Quote from: PSIandCO on May 17, 2022, 11:07:56 AM

does this work?
https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/904f386e-b91e-456a-a269-2f5df470b222/df5lnfw-6176ff97-0cf7-4b05-baa2-ea20f41505b0.jpg/v1/fill/w_786,h_1017,q_70,strp/page_substance053_by_psiandco_df5lnfw-pre.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MTY1NyIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzkwNGYzODZlLWI5MWUtNDU2YS1hMjY5LTJmNWRmNDcwYjIyMlwvZGY1bG5mdy02MTc2ZmY5Ny0wY2Y3LTRiMDUtYmFhMi1lYTIwZjQxNTA1YjAuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTEyODAifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ.AzSbAopGGRYkP5CGG7iEJkEF3Xl4psb3_1kJYjKx_GA

Uhhhh, if I've ever seen a link that screams "Internet herpes," it's that one.  Besides, the Pundit doesn't like blind links, so what exactly am I supposed to see once I click it (or at least what type of electronic VD will it give to my computer)...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on May 17, 2022, 05:26:16 PMwhat type of electronic VD will it give to my computer

Blipvert weaponry.
a stream of subliminal messages forced into the viewer's consciousness so fast that all neurons fire simultaneously:
The resulting heat and energy cause instantaneous explosive combustion.
gosh. you stopped me from murdering everyone...
damn meddling kids...

sigh...
Thank you for believing me to be Diabolical Genius enough to do such fun things... 

does anyone know how much is the "max headroom"?

Quote from: mightybrain on May 13, 2022, 05:42:20 PM

Quote from: Lurkndog on May 12, 2022, 09:37:52 AMSoldiers stationed in remote bases overseas come back ripped because they do a normal maintenance workout in the morning, pull their shift, then work out again at night just to pass the time.

Working out too frequently is counter productive. A workout, if it is to be effective, damages muscle. You only build muscle when you are resting between workouts and only if you have consumed enough calories and are getting enough sleep. If you arranged your rules system such that simply working out increased strength, then the munchkins would have their characters spending every conceivable non-adventuring hour working out until their strength maxed out. In reality, that doesn't work. A reasonable strength building schedule is a full body workout 2 to 3 times a week. Although some people prefer to focus on different muscle groups on different days so they end up doing more days but with 3 or 4 days interval between workouts on the same muscle group.

I only know all this as I am currently following a strength building programme. Now I've hit my 50s it's become a necessity. I only wish I'd started sooner.

What you're describing is a sound description of one school of thought on weightlifting and athletic training. There are others. Crossfit being a prominent example. There are trainers that emphasize being able to work out every day, and getting more reps in. Some athletes rehabbing injuries work out twice a day, if they're on the right drugs to be able to recover that quickly.

A lot of military guys are buff, but they generally emphasize endurance over peak strength and muscle mass. They may work out with weights a few times a week, but they go for a run every morning.

Many successful athletes alternate between different workouts to keep themselves from falling into a routine and plateauing.

My personal experience is that working to exhaustion sucked, I was tired and sore all the time, and my cardio went to shit. And this was when I was in college, in my physical prime.

Quote from: oggsmash on May 16, 2022, 04:07:30 PMHiven in the old rules, a 100 pound military press (and I am pretty sure Gary meant the strict press, not the event that the olympics had become before they got rid of the MP because dudes were turning into contortionists) is a 10 strength, and having taken a look at the average gamer, I have serious doubts many think they could actually be adventurers in the RPG sense.

Essentially every healthy male under 50 who trains can achieve that in their first 3-6 months. Essentially zero sedentary males can do so.

I would suggest that 2022 offers far more opportunities to be sedentary than did 1972, let alone 1222. Different assumptions.

Likewise why there were not rules for swimming, hunting, starting a campfire and so on. It was assumed everyone could do it, which was a fair assumption then, but is not now.

Quote from: Lurkndog on May 26, 2022, 10:21:47 AM

Quote from: mightybrain on May 13, 2022, 05:42:20 PM

Quote from: Lurkndog on May 12, 2022, 09:37:52 AMSoldiers stationed in remote bases overseas come back ripped because they do a normal maintenance workout in the morning, pull their shift, then work out again at night just to pass the time.

Working out too frequently is counter productive. A workout, if it is to be effective, damages muscle. You only build muscle when you are resting between workouts and only if you have consumed enough calories and are getting enough sleep. If you arranged your rules system such that simply working out increased strength, then the munchkins would have their characters spending every conceivable non-adventuring hour working out until their strength maxed out. In reality, that doesn't work. A reasonable strength building schedule is a full body workout 2 to 3 times a week. Although some people prefer to focus on different muscle groups on different days so they end up doing more days but with 3 or 4 days interval between workouts on the same muscle group.

I only know all this as I am currently following a strength building programme. Now I've hit my 50s it's become a necessity. I only wish I'd started sooner.

What you're describing is a sound description of one school of thought on weightlifting and athletic training. There are others. Crossfit being a prominent example. There are trainers that emphasize being able to work out every day, and getting more reps in. Some athletes rehabbing injuries work out twice a day, if they're on the right drugs to be able to recover that quickly.

A lot of military guys are buff, but they generally emphasize endurance over peak strength and muscle mass. They may work out with weights a few times a week, but they go for a run every morning.

Many successful athletes alternate between different workouts to keep themselves from falling into a routine and plateauing.

My personal experience is that working to exhaustion sucked, I was tired and sore all the time, and my cardio went to shit. And this was when I was in college, in my physical prime.

Crossfit is the reason rhabdomyolisis is a known word in the fitness community, if you train like that you can expect it, while conventional weight lifters don't run into that problem.

Here's a good summary of average lifting ability and the difference training can make over different timescales:
https://outlift.com/how-much-can-the-average-man-lift/

Interesting stats. I'd note that Rippetoe has subsequently said of those lifting numbers, "Lon and I pulled them out of our asses." It'd be reasonable for the original target market of his mentor Bill Starr's - high school American football players.

Anyway, my point is simply that the level of strength which a modern sedentary person gets after 3-6 months of proper training is about the level of strength I see in someone who comes into the gym who's previously been active in other ways, like gymnastics, swimming, BJJ and so on. That guy can press 100lbs on his first day, or at most after a week or two learning the technique.

Nowadays most people who are physically active have had to make a deliberate decision to do so. For most of human history, though, and for much of the world, today still, being physically active wasn't and isn't a choice.

So in a game portraying something like a mediaeval world, it's reasonable to present people as quite physically capable on average - able to lift fairly heavily, swim, make a camp and so on.

Literacy etc is of course going to be the opposite.

 Those numbers look pulled from the rear.  But I do not think he is very far off on several of them.  I would say Mark's Starting Strength Program is much better in action than I would have expected from seeing it on paper.  But that is from the perspective of a person who had not lifted weights for a bit over a decade (though I was active and still did BW exercises in that period) and simple as it was it actually put me ahead of where I had been in a few months before I stopped lifting (at least for DL and Squat, Strict press and Bench lagged, especially Bench since I had a partial pec tear that eventually ended the way you would expect years later).  The squatting 3 times a week and power cleans over age 40 were not very much fun, and the other athletes who did it alongside me did not really love the 3xweek squats so much either.   But it did work.

    I like the idea of comparing ability scores to a real world metric, but I also think it should be a very loose baseline.   Lots of the real world numbers we have come in due part to a good deal of training and preparation as well as "natural" attributes.  IQ tests are given to people who usually have years and years of academic study and training (even public school attendance counts towards that), strength tests are given to people with years and years of training to improve upon that metric (and in game terms strength is really more a measure of power, and that is really hard to come up with a real world comparison) and not an honest measure of real world application in all senses. 

   I still do think it is fun to try to calculate their AD&D strength score with that old formula Gary stuck in the DMG?  I say strength since it was the only one that had what was a pretty darn specific measure.

Quote from: migo on May 28, 2022, 03:12:05 AMCrossfit is the reason rhabdomyolisis is a known word in the fitness community, if you train like that you can expect it, while conventional weight lifters don't run into that problem.

A colleague had that a while ago. He stopped working out over the pandemic and then when he went back in his trainer had him carry on without working his way back up first. He said he knew something was wrong when his piss went brown. He was in hospital on a drip the next day. He sacked his trainer after that. I would too. Fuck that.

I think that guiding attribute values by real life metrics is a fool's errand because:

1) It's incredibly difficult to distinguish between raw natural ability and training when measuring real life abilities, or even to come with a solid official number of raw natural abilities that actually exist (you could break down "Wisdom" into Intuition, Willpower, Common Sense, etc.).

2) There's no universal guideline that can apply to all abilities across the board to come up with an adequate range of ability values.

3) Some abilities can't even be measured (how do you measure stuff like Wisdom, or even Charisma?). There's a reason weight lifting has dominanted this discussion and IQs have come up a couple of times, cuz those are the only two, and neither is a solid measure of everything that Strength or Intelligence can do.

And most importantly 4) ALL abilities in a RPG are inherently abstract figures intended to provide values usable for purposes of IT'S A GAME, and stuff that's workable in strictly mechanical game terms, making all real life measures fundamentally pointless beyond maybe giving you a ballpark estimate of what the lower or higher ends of ability can do in real life.

Quote from: oggsmash on May 28, 2022, 07:42:42 AMThe squatting 3 times a week and power cleans over age 40 were not very much fun, and the other athletes who did it alongside me did not really love the 3xweek squats so much either.   But it did work.

Past 50, people should really do only 2 tough workouts a week, plus their daily walk. This applies whether the workouts are strength, endurance, martial arts or whatever. I've had lots of 50+ guys tell me they regularly do more than that - then I ask them about their injury and surgery history, and things get interesting.

It might be earlier or later than 50 based on training and injury history, etc.

Likewise with athletes it's tricky. The point of physical training is to impose a stress on the system sufficient that the system adapts so that it's no longer a stress. But we have to consider all stresses - the other training the person's doing, their personal life and so on. For many people, when they feel they're struggling they decide the best thing to do is push harder. "Three hard runs a week and I'm not getting faster, obviously I need to do four! Also I'm going to start fasting on my rest days." And then they crash in a miserable heap.

There's a reason no game system goes into all this and just calls it "XP". Much simpler and less depressing.

Quote from: VisionStormIt's incredibly difficult to distinguish between raw natural ability and training when measuring real life abilities, or even to come with a solid official number of raw natural abilities that actually exist (you could break down "Wisdom" into Intuition, Willpower, Common Sense, etc.).

You've got two points in there.

It's not actually difficult to distinguish between talent and training. The talented person tends to be at least one standard deviation in performance above others. So for example the talented lifter walks into the gym and can on the first day lift what the untalented one lifts after 3 months of training.

More importantly, the talented person will demonstrate ability across a range of related areas which the untalented but trained person does. For example, the talented untrained lifter not only does the slow lifts (squat, bench, deadlift) as well as the untalented trained lifter, they do the quick lifts better, too.

We see the same with intellectual ability, with the child who does well in english generally doing well in mathematics, the one who does poorly doing poorly in all, and so on.

The second part of your comment is about how to measure these things. And that's a very important point, whether the RPG is trying to model some real-world thing, or just present some arbitrary abstract number. What I'd suggest is that this should depend on the game world in general. If your game world is fantasy, or such high scifi it's essentially fantasy (like Star Trek), then arbitrary abstractions are fine. If your game world is more-or-less realistic, then you may want to make the attributes more realistic and measurable.

In no event ought you to make yourself or game group members as characters, though. It just leads to tears of woe, self-pity, and "ACKSHUALLY"-type self-delusion.

   I will let you know how it goes when I am past 50.  I guess tough regarding workouts is relative. 

As I said, I am over 50. When I started, I did a full body workout every morning. I was also monitoring my muscle weight. And I was making no progress. I didn't think anything of it, because I assumed that any changes would be so gradual that it would take months to see a benefit. But then I had a day off. The next day, after no exercise, I found my muscle weight had shot up. I went back to training every day. No change again. Then I stopped. Once again, it shot up. So I tried different intervals and found doing the same workout every 3 days resulted in a fairly constant gain of about 0.5 lb of muscle weight / month compared to nothing working out every day. So I've stuck with that. It seems to work for me. YMMV.