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Old 06-02-2021, 06:25 AM   #27
Anaraxes
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: Skill Advancement

Quote:
Originally Posted by Emerikol View Post
I'm suspicious of being able to improve stats after character creation on everything but ST and maybe to a lesser degree HT. I don't think people's IQ changes
Keep in mind that GURPS IQ is not just a rating of some theoretical mental CPU power (despite the abbreviation). It also includes education and experience. (See, for example, rules for children having lower IQ, or the vast number of IQ-based defaults which represent knowing a little about a subject that you never actually studied.) Smart people can learn more easily, yes -- but IQ is the store of past experience at least as much as potential for the future. And IQ-based skills include a lot of things that aren't intellectual or difficult or demanding a lot of specific study -- being familiar with your hometown, for instance.

Any system with a small number of attributes means those stats each cover a lot of ground.

DX is certainly improvable in the real world. There are exercises to improve hand-eye coordination (one of the reasons you play catch with kids, but there are also exercises for adults. I'm studying guitar, and despite having had a profession that exercised my manual dexterity, I've still made a lot of improvements over that starting ability in controlling my fingers (especially with the left hand). That's certainly gotten noticeably better in less than a year. Stretching exercises improve range of motion and flexibility, both in exercise (yoga), PT, or athletic training.

Stats aren't divine gifts fixed at birth. They change throughout life.

And when it comes to game stats -- even if you believe there's an inherent natural limit, why assume that the numbers that a character happens to start with are actually at that limit? That hero might have an impressive ST or DX already, but their full potential has yet to be realized or revealed.

The main reason I can picture for prohibiting stat increases is a purely gamist one. It will always cost more to raise a bunch of skills than it will to raise the base stat. Therefore, the minmax thing to do once you have five skills at the 4 CP level (or ten with just 1 CP, so the next level would cost 2) is to just keep bumping the stat. In practice, it's not quite that bad, because players also think some skills are more important than others, and will run them up a little higher. But there's a point that's not hard to reach where a reasonably experienced character is mathematically better off just by raising their stats. In some genres and stories, even the omnicompetent hero isn't a problem -- even a trope -- but at lot of people tend not to like their games to get that extreme.
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