What's with the modesty about stats?

[Fwibos]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Yes. There are GMs who like both camps, depending on the campaign.

And those who especially insist on the story: everything can be justified... As soon as there is a good background or reason to justify it!

Even in a realistic world, for instance, a player telling that his character improves his DX rather than skills with a very good argument could sounds fine.

Through the practice of his favorite weapons, my character suddenly realized how to move his body faster and become more effective... "Perception!", he thought,"Perception is the key. Paying much more attention to the surrounding, to see things coming in advance and act rather than contenting myself to react! That is what I will try to do know."

Indeed, in reality, even in harsh and realistic reality, skill improvement is never progressive. Sometimes, you realize something that allow you to make a jump in a whole field of knowledge, if not several. And some other times, you stagnate at the same level, no matter the efforts.

Of course, in a harsh and realistic, this jump has to remain a little one. +1 to IQ or DX. No more.

This does reference the chicken/egg dillema of Attributes/Skills, and the fuzzy line between them. After all, isn't high school -where you are flooded with knowledge - just a way to increase IQ and add defaults?

So it could be said - justifiably, that polymathic profiency creates a high IQ as much as it requires a high IQ.

Likewise , is a high DX necessary for Arete, or can learning multiple physical skills make one dexterous?

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Fwibos

This does reference the chicken/egg dillema of Attributes/Skills, and the fuzzy line between them.

And as always, my answer to this old dilemma is: both captain, both!

When you are very dexterous, it is more easy to learn athletic or combat skills (among others). But when you learn them a lot, you also improve your skills. Both are true, at the same time...

This answer could also be applied to this whole thread... What is realistic, what is not. Is there really a frontier?

News are full of incredible things done by apparently ordinary true people... And some people are really outstanding. They do outstanding things quite regularly...

Is reality always realistic? It often go much farer than fiction...

[DCB]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Familiarity penalties can easily be as brutal as -6, making those level 15 defaults into level 9s.

Skills used at default do not take familiarity penalties (cite).
This was discussed at length with regards to Driving, and eventually Gollum asked Kromm about it:

"I have submitted our conclusion (20-50 hours of training and you have got default +2) to Dr Kromm and his reply is: "no".

There is no familiarity with default. And no malus for unfamiliarity with default. When you have the default level, you only have the default level. Familiarity or unfamiliarity is only taken into account for trained characters."


So an IQ 20 character will be, by default, an expert at every mental skill, save for Very Hard ones, where he or she will merely be akin to a trained professional. This is appropriate for some characters (and, indeed, formed the basis for the protagonist of a 90s tv show), but does not appear to describe any real-world humans.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

What about Newton?

Great mathematician and physicist, significant inventor.... Questionable chemist and theologian. Interpersonal skills lousy, no evidence of capacity in medicine or surgery or indeed biology. Nothing worth mentioning in history or geography. Disastrously incompetent economist. (The British thought he was such a good mathematician that they put him in charge of the money supply. It took until 1816 to repair the damage.)

[Kraydak]

Originally Posted by DCB

So an IQ 20 character will be, by default, an expert at every mental skill, save for Very Hard ones, where he or she will merely be akin to a trained professional.

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.

[Fwibos]

Originally Posted by Brett

Great mathematician and physicist, significant inventor.... Questionable chemist and theologian. Interpersonal skills lousy, no evidence of capacity in medicine or surgery or indeed biology. Nothing worth mentioning in history or geography. Disastrously incompetent economist. (The British thought he was such a good mathematician that they put him in charge of the money supply. It took until 1816 to repair the damage.)

I belong to the COSN, But I'd put him at IQ 12, with mathematical Ability 4* and Lightning Calculator and maybe incompetence: Finance?

*Or maybe a lower point cost version without it.

[Gollum]

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.

• Amateur: about 10
• Professional: 12 to 13.
• Expert: 14 and above...

See Basic Set, Characters, page 172, Choosing Your Skill Levels.

An IQ 20 character would have a default of 16 for all easy mental skills, 15 for all average mental skills and 14 for all hard mental skills*...

It would give him more than 90.7% chance of succeeding any average mental task of any kind (science, art, relation, technology, music, etc.) without the least hour of training and in an adventuring situation (hurry, stress, danger)...

It perfectly fits for an heroic character. But not for a realistic one...

_____

* With default, of course.

[Kraydak]

Originally Posted by Gollum

• Amateur: about 10
• Professional: 12 to 13.
• Expert: 14 and above...

See Basic Set, Characters, page 172, Choosing Your Skill Levels.

An IQ 20 character would have a default of 16 for all easy mental skills, 15 for all average mental skills and 14 for all hard mental skills*...

It would give him more than 90.7% chance of succeeding any average mental task of any kind (science, art, relation, technology, music, etc.) without the least hour of training and in an adventuring situation (hurry, stress, danger)...

It perfectly fits for an heroic character. But not for a realistic one...

_____

* With default, of course.

With due deference to Kromm, there is a technical term for assigning titles like "Amateur" and "Expert" to flat final skill levels.

That term is "silly".

The skill level appropriate to a profession is a combination of the skill level needed to perform that skill reliably (weighted by the severity of failure, this mainly sets the floor for acceptable skill levels) and the skill level of the competition. In highly competitive fields, the standard skill level will soar because you are competing against other, motivated, human beings. Many professional skills are gated behind *extensive* training programs. If those training programs were to be extended, the final "professional" skill level *would not remain constant*. If we were to develop a dexterity/intelligence boosting treatment (a reality in many GURPS settings...), the effective skill level expected of people would not stay the same. It would increase.

In a world with IQ 20 people, skill 14 would not be "Expert" in IQ based skills. Obviously. Which was my point: a lot of the COSN arguments are somewhat circular. If you assume low skill levels, then high stats break the low skill level assumption, so stats have to be low. So low skill levels makes sense.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Lamech

GURPS sort of models reality, but it makes a lot of excuses and differences for the fact that its a game.

I fully do agree with this. Now, this is still the most realistic game I have ever seen.

Originally Posted by Lamech

The learning by study rules are unrealistic. Defaults are unrealistic. The rules for sleep are unrealistic. (Most people could probably go two weeks with 7 hours of sleep a day without suffering hospitalization.) The rules for starvation are unrealistic. The rules for altered gravity are a joke.

Can you develop a bit, please (GURPS results vs reality data), because I don't agree with you here... But I may be wrong (and I'm very interesting to know it if I am).

About the average guy going two weeks with only 7 hours of sleep a day without suffering hospitalization, for instance, this is exactly what GURPS rules say.

Missing hours of sleep : 14. Times 2. 28. Divided by 4 (quarter days), 7. It just makes 8 FP. The character is very exhausted... But it doesn't directly send him to hospital.

Originally Posted by Lamech

So when people say "Well person X can't have this stat at Y because it would mean Z". Yeah, well you can say that about every person, for every stat, for every value.

Of course. But some scores still have so many consequences on what the character is able to do during the game that they can hardly be considered as "realistic".

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Kraydak

With due deference to Kromm, there is a technical term for assigning titles like "Amateur" and "Expert" to flat final skill levels.

That term is "silly".

The skill level appropriate to a profession is a combination of the skill level needed to perform that skill reliably (weighted by the severity of failure, this mainly sets the floor for acceptable skill levels) and the skill level of the competition. In highly competitive fields, the standard skill level will soar because you are competing against other, motivated, human beings. Many professional skills are gated behind *extensive* training programs. If those training programs were to be extended, the final "professional" skill level *would not remain constant*. If we were to develop a dexterity/intelligence boosting treatment (a reality in many GURPS settings...), the effective skill level expected of people would not stay the same. It would increase.

In a world with IQ 20 people, skill 14 would not be "Expert" in IQ based skills. Obviously. Which was my point: a lot of the COSN arguments are somewhat circular. If you assume low skill levels, then high stats break the low skill level assumption, so stats have to be low. So low skill levels makes sense.

Professions are not sports, generally speaking. Most jobs do not involve making opposed checks against your peers. Margin of success counts for much less than the fact of success or failure.

With a 12 or 14, you can expect very few failures in regular duties for most jobs. Having more than that simply doesn't do much of anything, unless you want to try to scrape a little bit off the job time with Haste or are for some reason cutting back on equipment. Or go into adventuring applications of your skillset. There are some jobs where opposed rolls or massive penalties are relevant. But they're rather rare.

You also seem to be assuming that the existence of very-high-stat people implies frequency of very high stat people. Which might make sense if you're thinking of them as the products of transhuman enhancement technology, but when we're talking about historic figures we generally are figuring that's not the case... 20 IQ blows the doors off in a world where 14 IQ is exceptional, which is (more or less, away from basic set) the standard expectation. In THS or the Culture, average IQ is going to be more than 10 but that's only relevant when we're statting persons from augmented settings.