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Originally Posted by DrTemp
Excellent question. Is there? Should we write one? Something like:
The stats in GURPS are meant as most people having 10 in a given attribute - most, which means, more than half. Take a group of 100 people, and at least 51 will have a score of 10, not more, not less.
Additionally, the remaining, higher attributes will be increasingly rare - while another 20% might have score 11, only 5 or 10% might have 12, etc.
Hm. Does not look complete. Additions?
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If you're trying to imitate the actual Gaussian distribution of a lot of human traits, saying "most people will have 10" is dead wrong. Rolling 3d6 is already enough to take you close to a Gaussian distribution; you can approximate one by rolling the traits of the general population at random—in which case 27/216 will have a score of 10 on a given trait, or one in eight, or 12.5%. If you want to get in the neighborhood of "half," what you want to say is that 50% of the general population will have a score of 10
or less.
Though that literal a translation does not really work for GURPS, and indeed cannot. For one thing, consider IQ. You would have to say that 10/216, or just about 5%, had IQ 5 or less—which is defined as nonsapient: equivalent to mammals (other than great apes) or birds, and incapable of language use. That's a hopelessly implausible model of the human population. At the other extreme, I don't think most stat normalizers would be happy with one person in twenty having IQ 16-18.
In any case, whatever distribution you adopt for the general population need not apply to player characters. Pretty much by definition, player characters are exceptional.
I am probably a stat normalizer by basic inclination. At least, I worked with such an approach when I was contributing to GURPS Who's Who. But I didn't try to make a bunch of notable historical figures fit onto a Gaussian distribution. What I did was more in the way of making their stats exceptional to the minimal degree needed to describe them: an 11 or 12 would become visible over time to anyone who knew the person, a 13 or 14 was obvious and would be a big influence on the person's life and career choice, and a 15 or 16 was rare and extraordinary, while anything beyond that was almost unheard of.
Bill Stoddard