Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
What game is that?
If I had to guess, I'd say the hypocrisy game. Just a guess, though. Feel free to provide your answer.
What game is that?
If I had to guess, I'd say the hypocrisy game. Just a guess, though. Feel free to provide your answer.
I'm not sure what you mean or are driving at. My position in this thread is clear - I believe there is no objectively right or wrong way to roleplay a character with a 5 Intelligence.
Book 1 says that INT corrsponds to IQ (the correspondence is not any further defined) and that EDU corresponds to the highest level of formal education. On a quick look through the skill entries, there are no DMs for INT or EDU but the description of Electronics skill says that some checks may require a minimum EDU or INT threshold.I was going to mention LLB Traveller but I couldn't remember if it used both EDU and INT, or how the difference was defined.
Yes. But INT is not done on 3d6. It is 2d6+6. RQ also has a way of distinguishing animal from human INT other than simply by score: it has the notion of Fixed INT for animals, which means the creature behaves in accordance with instinct rather than reason and is unable to learn knowledge or communication skills.classic Runequest has both INT & POW, doesn't it?
In my experience it's a little bit more than that, and relates both to [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s recent post upthread and [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION]'s reference to playing a 5 INT PC as Sherlock Holmes.Practically-speaking, D&D players use INT to represent a "arcane spell caster" not a "smart person".
What is the new information that is being arbitrarily added?It does have that concrete meaning. What you're doing here is taking that meaning, throwing away parts of it, and arbitrarily adding new information.
All you seem to be saying here is that, as a matter of natural numbers arithmetic, 18 = 3*6. But in the same sense, 100 = 2*50.In 3d6, 18 is strictly three times greater than 6.
What information has been thrown away? Certainly not information that 18 is 6 times as intelligent as 3, because there is no such information.you've chosen to throw away information from that 3d6 distribution when mapping it to INT
I find that a strange thing to believe, because of your inclusion of the word "objectively"....
I for one think that there are objectively bad ways to roleplay a 5 INT.
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This is a fair question.There is no objective way to measure the goodness of an example of role playing - it's an art form; the goodness of it is in the eye of the beholder. How, then, can you believe that the word "objectively" can legitimately be applied to the goodness or badness of the performance as you or I perceive it?
It's worth noting that the only reason I have for believing those reasons about antigens and the rapid test is that the doctor told me, and he is an authority. I have no independent access to the plausibility of those reasons.He presented his relevant experience and training along with reasons why he felt that the test could be wrong, and offered you his professional opinion.
If a geographer tells me the world is round, and a flat-earther tells me that the earth is flat, there is a contention between two parties. But it has no bearing on whether or not I should take the geographer at his/her word, because of the two contending parties only one - the geographer - is an expert.it doesn't matter if you're aware of a general contention around an issue, the issue was in contention in the argument.
By the phrase word usage is empirical in nature do you mean knowledge of word usage is empirical in nature? Because I only talked about the second.I don't think you can declare that word usage is empirical in nature. We often determine the meaning of a new word through deduction, not empiricism. Thirdly, the empirical and contention arguments fail the moment you touch prescriptive vs descriptive usage.
You misdescribe my argument.It has nothing to do with the form of your argument, which was, 'I am a lawyer, I know what irrational means, and you, sir, do not.'
There's no question begging. I simply affirm what, by Wikipedia, is the second premise in the standard form of the argument; and what, in my restatement of the argument, are premises (4) and (5). It's not question begging to reiterate the premises of my argument in circumstances where no on has offered any criticism of them.You finish by begging the question.
Yes, I would agree that labeling a performance as simply either good or bad is simplistic and recognizing a multiplicity of qualities (your examples are good ones) is better. I think that comes with experience, if the mind is open. But even so, and perhaps even more so, one's judgement about what qualities a particular performance has, whether one thinks it is sophisticated or subtle and so on, is still subjective. It was the use of the word "objectively" that rang alarm bells in my mind.This is a fair question.
I have a little bit of sympathy for accounts of aesthetic value that deny radical subjectivity. One reason for this is that it makes sense to try and cultivate one's taste - that is, to come to appreciate something in respect of which one, previously, couldn't see the value. And it is hard (not impossible, but at least tricky and perhaps a bit counterintuitive) to explain this purely by reference to the preferences of the self-cultivator.
But my way in would tend to be to query the use of "good" and "bad". Notions like "sophisticated", "subtle", "evocative", "inspiring", "emotionally demanding", etc seem to me to be more useful evaluative labels when trying to think about RPGing. There is something a bit crude about classic "pawn" play, for instance, where there is no attempt to shape a character with goals beyond beating the dungeon and thereby earning XP so as to get more powerful so as to beat the even tougher dungeon. I wouldn't say it's bad, per se, but one might wonder what it needs an INT stat for (maybe, as [MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION] suggested, a Magic stat would be better).
But there are ways of playing less crudely than that other than the 2nd ed style.
Game statistics tied to the value. You yourself mentioned how a given STR means you can lift a given amount, did you not? This is new information added to the ability score that is not present in the 3d6 roll. The 3d6 roll has not such information until and unless you transform it into an ability score. At that point, it loses it's rational nature, becomes ordinal or interval data (depending on application) and gains new meanings.What is the new information that is being arbitrarily added?
Yes, you've got it. The result of rolling 3d6 generates a number. That number is just a number, and has all of the meanings that just numbers have. An 18 is just the number 18. Six times greater than the number three, and one more than 17.All you seem to be saying here is that, as a matter of natural numbers arithmetic, 18 = 3*6. But in the same sense, 100 = 2*50.
I am not asserting any such thing. IIf you are also asserting that the 3d6 roll is establishing a number that measure some quantity of something, which varies in its presence in a given person between 3 and 18 units, what is that something?
As you say, such comparisons are meaningless except to say that given number is more or less than another given number, and to compare the exact game mechanics assigned arbitrarily to the rankings. The roll on 3d6 is used to randomly (random just means 'we don't know or can't predict the cause) assign a value, yes, but a single roll is not a statistical model like the normal distribution. The distribution of many 3d6 rolls has information that isn't transferable when you transform those numbers into ability score.Let's take CON. The AD&D rulebooks (PHB, DMG) tell us that CON measures physique, fitness, health and resistance. What would it even mean (beyond loose metaphor) to say that PC A has twice or three times the physique or the health of PC B? There is no quantity of some determinable property ("health", "physique") being measured here. All there is is a chart that assigns certain mechanical consequences to certain scores, and then a device - the roll of 3d6 - that allocates those scores on a probabilistic basis (which, as I have said, also seems intended to correlate in some fashion to frequency in the population).
Ding. You should stop right here and consider your words. 3d6 doesn't measure anything. IQ attempts to rank intelligences, and so is a kind of measure (one that only says this is more than that as you go higher). So, how can you possibly compare the measurement of intelligence that is IQ to the total non-measurement of the 3d6 distribution? You can't. Any argument that tries to is automatically false. This continues when you try to compare the non-measurement of 3d6 to the measurement of INT ability scores, another ordinal (if occasionally interval) data set? You can't swap from one measurement scale to a non-measurement scale and then to a different measurement scale. The information lost in every step is huge, in this case most of it between IQ and 3d6.With IQ, there are also charts that allocate certain numbers to members of the population on a frequency or likelihood basis. If someone wants to take the IQ charts with their frequencies, and the stat charts with their frequencies (as calculated via the odds of a 3d6 roll), and then match the too up where the frequencies are (more-or-less) equal, what is the objection?
What information has been thrown away? Certainly not information that 18 is 6 times as intelligent as 3, because there is no such information.
As I have said, the 3d6 score is not a measure of a quantity of something.
This is even more obvious in Classic Traveller (which uses 2d6 rather than 3d6 but is otherwise the same in its principles and logic). In Traveller, the Education (EDU) score is an indicator of the highest level of formal education attained. A character with a 10 EDU is not, though, 5 times more formally educated than a character with a 2 EDU. That makes no sense.
Likwise for Social Standing (SOC), another Traveller stat. A character with 11 or 12 social standing is a Knight or Baron respectively. There is no notion, though, that a Count has twelve elevenths of the social standing of a Knight. Again, that would not even be a coherent claim.
These random state generation techniques are for assigning scores that show rankings (from low to high), where the positions in those rankings are determined by their likelihood in some (fairly loosely defined) population.
Ability scores are like that. 3d6 rolls aren't. With a 3d6 roll, 18 is six times 3. With an ability score 18 is some amount more than 3 (perhaps a definite amount, depending on if the use is interval or ordinal), but you cannot say it is six times 3.EDIT: Here's another example - the MMII encounter tables are d8+d12, used to determine an entry on a chart where those entries are allocated on the basis of frequencies. There is no suggestion that the monster found on the 20 entry is 10 times as "encounter-y" as the monster found on the 2 entry.
3d6 ability scores are like that, except the entries are also in a ranking.