Maximum Capabilities for Realistic Characters

[AlexanderHowl]

While I know that I am opening up a can of worms, I was curious what everyone thought is the maximum capabilities of a realistic character? I am including people like Olympic record holders as realistic because they have quantifiable records. I am also willing to consider minor abilities that would be explained by the Special Exercises and Unusual Training Perks because I have experience sparring people who seem to have minor abilities that could be explained by such traits.

[Nereidalbel]

Just what capabilities are we looking at? Top speed? Weight lifting? Weight carried (different from weight lifting!)? There are people out there who can carry a small car, even though they can't lift it off the ground. Start it around chest height, though, and they'll move it.

[Leynok]

The way I've broken down Attributes for my games:

6 or less: Stupidly Crippling. -Players simply should not have Attributes this low in most games.
7: Crippling. -Having Attributes this low require GM permission, as having such a low attribute will cause problems for them.
8: Poor. -Lowest You can take freely.
9-11: Average.
12: Impressive.
13: Exceptional.
14: Amazing. -Highest you may take freely.
15: Legendary. -The absolute best a human can reach, not usually available to take during Character Creation.

I just set these according to what felt right to me, I don't have any numbers or science behind setting them this way.

[Curmudgeon]

We did have a thread on this a few years ago Peak Human Attribute Scores. There are some hard numbers for ST and Move starting around page 16.

[Mr Frost]

As a worldbuilder : Strength and Health 20 , Dexterity and Intelligence 15 .

Arguments can be made to max Health lower , but it seems to Me that it's just certain things don't scale as well with higher Health scores as We might wish . If I were to set it at 15 , I would either allow it to be bought higher with an Unusual Background cost {mabey just double cost} or allow extras like a few more levels of Hard to Kill/Subdue and Fatigue , a half level {1 point} of Breath Holding etc .

With Strength , the problem to Me isn't the score and is 2 fold : the lack of officially defined exact multiples of base lift for specific lifts in competition weight lifting where the greatest amount of exacting data can be found and that extra effort and the lifting skill seem to be too cinematic {and damage is a different issue yet again} .
I prefer to fix the actual issues than nerf the stat .

[Emerald Cat]

Originally Posted by Leynok

I just set these according to what felt right to me, I don't have any numbers or science behind setting them this way.

Yeah, trying to set something like this scientifically is more trouble than it is worth.

From a gamist perspective, I like to use 16 as an attribute cap. At this attribute level, your defaults are 12 for Easy skills, 11 for Avg skills, and 10 for Hard skills. In other words, you have a 74.1%, 62.5%, and 50% chance of success for an unmodified skill roll, respectively. The odds become much worse for adventuring tasks that have negative modifiers. This allows a high attribute character to reap the benefits of their high attribute without overshadowing their peers with default skill usage.

I personally don't see the need to limit the starting attribute levels of my players. I'm fine with my players deciding to max out their attribute levels at the start of a campaign. We are talking about someone spending 60 to 120 points to max out one of their attributes. On a 150 to 250 point budget, maxing out even one attribute is exorbitantly expensive. If a player wants having a high attribute to be the defining feature for their character, then so be it.

[Ji ji]

Originally Posted by Mr Frost

Arguments can be made to max Health lower , but it seems to Me that it's just certain things don't scale as well with higher Health scores as We might wish

To me, it's the largest part of things and all the important ones, that is why I never allow a score above 13 (HT+fit+hard to kill/subdue+whatever).

[AlexanderHowl]

Why would 15 be banned at character creation and why would 15 be legendary? The majority of the iconic characters in Basic: Characters have one or more Attributes at 15 or higher. Heck, according to GURPS standards an Olympic athlete would have a minimum of DX 16 and HT 16, while the weightlifters would have a ST 20.

No, what I mean is what do you think is the overall realistic limit. Do you think that we have people who would be considered 500+ character points or do you think that people cap out at lower point levels in reality?

[Lord Azagthoth]

With realistic, you mean without doping, steroïds, etc?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

While I know that I am opening up a can of worms, I was curious what everyone thought is the maximum capabilities of a realistic character? I am including people like Olympic record holders as realistic because they have quantifiable records. I am also willing to consider minor abilities that would be explained by the Special Exercises and Unusual Training Perks because I have experience sparring people who seem to have minor abilities that could be explained by such traits.

It depends on what we mean by 'realistic', too. For ex, the super-rare best of the bests are not unrealistic, just super-rare. Isaac Newton really existed, but some of his intellectual feats would be called unrealistic if a fictional character did them, for ex.

We probably are seeing something close to the limits of the biologically possible in unaided human physical achievement in some fields of athletics now. One sign that this might be the case would be that the improvements are now coming in split-seconds and marginal changes.

OTOH, we don't really know what the potential limit of human intellectual abilities are, we know some instances of rare achievement, but we don't know that something better yet can't happen or just hasn't happened yet.

(This is complicated by the difficulty of having time to learn enough to make full use of such gifts if they appeared.)