Bertrand, who grew up on a farm, will offer his services in exchange for food — there is always work to be done on a farm, particularly in the outback, so this offer will be accepted.
On the 6th of May, while the paladin works, again not officially, Arliss can explore Timberveil (see here) to see what goes on, and learn something about the next hex down stream (blue dot). He might also try to find a strapping young soul to perhaps join them; there are 14 chances of 4% of this.
A hardened commoner, should they find one, would add +2 h.p. to a d8 roll for hit points and would be proficient with a club as a weapon. According to the page linked, he or she would also have a +1 to constitution and strength ... which I'm considering just now. In fact, all this above has just been to get me to what this post is about.
I've long made the argument that class training would be something that youngster would begin around the age of 10 or 11. In that post, I proposed that a newborn's ability stats would be equal to zero, and that the child would gain 4-10 (2d4+2) points to their random ability stats the first year, and 1-7 (2d4-1) for each year thereafter ... and that this would end up producing an average of 63 at age 15 — which, as I said then, was the actual average of rolling 3d6 six times for a character's ability stats.
Personally, I think this is a brilliant statistical sleight of hand, but at the time it made little impression. It deserves it's own page on the wiki, but that's for another day. In any case, I suggested obliquely with that post that those who did not receive training after age 9, the total added for those last six years would be 2d4-2, producing an average of 57 rather than 63.
This neatly gets us around an untrained commoner having the same number of stats as a trained NPC fighter. Player characters do better than average, as the average of throwing 4d6 and discarding one die of the lowest amount gives an average of 11.91, or 71.46 for all six stats. The chance of a PC rolling an 18 for a stat is 3.4992 times better than an NPC.
The problem with that "hardening" given to commoners is if I roll an 18 on 3d6 for the NPC, it gets pushed to an 18/10 strength and a 19 constitution, which doesn't really work for me. Thus I had to include a note that commoners were prohibited from having their ability stats boosted above 18.
But suppose we use the system I proposed in 2010, and generate the commoner in a manner that an initial 18 of any stat isn't possible ... and so that we may know what the youngster's stats were when that individual was at 8 or 10 years of age.
With a little help from chat, I devised an excel page that will do that generation. Here's a sample screenshot:
Thus our individual developed a significant dexterity very early in life, so that at the age of 4 he or she had the pre-requisite to be a thief. Quite believable, as such characters have been a part of fiction since forever. He or she was quite a beautiful baby (3 pts.), but that faded to just above average. The other stats are fair.
Point in fact, this is not a levelled character. It proposes that this person might have been one, if they'd had the necessary training, but that never materialised. Training would have, according to the 2010 post, improved these numbers by 6 points across the board. The harden commoner page, which indicates a necessity for being "hardened" in order to enter combat without making a moral check first (and we can therefore assume every levelled person, even a mage or a bard, is "hardened" in this fashion), thus gives an additional +1 strength and a +1 constitution. That's at least 8 point ability points, on average, that this character could have achieved.
But that's not all. The original random number per year, up until age 9, the reader will recall, is 2d4-1. And with age 10 to 15, 2d4-2. The latter is an average of 3, but not a limitation of 3. Suppose that training does better than restoring that "-2" to a "-1." Suppose that it, in fact, gives a benefit of 2d4 without subtractions at all, or possibly just 1d4+4, applied to all stats, across the board.
We might even posit that different schools of training offer higher stat bonuses for the individuals who take their training there. Just in case any player characters want to be sure their children go to the best schools.
Those looking at the excel file I've linked will notice, possibly to their distaste, that I've placed a ceiling of 17 on the ability stats, so that this number cannot be exceeded in the generation. It's my feeling that the 18 has to result from training; it can't be acquired naturally. This may go against the grain of many, but the fix is easy enough if the reader understands excel. It's just how I intend my game to go.
Of course, the whole premise may be disputed by some. The most likely argument is that ability stats cannot be adjusted and are what they are, and that a character with an 18 strength at the age of 4 simply has a ratio-based 18, which makes him or her stronger than other children of that same age. Comme si, comme ça. The original game clearly did not consider ability stats sacrosanct, and there are rules that state they improve or decline with age, so I feel that what's shown here merely fits into those rules. And anyway, we don't need to know if a 6 year old can beat up other 6 year olds; we want to know, if the 6 year old with an 6 strength tries to help lift up the cart, how much actual help does that provide?
Because, as an aside, my rules for bend bars and lift gates depends on how much combined strength is brought to bear, without a die roll. If these bars can be lifted with a 17 strength, and you have that or better, then you can lift these bars. And if you have a 16 strength, and your one y.o. child has a 1 strength and helps, damn it, you can lift those bars.
'Course, you'll think you did it all by yourself.
'Course, you'll think you did it all by yourself.
All this goes to determine what sort of person Arliss and Bertrand might find, and what interesting stats they might have, allowing for the possibility that they could obtain a useful 10 y.o. Which I think would be most phenomenal. I'll have to devise some sort of random table that gives an age for any commoner wanting to join the party.
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