Grrl Power #926 - Best and brightest

Thanks so much for your support! Like, seriously, you guys.

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Hey, alien lady, just because some of us are total dimwits doesn't mean our best and brightest can't kick your ass. At least these two were smart and/or oblivious enough to circumvent the police cordon keeping lookie loos from wandering into an alien mercenary/superhero/supervillain rumble. (It's the latter.)

I guess the best thing you can say about these two is that they're remarkably upbeat about discovering the existence of lizard men and demons.

This page kind of makes me wonder about the intelligence distribution of alien races. (Granted "Intelligence" is kind of a broad umbrella term for a host of aptitudes, but I'm talking about overall averages. Also, IQ tests and scores are problematic for a number of reasons, but I'll use them as a simple point of reference as I'm not aware of another standardized measurement.) So, if there are humans with IQ's ranging from like 65 to 250 or higher, (yes, there are lower and higher scores, I'm doing Olympic rules and trimming the extreme outliers) are Vulcans like 90 to 300? Or are they 110 to 175? Are Orcs 45 to 105, or are they 85 to 110? Are the standard deviations consistent across races, or do some races have way more outliers?

In a lot of video games and RPGs, humans are the race with no racial bonuses, but also no limitations on class selection. They're the generalist species. I kind of think humans should have bonuses to every class, as Quark has pointed out (correctly I think) that comfortable Federation humans are a bit milquetoast, but before they became semi-post scarcity, they were more savage capitalists than Ferengi, and you take away their food replicators and electricity etc., and they turn nastier than the worst Klingon.

Of course, when we meet actual aliens, they might have a worker class that can barely follow basic instructions and a scientist class that make quantum computers look quaint, and they're all wildly bipolar. And then we'd be like, "No! All alien races are supposed to be a monocultures! You only get to specialize in one thing!"