Horwath
Legend
In WoD it's score of 2 average, so you have only 3 steps from average Joe to pinnacle of humanity.Yeah, that's more or less how Storyteller (White Wolf) games work. If you have 0 dots in something, you're garbage at it, perhaps even taking a penalty (e.g. rolling one less than your Strength if you have 0 Athletics or whatever). If you have 5 dots, you are the peak of human performance; anything beyond 5 dots is necessarily supernatural in one way or another.
E.g. as a werewolf in Crinos or "war" form--the full blend of man and wolf--my character has 8 dots of Strength, making him well beyond what even the most physically fit and trained human could ever achieve. However, that only gives him a total of 10 dice for Strength+Athletics rolls, as he only has two dots of Athletics, which means that his supernatural abilities "only" put him in the realm of the absolute top-tier human with maximum natural Strength and Athletics training. Should he train up Athletics and Strength further, he could potentially get to the point of rolling 14 dice for a Strength+Athletics check in Crinos form, which is...a lot. That's just a lot of dice. Even at, say, difficulty 9 (so you need a 9 or 10 to succeed), you'd have a 67% chance to succeed without pulling in any other bonuses, which is really damn high (and you'd only have a 3.75% chance to botch, aka critically fail, which is very low.)
Worth noting: you can normally only have 0 dots in the various "skill-like" things (called Abilities), not the various "stat-like" things (called Attributes.) The idea generally being that most living people have at least a certain minimum competence with all the various things. Being genuinely incompetent at baseline abilities is a major penalty, usually coming from some kind of debility or supernatural influence. E.g. your Charisma is 0 for the purpose of interacting with non-werewolves while in Crinos form, because you are a literally supernaturally-terrifying monster.
but when you roll one dice per attribute, I guess that low end has to be some number above 0.
with adding to the roll a fixed number, you can start with 0.