Abilities

Being born human is lucky. Without lifting a finger, we're born with amazing human potential.

Lions, tigers and bears may have greater physical strength, dexterity and constitution, but our mental abilities more than make up for our frailty. Humanity has unmatched intelligence for solving problems, perception for understanding our environment, and charisma for social collaboration. Our abilities make almost anything possible. Given these extraordinary gifts, it is ironic that our world remains as confusing as it is. We’re clearly not using our gifts to their full advantage yet.

As much as we might like the strength of a champion body-builder, the dexterity of a gold-medalist athlete, the perception of a crime scene investigator, the charisma of a rock star and the intelligence of a rocket scientist, there are only 24 hours in a day. So we end up with the abilities we use most.

Nobody is perfect, and while we would all like to embody the Greek ideal of balanced mental and physical excellence, most of us have to accept our limitations as well as our strengths. After all, we are at least partly responsible. While genes give us aptitudes, it is our life choices and compromises that either exercise or waste our potential.

Defining Your Abilities

You can have any number of abilities as long as it’s six: intelligence, perception, charisma, strength, dexterity and constitution. The six may not be perfect generalizations of human potential, but they’ll do just fine for profiling purposes. Documenting the infinite dimensions of human ability with accompanying appendices and biblography may be a worthy goal for science but overcomplication is a needless distraction from understanding roughly what you can do.

Charisma (Cha.)

Charismatic people have confidence that endears them to other people. Charisma comes from strong personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, leadership ability, and physical attractiveness. Charisma is rooted in real emotional strength, not merely the demeanor you portray.

Skills: influence, deception, parenting, teaching.

Intelligence (Int.)

Intelligence measures how well you think, reason, learn and remember. Without intelligence you’d be an unable to think beyond the programming of an automaton. Intelligence also makes you subject to influence by others as your mind tries to understand what it perceives.

Skills: Knowledge, Analysis, Recall.

Perception (Per.)

Perception is a combination of awareness, keen observation, willpower, common sense, and intuition. While Intelligence represents one’s ability to analyze information, perception involves being in tune with and aware of one’s surroundings. Perception provides the picture of the world which intelligence analyzes.

Skills: willpower, listening, seeing, smelling, judging, hiding.

Strength (Str.)

Strength measures your muscular physical power.

Skills: Striking, Grappling, Climbing, Jumping, Carrying.

Strength Training: The surest way to increase your strength is through strength training such as Fit Club.

Measuring Strength: You can measure strength more easily than other abilities by lifting weights. The more weight you can carry and the longer you can carry it, the stronger you are.

Dexterity (Dex.)

Dexterity measures movement speed, hand-eye coordination, agility, reflexes, and balance.

Skills: Shooting, Dodge (provided you can react), Reflex, Disarm, Trip, Throw, Balance

Constitution (Con.)

Constitution measures health, stamina, drug resistance and disease immunity.

Skills: Fortitude, Endurance, Concentration.

Measuring Your Abilities

It’s impossible to compare your abilities to other people without having some scale of measurement. Everyone likes to feel special, but some of us are better at some things than others. There are many different ways of measuring each ability. For example, many people are familiar with I.Q. testing and weight lifting, but these are not complete measures of intelligence or strength. There are geniuses with average I.Q.s and strong people who don’t lift weights. It’s just not that simple. So while academics search for a perfect system of measuring each ability, let’s keep it simple and speak statistically.

Think of your ability as a percentage of human potential. Nobody really has 2.5 children but averages are just that, averages, and peoples’ abilities will be 50% on average, with 0% being deceased and 100% being impossibly perfect. Most people’s abilities will fall between above average 60% or below average 40%.

Calculating the exact ability distribution of the world’s population is a task for scientists, but ability percentages may roughly approximate percentiles. A percentile test score tells you how many people are worse, equal or better than you are. So if you have 60% strength, you are stronger than about 59% of people, and only 40% are as strong as you. If you have 40% health, you are about as healthy as 40% of people and 60% of people are healthier than you are. This is statistically invalid but interesting nonetheless.

Game Sim

Ability Factors

Each of your above-average abilities gives you an advantageous factor on certain chances, and each below-average ability reduces your chances. A person with a healthy constitution is more likely to recover from a traumatic surgery. A perceptive person is more likely to hear muggers sneaking up from behind. An intelligent person is more likely to understand a complex document’s valuable information. Your abilities are a factor affecting your chances with skills. Each ability will have an effect:

Game Effect: the ability factor is the number added to or subtracted from your chances when you attempt to do something with the ability and related skills.

Profiling Your Abilities

Fairly gauging your own abilities is something any career counselor will tell you to do. Consider what you’re best at and where you have room for improvement. If you want to achieve your goals, it makes sense to maximize your own potential and pick a role for yourself that takes advantage of your best abilities while avoiding your weaknesses.

When you profile yourself, you can just assign your ability percentages subjectively. It's all right to have a high opinion of yourself. After all, self-esteem is an important part of charisma.

Profiling Fictional Characters

Assigning Abilities By The Rarity Curve

If you are profiling a fictional character, you can assign abilities by balancing rarity factors. If you were an average person, you might have entirely average abilities or as many above average abilities as below average ones. Exceptionally high and low abilities are rarer than average ones, with low abilities canceling out high ones. So if you have 60% intelligence, you might balance it by having 40% strength. Each ability has a rarity factor equal to double its ability factor. Thus, a 100% ability would have a 100% rarity factor, necessitating –100% in equivalent lower abilities. It could be offset by five 40% abilities (5 x –10% x 2 = 100%).

Differing Worlds, Different Ability Rules

In some Sims, high skills could be more or less rare. The rarity curve for assignment and improvement (see below) might be higher (triple) or lower (1.5). Many Sims set maximum ability caps for starting profiles to prevent everyone from having 100% charisma.

Improving Your Abilities With Exercise

The scientist was once a nervous undergrad and the athlete once tried out for little league. Where you are now is just a starting point. Your mental and physical abilities are not set in stone and can be improved with regular exercise. Just as muscles grow stronger with heavy use, minds grow wiser with probing thought. The three keys to improvement are practice, practice and more practice. You exercise an ability every time you practice a skill using it. For example, climbing mountains exercises strength and studying science exercises intelligence. In simulation, it would be possible to measure such improvements in tiny increments, but in role-playing, each time you luck out 100% on a skill chance, you improve by 1% (or a fraction of 1% if you are climbing the improvement curve.)

The Improvement Curve

Abilities do not improve linearly. It might seem easy at first to improve, but as you get better and better you find progress gets slower as you gradually plateau near the limits of human ability. Few people have the potential or motivation to press beyond those limitations.

Game Effect: Improving an ability takes effort equal to double the ability factor achieved. Thus, improving from 50% to 60% or 60% to 70% takes a 20% or 40% effort respectively.

Losing Abilities

When an ability changes, all skill factors associated with that ability change accordingly.

Ability Damage: Poisons, diseases, and other effects can temporarily or permanently harm an ability. Abilities lost to damage may return on their own, typically at a rate of 10% per day of recovery.

Aging Ability Loss: As a person ages, some abilities increase and others decrease. See Advantages: Age for more information.