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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadence" data-source="post: 8692458" data-attributes="member: 6701124">Report from the Royal Society of Organized Naturalistic Investigation On Debunking the Racialist Claims Concerning The Characteristics of Dwarves and Halflings As investigated in the 10th year of the Fifth EraWe randomly selected 25 mountain dwarves and 25 stout halflings from the tax rolls of the kingdom. We then attempted to find a halfling that matched each dwarf on the big 6, career, background, and training.  We did the same for finding a dwarf to match each halfling.  This was judged to be adequately done for a total of 22 dwarf-halfling pairs out of the 50 possible by our matching sub-committee.  To avoid bias, the sub-committee was selected from our society's  dwarf and halfling members, and made up equally of each lineage. We also consulted the oracle of our patron who agreed with the subgroup's deliberative operations. We note that as compared to the full dwarf and halfling population respectively, the final 22 dwarves were on average higher on the DEX-big6 scale than the dwarven population as a whole and the final 22 halflings were on average slightly higher on both the CON-big6 and STR-big6 than the halfling population as a whole.  We attribute this to random sampling error.  The most enduring dwarf in the original sample and most dexterous halfling in the original sample were unable to find matches given the other restrictions and were not among the 22.  We attribute this to natural random variation in the distributional extrema.  (See Appendix A for detailed statistics on the 22 pairs). We then put the selected pairs through various skills tests (see Appendix B).  With two exceptions, regardless of the skill tested- from staged combat to academic studies to physical activity - the percent of times the halflings succeeded was higher than that of the dwarves.  This ranged from the success rate being approximately 4% higher for tasks judged as  "easy" for the particular pair (averaged to 84% vs. 80%), to approximately 1% higher for the tasks judged as "hard" for the particular pair  (6% vs 5%).  This was roughly constant across task types and persisted in an anti-magic shell.  There were two noticeable exceptions: (1) in stonework - in this case the dwarves who were untrained in stone work performed as well as the halflings at the advanced apprentice level halflings, and the trained dwarves did noticeably better than that, and (2) even the dwarves who had no combat training were able to use leather and chain mail armor, and axes and hammers with none of the usual difficulties associated with lack of training in wearing armor or using specific weapons (as opposed to general combat training).  The magi consulted were unable to find anything to contradict the dwarven claims of no formal training in those areas.Next we conducted a large number of resiliency tests (see Appendix C).  No differences were noted except in one area. The "Terror Test" using exposures to the various royal Scarecrows found a significant difference, with the halfling member of the pair being much less likely to be paralyzed into inaction (the overall chance of being rooted by horror was found to be around 40% for the dwarfs and only 31% for the halflings).    This met with strong objection from a portion of the committee and a back up sample was obtained (albeit with less stringent matching) and subjected to the terror causing illusion spell of the third circle.  It confirmed the initial findings and a consultation with the oracle confirmed the integrity of the operational plan.At this juncture we note that two members were expelled from our assemblage for hypothesizing that the differences in favor of the halflings were simply due to mythological innate "Luck" and "Bravery".  We have no place in our body for those who ascribe to such fables.  We have requested that the Royal Society of Magi and Spiritualists investigate for possible outside interference in our experiments and for the possibility that some entities are able to void the standard anti-magic fields.[Edit: It should be noted that no such differences occurred in previous studies that examined across the different hair colors of high elves, eye colors of humans, skin tones of wood gnomes, dialects of wood elves, or national origins of half-orcs, all after matching on big 6, career, background, and training]</blockquote>

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