|
We use to play ourselves when we were youger. If i can remember, this is a bit of how we figured our stats:
Strength: How much one could lift over their head from the floor. There is a 1st edition chart somewhere for this.
Intelligence: IQ tests. 120 equaled 12, etc In the beginning, we used education to figure out Intelligence. Later figured that education wasnt accurate when it came it Intelligence for any average slob could get a degree. We played with GPA for intelligence, but it wasnt accurate either. But it's up to you all how you want to go about it. We found that the IQ test was the best method by far. Anyone can pick up a test book at any bookstore or take a test on the computer. My brother was a genius and he did quite well. The rest of us came in with an intelligence from 11-14. Yes, it was a wake-up call for us. LOL Please note: find a hard IQ test and not an easy one. Yes, i am aware that they exist. Ha!
Wisdom: This was never very high considering we were human and our lifespans werent long enough to get a real clue. So we started at a base of 10 and took any hurdles in our lives into account to bump it up or down, but it was never far from 10. Perhaps 9-11. So if one had it easy-Hogans or Ozzy's kids, they would lose 1-2 points making them an 8 or 9 Wisdom. If one had it rough or had a challenging life for any number of reasons(doesnt have to be based on parental income) then one would add 1 or so. You get the idea. Again, avg was a 10. No one ever argued with this stat. The stat was definitely human-specific.
Dexterity: Started at a base of 10 and adjusted accordingly. If one was an athlete then it was kicked up. If one wasnt very active, then he or she got a 10-12. If one was a martial artist and or a gymnast, then they gained extra points. If one was a videogamer and never exercised a day in his or her life then an 8 Dexterity would be in order.
Constitution: Again, depended on athletic ability, and it had to be a contact sport. So a martial artist gained the most constitution points and football players would have gained some as well.
Charisma: Had to do with popularity with the opposite sex as well as the amount in your circle of friends and who was the natural leader of said group. Usually this came down to a group vote and averaged it.
We actually had quite a chart back then and i wished i had it now. You all would of loved it. It took us years to perfect.
In the end, stat scores were usually around 8-16, overall average of 12. Seems i had around 18:40(something) strength for lifting over 250lbs over my head. Again, 1st edition chart. If memory serves, someone with an 18:00 could lift 650+lbs over there head. Of course, someone with this strength was never human. I believe the record today is around 450 lbs, which would equate around 18:71?).
It was fascinating to us that humans couldnt receive a high Wisdom due to our low lifespans. Humans couldnt get better than a low 18 in strength. Also, this influenced my game play quite a bit. In fact, humans were averaging a 10. If a human had all 12's, then he or she was a very capable character.
Since we were martial artists, we figured belts corresponded with levels.
Here's how we did it-again, i am going off of memory:
White Belt: Nothing
Yellow Belt: 1st level
2nd Yellow: 2nd level
Green Belt: 3rd
2nd Green: 4th
Blue Belt: 5th
2nd Blue: 6th
Brown Belt: 7th
2nd Brown: 8th
3rd Brown: 9th
4th Brown(school black belt): 10th
Black Belt: 11th
2nd Black: 12th
3rd Black: 13th
4th Black: 14th
5th Black: 15th
6th Black: 16th
7th Black Belt: 17th
8th Black Belt: 18th
9th Black Belt: 19th
10th Black Belt(Grand Master): 20th
As you can see, as one got better, it got harder to increase in levels. We never allowed extra levels for belts in multiple arts. In may case, i had a 3rd in Tae Kwon Do, Black Belt in Hap Ki Do, and a 4th Black in Kung Fu San Soo. So i took the highest belt and made myself a 14th level. Of course, we would run ourselves every year. In the beginning, we were low level and that last time we played(over 12 years of playing since beginning this i was a 14th level.) Keep in mind i trained 6-7 days a week for a minumum of 3 hours a day. Weekends could easily equate to 6-8 hours of training. It took me about 12 years of multiple hour daily training to get there. It was cool for us since we were all martial artists that trained and fought full contact daily-with pads. Pretty wild playing yourself in high level modules and it realy messed with our heads when one of us died or got maimed. It was pretty brutal. Okay, i rambled enough. Anyone else in Paizoland have any stories to share?
When me and my mates were about 15-16 we did the same thing, only we weren't so generous with our levels as you guys!
We were all martial artists too (I'm beginning to think there's a correlation between martial arts and teenage game geeks!) I had a 2nd dan in kenjutsu and we decided that this meant I was a 2nd level fighter with weapon specialization in katana (this was 2nd ed). We basically counted a (shodan)black belt as 1st level, because we reasoned a professional warrior in a mediaeval style world would be at least the equal of any modern black belt, simply because his life depended on his skill. We also decided that unless you'd been in a fight to the death, you couldn't be above 2nd level. That was as far as thoery could take you, no matter how hard you trained. I trained with my sword an average 2 hours a day every day for 6 years, but we had to be honest and say it didn't matter, I was still untested as a warrior.
Ah, if only I was still a school kid and could spend hours swinging my sword around while my parents washed my clothes and paid the bills... sorry, bit of notsalgia there :)
So anyway I and one of my friends were 2nd level, all the others were 1st.
We did INT and STR the same way as you. WIS and CHA we made secret ballots and rated each other, then averaged the scores. It took a few tries before everyone had serious answers I seem to remember :)
DEX I remember we had some convoluted test involving the elbow and coin thing that Drizzt does in the novel "Homeland." CON we based on how often we got sick, for some reason, with the average being 12 as we figured modern people have good hygiene and general health compared to squalid mediaeval guys.
We ended up being pretty much what we were, I think: Young men who wanted to be adventurers but lacked experience. Stats-wise most of us would have been better suited as wizards I think, but we all thought we were awesome warriors :D
I think my stats were STR 14 (I never did weights training, my physique came only from my sword work), DEX 16, CON 12, INT 15 (back then - I'm not as intelligent now!), WIS 10, CHA 13.
I had a non-weapon proficiency in juggling too I remember. One of my mates used to be a boy scout and he had all thess useful skills like use rope, fire building, and direction sense.
|
We did INT and STR the same way as you. WIS and CHA we made secret ballots and rated each other, then averaged the scores. It took a few tries before everyone had serious answers I seem to remember :)
DEX I remember we had some convoluted test involving the elbow and coin thing that Drizzt does in the novel "Homeland." CON we based on how often we got sick, for some reason, with the average being 12 as we figured modern people have good hygiene and general health compared to squalid mediaeval guys.
Hey... Did we all tap into some collective idea of how to figure these things out? We did the ballot for CHA and all kinds of personality tests for our WIS and INT (one of our moms worked as a university researcher with cognitive psych and had all kinds of weird and wonderful tests) - a big debate was how to define WIS... We did a comparative evaluation of DEX ("You are kinda fast... probably a 14") and a general "toughness and health" evaluation for CON.
I think I ended up as a Ftr 2 (I did National Guard Youth) with the Myrmidion kit. My stats were something like:
STR 17 - I played ice hockey and lifted a lot of weights
DEX 10 - I'm too big to be fast...
CON 16 - ...but I'm never sick, and I could take a beating
INT 16 - Scored well on that test...
WIS 14 - ... and this one...
CHA 10 - ... but not on this. I remember feeling quite wounded by my peers' disdain for my imagined CHA.
Not a bad line, all things considered. Then, of course, I promptly got brained by a bugbear.
I think my stats came out at something like this...
STR 12 Stronger than most but not overly so.
DEX 14 I'm agile enough to jump off walls and impress people with various dexterity based tricks.
CON 8 I kinda have something wrong with my lungs...but I've probably got ranks in Autohypnosis.
INT 16 I'm in the top 5% of the population, I figure that's at least a 16 Intelligence.
WIS 6 or 20 depends on which way you judge it, I'm kinda a little insane so it's either inhumanly high or abysmally low.
CHA 14 I'm pretty likeable, so rather than counting my friends it's easier to count the number of people who don't like me.
And my levels were Fighter 3/Barbarian 1, cause I've got this tendancy to fly into a blind rage when I get into a fight, which happens frequently, and I'm good enough to have yet to lose. Probably have Improved Grapple and Close-Quarters Fighting because of how I fight.
hehe I really rock on your chart. I have seen so many groups in my about 27 years of playing this game try to come up with ways to play themselves; the problem is always that people want to have fairness and everyone be about the same level of ability and this is clearly not the case. Take someone like myself for instance, I scored 147 on a national IQ test given by real psychologists, took it in my spare time for fun a I had to spend many hours each week waiting for someone at a mental health office. I ran track and cross country; I was a soldier, lifted weights, trained to kill and am trained in woodlands and desert survival; I can and did shoot well enough to get on several teams and also shot with the nra; is this a cross skill; many think so; I can also demonstratably throw knives; axes; stars; spikes, shoot bows, xbows; guns; rocket launchers, grenade launchers; machine guns, I can use and truly build and own a catapult, I can sword fight sword and board; sword and dagger and dagger competently enought to sometimes win tournaments. I have 3 college degrees; I have boxed at the boys club for two years as a teenager; I have done martial arts since 1975 and have belts in 8 styles; only one you would call black, but lots of browns cause I used to move a lot. I can more or less get along in German and Spanish and have lived Europe and been to many countries.
Many of the groups I know always let people play at their maximum fitness and any ability to become "heroic". The problem was always been, what to do when you have some guys like me in the group; and some couch potatoes who never did much but work a mindless job and finish high school.
My group and I actually did something like this a few years a go, we played ourselved thrown into a D&D world populated by versions of everyone we knew.
Stats, Race, Class were tricky... we had little councils of DM (me)+ 2 other player assigned to determine the game stats for each person... to keep things fair I tried to keep roughly the same sum total of the stats, but in the end there were inequities. Its never cool when by unanimous vote you have to tell one guy he's a half-orc with a Cha of 4 AND a Wis of 6 and a Dex of 9.
My true life ability scores all hover between 25 and 40.
You may bow unto me. And while you're down there, spit shine my boots, suckah.
hehe I really rock on your chart. I have seen so many groups in my about 27 years of playing this game try to come up with ways to play themselves; the problem is always that people want to have fairness and everyone be about the same level of ability and this is clearly not the case. Take someone like myself for instance, I scored 147 on a national IQ test given by real psychologists, took it in my spare time for fun a I had to spend many hours each week waiting for someone at a mental health office. I ran track and cross country; I was a soldier, lifted weights, trained to kill and am trained in woodlands and desert survival; I can and did shoot well enough to get on several teams and also shot with the nra; is this a cross skill; many think so; I can also demonstratably throw knives; axes; stars; spikes, shoot bows, xbows; guns; rocket launchers, grenade launchers; machine guns, I can use and truly build and own a catapult, I can sword fight sword and board; sword and dagger and dagger competently enought to sometimes win tournaments. I have 3 college degrees; I have boxed at the boys club for two years as a teenager; I have done martial arts since 1975 and have belts in 8 styles; only one you would call black, but lots of browns cause I used to move a lot. I can more or less get along in German and Spanish and have lived Europe and been to many countries.
Many of the groups I know always let people play at their maximum fitness and any ability to become "heroic". The problem was always been, what to do when you have some guys like me in the group; and some couch potatoes who never did much but work a mindless job and finish high school.
Oh, you fighter types... Why, when I was 8 months I escaped my own crib with a passwall spell and then crawled two miles into town armed with nothing but an arsenal of loaded didy and a Tweety Bird pacifier. Along the way I came to learn a druidic appreciation of nature from the various gardens and plastic pink flamingoes I passed, then upon reaching town cast a creeping death within a movie theater playing Rosemary's Baby that made the papers in every country.
West Nile, my ashhhhhhhhhh.
ROFLMAO..Damn that's funny!
lol at Jade. Was just wondering what your Con would be if you whipped down a corner on your bike and fell but my bike crashed into a sign post hard enough to bend the metal nearly halway. Got scratched pretty good and bike was mostly intact but the newspaper calimed it was a possible "alligator attack."
And just wondering what kind of Wisdom score would a Johnny Knoxville cronny have?
my group played an adventure like this about a year ago.We were all "magically" abducted to some unknown d&d world.We all started off as 1st level human commoners and had to acquire training to get our first actual level.Most of the players went for fighter class as it seemed most logical.It was a lot of fun.As for ability scores we each gave our opinion and then averaged them all together.Amazingly everyone was satisfied and no one balked at some of the low but realistic scores.
|
|
Oh, you fighter types... Why, when I was 8 months I escaped my own crib with a passwall spell and then crawled two miles into town armed with nothing but an arsenal of loaded didy and a Tweety Bird pacifier. Along the way I came to learn a druidic appreciation of nature from the various gardens and plastic pink flamingoes I passed, then...
Hilarious. Great post.
Thoth-Amon
|
|
When me and my mates were about 15-16 we did the same thing, only we weren't so generous with our levels as you guys!
I see your point. Let me set the perspective in time...
White Belt: Nothing
Yellow Belt: 1st level
2nd Yellow: 2nd level
Green Belt: 3rd
2nd Green: 4th
Blue Belt: 5th
2nd Blue: 6th about 1 year of constant training
Brown Belt: 7th
2nd Brown: 8th
3rd Brown: 9th
4th Brown(school black belt): 10th
Black Belt: 11th Minimum 2 years of full time daily training
2nd Black: 12th add 2 years...4 years total
3rd Black: 13th add 3 years...7 years total
4th Black: 14th add 4 years...11 years total
5th Black: 15th add 5 years...16 years total
6th Black: 16th add 6 years...22 years total
7th Black Belt: 17th add 7 years...29 years total
8th Black Belt: 18th add 8 years...37 years total
9th Black Belt: 19th add 9 years...46 years total
10th Black Belt(Grand Master): 20th...add 10...56 years total
This means that it would take a minimum of 56 years of full time serious training to be a candidate for 20th level. Hope this chart makes more sense now.
As you can see, low levels arent that hard to gain but as you get to higher levels, one can now see the difficulties and time required to be a candidate for leveling.
I believe this chart really sets into perspective the difference in skill between a Black Belt and a 2nd Degree Black Belt.
Thoth-Amon
Well, INT would be relatively easy to calculate when comparing it to, say, Mensa's test as it is a Gaussian curve. INT 17+ is chance of 4/216 (with 3d6), which equals ~2% of population or IQ 148 (someone who is really interested in the subject can do the exact math).
DEX has a problem that it can refer to athletic agility but also finesse of manipulation. Video gamers are usually rather good in the latter while sucking in the first one, many athletes can be just the opposite.
WIS is a vague stat which generally should probably be determined by group voting. If one dares, of course :)
CHA...we are being heterosexist here? What's this talk about opposite sex?
Personally I am not much of a leader in the group, I like to be the one who tells the leader what to do. There is also a bunch of strategy games where I do rather well since I can "sell" to other players strategies which will benefit them most (and naturally will benefit me too...). On the other hand, I am rather uncomfortable with strangers or large groups. So my CHA stat is very uncertain, depending completely on situation.