Relative Attribute Scores

[Proley]

Hey everyone,

I thought I recalled their being guidelines to common levels of attribute scores but I don't know where I saw it.

For example, your fighter has a total strength of +23 after mods and such, so how strong is he relative to other people? For STR it's easy to calculate carrying capacity and get a sense of an average person compared to someone with a 23 score, but intelligence and wisdom and such make it harder.

Think of a stereotypical know-it-all wizard, let's give him an INT of 25 after every bonus, is he literally the smartest man in the room or does he just think he is?

If you stroll into a town with a charisma score of 17 are you average charming, or the studliest stud in town?

Basically, is there context for attribute scores or are they just numbers?

[Jeraa]

A 25 in one score is roughly the same as a 25 in another. If a 25 strength makes the warrior the strongest guy in the room, then a 25 intelligence makes the wizard the smartest guy in the room.

A score of 10 or 11 is average for most people. Some races have slightly higher averages. Elves, for instance, you have an average dexterity of 12 or 13 (10 or 11, with a +2 racial bonus.)

If the majority of the population is 1st level, then the highest stat they could hope to achieve is 18 (20 with racial modifiers). So a 17 charisma would put that person at almost the very top of what a normal person could achieve. That would probably make him the studliest stud in town.

[EWHM]

Well, a careful examination of the strength lift chart will show you that the strongest human ever in the real world is around STR 23-24 or so. The equivalency I use in most of my games is that every 2 points in an attribute maps to a standard deviation. So like 2% of the population has an attribute of 14 or better, and an 18 is between the one in 1000 to one in 10000 level.

[Proley]

Thanks for the insight guys, wanted to figure out the right route to take in regards to RPing my int-based PC.

Going off of the strength lifting chart didn't strike me as transferable to other skills since Intelligence, Wisdom and force of personality don't really follow the same easy measurability.

I like the standard deviations idea, and it makes my PC in the upper echelons. Thanks!

[Lab_Rat]

Jeraa wrote:

A 25 in one score is roughly the same as a 25 in another. If a 25 strength makes the warrior the strongest guy in the room, then a 25 intelligence makes the wizard the smartest guy in the room.

A score of 10 or 11 is average for most people. Some races have slightly higher averages. Elves, for instance, you have an average dexterity of 12 or 13 (10 or 11, with a +2 racial bonus.)

If the majority of the population is 1st level, then the highest stat they could hope to achieve is 18 (20 with racial modifiers). So a 17 charisma would put that person at almost the very top of what a normal person could achieve. That would probably make him the studliest stud in town.

You are mistaking adventurers stats and classes with the average NPC.

Probably 90% of all people in Golarion have the Basic NPC stats closest to what they do. Skilled workers have the skilled set. Physical laborers probably the melee. The other 5-8% have the Heroic set. All of these people (95-98% of the population of the world) have NPC classes. Most have 1 lvl on up to about 5 levels or so. I would say between 2-5% of the population are actually adventurers and get starting stats beyond that.

[Proley]

But racial stat modifiers are a flat increase for everyone in the race (except for alternate human abilities), not class so even if an NPC never adventures in his life, he has the same stat increase as the 3rd level hero.

The difference between NPC and adventurer would come from the 4 and 8 level attribute bumps, and magical gear (like a headband of vast intellect +4), but if we factor magic items in, then even the flat 10 attribute becomes a 14 meaning someone has just gone up by 2 standard deviations, and since that sort of intelligence boost puts you leaps and bounds ahead, even a farmer could see the merit of saving up to be the smartest farmer in the land and able to thus better farm, or a village could justify pooling resources to get a smarter member so they produce more. Considering this, a standard race/level 1 commoner could already be sitting at Mensa levels.

But then does that just open up an impossibly huge can of worms? Would benchmarking work better to determine relative attributes? i.e.

Local militia man, STR 12
Trained Soldier, STR 16
Elite guard, STR 20
Level 8 PC STR 22 <- Stronger than elite guard

Student INT 12
Undergraduate INT 14
Masters Degree INT 18
Doctor INT 22
Level 8 PC Int 21 <- Upper echelon of academia but still has room to learn

etc... or is that broken?

[EWHM]

My recommendation on +stat items, particularly +mental stat items is to view them a lot like the skill wires/ chipped skills in Shadowrun and similar cyberpunk games.
Note that the int headband doesn't give you skill points, it actually gives you fixed skills at full rank. This supports the 'chipped skills' interpretation. It probably also gives you a pretty good sized external memory 'cache'.

[n00bxqb]

Proley wrote:

But racial stat modifiers are a flat increase for everyone in the race (except for alternate human abilities), not class so even if an NPC never adventures in his life, he has the same stat increase as the 3rd level hero.

The difference between NPC and adventurer would come from the 4 and 8 level attribute bumps, and magical gear (like a headband of vast intellect +4), but if we factor magic items in, then even the flat 10 attribute becomes a 14 meaning someone has just gone up by 2 standard deviations, and since that sort of intelligence boost puts you leaps and bounds ahead, even a farmer could see the merit of saving up to be the smartest farmer in the land and able to thus better farm, or a village could justify pooling resources to get a smarter member so they produce more. Considering this, a standard race/level 1 commoner could already be sitting at Mensa levels.

But then does that just open up an impossibly huge can of worms? Would benchmarking work better to determine relative attributes? i.e.

Local militia man, STR 12
Trained Soldier, STR 16
Elite guard, STR 20
Level 8 PC STR 22 <- Stronger than elite guard

Student INT 12
Undergraduate INT 14
Masters Degree INT 18
Doctor INT 22
Level 8 PC Int 21 <- Upper echelon of academia but still has room to learn

etc... or is that broken?

You don't necessarily need to be spectacularly intelligent to get those degrees. You still need to be of above average intelligence in order to understand the material, but most of it is putting the time and effort in (skill ranks).

[Proley]

True, but there's not really a clear cut way of viewing someone's intelligence level. For example, the body builder who can lift a thousand pounds looks like he can, but the smartest guy in town doesn't stand out, so I used academic institutions to demarcate that.

I'm not familiar with shadowrun and such, also not sure how that would apply to Golarion by taking a "chipset" angle. How would you contextualize "extra RAM" for a person in pre-computer society?

[EWHM]

Proley,

People have embedded what we call stats into the language. For instance, that guy with a 12 INT is called 'smart'.
The guy with the 14 is called 'very smart'. At 16 he starts getting called brilliant or other superlatives, as a 16 is often the highest stat ordinary people have any direct experience with.

In cyberpunk settings, skill chips/skillwires are pretty common. Essentially they give you the skill but without the scaffolding that someone who learned the skill organically probably would have gotten. So you can use Skill X, but because it's not totally integrated into your mind, you can't use it as a default for Skill Y, which is somewhat related to skill X. Insofar as the extra memory is concerned, imagine having a google glass on steroids. Look at someone and everything you have recorded about that person is right there on your heads-up display,including all things you owe him or vice versa. Also imagine being able to have nearly perfect recall of anything you'd ever read. That's how extra RAM conceptualizes in a magical society (note, a very very small fraction of society has this already in full blown form, with a larger small fraction having 'really good memories').
Somebody with a 20 INT + 6 for an item would act like a 20 intelligence person with 3 chipped skills and radically enhanced memory capabilities (and a somewhat enhanced ability to channel magic if that person is a wizard). An 'organic' 26 intelligence would be a different beast, although identical for most game purposes they'd be roleplayed a lot differently.

[Proley]

Thanks EWHM, think I get your angle better now. I'm a PF exclusive player so modern d20 is druidic to me (hahahaha)

[EWHM]

Proley,
It's also a good idea to assume a lot of your extremely high INT extraplanars/dragons/etc have a fair bit of their mental stats loaded out that way---i.e. a very high stat magically augmented. Otherwise its nearly impossible to do them any sort of justice. An organic 30 INT, for instance, boggles the imagination.