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<blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 9316060" data-attributes="member: 7025997"><p>That is not dead which can eternal lie circumspect,</p><p>And with strange aeons even threads may resurrect.</p><p></p><p>3d6: you know, they were a lot more limited by what kinds of dice they had--'little brown book D&D' used 6-siders, and they didn't have computers to generate random variables that couldn't be made by dice. Expected value of 3d6 is 10.5, and that was close enough to 10, which is a nice round number and also evokes the average 100 IQ.</p><p></p><p>Now <em>technically </em>IQs are normalized to have a 100 average and 15 SD, and 3d6 has a standard deviation of 2.96, not 1.5, so the distributions aren't the same--3d6 varies too much to be IQ/10. You could go for 4d4 if you wanted an average of 10 (with a more appropriate SD of 2.24), and 5d3 is still too variable at SD 1.8 and 6d2+1 too un-variable at SD 1.2...but nobody thought that hard about it, and before computers they would have had to spend a lot of time messing around with pen and paper and/or go to the library to look up a statistics book (and who knew what the Lake Geneva public library had). The 1e DMG has a picture of a bell curve, so probably Gygax heard somewhere it was close to that, thought 'good enough for a game' and left it at that.</p><p></p><p>Dude just wanted a 'smarts' stat to go with the 'strength' stat.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Blue Orange, post: 9316060, member: 7025997"] That is not dead which can eternal lie circumspect, And with strange aeons even threads may resurrect. 3d6: you know, they were a lot more limited by what kinds of dice they had--'little brown book D&D' used 6-siders, and they didn't have computers to generate random variables that couldn't be made by dice. Expected value of 3d6 is 10.5, and that was close enough to 10, which is a nice round number and also evokes the average 100 IQ. Now [I]technically [/I]IQs are normalized to have a 100 average and 15 SD, and 3d6 has a standard deviation of 2.96, not 1.5, so the distributions aren't the same--3d6 varies too much to be IQ/10. You could go for 4d4 if you wanted an average of 10 (with a more appropriate SD of 2.24), and 5d3 is still too variable at SD 1.8 and 6d2+1 too un-variable at SD 1.2...but nobody thought that hard about it, and before computers they would have had to spend a lot of time messing around with pen and paper and/or go to the library to look up a statistics book (and who knew what the Lake Geneva public library had). The 1e DMG has a picture of a bell curve, so probably Gygax heard somewhere it was close to that, thought 'good enough for a game' and left it at that. Dude just wanted a 'smarts' stat to go with the 'strength' stat. [/QUOTE]
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