That second test rates me way too high. According to it, I'm an Olympic Marksman, a certified genius, the wisest person around, and one of the most charming and attractive people on the planet. And I have a low self-esteem, so I'm actually more likely to underrate myself then anything.
Now, I do have a genius level IQ (according to IQ tests I took back in school), but I still wouldn't rate my Intelligence more then 15, maybe. There's more to intelligence then just IQ tests. And the rest? Forget about it. 12 at most, probably. Maybe a tiny bit higher for the dexterity and charisma, but only to like, 13.
At least it rated my STR and CON as miserable, though I *can* drink all night and not suffer any problems. I have the highest alcohol tolerance of anyone I know, in my 100lb weakling body. Cheers to me, I guess? That'll be useful tonight, anyway. Woo!
I'll have to try the other test, that seems to have actual measures of testing rather then just having you evaluate yourself.
@TPSullivan1, if you're just looking at total of combined stats, you're not doing it right. You're supposed to be looking at individual aptitude scores. Based on yours, I'd say your best bet is thief, cleric, or sorcerer.
Your only stats that are anywhere near exceptional are DEX and CHA. (Only the average INT counts, although, in BG, even a mediocre INT stat still qualifies you to be a mage or bard. You'll just have a bit of trouble scribing new spells, and even that will go away if you set the difficulty on "Normal", although, "Your own conscience be ye guide" about that.)
Based on the stats you give, you'd be a good potential cleric, druid, bard, thief, or mage. Forget being a front-line melee fighter of any kind, unless you want to be a bad one.
Whether you would make a good druid depends on how much you love the balance of nature and the outdoors in general.
You meet the minimum aptitudes with no doubt for cleric. Your charisma is iffy for bard or druid. Your part 1 intelligence score suggests that you should not be considering mage.
I'd go with either cleric or thief, depending on your personality. You could be a sorcerer if you have lucky genetics. Do you have a relative with some kind of "mental illness" in real life? That would increase your likelihood of having the blood needed to be a sorcerer.
Bottom line: There will be no stat-based bonuses regardless. Your aptitude and attitude suggest thief. If you're devout in real life, then you'd make an equally good cleric, or even cleric-mage, if your blood background suggests mixed heritage.
Most people seeking for a real-life self insert should be looking at which of their test scores are the highest, and meet minimum requirements for classes, compared to their personalities, not trying to min-max stat bonuses. Very, very few people are going to have stat bonuses in real life. Exceedingly few people will have stat bonuses in real life. Class decisions would rather be made on minimum requirements, not maxed out ones.
I'd be interested in a statistically based STR reading. Just based on playing around with the numbers on this site it seems a bit... off. 30 push-ups, 30 sit-ups, and a 500lb bench gets you a STR score of 15, which would be top ~9% of the population if you consider the dice-rolling probability. Considering that nobody ever benched over 500lb prior to 1951, I would think that the STR value for these numbers should be a lot higher- even reaching into exceptional strength.
Of course, if you could bench 500lb, you could probably beat 30 push-ups/minute, but...
The tough part is actually finding statistics for this, though. Then you have to interpret it somewhat to actually fit it to D&D terms- for example, in Baldur's Gate females have the exact same STR probabilities as males, but in real life the averages are quite different. It would be up to the author of the test to either adjust values to normalize sex differences or leave them as-is.
@Mitchfork, you make very good points. The Angelfire test is very flawed for the reasons you bring up - males have higher upper range potentials in strength for the upper body, while females have higher upper range potentials in strength for the lower body.
One gender-independent way that I often think of for D&D strength, is that D&D strength is a measure of overall athletic ability, including effective aggressiveness, ratio of power of blows to effort spent, ability to lift body weight against its own gravitational resistance (pullups and pushups), and several other measures of lifting, pushing, pulling, and throwing.
This objective measure of "strength" could be done by recording numbers of pushups, pullups, situps, bench press weight able to be done for at least 8 reps, or, as a more gender inclusive measure, maximum weight carried on shoulders for squats of at least 8 reps.
Defined thus, constitution then becomes the measure of reps able to be performed over time (such as one hour) with negligible resistance, other than body weight, combined with objective measure of frequency of sickness. (How often have you had cold or flu over the past five years?) Constitution also has elements that include number of miles able to be ran, or any other aerobic feat, as well as the element of alcohol tolerance - if you can drink any of your friends or acquaintances "under the table" at will, you might have a high constitution.
Dexterity will then be defined as ability to hit a target - can you catch a ball thrown to you, can you throw a ball such that anyone with good dexterity should be able to catch it, or, can you go the firing range and make every shot into that paper silhouette's heart, or can you go to a bar and make darts bullseyes at will, to the consternation of your darts-playing, bar-frequenting friends.
The "physical stats", defined in these ways, cause them to be just as complicated, arguable, and interestingly multi-layered as the "mental stats" of intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.
I'd be interested in a statistically based STR reading.
How are stats rolled? Is it 3d6?
Assuming they are, I went ahead and calculated some values based on the probability of rolling each score (3 to 18). I got a mean and stdev for pushups over 2 minutes from this source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17357760
Assuming a normal distribution for the pushup numbers,
If you guys can dig up a mean and standard deviation for any other normally-distributed feats of str/dex/int/etc, it should be easy to come up with numbers for those too.
(I think I can do more than 60 pushups so maybe my str is not as low as I thought, yay)
@nano - using an academic source is good, but this particular study only looks at U.S. Army mechanics, and I think that that sample would be much more physically fit than the average person.
Hmm, there's some weirdness at the end because of the discrete nature of the distribution. Maybe someone good at statistics can tell me how I'm supposed to deal with it. [spoiler=ew, stats] I'm finding the probability of each score and then turning it into a cumulative distribution, then converting the values into z scores and turning them into pushup numbers using the mean and stdev. Maybe I should be treating the value at each stat as uniformly distributed throughout the interval and split it evenly on both sides? [/spoiler] argh I don't know how to format spoiler tags either nvm, got it
@Mitchfork It was the first thing I found via google Values for the general population would definitely be better, if they exist. I guess it's hard to convince random people to do pushups...
@nano, it strikes me as comically absurd that a person with 3 strength is supposed to be able to do 24 pushups. When I was young and at my maximum strength, I could have maybe done 10 to 20 pushups in 2 minutes, with resting at intervals.
I can now do precisely ZERO pushups during any time interval. I simply can't do a single one, even if my life depended on it. At the same time, I can regularly lift and carry 50 pounds or more of groceries in a single trip.
That whole table is making me shake my head and sneer at its ridiculousness.
I'm sorry, but it does. That table is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life - something published by a military organization, or a bunch of PE teachers, I would take it, who all put together likely have a body weight of about 120 pounds, and who think that's normal for an "average" male.
Someone with 10 strength is supposed to be able to do 61 pushups in 2 minutes? OMG, the absurdity of that table just overwhelms me. I can't even adequately express how ridiculous that table is to me. I don't know whether to collapse in hysterical laughter, or into tears. Somebody help me catch my breath from my helpless paroxysm of scornful laughter, please.
@belgarathmth Well, that's the nature of the normal distribution. You don't get good results at the extremes. But a big part of interpreting statistics is paying attention to where the data comes from, and in this case I based it on values for the US Army because they had numbers for pushups. That's why they say "lies, damned lies, and statistics"; most people will overlook details and misinterpret the results.
But 60 pushups in 2 minutes sounds about right to me...
@Mitchfork Yep, I have the same probabilities but I think I should be doing something to uh, "symmetrize" the cdf. Do you have any good numbers for the 1-rep bench press? I'd be interested in taking a look.
edit: okay, I think you have to subtract half the p value at each point to account for the fact that it's a discrete distribution. Wish I could remember what that was called.
There's something obvious about strength that I don't think that those of you attempting to link the stat to some number of push-ups or bench presses are considering.
Whatever you think your strength is, suppose that I, at 6'4" and 300 pounds, and in relatively good health, were sitting on top of you, enraged, and with lethal intent, with one hand gripping your throat, and the other pummeling you in the abdomen. I rather think the advantage of my "less than 3" strength would very much trump your definition of "10 and above" strength rather easily.
I really am not going to be thinking much about how many pushups you can do or how much weight you can bench, when, enraged to the point of lethal intent, I am on top of you with my 300 pounds against your "15 strength" and 150 pounds of body mass.
Mass matters. So does dexterity interpreted as speed, if you have enough sense to avoid letting me get ahold of you. Speed can usually trump massiveness. But, unless you match me at 300 pounds, and can also do 100 pushups in 2 minutes, I really think that you're likely done for if "little" "3-strength" me gets ahold of you while in a state of rage.
@belgarathmth obviously it's just an approximation. The whole DnD stat system is. No one is saying that just because I can do pushups I'll automatically beat you in a fight.
Though the gameplay effects of strength leads to me to believe that the actual distribution of strength in the DnD universe has little to do with the rarity of the dice rolls...
@nano, I don't think we're really communicating here. I'm arguing against the interpretation of strength as "number of push-ups" or "maximum weight that can be bench pressed in one to x reps", which has nothing to do with statistics that reference the bogus strength measurements.
I think a much better measurement of strength, which would also be body type and gender inclusive, would be amount of weight able to be carried successfully for x distance, for y trips.
Let's set x at 100 yards, and y at 3 trips. How much weight can you carry for 100 yards with three trips?
I think I could carry at least 50 pounds in each hand each trip, for a total of 300 pounds during the test. Straining myself to my limits, I might be able to carry 75 pounds in each hand each trip, for a total of 450 pounds during the test.
That seems like a much more valid measure of personal strength to me, since it is independent of both body mass and gender.
Push-ups only measure the ability of the subject to push against the resistance of their own leverage-adjusted body weight. That is a very poor measure of overall strength, which should be a summary measurement of the subject's ability to handle mass and weight in a general fashion, where power of blows rendered, and ability to move while encumbered, are much more practical and sensible end products of high scores in the attribute we're trying to measure here.
@belgarathmth If you can provide statistical data for "weight carried for 100 yards", then sure. I'm not claiming that pushup prowess is equivalent to strength. I chose pushups to demonstrate the statistical approach because it's a feat that's somewhat correlated with strength and, first and foremost, I was able to find numbers. Statistics have no value if you have no data.
Int scores matched with IQ - perhaps a better demonstration because modern tests use deviation IQ where mean and std are defined.
@nano, statistics also have no value when they reference a meaningless set of data. "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." Summation one to Infinity times zero all comes out to zero.
@belgarathmth I was demonstrating an approach, while you seem to be preoccupied with the results of my "test data". I literally spent 30 seconds googling for pushup numbers and got a result from the US Army. I'm sorry if you feel that it's unfair on people who don't belong to that demographic, but nowhere did I claim that it was supposed to be universally representative. Just because you're unhappy with your supposed "3 strength" by this interpretation of US Army standards doesn't mean it's meaningless. Like I said, provide more appropriate data and you'll get better results. Pretend I was using data for horses or something if it makes you feel better.
@nano - There are very few academic sources for a general population, so I have to admit that the source that I'm using is not ideal. I'm using 146lb for my mean and 35 for my STD. This data comes from http://www.mhhe.com/catalogs/sem/hhp/faculty/labs/index.mhtml?file=/catalogs/sem/hhp/labs/activity/12, which is old data (2003 at the latest) and unsourced. I used the male under 30 years statistics since I figured most adventurers would fit into that bracket. From that I got the following table:
Interestingly, these correlate pretty well with these tables: http://www.crossfit.com/cf-journal/WLSTANDARDS.pdf. The tables here aren't statistic-based, but consider the average-weight American male at 198lbs. An untrained male would score a 10 on average, which is right below 3d6 average, so I would consider that good anecdotal correlation. A novice weightlifter (3-9 months training) is at 13 (stronger than 74% of the population), and an intermediate weightlifter (about 2 years training) is at 16 (stronger than 95% of the population). These also seem pretty believable- someone would either have a physically demanding routine or dedication to training to get these scores. An advanced weightlifter breaks off the scale- the definition of advanced in this context is "an individual with multi-year training experience with definite goals in the higher levels of competitive athletics" which I think would qualify for exceptional strength in AD&D terms. Same for expert. Again... these values are not strictly statistically generated. But I do feel that they are reasonably accurate and useful for a general audience.
So, yeah. I'm reasonably satisfied with these numbers, and I clock somewhere at 9 or less STR according to this which is about how I'd self-rate.
@belgarathmth - It's true that these metrics are going to come up short. The muscles that you use for doing crunches or bench pressing are going to be different than the muscles that you use to swing a mace or force a lock- and if you get into grappling, the situation is going to depend a lot more on training and skill than your raw strength. But you can't possibly incorporate all of those factors into an internet test- you have to hack it a bit "quick and dirty" with tests that most people can perform pretty quickly or will know/be able to guess. From a practical standpoint, I think it's probably most useful to stick with exercises that have no equipment (push-ups, sit-ups) or exercises that are ubiquitous enough that most anyone with access to the equipment will know their range.
@nano 74 pushups/minute, 66 sit-ups, 315 lbs bench press for a 17 strength score. 2 hours/day training for years now, and my military service just ended in November so there is that too. But consider the sacrifices, I don't even get to eat cookies.
This is so cool. Starting a new run when I have more time.
Str: 16 (all those years of gym memberships seems to have paid off) Dex:14 (if only I could dance...) Con: 15 (I never get sick - knocks on wood, and commute by bike) Int: 16 (Well I took an IQ test before, so some of the questions were sort of familiar ) Wis: 13 (On the other hand, I just spent about half an hour of my life on this test... perhaps I should lower it) Cha: 15 (This one was a mystery to me)
I am looking forward to my run as me. This time, I'll be REALLY pissed if I get killed by a gibberling.
@nano, I want to apologize to you. For some reason, I was thinking that the table was just something you pulled up and quoted - it didn't occur to me that it might be something you had spent some time and thought on, and that you just wanted to share your research and effort.
If that had occurred to me, I would have been much gentler in how I criticized it and argued with it. I think the low end of the table for people with strength under ten was what caused me to have a negative emotional reaction to it. According to that skewed metric, my own strength would not be 3. It would be 0, which is what seems absurd to me.
Please forgive my uncalled-for harsh rhetoric, though. Mea culpa.
@TPSullivan1, if you're just looking at total of combined stats, you're not doing it right. You're supposed to be looking at individual aptitude scores. Based on yours, I'd say your best bet is thief, cleric, or sorcerer.
Your only stats that are anywhere near exceptional are DEX and CHA. (Only the average INT counts, although, in BG, even a mediocre INT stat still qualifies you to be a mage or bard. You'll just have a bit of trouble scribing new spells, and even that will go away if you set the difficulty on "Normal", although, "Your own conscience be ye guide" about that.)
Based on the stats you give, you'd be a good potential cleric, druid, bard, thief, or mage. Forget being a front-line melee fighter of any kind, unless you want to be a bad one.
Whether you would make a good druid depends on how much you love the balance of nature and the outdoors in general.
You meet the minimum aptitudes with no doubt for cleric. Your charisma is iffy for bard or druid. Your part 1 intelligence score suggests that you should not be considering mage.
I'd go with either cleric or thief, depending on your personality. You could be a sorcerer if you have lucky genetics. Do you have a relative with some kind of "mental illness" in real life? That would increase your likelihood of having the blood needed to be a sorcerer.
Bottom line: There will be no stat-based bonuses regardless. Your aptitude and attitude suggest thief. If you're devout in real life, then you'd make an equally good cleric, or even cleric-mage, if your blood background suggests mixed heritage.
Most people seeking for a real-life self insert should be looking at which of their test scores are the highest, and meet minimum requirements for classes, compared to their personalities, not trying to min-max stat bonuses. Very, very few people are going to have stat bonuses in real life. Exceedingly few people will have stat bonuses in real life. Class decisions would rather be made on minimum requirements, not maxed out ones.
You are correct and I like your logic. I only had time to post my stats last night but did not get a chance to really ponder the implications of them. I am devout in real life, I'd characterize myself as Lawful Good in the real world, so I'm thinking Cleric over thief for sure. I could of course tank, if we were making 'Baldur's Gate: The Comedy' a la Monty Python, but the reality is that a front-line slot for me would end badly, and quickly!
I'm thinking a back-row slot, with shield and helm for protection, probably using Slings due to the decent Dex score and buffing my mates while turning undead. Seems a better fit for my personality than a thief.
@booinyoureyes, you're only one charisma point away from qualifying for bard, so, you could just chalk that up to margin of error on the test, and give yourself the point. If you've got the personality for it, I'd say go ahead and be a bard, if that's what you want to be.
Comments
Now, I do have a genius level IQ (according to IQ tests I took back in school), but I still wouldn't rate my Intelligence more then 15, maybe. There's more to intelligence then just IQ tests. And the rest? Forget about it. 12 at most, probably. Maybe a tiny bit higher for the dexterity and charisma, but only to like, 13.
At least it rated my STR and CON as miserable, though I *can* drink all night and not suffer any problems. I have the highest alcohol tolerance of anyone I know, in my 100lb weakling body. Cheers to me, I guess? That'll be useful tonight, anyway. Woo!
I'll have to try the other test, that seems to have actual measures of testing rather then just having you evaluate yourself.
STR: 8
DEX: 13
CON: 7
INT(pt1/pt2): 8/14
INT: 11
WIS: 13
CHA: 14
That's an 80 combined.
Your only stats that are anywhere near exceptional are DEX and CHA. (Only the average INT counts, although, in BG, even a mediocre INT stat still qualifies you to be a mage or bard. You'll just have a bit of trouble scribing new spells, and even that will go away if you set the difficulty on "Normal", although, "Your own conscience be ye guide" about that.)
Based on the stats you give, you'd be a good potential cleric, druid, bard, thief, or mage. Forget being a front-line melee fighter of any kind, unless you want to be a bad one.
Whether you would make a good druid depends on how much you love the balance of nature and the outdoors in general.
You meet the minimum aptitudes with no doubt for cleric. Your charisma is iffy for bard or druid. Your part 1 intelligence score suggests that you should not be considering mage.
I'd go with either cleric or thief, depending on your personality. You could be a sorcerer if you have lucky genetics. Do you have a relative with some kind of "mental illness" in real life? That would increase your likelihood of having the blood needed to be a sorcerer.
Bottom line: There will be no stat-based bonuses regardless. Your aptitude and attitude suggest thief. If you're devout in real life, then you'd make an equally good cleric, or even cleric-mage, if your blood background suggests mixed heritage.
Most people seeking for a real-life self insert should be looking at which of their test scores are the highest, and meet minimum requirements for classes, compared to their personalities, not trying to min-max stat bonuses. Very, very few people are going to have stat bonuses in real life. Exceedingly few people will have stat bonuses in real life. Class decisions would rather be made on minimum requirements, not maxed out ones.
Of course, if you could bench 500lb, you could probably beat 30 push-ups/minute, but...
The tough part is actually finding statistics for this, though. Then you have to interpret it somewhat to actually fit it to D&D terms- for example, in Baldur's Gate females have the exact same STR probabilities as males, but in real life the averages are quite different. It would be up to the author of the test to either adjust values to normalize sex differences or leave them as-is.
One gender-independent way that I often think of for D&D strength, is that D&D strength is a measure of overall athletic ability, including effective aggressiveness, ratio of power of blows to effort spent, ability to lift body weight against its own gravitational resistance (pullups and pushups), and several other measures of lifting, pushing, pulling, and throwing.
This objective measure of "strength" could be done by recording numbers of pushups, pullups, situps, bench press weight able to be done for at least 8 reps, or, as a more gender inclusive measure, maximum weight carried on shoulders for squats of at least 8 reps.
Defined thus, constitution then becomes the measure of reps able to be performed over time (such as one hour) with negligible resistance, other than body weight, combined with objective measure of frequency of sickness. (How often have you had cold or flu over the past five years?) Constitution also has elements that include number of miles able to be ran, or any other aerobic feat, as well as the element of alcohol tolerance - if you can drink any of your friends or acquaintances "under the table" at will, you might have a high constitution.
Dexterity will then be defined as ability to hit a target - can you catch a ball thrown to you, can you throw a ball such that anyone with good dexterity should be able to catch it, or, can you go the firing range and make every shot into that paper silhouette's heart, or can you go to a bar and make darts bullseyes at will, to the consternation of your darts-playing, bar-frequenting friends.
The "physical stats", defined in these ways, cause them to be just as complicated, arguable, and interestingly multi-layered as the "mental stats" of intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.
Assuming they are, I went ahead and calculated some values based on the probability of rolling each score (3 to 18).
I got a mean and stdev for pushups over 2 minutes from this source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17357760
Assuming a normal distribution for the pushup numbers, If you guys can dig up a mean and standard deviation for any other normally-distributed feats of str/dex/int/etc, it should be easy to come up with numbers for those too.
(I think I can do more than 60 pushups so maybe my str is not as low as I thought, yay)
[spoiler=ew, stats]
I'm finding the probability of each score and then turning it into a cumulative distribution, then converting the values into z scores and turning them into pushup numbers using the mean and stdev. Maybe I should be treating the value at each stat as uniformly distributed throughout the interval and split it evenly on both sides?
[/spoiler]
argh I don't know how to format spoiler tags either
nvm, got it
I can now do precisely ZERO pushups during any time interval. I simply can't do a single one, even if my life depended on it. At the same time, I can regularly lift and carry 50 pounds or more of groceries in a single trip.
That whole table is making me shake my head and sneer at its ridiculousness.
I'm sorry, but it does. That table is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life - something published by a military organization, or a bunch of PE teachers, I would take it, who all put together likely have a body weight of about 120 pounds, and who think that's normal for an "average" male.
Someone with 10 strength is supposed to be able to do 61 pushups in 2 minutes? OMG, the absurdity of that table just overwhelms me. I can't even adequately express how ridiculous that table is to me. I don't know whether to collapse in hysterical laughter, or into tears. Somebody help me catch my breath from my helpless paroxysm of scornful laughter, please.
Check the "Value from an area" radio button and input your mean/STD. Then for area, put in the cumulative probability for a 3d6 roll (I used this image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_02Cqq_6pNSs/TSOXngwmgUI/AAAAAAAAAFc/1sEC2xFPJnQ/s1600/Screen+shot+2010-12-31+at+20.59.17.png). Then hit the "Below" radio button and you'll get the number of push-ups on that value threshold.
Been a while since I took statistics but that should be correct.
But 60 pushups in 2 minutes sounds about right to me...
@Mitchfork Yep, I have the same probabilities but I think I should be doing something to uh, "symmetrize" the cdf. Do you have any good numbers for the 1-rep bench press? I'd be interested in taking a look.
edit: okay, I think you have to subtract half the p value at each point to account for the fact that it's a discrete distribution. Wish I could remember what that was called.
Whatever you think your strength is, suppose that I, at 6'4" and 300 pounds, and in relatively good health, were sitting on top of you, enraged, and with lethal intent, with one hand gripping your throat, and the other pummeling you in the abdomen. I rather think the advantage of my "less than 3" strength would very much trump your definition of "10 and above" strength rather easily.
I really am not going to be thinking much about how many pushups you can do or how much weight you can bench, when, enraged to the point of lethal intent, I am on top of you with my 300 pounds against your "15 strength" and 150 pounds of body mass.
Mass matters. So does dexterity interpreted as speed, if you have enough sense to avoid letting me get ahold of you. Speed can usually trump massiveness. But, unless you match me at 300 pounds, and can also do 100 pushups in 2 minutes, I really think that you're likely done for if "little" "3-strength" me gets ahold of you while in a state of rage.
Though the gameplay effects of strength leads to me to believe that the actual distribution of strength in the DnD universe has little to do with the rarity of the dice rolls...
I think a much better measurement of strength, which would also be body type and gender inclusive, would be amount of weight able to be carried successfully for x distance, for y trips.
Let's set x at 100 yards, and y at 3 trips. How much weight can you carry for 100 yards with three trips?
I think I could carry at least 50 pounds in each hand each trip, for a total of 300 pounds during the test. Straining myself to my limits, I might be able to carry 75 pounds in each hand each trip, for a total of 450 pounds during the test.
That seems like a much more valid measure of personal strength to me, since it is independent of both body mass and gender.
Push-ups only measure the ability of the subject to push against the resistance of their own leverage-adjusted body weight. That is a very poor measure of overall strength, which should be a summary measurement of the subject's ability to handle mass and weight in a general fashion, where power of blows rendered, and ability to move while encumbered, are much more practical and sensible end products of high scores in the attribute we're trying to measure here.
Int scores matched with IQ - perhaps a better demonstration because modern tests use deviation IQ where mean and std are defined.
I guess we have to just agree to disagree, here.
So, yeah. I'm reasonably satisfied with these numbers, and I clock somewhere at 9 or less STR according to this which is about how I'd self-rate.
@belgarathmth - It's true that these metrics are going to come up short. The muscles that you use for doing crunches or bench pressing are going to be different than the muscles that you use to swing a mace or force a lock- and if you get into grappling, the situation is going to depend a lot more on training and skill than your raw strength. But you can't possibly incorporate all of those factors into an internet test- you have to hack it a bit "quick and dirty" with tests that most people can perform pretty quickly or will know/be able to guess. From a practical standpoint, I think it's probably most useful to stick with exercises that have no equipment (push-ups, sit-ups) or exercises that are ubiquitous enough that most anyone with access to the equipment will know their range.
For dex, I think reaction time would be a good metric because there's plenty of data available for that.
74 pushups/minute, 66 sit-ups, 315 lbs bench press for a 17 strength score. 2 hours/day training for years now, and my military service just ended in November so there is that too. But consider the sacrifices, I don't even get to eat cookies.
Str: 16 (all those years of gym memberships seems to have paid off)
Dex:14 (if only I could dance...)
Con: 15 (I never get sick - knocks on wood, and commute by bike)
Int: 16 (Well I took an IQ test before, so some of the questions were sort of familiar
Wis: 13 (On the other hand, I just spent about half an hour of my life on this test... perhaps I should lower it)
Cha: 15 (This one was a mystery to me)
I am looking forward to my run as me. This time, I'll be REALLY pissed if I get killed by a gibberling.
If that had occurred to me, I would have been much gentler in how I criticized it and argued with it. I think the low end of the table for people with strength under ten was what caused me to have a negative emotional reaction to it. According to that skewed metric, my own strength would not be 3. It would be 0, which is what seems absurd to me.
Please forgive my uncalled-for harsh rhetoric, though. Mea culpa.
I'm thinking a back-row slot, with shield and helm for protection, probably using Slings due to the decent Dex score and buffing my mates while turning undead. Seems a better fit for my personality than a thief.
Thanks for your thoughts and insights!
I'm a clumsier Aerie, though I'd like to be a bard