds without rolling. Since two-handed lift is 8×BL without a roll, that would make their BL 80 lbs, which is ST 20. I am quite fine with accepting ST 20 as realistic.

Excuse me but the world record for the two hands anyhow is 448 lbs by Arthur Saxon and your calculations are very wrong. For 74.07% success you can roll at 12, so you are at +80% by Lifting 20 if you want to limit yourself to the 75% rule. Now at ST 14 you have two-handed lift at 312lb which with the bonus goes up to 561.6lb, and you just got a world record by +25%. So please do your Lifting at 18 rolling against 13 for +50% at 83.8% success and get a world record of 468lb which already surpasses the old one by +4%.

If you want to go for superheroes with ST 15+ all the way up to 20 of course you are free to do it, but get it right and remember that on failures you achieve only what you would have accomplished without extra effort and you only get injured on critical failures to start with.

The same even works for clean and jerk if you consider it a variant of two-handed lift and take a perk for +2 to skill, granting a world record at 592.8lb by +2% at Lifting 18 with a 62.5% success.

And then if you consider the raw deadlift to be a variant of carry on back, you get a world record at 1053lb by +1% and with a 74.07% success if you take an appropriate perk for +2 to skill by Lifting 18.


Now if you do not think this is enough to justify limiting human characteristics to 14 (15 if you are feeling very generous), I believe that nothing will be, but you can also check that conan the barbarian had ST 14, and that most if not all animals in the GURPS books respond to the formula 2x(cube root of weight in lbs) which basically means that by ST 14 a human would weigh 343 lbs, and by ST 15 that would become 422 lbs (having Glenn Ross weighing 406 lbs, and he looks fat in my opinion so I would rather take Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson with 400-440 lbs and 6 ft 9 in thus probably qualifying for gigantism)... and much better: you can just check the GURPS update which is basically free and introduces that same formula under massive creatures (note that with very fat those average weights raise to 686 lbs for ST 14 and 844 lbs for ST 15).

[AlexanderHowl]

You are incorrect about the world records. Zydrunas Savickas deadlifted 1155 pounds in 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BD...rsonal_records). Eddie Hall deadlifted over 1100 pounds in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Hall).

By the way, Arthur Saxon set his record with the Two Hands Anyhow, which is combined lift where the competitor lifts two different weights with two different hands (meaning that it is two different one-handed lifts occurring simultaneously and not a single two-handed lift by GURPS rules). If you look at the famous picture of the event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Hands_Anyhow), he one-handed lifted a 336 pound barbell above his head, which would require a minimum BL of 94 pounds using the 75% rule (meaning that he had an effective Lifting ST 22 by GURPS rules). He also had the world record for the bent press (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_press), where he one-handed lifted a 371 lb weight over his head, which would require a minimum BL of 103 lbs using the 75% rule (meaning that he had an effective Lifting ST 23 by GURPS rules).

[sjard]

<Moderator>
A reminder to keep the tone civil.

Thank you.
</Moderator>

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

You are incorrect about the world records. Zydrunas Savickas deadlifted 1155 pounds in 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BD...rsonal_records). Eddie Hall deadlifted over 1100 pounds in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Hall).

By the way, Arthur Saxon set his record with the Two Hands Anyhow, which is combined lift where the competitor lifts two different weights with two different hands (meaning that it is two different one-handed lifts occurring simultaneously and not a single two-handed lift by GURPS rules). If you look at the famous picture of the event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Hands_Anyhow), he one-handed lifted a 336 pound barbell above his head, which would require a minimum BL of 94 pounds using the 75% rule (meaning that he had an effective Lifting ST 22 by GURPS rules). He also had the world record for the bent press (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_press), where he one-handed lifted a 371 lb weight over his head, which would require a minimum BL of 103 lbs using the 75% rule (meaning that he had an effective Lifting ST 23 by GURPS rules).

My references are for raw deadlift, without straps. Straps and suits should give equipment bonuses of up to +4 by TL 8. However you are right in that the one handed lifts can be problematic, we should test arm ST.

You start getting appropriate numbers by arm ST 5 rolling at 25.93% success.

Found the problem. For some reason one handed lifts works at BL ×2 while two handed lifts work at BL ×8. I have several friends who do weightlifting and this does not make any sense, so do one handed lifts at BL ×4 and everything will run just fine. If you disagree with maximum one handed lifts working at ×4 for free, make it a perk or an advantage to represent training. If you disagree with the general idea check on the world records if the differences between one and two handed lifts are so large (they are not). This way you do not need arm ST at all.

[acrosome]

Holy crap... Well, I guess I just proved my point about miscommunication. And also that I'm not guiltless of poor interwebs communications skills, myself. After what I thought was both a private and public apology (albeit I did ask him if he was somehow threatening me; I won't go into details but I guess that might have come across the wrong way, too) hal sent me a diatribe via PM and then ignored me. Part of what steamed him was my use of "Tex", which though it was only meant to communicate my surprise at his reaction, it apparently got read as some version of the "thick skin" thing. Which I guess is pretty obvious in retrospect. I've done it before, and I guess I just did it again. So, consider me chagrinned.

Anyway, I'm now WAY off topic so I'm stopping, but I'll ask a favor of anyone here who cares to clue me in. Please only reply by PM.

Was I being an ass here? Well, that might be difficult for you all to answer without the PM- which truly surprised me- so I'll narrow it: Specifically, did that public response of mine come across as anything other than an acknowledgement that I could have handled the whole issue better in at least two ways: better choice of words, and via PM rather than public?

Edit--

And now I just read the mod's comment above. Was that directed at me? Because if so then, yes, I'm clearly failing at my intended message, here. And I don't really see anything else that might have prompted that, so I suspect that it must be me. I'll have to ruminate on that. Just let me know and I'll delete this post. Or, heck, just go ahead and delete it.

So, another apology: sorry for the drama, folks. My bad. That rapidly got WAY out of hand, and there's no denying that I'm the one who started it. I could have just let it lay.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Driving a nonsentient device is even more difficult, as an untained animal can at least guess your intentions, while a car just obeys the laws of inertia.

I agree!

My proposed maneuver is semi-cinematic. I was thinking of situations where the driver might take his hands off the wheel briefly in order to pull the pin on a grenade or slap a new magazine into a pistol. (And don't forget that he still has to keep his eyes on the road, meaning he must use the Work by Touch technique as well!)

I also tried to keep it somewhat reasonable by specifying that you must roll every second in demanding conditions. It's easy enough to keep a car going straight by holding the steering wheel steady with your knees on a flat, level, smooth, empty road, but otherwise, you're asking for trouble.

The Bad Weather Vehicle Control Perk is a bit more realistic, as long as the GM doesn't allow more than 1-2 levels. For a car, that means things like practice identifying black ice before you hit it, and skid control exercises. For an aircraft, it means techniques to deal with crosswinds and turbulence, as well as extra training to deal with issues like aircraft icing.

[mr beer]

The thing is that using real world weightlifting feats in order to determine GURPS strength is only ever going to be a rough approximation.

If you want to use GURPS to realistically model world-class strength athletes, you'd need to write GURPS: Strength Athletes and it would involve reworking the Lifting skill and using new, specific formulas for a number of common lifts and feats. This would be a plausible project but likely extremely dull for most games and gamers.

Conversely, if you want to use strength athletes to model GURPS, you are wasting your time IME.

My conclusions from observing strength sports is that it's a reasonable rule of thumb to say that world class strength athletes in an uncapped weight class are at least 4x as 'strong' as a normal man in good health. In GURPS, a ST 20 character is 4x as strong as a ST 10 character. Therefore ST 20 is a plausible real world stat.