“A scale of one to ten, or scale from one to ten, is a general and largely vernacular concept used for rating things, people, places, ideas, and so on. The scale has 10 as a maximum score, as a denotation of exceptionally high quality or of another attribute, usually accompanying 1 as its minimum, although some common variants have a minimum of 0.” — Wikipedia entry for ‘Scale of one to ten’
Simple, common, intuitive, perhaps pervasive, perhaps universal(?)1 and widely applicable: a scale from one to 10. Or zero to ten (but we’ll get there).
You may have been asked to rate your pain on a one to ten scale in an ER or doctor’s office, and there are many common systems, like gymnastics and ‘perfect’ 10.00 scores2 and informal usage, including the “on a scale from 1 to x” memes, “These go to 11”, “Listen up fives, a ten is speaking”, and even gems like “On a scale from 1 to 10, your mama’s so fat she’s a 747-300”
So one aspect of a commonly-known, commonly-used linear numeric scale like “1 to 10” is that we’re all aware of what it is, what’s best, what’s worst, where it maxes out, and have a mental picture (if not a precise mental Gaussian probability distribution curve) of what the scale spans and how a difference of one—up or down—looks, feels, and works. Except…
There is another commonly-known, commonly-used ordinal-based convention with a whole lot of overlap on 1-to-10 and that’s the top 10 list. The top 10 list is probably more common (is certainly more common every December) and now we have an issue of ‘perfect ten’ vs ‘number one’ — is being a 2 an almost-great thing or a terribly bad thing? This is why, on questionnaires, any prompt to rate something on 1-10 nearly always specifies “with 1 being the worst and 10 being best”3
The easiest way to short-circuit this particular automatic pathway, “1 means ranked number one”, is to add a different lower base value:
zero.
There are other reasons to add a zero4, but the main one is that you almost never have to qualify that zero is worst and ten is best, and after an appropriate introduction (one shorter than this blog post) readers rapidly adapt and the numerical values allow for easy comparisons and the underlying questions (e.g. “how Strong is my character?”) can be left unstated entirely.
This system seems like it might be an improvement [The blog post title, above, is a teaser-in-three-parts, so you know at least one more part is coming] but there’s an additional gloss I picked up from a roleplaying system called FUDGE, written by Stephen O’Sullivan5 — and that is the use of comparative terms, on an ascending adjective scale. We bolster the ok-maybe-it’s-not-as-intuitive-as-I-thought zero to 10 scale by pairing (and pinning) the numbers with common adjectives. Broadly speaking, things that are ‘good’ are better than things that are ‘fair’, and if asked to pick between something ‘good’ and something ‘great’, of course you pick the merely good one6
The Fudge scale only uses 7 adjectives for this, but with a zero to ten scale, we’re going to need a total of 117:
0. fatal (or near fatal)
1. terrible
2. awful
3. poor
4. meh.
5. fair
6. good
7. great
8. rare
9. epic
10. legend
“Meh.”, at 4, has some pushback from my early testers (roughly half)8 but isn’t carved in stone; if a term like ‘mediocre’ or ‘meagre’ has more fantasy flair and you’d prefer it to the more recent coinage (my editorial on that is also the term under discussion: meh.) then by all means change it for your own use. And while I like the Rare-Epic-Legend ladder for the top end of the scale, again, that’s my preference and you’re welcome to check as many thesauruses as you like to find alternates (I couldn’t find any I liked better).9
In my proposed system, the zero-to-ten scale balances at the midpoint, 5, though you might think of 4 as being the stock-NPC default baseline.
Because here’s the thing: all our characters are above average.
Part of that is part-and-parcel of playing a role playing game; we take on the role of an adventurer or hero (of whatever type) and we play through that fantasy. Of course we’re nothing special at the start and we have to grow and learn and gank monsters that are basically piñatas made of loot and that sweet, sweet XP — but no PC, even at level one is (ugh) ordinary . It’s an unspoken rule at the table. Even our flaws rarely have gameplay consequences and while barbarian Barbomight Stumpswinger of the Great Northern Woods may be about as sharp as a sack of oatmeal (Intelligence 3, poor) he is creative and improvisational in a fight (his namesake weapon is a stump! which he picked up as the only thing to hand to swing in one of his earliest adventures) and is not, as played, dumb.
There are role-play reasons and character ‘flavor’ reasons to take an low attribute, trait, skill, or ‘flaw’ but these are usually balanced (and over-balanced) by the role-play and ‘flavor’ of a character’s background and heritage, and their chosen class or skill set.
So, just embrace it, your stock-NPC defaults to 4, meh. Anything better is fair, or fair to good, and for most player characters we’re working in the 7-10 range anyway10&11
Coming back around to the first third of the blog subject:
ZTT. Zero-to-ten. As defined above. It will be a whole lot easier to just say “ZTT” and link to that — or actually, link to this12 —which is not only a brief intro to the idea but some behind-the-curtain thought process and also a definition of terms.13
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1 at least for sophants with 10 total digits on their manipulation limbs
2 the International Gymnastics Federation uses a system of points, not a rating scale, that coincidentally maxes out at 10, or at least did so before 2006. Under the revised code, scores can theoretically exceed 10, based on difficulty and event, but you’d probably still need the Russian judge in your pocket to even think about that
3 on a scale of 1 to Michael Bay, one being no explosion and 10 being Michael Bay, is 10 a good thing or a bad thing?
4 I’d read the articles at waypointgroup.org/why-a-0-10-scale-is-your-best-option/ and www.primary-intel.com/blog/the-magic-in-a-0-to-10-rating-scale/ for some good discussion and non-meme, non-RPG based context
5 links to additional resources, the open licenses available for other creators, and a general discussion of O’Sullivan’s FUDGE are about half-way down this page
6 oh no, I don’t want to be a bother, no no you take the bigger piece I’m not that hungry. please, no, I insist
7 having eleven terms is different from “These Go to Eleven” but “These Go to Eleven” is in fact a game mechanic that I have considered and am iterating on.
8 though everyone immediately understood the meaning
9 One design consideration was finding a clear, strong, monosyllable (whenever possible) for each, 0-to-10. This constraint is why ‘meh.’ is a clear winner at no. 4, though even in my own use I’ll likely use ‘meagre’ if it comes up
10 with muchkins and min-maxers already looking at my proposal and thinking about how to get 7-out-of-10 stats at 11 or better, and their primary at 14 or 15. If you’re a DM looking to homebrew a system or just with a robust set of house rules, the idea of a “working range” for skills and attributes is probably more helpful than the mechanics and terms anyway. What is our “working range” for a 3d6,d20 D&D-like system? 10 to 20, functionally, with bonuses for those scores ranging from +1 to +5. So really, arguably, just a five point scale, at least for the player just looking at those plus-ones. Or maybe a six-point scale, with the occasional bad roll (or PC choice) putting a score at 8-9, -1. Coming around to my zero-to-ten scale, we start at 4 and go to 10, legendary, with the occasional 3 and a working range of 5-6-7-8-9, hopefully. Enough for meaningful gradations and for each point/step/plus-one to feel weighty.
11 building on that, you could easily add half points to the ten point scale (e.g. 7.5) which sets the new legend, max value at 20. This hack gives you some more direct correspondence between 3d6 and a zero-to-ten, and I may have to explicitly say that in whatever final version of the system (one page ‘lite’ versions, even) rather than hide it in an endnote. Here, I’ll walk you further down the path: 7, great, is a 14 on a 3d6, and a +2. 7.5, still great, is a 15; get up to 8, rare, though and we’re looking at 16 on a 3d6 and a +3.
12 or put it in the endnotes, as applicable
13 On a scale from zero to ten, overall, I give this a 9, epic, for asides and endnotes; an 8, rare, for introduction of new ideas to TTPRGs; and a 4, meh., for readability, perhaps trending down to 3, poor, for virality or share-ablity of the post itself.