Irl, throwing anything but a rock or a dart should take a shitload of practice. I was institutionalized at the age of 9 and we (maybe 30 of us) spent many weeks, many hours a day, every evening after dark, perfecting the art of throwing knives that were not weighted for throwing. It takes about a month to get the hang of it of you are gifted. Three months if you are not gifted but most people can never get it no matter how long they try. You have to get a gut feel for the way the knife w/ spin in the air. Once some of us had mastered it, the game gradually died and then stopped ... Of course, the grown ups did not like us playing that game. And some of the losers squealed. But it went on, anyway, in secret. We were addicted. Why did we stop the knife game? For the same reason we stopped w/ Baseball. In the Institution, I formed a dyad (i.e. partnership) w/ a boy who could throw the ball and I would catch it in backstop. So everybody was not even getting to go to first base w/ maybe two weeks. It took two weeks to perfect the dyad. So after that, nobody wanted to play Baseball any more. In D&D, the relevant stat would actually be Wis because determination is the real key there. If winning means so much to you? You can learn to strike out kids w/ much more Dex and Str than you have. Other games: Basketball is a great game. But that had to stop after the "Recreation Officer" was sacked for fucking little girls. & he seemed like such a nice man. No. He never went to jail. He just got a new job. That was Sydney, Australia, 1971. I'm a shrimp, so I never got much good at Basketball. We spent days playing that! Then the fucker left and it stopped. The D&D stat should be Con because most games are won on "wind" (i.e. aerobic fitness). Chess. Chess is a great game. You can spend hours and hours playing Chess on rainy days. But you cannot really get very good w/o a teacher. I taught my own girls Chess when they arrived at the age of 5 or 6. By the time they were 7, they were beating me quite routinely and had to find new opponents, which was impossible b4 they got to High School and joined the Chess Club. I had already taught them all I knew, forking and pinning, predicting the enemy at least three moves in advance, and marking and calculating exchanges. You can try to learn it from books, but you really need to play against a master/mentor. The relevant D&D stat w/ be Int but more specifically "Rote Operations" which is just one kind of Int. Knucklebones. <a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRcX0k0B69JLr7mdL8TzthpK51GnKlhk5jZDg&usqp=CAU" rel="nofollow">https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRcX0k0B69JLr7mdL8TzthpK51GnKlhk5jZDg&usqp=CAU</a> This craze never stopped. It was a craze b4 I went in, and it was still a craze when I got out. The USA version is called Jacks but uses different equipment. Mastery is displayed by how many times you can run the series of tasks before dropping a jack. Almost every kid in the Institution could go through at least 3 Series b4 a fumble. Again, you'd think the relevant stat in D&D would be Dex. But it really is not. It's Wisdom. Monkey Bars: <a href="https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/little-girl-playing-on-playground-260nw-583223008.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/little-girl-playing-on-playground-260nw-583223008.jpg</a> You start by doing one hand to the next rung then the next hand follows and you can maybe make it to the end. But within a few weeks you can brachiate, unless you are a girl or a fat boy (not being sexist or ableist: you need a high center of gravity and upper body strength), and then (after about a week, if you do it fanatically, every day for hours) you can start skipping rungs. Some of us were doing literally hundreds of rungs b4 the game stopped. You develop callouses to deal with the pain and your hands bleed b4 you master it. The D&D stat should be Strength, but Gygax says Dex. More precisely, it is your ability to hold up your own weight w/ your fingers. In my teens, on my mum's farm, for maybe three months a year, I spent many hours trying to throw a hatchet at trees. I never managed to master that. In any case, the relevant stat (irl) is Wis, not Dex, & not Str. Because it's to do w/ knowing in your gut how that weapon will behave once it leaves your hand. Throwing an axe, however, is possible. But it's a lot harder than throwing a knife. O and if you want to know what life is like at the age of 9 in an Institution? Just read Lord of the Flies.
