NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6851114" data-attributes="member: 42582">The relevance of all this to the present discussion is lost on me.Yes, natural numbers have various properties and relationships to one another. But that is equally true of the numbers used to label IQ score eg if my IQ is 50, and yours 100, we can both note that 100 is twice 50, that 75 is as much greater than 50 as it is less than 100, etc.Those observations about the properties of numbers tell us little or nothing about the relationship between my intelligence and yours. Similarly, the various observations you are making about the relationships between numbers generated by rolling 3d6 tell us little or nothing about ability scores in D&D, and the personal attributes that they notionally measure. That is why I am puzzled by your calling the association of mechanical stats with ability scores arbitrary. It's not arbitrary, as far as I can tell - the point of rolling scores is to establish those mechanical stats!Bottom line: the likelihood of rolling an 18 on 3d6 is a bit less than .5%. There are IQ scores whose incidence in the population is, by definition, a bit less than .5%. If a player of D&D wants to say that rolling 18 for INT is a marker of having that degree of IQ, and puts forward as his/her reason for that that the likelihood of the dice roll result correlates to the incidence of the IQ score, that seems fine to me. If done accurately, this technique can be expected to yield a distribution of IQ scores among randomly generated D&D characters that at least approximates to the distribution of such scores in the general population.The point that [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] was making to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] and others, though, is that in their attempt to make a move along these lines they have failed to achieve a correlation of likelihoods. The reply was that they are aware of this, but are prepared to tolerate errors in approximation. Hriston then pointed out that the errors are so significant that they cast the whole project (of treating INT as corresponding to IQ/10) into doubt.The result of the 3d6 roll is a number, which is intended to be a type of measure - not a measure of the quantity of some determinable property that is present (as I posted already, that makes no sense) but a type of ranking measure where position in the rank also corresponds, roughly at least, to population frequency of that degree of ability/aptitude.I don't follow this either.In D&D, being Sherlock Holmes is a consequence of action declaration and resolution. That is to say, the player can't just declare "I'm a genius who solves the mystery": rather, the GM frames the PC (and thereby the player) into some sort of challenging situation or other, the player declares action, adjudication takes place and we then learn what exactly has happened in the fiction.If the player whose PC has 5 INT declares actions that turn upon intelligence, and the GM adjudicates them in such a way as the PC is revealed to be a genius, why is that the player's fault?</blockquote>

Verification