'Realistic' Arrangement of Ability Scores

[silentspace]

Many of the findings involved primitive tribes with little or no access to western media.

Hot or Not?: Genes vs. Culture & Taste provides an excerpt from Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty that summarizes findings on Universal Beauty.

Many people believe there is an objective, cross-cultural, universal standard of beauty. In fact, that is what many learned in school, based on older studies.

The study I referred to earlier, that found only one "universal" standard of beauty, was the best attempt at finding a cross-cultural standard. They in fact put all the previous studies to the test (studies which found that big eyes, for example, was universally considered beautiful). They went out of their way to find isolated settlements who had as little access as possible to western media, something that few previous studies did. They found that all of the previous findings, such as the ones you mentioned, were not true. They were only able to find one universal standard, which was the ratio of waist to hips. I don't believe they considered symmetry - that study was much later.

You have to keep in mind that most studies are done within the constraints of a specific culture, and don't in fact consider other cultures. This cultural bias is pervasive. We celebrate the explorers and 'discoverers' of new territories where humans have already been living for thousands of years. Previous studies on 'universal' beauty were not universal at all, but actually only considered other cultures that were already, in the larger scheme of things, very similar to the culture of the researchers.

This does not in any way refute or invalidate any other findings. Only that just because something is universal in one culture does not mean it is universal in all cultures.

 

[silentspace]

I apologize if this is too much of a thread hijack, but I just have to respond to the links mmadsen posted. Personally, I find them to be ludicrous...

"There must be some general understanding of beauty, however vaguely defined, since even three-month-old infants prefer to gaze at faces that adults find attractive, including faces of people from races they had not previously been exposed to."

She should learn a little about child development! Or maybe she already has, which is why she repeatedly mentions the three-month old infant in the excerpt.

"Although the high level of agreement within cultures may simply reflect the success of Western media in disseminating particular ideals of beauty, cross-cultural research suggests that shared ideals of beauty are not dependent on media images. Perhaps the most far-reaching study on the influence of race and culture on judgements of beauty was conducted by anthropologists Douglas Jones and Kim Hill, who visited two relatively isolated tribes, the Hiwi Indians of Venezuela and the Ache Indians of Paraguay, as well as people in three Western cultures. The Ache and the Hiwi lived as hunters and gatherers until the 1960s and have met only a few Western missionaries and anthropologists. Neither tribe watches television, and they do not have contact with eachother: the two cultures have been developing independently for thousands of years. Jones and Hill found that all five cultures had easily tapped local beauty standards. A Hiwi tribesman was as likely to agree with another tribesman about beauty as one American college student was with another. Whatever process leads to a consensus within a culture does not depend on dissemination of media images."

What? Because a small tribe agrees on what is beautiful within that culture, and that same tribe does not have their own broadcast television stations and pulpy beauty magazines, then consensus within a culture does not depend on media images? Does a small tribe need mass media to disseminate cultural ideas on beauty? And this finding somehow proves that the other findings she cited, about thousands of Americans agreeing on what is beautiful and what is not, is not influenced by media?

"Cross-cultural studies have been done with people in Australia, Austria, England, China, India, Japan, Korea, Scotland, and the United States. All show that there is significant agreement among people of different races and different cultures about which faces they consider beautiful, although agreement is stronger for faces of the same race as the perceiver."

Of course, mass-media has nothing to do with this, as proven by the isolated tribe case. (!)

Really, if the rest of the book is anything like the excerpts, its a complete pile of trash.

 

[Thanee]

Yes, that's an excellent example of exactly the kind of thing a fantasy RPG system should model.

That reminds me -- tangentially -- of something else D&D doesn't model well: big, slow giants. Since Strength adds to melee to-hit bonuses, ogres and giants hit all the time, which just doesn't feel right. I'd like them to miss most of the time, but hit really, really hard when they do connect.

Yeah, that's why in my listup on page 1 I have moved "to-hit" to Coordination (manual dexterity).

While I am aware, that muscles are very important for fighting, since you need them to move a weapon quickly, it's not only about muscles, and I feel coordinating them is just as, if not more important.

Even there it's still an abstraction, but it allows to model stuff like that.

Giant = super high Muscle, average to low Coordination.

My stats also allow to model someone who has a high body mass (Toughness), but has a very low endurance (Fitness), which is quite common, is not very nimble (Agility), but still has a high manual dexterity (Coordination).

Bye
Thanee

 

[Roman]

An excellent and highly interesting set of responses! Thanks ladies and gentlemen!

Some of you (specifically Thanee) even gave info on possible application to D&D. I did not actually have an application in mind when creating the thread - I was merely interested in how you would separate out basic characteristics if you were to numerically simulate a human being as realistically as possible in an unspecified RPG. Nonetheless, the applications to D&D were interesting reading even so - after all I am a D&D gamer.



Now, I would like to ask two related questions:


1) What do you think are the parameters of variation (perhaps the 'mean', type of distribution [binomial, normal, other] and 'standard deviation' - or whatever other parameters of variation you can think of) of these ability scores in the real general population? (Yeah, I know for some ability scores this is basically impossible to determine, but for some it is possible.)

Here is an example to illustrate what I am looking for:

Say we look at Strength/Power (or whatever you want to call it). Strength is measured reasonably well by how much a person can lift. So... is the weight lifted represented well by say a normal distribution? What is the mean weight lifted? What is the standard deviation? I am sure someone must have done studies on something like this (not for RPGs, but for legitimate scientific reasons).


2) What are the correlations between these 'ability scores' IRL?




NOTE: IRL people obviosly do not actually have 'ability scores' - when using the term we are obviously only speaking of a model. I know that this is obvious - I am just covering my bases in case someone wants to accuse me of 'reducing people to numbers and statistics'. That should not be a problem with people on this board, but better to be safe than sorry.

 

[Roman]

Hmm, that although it is a follow on topic, it probably would be better served by a new thread. I will start one.

Ok, I have just begun a thread on the follow on topic. Here is the link: http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?p=1608198#post1608198

BTW: If anyone has some more ideas on the original topic of this thread - please do not feel that by creating the new thread I am shutting you off from sharing them with us - feel free to do so here.

*Edited to add extra comments and to add the link to the follow on topic.

 

[Thanee]

Some of you (specifically Thanee) even gave info on possible application to D&D.

Actually it was more meant to show what I think is included in that attribute, to give a better idea of the differences. Using D&D terms seemed a reasonable approach on these boards.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Umbran]

In the physical and mental cases, the force and resist stats should probably be folded in together.

Because we have some clearly obvious study on mental force that indicates this?!? In this case, you're talking about "realistically" modelling something that doesn't occur in nature!