Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Kuroimaken 03-28-08, 03:41 AM	Or, how to better define a few stereotypes. This little discussion was intended to go to Regdar's, but since it's on hold, I figure I may as well post it on the second most appropriate place. I'll begin by saying this: everyone knows there's no such thing as a perfect person. Elminster can do a little bit of everything, but in the end, the guy is a Wizard. Which basically says that people have a certain tendency to focus on certain areas, no matter how many different classes they are. And, although there are certainly exceptions, people are often aware of what their strong and weak suites are, and thus capitalize on them. However, many people tend to misinterpretate what that means. First, let's take a quick look at the stats: Strength: represents how well you can lift and how hard you hit. Strength has always been a silly stat to me due to the fact that its use is pretty much one-dimensional: you can move heavy stuff from point A to point B (whether violently or not is beyond the point). If you think about it, that's all Strength does. Similarly, people with a good strength score have a certain tendency to oversimplify problems, though the solution is not always readily available to them by force. A strong, but dumb fighter is just as likely to use diplomacy as a strong, smart fighter. The difference is that the dumb guy might have a little bit of a problem getting what he wants unless the solution to the problem is painfully obvious. Oh, and for the record: having a high strength stat does NOT mean you're built like Arnold Schwarzennegger. Having a high constitution means you're likely larger, having a high strength doesn't. Keep that in mind. Dexterity: represents your overall agility, manual ability, reflexes and the like. I've always loved dexterity because there are just too many things you can do with it. People who emphasize dexterity have a tendency to favor grace and agility over strength. Because dexterity is such a broad stat and does not separate your hand-eye coordination from your overall reflexes, it tends to generate a few bizarre character stereotypes, or make it harder to portray your own. Case in point: Metal Gear Solid 2's Fatman. Obviously the guy has great hand coordination, but would you say he's agile? In any case, because in real life dexterity is directly connected to how your brain interacts with your body, dextrous people are, very often, also smarter than average. Their approach to problems may not necessarily be subtle but it's oftentimes effective, and tend to focus on capitalizing damage from their opponent's weak spots and mistakes. People with high dexterity are not necessarily lean and scrawny, too. Constitution: Your health, pure and simple. People who never get sick, are not easily hurt, and so on, tend to have a good constitution. However, this DOES mean they're oftentimes oblivious to why people may be more scared than themselves of certain things. Think of it like this: your average guy gets drunk after 6 bottles of beer. Meanwhile, your con-high guy might take 7 or 8 to get to the same state. Who do you think is going to be more afraid of drinking too much? People who emphasize constitution might believe themselves untouchable on occasion (as does everyone with good defenses against mostly everything), which reflects on the way they approach problems. To them, damage is acceptable, provided it isn't permanent. As such, their plans can and will probably involve collateral damage of some sort. Intelligence: Okay. First, let me tell you something. CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, PEOPLE WITH LOW INTELLIGENCE DO NOT NECESSARILY SPEAK LIKE THEY'RE "MENTALLY CHALLENGED". Just because someone has a larger vocabulary does NOT mean they're going to use it, either. They will often display an interest in a very broad range of subjects (now you know why Intelligence gives you more skills known!), and it's not rare for someone with high Intelligence to specialize on a field or more of knowledge. Characteristics such as memory and certain types of associations (for example, undead=weak to positive energy, fire=not good to kill fire elementals) come from a high intelligence score. People with high intelligence tend to plan for contingencies ahead of time, and are constantly thinking of "what if...?" situations. They also tend to rationalize their feelings, and they're more likely to use a freaky psychological technique to make you stop crying than lend you a shoulder. Finally, they tend to be VERY sore losers, mostly because intelligent people are oftentimes not modest about that aspect of themselves, and it hurts to know your logic has been pierced. Doubly so if the flaw was obvious. They are often not offended, however, if their logic is foiled in a clever way. Wisdom: it represents your perception, in most cases. However, Wisdom also represents the kind of knowledge you do not gain from studying or rationalizing. In many ways, people with high wisdom tend to be more experienced than those without. They make good listeners but not necessarily good speakers. More often than not, the wise are silent, because they could either A) assume someone is going to say what they're thinking sooner or later, or B) assume someone is going to add a fact or information that may prove crucial to the subject in discussion and that could be easily lost if he speaks too soon. Whether others perceive his wisdom or not, however, tends to be another issue. Wise people also tend to have strong personalities; as such, it shouldn't strike anyone as odd that people with high wisdom are often charismatic as well. Do not assume, however, that this makes them more focused in everything they do. While focus on a particular moral issue, quest or what have you may be the terrain of the wise, particular focus on knowledge and the like belongs to the land of the smart. Their approach to problems usually prioritizes the gathering of information over the necessary strategy to solve it: after all, a single fact can change everything. Charisma: though charisma represents the strength of your personality, it should be noted that actual charisma can assume one of two facets: the leader and the passive-aggressive. The leader likes to take charge, expose himself -- he's in it for the fame most of the time. This is the kind of charisma celebrities have. The passive-aggressive, however, avoids the spotlight like the plague, and tends to have his desires tended to nonetheless, often by manipulation. The real difference is that while leaders do so actively and openly, passive-aggressives tend to bide their time and use proxies to their ends. It's kinda like trying to kill someone. The first grab their guns and fire, assuming nothing will happen to them because they know they can convince the crowd. The second tells the one he wants to take the blame that his victim is cheating on him and watches with glee as the trigger is pulled. People with high charisma tend to have a very strong dislike for being told 'no', due to the fact they often convince themselves they can talk people into doing anything for them. And since a good deal of time they are right, it usually takes them a lot of trial and error to get things right, which is their normal approach to most problems. Well, this is really a very basic outline, and the combination of two or more high attributes from the start can be a royal pain in the rear to picture. Normally, when people are strong in more than one area, they tend to have a certain preference for one strength over the other and build on that (which often cause certain traits of their personality to come to the surface as well). People very, very rarely tend to focus on two strengths at once: that takes training and mental maturity to achieve. Not something all people have. This article is really about defining stereotypes better, but you shouldn't stop THERE. Use them as your building blocks to make your character more than a sheet of paper.
Terjon of the Blue Rose 03-28-08, 06:58 AM	Very nicely done. Concise yet informative this should be of great use for players looking to develope personalities from their base scores. 2 of the entries seem a little incomplete to me though. Strength may seem like a silly score but it represent an important aspect in a creature. It is perhaps the easiest of all the scores to raise in real life and varies more greatly than any other over the course of a person's life. This is not represented mechanically in the game but for role-playing purposes this should not be overlooked. The ease of raising ones strength, relative to other scores, is one of the major reasons for the dumb fighter cliche. High strength tends to lend itself to a very direct personality. With the ability to power through many obstacles with brute force many people never develop any significant other means of dealing with problems. It should also be noted that strength shares much in common with intelligence when it comes to developing personalities. Both represent a primal sort of power which, when highly present or lacking, shapes the way people think. There is a tendency to rely heavily upon these stats since they both lend themselves to a wide range of applications. People who become highly defensive when either of these stats is challenged often do so because they either lack or feel that they lack, other abilities. The other stat that seemed a little lacking was, as you may have guessed, intelligence. As I pointed out intelligence is a sort of power. Where wisdom and charisma represent experience or instinct intelligence is closer to a raw proccessing power within the mind. This power, however, has an often missed application. Highly intelligent people are often extremely gifted in creative endeavors. Creativity is a function of intelligence NOT charisma. Highly intelligent people are more likely to "look outside the box" than are wise or influential ones. This results both from a simple ability and from a tendency to disdain relying heavily on the results of others. Perhaps a side effect of this tendency to view the world in such a different fashion, or maybe a cause of it, is that very bright people often have a tendency towards psychological ailments. These disorders are no less widely ranged than those of less intelligent individuals but there seems to be a greater prevalence amongst such. It should also be pointed out that while many people with either high intelligence or strength are easily offended by others challenging their ability, there also exist many opposites to these. Natural strength may well result in a fearful person who is overly-cautious due to a history of broken objects and unintended harms. Similarly a high int can result in a person who seeks rather desperatly to fit in. The very ability to think in such an unusual fashion often means that there is a very difficult bridge to gap in social relations. This can lead to a person who lives more to please others than to serve their own interests. On the other stats I can't really think of much to add. Again, this was a very well written essay. Congratulations on a smashing success.
Kuroimaken 03-28-08, 05:24 PM	I thank you for your reply and counterpoint, Terjon. You did raise quite a few points that I probably should have addressed in my essay -- namely the ease of fluctuation of the Strength stat, as well as how Intelligence relates more closely to creativity than Charisma does. I do believe, however, that in the case of creativity, it's really not a matter of whether you should associate one OR the other: creativity itself is a very complex process, one that even today is analyzed to exhaustion. For starters, what 'sparks' an idea tends to vary from person to person: music, imagery, philosophical concepts, or, more often than not, a mix of them all. It all depends on what kinds of associations people make within their minds that makes certain ideas acceptable or repulsive to them. Conversely, personality plays a great part in personal expression: it is not without reason that Jack Nicholson did a great job playing the Joker in the original Batman movie, given just how strong his personality is. Or Anthony Hopkins getting really deep playing Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs. Although one could argue that acting is not a creative process but rather a performance, it should be noted that it is in great part the actor who must make the necessary associations in his mind, developing ticks and assuming a personality other than his own to better play the part. Whether one thinks outside the box or not tends to depend more on their personalities than their raw intellect, however. No matter how intelligent one is, the brain tends to follow certain processes when tackling a problem. People who think outside the box tend to see the problem as a whole -- they literally see the box, and what is wrong with it, without necessarily looking close to its corners. Conversely, people with more narrow viewpoints (and thus further focus on certain areas) have a tendency to tackle the problem one side at a time. But whether one has a narrow or a broad viewpoint depends, strangely enough, on how they view EVERYTHING around them, and not just problems. It's much more common for someone who is normally extroverted to present an unusual solution than someone who keeps to himself to do the same. As for personality disorders and high intellect, this is not yet a fully proven association, due to the fact that intelligence is classified in more ways than raw "processing power", so to speak. What generally happens is that people have three usual reactions when they perceive that someone is superior to them in some respect: they either tend to submit to that fact (and thus to the person they perceive as superior), they tend to become indifferent (or at least feign indifference, as a defensive mechanism to not display "weakness" in any environment), or they tend to repulse those they perceive as superior (again, a defensive mechanism, but one of a more active nature than becoming indifferent). In the last case, it's not unusual for them to try and manipulate others around themselves to create peer pressure. Since people with high intellect have a tendency to rationalize, they often come to the conclusion that it's their inherent fault that they are shunned much faster than others do (even though they may not readily realize it). If they keep to themselves, they start developing psychological ailments. This is also the case if they are repressed or if their home environment is too different from their peers', which is very often also the case. So, if you have a genius with 180 IQ, this does not necessarily mean he'll have to undergo therapy. Again, thank you for appraising my thoughts on the subject. I hope to hear more from everyone in the boards soon.
Terjon of the Blue Rose 03-28-08, 11:10 PM	In the case of creativity it becomes heavily a question of how one determines and measures intelligence that decides whether there whould be such an association. I tend to view Int as a sort of mental power. As such, at least to me, it tends not to matter whether that power is the more commonly associated left-brained logic or the less commonly associated (and far more difficult to measure) right brained aspect of a personality. With the given examples you are using acting which I do, in fact, tend not to associate with creativity. Acting is more a matter of expression; important to show creativity but not a true aspect of that ability. Mechanically such would be represented by the divergence between craft (for example poetry) vs perform (the same). The creation and thus creative portion of the poem would be a function of Int while the performance of the piece would be a matter of expression and thus Cha. Unfortunately at this point we are looking more at Int and Cha from a perspective of alignment (chaos vs law). Still I tend to view a high Int chaotic as more creative than a high Cha chaotic. Of course a high Int Lawful may well be less so and, as such, it may well be best to leave creativity from the description in a thread devoted to all of the scores and not Int and/or Cha alone. On thinking outside the box we're really back to creativity. If one accepts it as a function of Int, then certainly that score become key in the ability to such a function. On the other hand Wis, the ability to percieve and comprehend, is at least as key here so we again become muddled by the fact that a human (or presumably other) mind is the result of complex interactions which have been broken apart from each other for rules purposes. I do tend to view this ability less as a matter of personality than you seem to suggest, however. A person with a high score in either Int and/or Wis will likely possess it while a person with low scores in either and/or both will be more apt to conventional solutions. The suggestion that introverts are less likely to possess such a talent than extroverts is a little off though. Extroverts may well be far more likely to express such an idea but an introvert, who is likely less exposed to traditional thought, may well be more likely to develope their thoughts along more extraneous lines. The last is the matter of personality disorders and you are absolutely correct that this is a far from proven association. Since we're developing along the lines of stereotypes, in particular those used as common tropes in literature and as role-playing devices, however, I tend to stick with my original concept. While there is no requirement of such in groups with either very high or low Int both have developed strong leanings in both popular fiction and history. Given the rarity of severe mental disorders we look through both catagories and see startling regularity amongst great minds. Amongst the creative we have such individuals throughout history as Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Winston Churchill, etc. While not every genius is mad there is a strong association there, which can prove a very useful tool for those aspiring to create a strong personality for a high Int PC. All that being said I do tend to agree with you in a general sort of way on many of your comments. In the end it comes down to the fact that the mind can't really be seperated into the limited aspects which the rules require. A strong mind is often strong in many of these aspects while the rules not only allow for but even encourage using one or two as important while others are treated as more or less throw-aways. Truth be told the same argument can even be made for the physical stats (albiet far less strongly so). The interplay of mind and body isn't taken into account very well by the rules and as such the scores are often not very good points for determining personality, the key "stat" in RP.
ciaran 03-29-08, 12:32 PM	There are some very well-educated statements here. Good stuff. We all know there are many kinds of intelligence (lower case i) and, generally, one views the their own type of intelligence as more valuable than someone else's - or I should say a type they do not possess. There are far too many traits in a person to identify numberically, so the simple 6 is what we're stuck with. Perfect? No. But I personally don't want a swarm of them. Now as for Intelligence, I've always seen it as the ability to process and understand information. I couldn't disagree that an actors performance would be based off of this, but it would also take Charisma - the ability to manifest your personality in the form of a presense that can be felt - to portray it effectively
Terjon of the Blue Rose 03-29-08, 10:31 PM	Oh, I agree completely that, for rules purposes, six is a perfectly sufficient set of stats. Any more would make the system overly complex and likely lead to an actual loss in accuracy of representation. The point I made was simply to note that the rules are intentionally a simplification. That all the mental stats should be played together rather than trying to play each individually.
Kuroimaken 03-29-08, 10:40 PM	Oh, I agree completely that, for rules purposes, six is a perfectly sufficient set of stats. Any more would make the system overly complex and likely lead to an actual loss in accuracy of representation. The point I made was simply to note that the rules are intentionally a simplification. That all the mental stats should be played together rather than trying to play each individually. Seconded. And that's exactly why I shudder at the thought of the upcoming "social combat system" 4E is expected to bring. While it helps to bend a DM who might otherwise be too stubborn to accept a certain point (on an NPC's stead), it still relates a little too much to roll-play rather than role-play.
Terjon of the Blue Rose 03-29-08, 10:47 PM	Have you read any of the 4th edition "previews" they are selling for 20 bucks a pop. They have decided to intentionally design the rules to include heavier flavor as they found previous versions too bland. The term "ignore the fluff" is going to take on a whole new dimension.:rolleyes:
Kuroimaken 03-29-08, 11:22 PM	Have you read any of the 4th edition "previews" they are selling for 20 bucks a pop. They have decided to intentionally design the rules to include heavier flavor as they found previous versions too bland. The term "ignore the fluff" is going to take on a whole new dimension. It's going to be powergaming heaven. After all, something tells me they're NOT going to separate fluff from crunch well, just like they never did before. But anyway, let's try not to stray too far off-topic here.
ciaran 04-01-08, 02:59 PM	The point I made was simply to note that the rules are intentionally a simplification. That all the mental stats should be played together rather than trying to play each individually. Indeed. You shouldn't condense your roleplaying into a one stat representation.