Realistic Point Gains

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Hide

Well, this is what I think:

Let's suppose this person is a human being living right now, in our world. Consider that a child's brain is not ready to endure 315 hours of training per month. Roughly, a child's body and mind are not in shape to do so; and this is natural, because this person's development is incomplete.

Since your NPC receives special education for the first 14 years of life. I will assume that she starts education at age 1.

From age 1-14, you don't have enough development to properly discern anything, and more importantly, you don't have the "mental-structure" to tell between useful and useless information, good and bad sources; you don't know how to employ your knowledge in specialized fields, because you also lack basic knowledge of the world and other obvious things.

This does not mean you cannot learn anything. But the abilities to direct your focus, imagine and discern among good/bad information and knowledge, are yet to be acquired. And probably, this will take place until adolescence. Perhaps once your NPC is 8 years old.

Regarding her education program, if a month has 30 days, then you have 720 hours per day. Out of these, I will consider this:

240 hours of sleep
90 hours to eat/groom yourself everyday
60 hours to move from one place to another or spend "dead time" events (ie. turning book pages, booting a pc, small pauses between your actions, waiting for your teachers, events out of your control, etc.)
30 hours "socializing" or in human interaction (greeting, asking for food, small-talk, etc.)

After this, you have 300 hours left. Then, you have 150 hours of school and 165 hours of "self-teaching".
That yields 735 hours spend in a month. (-15 hours out of 720)

Take into account that in order to make your knowledge useful, you need to put it into practice. With this schedule, it is highly unlikely that your NPC put to practice most of the stuff she learned. But, she might have specialized in a certain field, that would be acceptable.

Considering her rigorous education program, I suppose you want to support the fact she knows many things. Is this right? And then, when you say "I compared all of her character sheets from age 0 to age 32", I suppose you are stacking all of the stuff she has learned. Is this correct?

Let's suppose your NPC is older, and now she has the basic stuff to focus in her goals and drive herself.

Having photographic memory does not mean you can handle and execute your knowledge flawlessly.

You could have learned how to fire a gun, but if you don't fire often, you get rusty. If you studied surgery, you might have the basic knowledge to practice surgery, but you are not ready for "the special situations" of the trade. Your NPC could be the child playing the drums at age 4, but probably, she won’t do it properly if she does not play the drums in the following 10 years (even if she performed “acceptably” at age 4).

So, studying in fact, is not enough to grant your NPC loads of CP. It does not matter if your NPC took nootropics or if she has less sleep. All of it is flavor for her background. This is more or less what I mean:



However, all of her knowledge could justify this advantage we often see in real life: When one know lots of stuff and is clever, one can link ideas and solve problems more easily.

So, instead of giving her lots of CP (or probably stacking all of her previous CSs), employ her background to justify a wildcard skill for "the job she practices" (B175) and mental advantages such as wild-talent with retention (B99) and/or modular abilities (B71) to justify her impressive background-knowledge and the capability to do lots of things.

I believe the rules behind those items could make your character more plausible. This will also save you some room in your character sheet. Then, you can buy any other skills you deem required.

Finally take a look at the CPs your other characters will have.
She should be more or less the same if you want her to belong to your world's setting.

In this world, we have young geniuses in specialized fields. Such as this kid playing the drums at age 4, but that was mostly, the effort of their parents and the potential they spotted and how they put the kid to work.

I don't deem your NPCs achievements impossible (i.e. conveniently discovering the drug to sleep less and study more), but if this is for a realistic setting she might need a partner/source lending her significant guidance and support. For example, gun-powder and its current applications were discovered after several years of observation and after gathering the of knowledge and theories made by many people (at first, it was medicine). With this, I mean that inventions usually have a background. Another example, Steve Jobs created an innovative cellphone, but it was not the first phone in the world.

If I was the GM, I would tell you that from age 0-14, she naturally lacks the individual-development to drive herself to the extent she did. In other words, I would change that or make it clearer.

Then, I would take real-life examples of "young successful people" in order to learn about the kind successes these people had, expecting you would employ it as a reference for your NPC.

- Hide

Yes, for some of this reasons I used some harder maintaining skill rules. However, I think that the characters basic set points at 0.5h/day per lunch, needing 3 (total 1.5h/day, or around 45h/month). As for 2h/day of dead time, I think that implications as a month, 8h/day, translating into 150h/month takes this into account already, moreover since she does not need to drive, so she can actually perform her self-teaching while on transport. She also got single-minded naturally, so she can drives herself in a better fashion than most. In her reasearch she employed several elite levels people (contact group-21, personal skill around 15), though she was the principal researcher, so to say. I took some real examples, like geniuses who got their Ph.D. at thirteen, and an average character got among 50-200 points, depending on the education received and lifestyle. I actually hold all the character sheets from age 0 to 32, updated at 1. January of every year xD

[AlexanderHowl]

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.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Alexander Howl

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

I have to disagree. What allows them to succeed is the same thing that allows any adult to succeed: they have the motivation and they've put in the time. Someone graduating with a doctorate is skill 12. Someone lazy graduating with a doctorate is skill 11.

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.

Originally Posted by Alexander Howl

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

This doesn't happen. There has been empirical investigation into the learning times of musicians--how much practice it takes for them to reach certain skill levels--and there is very little variation. The children who reach high skill levels have put in the same amount of time as everyone else who reached that skill level.

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.

[AlexanderHowl]

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).

[whswhs]

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.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

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).

Kromm Quote:

Originally Posted by Kromm

Most people do . . . it's no crime. The on-topic points to take away when converting a real-life person to GURPS are:

1. Don't use a PhD to justify anything but a bunch of skills. In particular, don't hitch it to IQ. By all means, create high-IQ adventurers with PhDs who, being built on finite budgets, need to get all of those PhD skills as cheaply as possible! But for real academics, assign the skill levels and let them cost what they cost; there's no "principle of least cost" at work in the real world.

2. Don't assume that a person with IQ above some level can't exist merely because someone like that would have a cartload of PhDs in diverse fields, and nobody like that exists. A person who, in GURPS terms, has IQ 15 and 1 point in each of 20 IQ/Hard sciences at 13 might exist, be a complete hermit who reads tons of books and journals, and remain unknown to the world. "Real" academics wouldn't take such a person seriously, as he wouldn't be published or have suitable paper credentials.

Originally Posted by Kromm

All of this variability applies to modern university degrees, too. I know of at least one "indifferently competent" physicist who was awarded his PhD by an entirely reputable school to get rid of him, because he was creepy enough that his presence was casting a pall on the department, but he wasn't breaking any regulations or laws per se. I know of several people who got their BS through non-academic means, up to and including bribery by a wealthy family and sleeping with the professor. And I know of countless MBAs who essentially bought their qualifications.

About all a university degree means is that you had the will to get a university degree. I do not believe that the school exists where family, money, and social manipulation can't score you a degree at least as easily as hard work. Which is not to say that most people have such family and money, or that those expert at social manipulation don't have skills of a different kind. One could argue that Status 3, Very Wealthy, and Sex Appeal-14 are harder to get than, say, Physician-12. But I would scoff at a little chart that matched degree X with skill level Y, because the real world doesn't work that way.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

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).

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I have to disagree. What allows them to succeed is the same thing that allows any adult to succeed: they have the motivation and they've put in the time. Someone graduating with a doctorate is skill 12. Someone lazy graduating with a doctorate is skill 11.

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.



This doesn't happen. There has been empirical investigation into the learning times of musicians--how much practice it takes for them to reach certain skill levels--and there is very little variation. The children who reach high skill levels have put in the same amount of time as everyone else who reached that skill level.

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.

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Kromm Quote:

Here are some character sheets in pdf

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?

[DocRailgun]

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.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Here are some character sheets in pdf

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?

Adam Sephard has attributes worth 250 character points, but you show his attributes as costing 0 points. And I can't make the various categories of traits add up in a way that makes sense. So I'm not sure what's going on.

[whswhs]

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.