[Basic] Nature versus Nurture - DX and IQ

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I'm not sure what you would want to know for though. It wouldn't matter to any individual character particularly, and couldn't usually be separated anyway.

I can think of a few instances where it would matter.

• Flashbacks. You play a game where the players replay events that happened in the distant past, how much DX does the rogue have without all his experience?
• Eugenics. You're creating an evil eugenics cult that's existed for millennia, how high could you theoretically put the attributes just down to selection.
• On a similar vein, Supersoldiers. You've just taken a serum that puts your physical stats up to the peak of human potential. However, unless it's somehow psionic, it won't have affected your experience, it'd only give you the best possible genetics.
• Memory Wipe. You're hit by a curse that wipes your memory, as well as all your skills and experience. What are you left with?

There are more, but they're mostly permutations of the same concept.

YMMV as to how useful it is. I find my players tend to like complete nonsense, or fairly hard science. Not necessarily simulationism, but a general feel of realism. Within a game version of the real world, this could happen. My preferences tend to run in a similar direction.

[Flyndaran]

Those require superscience or otherwise glossing over many realistic consequences without answering your question.
Knocking out memory rather than traumatically causing forms of amnesia would make you an infant but with less plasticity.
Flashbacks also allow you to remember when you were a youth. No super agile/strong/etc. adult was that way as a child.
Even if you were, memories are based on examples not theoretical things except as the back handed compliment; you have such potential.

[Flyndaran]

Eugenics means to alter the genetics. Do that enough and you have a new species, so what the theoretical extremes of the original form are doesn't really matter.

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Those require superscience or otherwise glossing over many realistic consequences without answering your question.

Yes, they do require superscience, or alternatively magic. This is a game we're talking about, I can still want to run an otherwise semi-realistic game in which superpowers or magic exist.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Knocking out memory rather than traumatically causing forms of amnesia would make you an infant but with less plasticity.

Let's call it a mental reset then. Again, magic.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Flashbacks also allow you to remember when you were a youth. No super agile/strong/etc. adult was that way as a child.

I'm talking more flashbacks in the movie sense, something happens that relates back to the past, so we do a scene in the past. And besides, that's rather my point, I want to know what the character would be like with all the experience stripped away, they certainly wouldn't be as agile as they are when they're older.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Eugenics means to alter the genetics. Do that enough and you have a new species, so what the theoretical extremes of the original form are doesn't really matter.

Fair enough on that point.

[aesir23]

The last I read, scientists who study these things believe that about 50% of intelligence and personality are genetic.

This makes a lot of sense, especially with what we now know about brain-plasticity (the ability to create and reinforce neural connections within the brain through practice and exercise.)

You may be born with a "potential range" (in GURPS terms, your genetics might determine that you can have an IQ as high as 14, and no lower than 11 (baring brain damage), after that it's all about training.

I had a similar experience to Gef related to DX--I was uncoordinated and bad at sports as a child, now I'm probably somewhere above average because of years of martial arts training.

IQ is more difficult to prove--I was always bright, but also somewhat hindered by ADHD. There was a time when my GURPS IQ probably went down because of chronic marijuana use (I've since quit), but the rigors of graduate school have probably brought it back up somewhat (including Will, certainly, but probably not Per). Hard to measure and prove such things, though, especially with how broad GURPS IQ is.

As a GM, I would absolutely allow players to improve any stat, and I'm a big fan of allowing players to "sell back" skills in order to improve the base stat (e.g. "you've improved Acrobatics, Dancing, Rapier, Guns (Pistol), and Riding (Equines) by 4 points each since the campaign has begun, if you'd like to drop each of those by one level, you can spend those 20 points to improve your overall DX without any loss of absolute skill.")

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

Yes, they do require superscience, or alternatively magic. This is a game we're talking about, I can still want to run an otherwise semi-realistic game in which superpowers or magic exist.
...

You're asking what stays the same when you change things. That depends far more on what magic/superscience can do than what individuals can do with normal self-improvement.
When dealing with such things, I don't see how anyone can argue anything but eyeballing what "seems" reasonable.
Magic can reduce stats by X% for example isn't any more or less realistic than saying it can only -2 for those at the high end of the species' attribute curve.
No one knows how nature/nurture goes with a single individual let alone species in reality. I don't see how we can define it clinically here in games with reality breaking or even low cinematic settings better than that.

[Wavefunction]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

You're asking what stays the same when you change things. That depends far more on what magic/superscience can do than what individuals can do with normal self-improvement.
When dealing with such things, I don't see how anyone can argue anything but eyeballing what "seems" reasonable.
Magic can reduce stats by X% for example isn't any more or less realistic than saying it can only -2 for those at the high end of the species' attribute curve.
No one knows how nature/nurture goes with a single individual let alone species in reality. I don't see how we can define it clinically here in games with reality breaking or even low cinematic settings better than that.

Oh, I know, and since DX and IQ don't have good real-world equivalents it gets even harder. But that's why I'm not asking for empirical evidence, that'd be ridiculous, I'm asking for people's opinions. I can eyeball things, but it's always nice to know whether other people eyeball it around the same level.

In this case most people seem to be eyeballing roughly around the half genetics, half experience mark. That seems like a good, workable abstraction.

[weby]

Background:
I have also found the broadness of IQ (and lesser degree DX) a problem in GURPS. Basically the wide disconnect between few stats and so many skills makes things wonky. You can easily have 50+ IQ skills so even putting one point in each of them over the base 1 is not worth it for such. So after a point there is no use in learning a skill better unless it is about the only skill you use.

Thus my view:
IQ and Dx are just things that work as a bonus of an too broad set of skills. Super ability that is basically heavily discounted for game use the same way combat reflexes is discounted defense. Thus they are fully learnable things and do not correspond to anything in real life.

On real life analogue:
Any real life IQ would most likely be one or more talents, more broad for some people, less for others.

Thus I use:
Talent-inborn- >Nature
IQ/DX -learned things->Nurture

[Edges]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

[*]Eugenics. You're creating an evil eugenics cult that's existed for millennia, how high could you theoretically put the attributes just down to selection.

Millennia? We would have some weirldy freakish humans with all kinds of traits. It would put dog breed variation to shame.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Edges

Millennia? We would have some weirldy freakish humans with all kinds of traits. It would put dog breed variation to shame.

Probably not. Even rather slight variant dog breeds are something like 30 to 50 generations deep. For humans that's about one millennium, so a couple millennium long program might rival dog breeds, but not put them to shame.

Note that this requires essentially total breeding control, with massive levels of inbreeding and culling, so to get even that we aren't talking about arranged marriages here, we're talking about slave populations forced to breed with multiple closely related individuals whether they want to or not, and killing many if not most of the children. A less compulsory program could perhaps manage some slight improvements in a millennium, at least to the extent of maybe removing serious defects (it's easier to persuade people not to breed if you can prove to them there is a high risk their child will be crippled after all), but it's not going to do obvious breeds or speciation.