What's with the modesty about stats?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Lamech

...
The rules for gravity changes are awful as I mentioned. If a guy can lift a ten kilo weight and you halve the gravity he can lift more than a twenty kilo weight. His arms no longer need to spend as much force on the arms themselves. However not so in GURPS.

Only if you completely ignore the negative encumbrance you gain from not having to lug your earth level weight around.
At 220 lbs, 0.5 G will give me 110 lbs to soak up much more than that 20 kilos to leave me still at no encumbrance.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Gollum

I fully do agree with that!

But to put geometric curves in a game, complex arithmetics are required. Then, the game is not anymore playable without a computer or a pocket calculator...

So, in my humble opinion, GURPS remains one of the most realistic though playable without calculator role playing game! If not just THE most.

The Last Gasp article does a lot to make physical exertion fatigue geometric and workable, for the most part.

[Fwibos]

Originally Posted by Kraydak

But that just means that the 15=expert rule is silly; and if 50ish=normal person works at TL3, it may not apply in a world where the government spends over $100K per person on just K-12, and a huge swath of the population spends/has spent on their behalf another $100K or more on college.

Those assumptions (15=expert etc...) cause major problems if one has, say, two parallel systems (in different countries, say), with very different standards. You can easily have two different people who just graduated with multiple years differences in their education, but the 15=expert system would give both the same skill level.

You also have problems if you say "12 cp in your primary skill" when one person could have started his skill just after college, and has been learning on the job for 6 years, while the second has gone through post-graduate education in his. The two people obviously should not have the same number of cp invested.

Why not? Maybe one fo them slacked off or worked harder? CP are not a factor of time but of effort. They *can* represent time - GURPS figures 1 cp / 200 hours of training. But they need not.

12 cp in your primary skill is a a benchmark. Assuming a hard skill, and IQ 10, it gives you a 12 - professional level.

Let's say you weren/t the brightest bulb and have GURPS IQ 9. The same effort investment yields 11 - Sucky professional. You can probably get buy in the real world, but to be as good as an average GURPS IQ person - you have to put in more work - 4 cps worth, in game terms What this is in real terms - you got me. *00 hours? Special Seminars? A new way of thinking? But regardless, being less smart means it takes more effort to be good.

The reverse is also true. IQ 11 means you save 4 points of "effort". You can use that "effort" to learn a different Average skill at professional level, or two easy skills at Pro Level ("I'm a Chemist, Cook, and Gardener").

At IQ 12, the difference is even more striking - and this is why I am a stat normalizer.

But even the IQ 11 person has a limt - time in a day. If he fails to specialize, he can be surpassed by a particularly specialized and hardworking IQ 9 person. (IQ 9 spends 4 hours a day learning to Knit. IQ 11 Knits, Gardens, Cooks, and Studies Cheese) It will take IQ 11 4 times as long to gain 1 point in knitting as IQ 9. But One will be at 11, the other at 9.

So I Skill level is a good way to measure - with wriggle room. Your Skill 11 doctor may have great bedside manner and a competent nurse (Cahrisma and Ally) and so, yes, he can get away with

Basically, dumb people need to work harder to do be good at knowledge skills. This is realistic - a dimb person is better off focusing on one or two skills than spreading points thin.

It also explains people who do 5-6 things. They probably are above average (Stat 10-12) and a few points in a bunch of things.

[Lamech]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Only if you completely ignore the negative encumbrance you gain from not having to lug your earth level weight around.
At 220 lbs, 0.5 G will give me 110 lbs to soak up much more than that 20 kilos to leave me still at no encumbrance.

Nope. Check page 350.

Originally Posted by da rulez

If local gravity is less than 1G, multiply the weight of
the gear you’re carrying by the local gravity, and use the
modified weight to determine your encumbrance. There
is a similar reduction in your body weight; this does not
affect encumbrance,

It makes sense, to do realistically would be a pain in the ass, but they are still off.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I know a long time ago someone had the idea to base defaults from attributes like this:

Easy: Attribute/2 +1
Average: Attribute/2
Hard: Attribute/2 -1

That'd be me. Might have even written it up as an article at one point. :-)

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

That'd be me. Might have even written it up as an article at one point. :-)

That just demonstrates your legitimate claim to IQ 19, I think.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

That just demonstrates your legitimate claim to IQ 19, I think.

I would give him whatever skill level in game design Chopin had at composing. Not even joking.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I would give him whatever skill level in game design Chopin had at composing. Not even joking.

Assuming you dont think Chopin sucks pink fuzzy donkeys . . . Wow!

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Assuming you dont think Chopin sucks pink fuzzy donkeys . . . Wow!

Well, the same effective skill level.

I'd probably say you have the Hyper-Specialization perk and are getting a bonus from some complementary skill roll. So, figure twenty-three minus four for the perk, that's nineteen. Maybe minus another one for the complementary skill and that puts you at eighteen. If you're taking extra time, which for all I know you might be, that puts you at skill sixteen or so.

Whereas Chopin probably had skill twenty-two and was taking extra time for only a plus one.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Kraydak

Hardly. An IQ 20 character is probably moving in a world with a lot of IQ 16-17 characters, who have 12/16+ points invested in their primary skills. The IQ 20 person will be, at best, a talented amateur at every mental skill that allows an IQ default, and can relatively cheaply (1-4 cp investment) compete with experts. Which is perfectly reasonable.

It is not the comparison with other characters, but the comparison with task difficulty, that makes defaults from IQ 20 or DX 20 equivalent to high expertise.