From: tbarnes@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (thomas wrentmore barnes)
Subject: Re: <none>
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 17:12:17 GMT

In article <06OCT92.18197106.0094@VM1.MCGILL.CA> CX6L@MUSICA.MCGILL.CA (CX6L) writes:
>>bkoike@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Bryce Koike) writes:
>>>I still believe that anyone with a 15 stat can be considered "heroic."
>
>Yeh. The GURPS stat table with those cute little descriptions
>(Nobel prize winner, Olympic fencer, etc..) are a crock. Wrong.
>I'd believe an Olympic fencer may have Fencing Sport at 20, but
>not DX! In my experience, 9 is notably poor, 10 average, 11
>notably better, 12 exceptional, 13 the highest you'll meet
>at a cocktail party, 14 the highest you might know in your
>life and 15 heroic like in the movies. Higher than 15 are
>the historically noted Rasputins (HT 16), Einsteins (IQ 18)
>etcetera.

I had a real problem with  those numbers too. I think the whole problem
is that the charts and a lot of the abilities give us a whole lot of
hard to prove assumptions about human capacity. In GURPS I think that
the only truly measurable statistics are ST (because there is a lot of
data on human performance in this area) and HT (because it is largely a
"passive" statistic. It is almost never used as a basis for skills -
carousing and sex appeal being notable exceptions- and is never used as
a basis for a contest of skills. Also there is a lot of data on human
morbidity and mortality out there.) When you get into DX after a while
you can't be sure if a person with a high agility, flexibility, hand/eye
coordination in a specific skill has a high skill with every physical
skill. Obviously these elements help in picking up new skills, but where
does innate "DX" end and training in the skill begin. If all athletes
had a high DX then there would be a lot more "cross-over" athletes in
professional sports than there are. Obviously there are a lot of "double
lettermen" in high school and a few in college, but by the time you get
to the pros, where presumably the people with the highest "DX" statistic
would end up, you have very few cross-over athletes. 
	My point is that maximum natural "DX" might top out at a lower
level than we think it does, with training in specific skills being the
key factor in high performance. So instead of the olympic fencer having
a 20 DX, he might have a 16 DX (human maximum) and a 20-23 fencing
skill.
	I think that people make the same mistake with IQ. Einstien
probably had a skill of 20-25 in Physics, but an IQ of 16-18 rather than
20. The worlds smartest human, Marilynne Gros-Savant has an IQ of 220,
but she makes her living as a newspaper columnist and probably gets her
information from books like the rest of us (rather than having in "in
memory"). Doubtless, she is a quick study with new skills where she can
use her intelligence to good effect, but her performance vs. people with
IQs of 120-150 (my guess as to the range of the IQs for most college
educated people) is not particularly outstanding. Once again, I would
say that human maximum IQ is about 16-18 in GURPS terms, with any extras
coming from skill. Remember that Einstien was thought to be an idiot
until he was 8, and still needed a mathematician to verify his brilliant
ideas mathematically. I have known of Nobel Prize winners who, though
brilliant in their field, had feet of clay in many other areas. If James
Watson (who won the Nobel prize for discovering DNA) has an IQ of 20,
why did he have to swipe data from Rosalind Franklin (who was doing X
ray crystallography on the DNA molecule), why isn't he a noted historian
if his default skill in history (according to gurps) is 15 (IQ 20 - 5 =
history default)? I'm sure that he could be a good historian if he set
his mind to it, but my point is that it is more training than IQ that
determines skill.    
	Suggestions: Leave the system as it is for cinematic campaigns,
limit IQ and DX to 16-18 in non-cinematic campaigns (I'm not talking
about point levels here, I'm talking about style of campaign). ST seems
to be fine as is. HT could possibly be limited to 16-18 as well.
	Throw away the silly table listing the various attribute levels
for the various professions. Think instead of each 1 point increase in
past 10 as being a logrithmic increase rather than a decreasing
percentage chance.

	11 = 1 in 10
	12 = 1 in 100
	13 = 1 in 1000
  	14 = 1 in 10000
	etc.
	
	This puts most people with above average intelligence in the
11-12 IQ bracket and makes really high attribute levels truly
exceptional.                                         

tom \|/
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