Golandrinel said:
Americans and Germans, for instance & in my experience, tend to be bigger than the British. So why could you not give them a higher strength, on average?
An article,
Were They Shorter Back Then? points up that for modern white American vs. British, the difference is only about 1 1/4 inches. I doubt that's enough to make a difference in Strength scores. Half-orcs are stronger, but they're also generally broader, with more muscle mass it appears. Plus, you're factoring in an alien species, so who knows how that would affect things.
Intelligence as we generally think of it is more of a cultural thing than a physical one; Intelligence in D&D I think is more a measure of potentials than not (ie, more physical). Half-Orcs, again, are the only PC race where Int is mentioned, and they get a -2. They are less intelligent on average; they don't learn as well, some concepts might even be forever beyond them. Individual half-orcs can, with luck and hard study, overcome this (place some points into Int as they gain levels).
As an aside, they could always go and buy a Headband of Intellect or something like that. Can you imagine what that muct be like? Shell out some gold to a wizard and all if a sudden, you
understand more.
Culturally, there could be situations where Intelligence could come into play. A culture that emphasized the values of study and literacy to the point where, for instance, each child was literate and had a basic grounding in general education could be considered to be 'more intelligent' than a culture that, for whatever reason, de-emphasized such activities or actively pursecuted them.
I'd think that such extremes would be both rare and not likely to last very long; they would last as long as the factors that contribute to the general abberation lasted. The 'intelligent' culture would probably actually be a subculture, a subset of the general people: again, this would be handled by the appropriate regional feat.
The people of Candia are situated on a rich trade route, and their main port city has grown rich and powerful. So rich, in fact, that there has emerged an entire class of people that have more idle time than others. They have the luxery to study and pursue the arts: as a result, a university has grown up in the port city. Many people above the level of shopkeeper there have a firm grounding in the arts and sciences, and all of them can read. More importantly, they are taught how to learn. People from this port city might have a +1 int as their regional feat OR they could just have certain Knowledge skills always be considered Class skills for them.
Meanwhile the other Candians, the 90% or so that do NOT live in the port city, are of average intelligence.
Decades later, tastes change and no-one wants the spices from the south anymore. The trade route tries up and the easy money flowing into Candia's port city stops. The rich can no longer afford to patronize the arts. The teachers and artists at the University have to get real jobs or move elsewhere; the university closes and children stop getting tutored in the classics. A couple generations later, that subculture has disappeared and so does the regional feat.
Dusk and FR, I've seen, also handles this. Certain cities within nations have situations existing in them that differ from the nation as a whole, so they get different regional feats.
Years after that, a religious scism occurs and the Church of Tarn comes to power in Candia. Tarnism states that all learning that does not come from the Book of Tarn is evil. All the books in the country are put to the torch and the remaining philosophers have their tongues cut out. I don't think this would produce the opposite effect, though; the Tarnians are not stupid, just ignorant. They don't have access to books, but if one was to leave the country and be exposed to them...
A half-orc, on the other hand, is born with a handicap. He is significantly less bright than the humans around him and will always be so, to some degree. Trying to RP that is difficult, though. If I put a 14 into Int, my Half-Orc still has a 12. Not too bad at all. He's certainly not stupid, but not as good as he could have been. On the average roll of 10, though, the half-orc will have an 8. That's a pretty significant drop off, especially since I do see it as an measure of IQ as well.
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