How far should training and exercising realistically raise your states ingame? In real life you can get stronger, faster, smarter, etc. if you train/exercise hard enough or use the relevent cognative abilities enough.
So how far could your characters stats be raised simply running around, fighting zombies, learning new things and doing dedicated strength and flexibility exercises?
I’d imagine “pretty high”, given enough time. The two main inhibitors at the upper end of physical performance are diet, and the actual strength of the materials the body is made out of. After a certain point, instead of dropping a weight thats too heavy, you’ll rupture a muscle instead. Neurological performance is a huge can of worms, but you can get comparative results to genuine IQ increases from effort and techniques and practice on ‘how’ to learn well.
The physical part can be pushed probably past human limits by the blob in your system - We already know its amplifying healing and other aspects, so gaining muscle mass would likely be faster, as would healing from overdoing any exercise or practical strain. It’d be fair to assume you’re physical limits would be musculature physical strength and skeletal tensile strength at that point, without mutations. That’d put you at the peaks of world strongman competitions. I’d imagine similar behaviors would come in for dexterity as well, effective healing and muscle growth should prevent things ‘tightening up’ quite as much.
The mental aspects, no idea - I’ve not seen any indicators of the blob infection improving mental function in people outside of mutations. But considering the peak of any of our technological developments is either “stuff someone else already figured out and wrote down for us” or “Makeshift versions of stuff someone else already invented”, we’re probably reasonable enough to raise int to meet any of the particular int limited books out there, at least enough to get through them.
Perception is the only one I can’t really see a great way to boost much - we already practice near-perfect alertness through the game, and short of mutations or cybernetics, your eyes are something you can’t really train super well (You can mitigate poor vision with some specific training, but not gain 20/20).
Regarding perception; pattern recognition and observation techniques can be trained and improved upon with certain mental exercises.
The military uses things like combat hunter observation techniques where you will essentially do an I Spy game on a patch of ground where someone has placed certain items. Certain techniques like observing right to left as opposed to left to right can improve your ability to see camouflaged objects (because your brain doesn’t gloss over it like written word). Additionally, simple familiarity of things that are likely to pop up in certain areas drastically increases perception.
I think perception like the others is an alright candidate for increase as well- if more limited.
So how many points would that be? Something like going from 8 to 11 (3 points) for strength after 2-3 years of dedicated training and daily exersice plus some steroid use.
INT ingame seems to be more than just raw IQ. It also seems to include emotional intelligence and memory. IQ itself is also measured in fluid and cristalized intelligence and your character aquirering new skills, experiences and knowledge definedly would count as a increase in cristalized intelligence.
Probably would increase by itself over time based the fact that you are always on the lookout for zombies and other threats and looking around for usefull stuff the whole time.