Super and Numbers

[David Johnston2]

I was just looking through the copy of I.S.T. and thinking about numbers. Specifically the numbers in the World War II setting because I have an ongoing fascination with the era as a location for supers games. Now it put some pretty tight restrictions on the numbers for supers in that era. Tight enough in fact that it's dubious that the first super casualties were from mortars rather than just y'know getting shot.

But also in terms of how many of them, which led me to think about the USO Chorines. 100 known supers...tops. That's for the whole combatant world so the United States has maybe, what 30 of them? With 10 per cent of them of them women? With those numbers would they really have more than one Amazing Girl in the U.S.O.?

[Flyndaran]

What super setting ever has anything approaching normal statistical distribution curves? Even if they did, once you get down to only 100 data points, things get rather unpredictable anyway.

[David Johnston2]

Actually IST has a pretty normal distribution curve in the modernish setting. The heavy emphasis on an international setting encourages it. But I wasn't really thinking in terms of a "normal distribution curve". I was thinking in terms of "Well the Germans have to have at least as many supers and probably more. Then there are the Italians, the Japanese, the Russians, the British and the French all of whom canonically have supers even if we assume the Chinese are entirely S.O.L. When I say "thirty" for the Americans it's with the assumption that they have more than "their share".

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I was just looking through the copy of I.S.T. and thinking about numbers. Specifically the numbers in the World War II setting because I have an ongoing fascination with the era as a location for supers games. Now it put some pretty tight restrictions on the numbers for supers in that era. Tight enough in fact that it's dubious that the first super casualties were from mortars rather than just y'know getting shot.

But also in terms of how many of them, which led me to think about the USO Chorines. 100 known supers...tops. That's for the whole combatant world so the United States has maybe, what 30 of them? With 10 per cent of them of them women? With those numbers would they really have more than one Amazing Girl in the U.S.O.?

The key thing there may be that there were at most 100 known supers. Who knows how the apparent distribution was skewed by which people with newly endowed powers chose to go public, and which did not?