(TFT) Attribute ratings for real people

[Mark Tapley <mtapley@swri.edu>]

At 21:45 -0400 9/19/06, LifeisFun wrote:
> after a few minutes of trying to wield it in a combat situation, 
> you'd be hurting for technique.


Brings up something I've been interested in for a while (and we've 
written about before, at least a bit).

One thing about ST: it doesn't seem to much correspond to endurance. 
I mean, most TFT combats last around one minute or so, so if you can 
swing a sword 12 times in a row, I think you qualify as having ST for 
that weapon. However, many of us don't have access to realistic 
weapons and don't have a good way of discerning whether we are strong 
enough to wield the weapons effectively, even if we did.

Bow weapons provide a minor exception to this, although there's 
always the debate about just how heavy (draw weight) a longbow is. My 
rule of thumb is that a bow of (10 * n) pounds draw weight should do 
(n) hits of damage on the average. That puts a Melee "longbow" at 55 
lbs. draw weight (average damage 5.5). (I have claimed in other posts 
that the English longbows were heavier than this.)

There are a couple of independent measures in TFT - how much you can 
shift, how much you can lift, how much you can walk with, etc. are 
given in kg. as a function of ST. That provides an absolute measure 
which is reasonably accessible to most.

IQ is also possible to estimate, simply by adding up talents.  I'd be 
a little careful about claiming weapon talents, but then modern 
coaching in fencing, e.g. is probably a lot more effective per unit 
time than what medieval swordsmen got. Many of the other talents 
listed have good modern equivalents: paramedic training -> Physicker, 
etc. There is often not an exact correspondence - I know integral 
calculus and a few computer programming languages, so I don't feel 
bad claiming Mathematician even though I'm no astrologer.

DX is the real sticking point, for me. I can take my bow, back off 3 
megahexes (depends a little bit on the size of the megahex, but I'm 
still probably in the -1 adjDX band) and loose 6 arrows in 30 
seconds. Then I can figure effective adjDX by working backward from 
the fraction of the arrows that land in a 6-inch circle ("hits"), and 
averaging over many volleys. But I don't really believe that equates 
to combat conditions, and I really don't know how to derate for that.

I suspect that I'm near low man on the totem pole on this list as far 
as experience in mock combat, so all of the above should be taken as 
a request for advice more than as how it should be. Comments welcome!
--
                           Mark Tapley, Dwarf Engineer
                       (I haven't cleared my neighborhood)
                                  210-379-4635
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