Ascending above human intelligence

[Milo v3]

I'm currently making a wizard in pathfinder with an intelligence score of 26, which isn't that weird for a high-level wizard. But I just realized that 18 intelligence is as far away from human standard, as the human standard is from animal intelligence, so having 26 intelligence should be a massive difference mentally.

The issue is, I have no idea how to role-play such a massive dissonance in intelligence.

[Bad Wolf]

Look up optimization tricks for wizards that involve nested time stops and shadesteel golems, and I don't know, hiveminds?

[Karl Aegis]

You just so happen to have a contingency for the exact situation prepared and escape the battle by pure fiat.

[Maglubiyet]

I'd venture to say that no human does.

Fortunately real intelligence isn't on a linear scale as represented in your typical rpg.

[Draken]

I'm currently making a wizard in pathfinder with an intelligence score of 26, which isn't that weird for a high-level wizard. But I just realized that 18 intelligence is as far away from human standard, as the human standard is from animal intelligence, so having 26 intelligence should be a massive difference mentally.

The issue is, I have no idea how to role-play such a massive dissonance in intelligence.

Your character is still just human. The fact that he is more intelligent than people are generally capable of being doesn't change that. He has human needs, human desires and all seen under human psychology.

What his intelligence gives him is for the most part an amazing capacity to retain knowledge. Useful and useless alike. He most certainly knows a massive number of utterly obscure facts. He almost certainly can name every person of some global importance in a room. He can perhaps name every notable event that has happened, with dates, and also where they happened and where that place is in relation to his current position.

And that is pretty much all that the intelligence score really tells about him.

[Flickerdart]

There are mechanical features that will help you - Uncanny Forethought is literally fluffed as "the wizard is so smart that he thought to prepare X spell even though the player didn't." Make a bunch of Intelligence checks and see if the DM will give you nuggets of info about stuff for them.

You can also use your group - put your heads together and try to come up with the best possible idea, and then have the wizard voice that idea in-character.

[Esprit15]

Well if you started as a "mundane" creature, you would retain your personality, but might get annoyed with simple folks. They're so slow, they don't think, they just do. You're the know it all, and it can be frustrating when others don't reach the same conclusions as quickly as you, or can't follow your reasoning. You have the whole of knowledge stored away mentally, and can call on it at a moment's notice.

Really, it depends on what your personality is like. Some people would shut their selves in study, others would remain pretty much the same as normal.

[Darth Ultron]

Children are a good example here. Compared to an adult, children know just about nothing. So a 26 Intelligence person in a world is a lot like an adult in a room full of kids. You can get the following:

Alone the intelligent person is all alone. They have no one to talk too, no one to relate too. In the same way an adult can't have a intelligent conversation with a five year old. Another good example is the person that is not a sports fan, in the world were everyone is set on default as a ''sports zombie''. That person would love to talk about anything else, other then sports.....but everyone in the world is just zombied to ''did you see the game last night'' and lacks the ability/desire to talk about anything else.

Frustrated The intelligent person just hates waiting around for people to think and do something. They can figure things out in seconds, but it takes others minutes, hours, weeks, years or lifetimes.

Patience The ''good side of frustrated''. This is where the smart person accepts others are not so smart, and simply waits. Like ''ok, go ahead and add two plus two, I will be talking a nap, wake me up when you get the answer''.

Ignore Some smart folks just have to ignore the other, less smart people. They just get in the way and don't know anything. It is best to just ignore them.

Look Down Upon everyone is useless, or even worse then useless. They can't think or even do simple things.

Control You are the smartest one, so you should be in charge...if you want to be.

[Esprit15]

The adult-kid comparison actually is a bit interesting. You might, were you Good, take it upon yourself to act as a parent to others. Help them grow and mature to where you are. After all, just because a parent is smarter than their child doesn't mean they get annoyed to the point of ignoring or belittling them. They try to raise the child and help them mature into an adult. It's just that in this case the child is a fully grown adult.

[Rakoa]

The adult-kid comparison actually is a bit interesting. You might, were you Good, take it upon yourself to act as a parent to others. Help them grow and mature to where you are. After all, just because a parent is smarter than their child doesn't mean they get annoyed to the point of ignoring or belittling them. They try to raise the child and help them mature into an adult. It's just that in this case the child is a fully grown adult.

But the thing is, these people are done growing. They can't develop anymore. Having to raise a child can be rewarding. Being stuck with one forever is exasperating beyond all belief.

[Darth Ultron]

But the thing is, these people are done growing. They can't develop anymore. Having to raise a child can be rewarding. Being stuck with one forever is exasperating beyond all belief.

It is not about the ''developing/growing.'' Sure, every little kid will grow up to be a genius....ok.

Think more like a teacher that always is around kids of the same age/development. They get new kids every year.

Or, for a more adult one......ask your average collage RA what the first couple weeks are like....every year.

[toapat]

I'd venture to say that no human does.

Fortunately real intelligence isn't on a linear scale as represented in your typical rpg.

DnD doesnt represent or even acknowledge that there are levels of thought that humans are just not adapted to think about (4 dimentional geometry) but which without passing through an evolutionary barrier we cant really understand. that is the thing, massive int scores dont really equate to super-intelligences. just that the person has alot of knowledge and is pretty adept at logic

[Segev]

The areas that you'll have the most trouble, I think, are actually those of philosophy and hypotheticals. Philosophy and hypotheticals are where we tend to get political ideologies from, and those are fraught with ... baggage.

The temptation, when playing a "super-intelligent" individual (or writing about one, or otherwise portraying one), if philosophy comes up, is to claim that they're so brilliant they've thought of all the potential pitfalls and made your philosophy of choice work. Because, of course, your philosophy of choice is the right one, and you're just not smart enough to implement it perfectly.

In less socio-politically oriented games, this difficulty will arise when you try to come up with suitably brilliant plans. A hallmark of intelligence is the ability to see enough ways things CAN go wrong to plan around them, or to see how to resolve a problem by achieving mental steps that would take others long periods of time and many notes they have to check and re-check to get there. Intelligence contains some elements of intuition (though many of those actually fall in Wisdom in D&D); specifically, intelligence contains the ability to intuitively grasp something and then work backwards to figure out the steps required to show somebody else how you got there.

There are ways the mechanics can help you. Your high number of skills from Int bonus to skill points will help you be a bit of an omnidisciplinarian, whether competent in tons of fields or shockingly brilliant in merely several. If the DM uses Int Checks for things like memory and solving logical puzzles, you'll find yourself being given a lot of "this is what IS" answers.

It ultimately requires some measure of collaboration with the DM. Discuss things with him and pick his brain about how the game setting works. Run things by him and ask him for insight into where he thinks your RL interpretations are off based on things your PC should know and things your PC might be clever enough to deduce or induce from such knowledge.

Remember that your character grasps concepts that you find incomprehensible as easily as you grasp the English language (or other language and reading structure of your personal choice). Role-play him as confidently knowing things (and don't be afraid to ask the DM if there's something he knows). If a complex idea, plot, or design is presented, and you do'nt grasp it, feel free to ask the DM to break down the final consequences for you. You don't have to know how they'll get there; your character does. When you try to explain it and it makes no sense to the others, that's fine; they should be baffled IC, as it's beyond their characters. Then you can break it down for them as the DM did for you. They might not understand why, but they can trust that you've figured that much out. (The Doctor in Doctor Who is guilty of this a LOT.)

[Susano-wo]

There are a lot of good ideas here (including the idea that you cant really measure INT scores on a linear scale), but i would add just one more. One I feel might be really fun, as well as getting the idea across that the character is super smart.

Forget that other people cant do it too. Take it for granted that they can do however-many calculations in their head at the same time. Forget that they can't see 200 (or whatever) moves ahead.

Now, I don't mean being obstinate about it, but you have to try to bring yourself down to normal levels, so at times, especially when you are thinking hard, or on a mental roll with whatever thought process, it might be easy to forget others' limitations.

[NichG]

Here's what I'd suggest:

- Breadth, not depth. It's going to be hard to portray having deeper understanding and thinking about a single topic anyone else at the table unless you actually have it. However, its easier to just have a lot of breadth where you're as intellectually comfortable as anyone else present even at their specializations. Things you don't know, you can reason out and its as if you know much more than you actually have been directly exposed to or taught. You learn new things extremely quickly. Mechanically, this dovetails with the fact that you get more skill points but not higher skill caps.

- Furthermore, when things go pear shaped or strange or weird, while other people are confused, you've already figured out exactly what beliefs you had which need to be updated, what plans need to be adjusted, etc. This sounds like a lot to ask, but here's where you can leverage the ratio between OOC time and IC time. If 6 seconds IC is 10 minutes OOC, you can represent your character thinking 100 times faster than a normal person. The key thing to do as a player is, when you're waiting for your turn and things like that, you should actually spend that time thinking through the current situation.

- Focus on the non-obvious stuff. When something seems clever, its usually because it connects in something that isn't immediately apparent. Sometimes if you sacrifice deep thinking about the immediate topic (you can just listen to what the other players are talking about and let them do that thinking for you), you can force yourself to find those unlikely connections. For example, if everyone is thinking 'how do we survive this trap?', you can think 'why is there a trap here in the first place?'. One advantage here is that the DM is only one person, so if you present a line of reasoning that they didn't consider but also present the explanation, many DMs will run with it and make your explanation the real reason. The key there is to make it easy for the DM to escape their mistake by also giving them an out in the same sentence as pointing out the mistake.

- Avoid the 'ego' trap. One stereotype of intelligent people is that they're so egotistical that they believe themselves correct even when proven wrong. The thing is, if you look at the actual cognitive biases people have, the better people are at something the more likely they are to think that they're bad at it (the Dunning-Kruger effect). So you can play super-intelligence as being intensely aware and unforgiving of every mistake you make, especially if that mistake is due to some kind of intellectual laziness ('I wanted to believe X...', 'by believing X I felt more in control', etc).

- Be the one to reframe the problem. One thing that happens when people fail to figure things out is that they latch onto a particular way to think about the problem which isn't going to work, but then its hard to get out of it. Ideally, if you actually had super-human intelligence, you'd simultaneously apply every way to frame the problem that you can think of without committing to any particular way, until you find one that works. What you can do instead is that you can notice when other people are getting stuck, and use that as a cue that you should try to reframe things. If you're always the one who picks the framework that eventually solves the problem (and if you're the only one changing frameworks, this will be often), then that'll make it look like all along you knew what the right framework was.

There's a blog post (http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing) with a bunch of tricks for writing intelligent characters which you might try to use for playing intelligent characters instead (but many of the tricks have to do with not being a lazy author, so YMMV).

[Flickerdart]

But the thing is, these people are done growing. They can't develop anymore. Having to raise a child can be rewarding. Being stuck with one forever is exasperating beyond all belief.
Fortunately, like all problems, this is one that can be easily fixed by Mad ScienceTM.

[Psyren]

Children are a good example here. Compared to an adult, children know just about nothing. So a 26 Intelligence person in a world is a lot like an adult in a room full of kids. You can get the following:

Alone the intelligent person is all alone. They have no one to talk too, no one to relate too. In the same way an adult can't have a intelligent conversation with a five year old. Another good example is the person that is not a sports fan, in the world were everyone is set on default as a ''sports zombie''. That person would love to talk about anything else, other then sports.....but everyone in the world is just zombied to ''did you see the game last night'' and lacks the ability/desire to talk about anything else.

Frustrated The intelligent person just hates waiting around for people to think and do something. They can figure things out in seconds, but it takes others minutes, hours, weeks, years or lifetimes.

Patience The ''good side of frustrated''. This is where the smart person accepts others are not so smart, and simply waits. Like ''ok, go ahead and add two plus two, I will be talking a nap, wake me up when you get the answer''.

Ignore Some smart folks just have to ignore the other, less smart people. They just get in the way and don't know anything. It is best to just ignore them.

Look Down Upon everyone is useless, or even worse then useless. They can't think or even do simple things.

Control You are the smartest one, so you should be in charge...if you want to be.

How about... you know... teaching? That is a thing many adults do when faced with children. You came close with the "patience" option, but that wass still very hands-off/laissez-faire.

Personally though, I don't think Intelligence scores scale in the same way that, say, strength scores and muscles do. For one, it would make many villains require contrivances to defeat, as they should be smart enough to anticipate everything the heroes could try otherwise. And I also have a problem with equating intelligence to knowledge, which is what I see come up a lot with these Batman Wizard builds that can not only think quickly but have perfect information to feed into their plans.

[Segev]

And one trick that sometimes works if the whole table is willing: seek input and shamelessly steal others' ideas.

I don't mean be a jerk and claim OOC credit for ideas not your own. I mean, you're playing the brilliant guy. Crowd-source it. Chances are, one or more players are playing less-smart-than-they-are characters. They may have, OOC, great ideas. Offer your character as the mouthpiece for them. He's brilliant; he can come up with it even if you can't. Simulate higher Intelligence with simply more brains to apply to problems.

[Wardog]

But I just realized that 18 intelligence is as far away from human standard, as the human standard is from animal intelligence, so having 26 intelligence should be a massive difference mentally.

Assuming 3d6 represents the typical distribution of attributes in the population, then 18 int just means you're in the top 0.5% of the population, and 3 int means you are in the bottom 0.5%. (Or 1 in 216, to be precise). The fact that 2 int means "animal" rather than merely "lower than the 0.5 percentile" means that the int scale is non-linear, and changes what it represents at that point. (Someone once worked out what IQ int 2 would represent if you assumed it followed the same pattern as the restof the scale).

As such, it doesn't necessarily follow that 26 int means "as far beyond a regular genius as an average human is beyond and animal". So 26 int just means "really, really, really clever", not "ascended to a higher plane of existance -clever".



Alternatively (or as well) consider that int is crunch, and represents a character's ability a particular game mechanic. 26 int means your character can do... whatever the rules say 26 int lets you do. But it doesn't (necessarily) mean other aspects of "intelligence" (in the general rather than crunch sense) are as good. IRL people can be (and often are) very good at certain aspects of "intelligence" but lacking in other sorts of "intelligence". I don't think it is unreasonable to have a wizard be super-humanly good at all the specific tasks a high int score helps with, while being limited to whatever the player can think of when it comes to more general intelligence.

Although they might think that every idea they come up with is supported by their 26 int - which could be an idea for roleplaying with. There are plenty of cases in real life of people thinking that because they are an expert in one subject, anything they think about a completely unrelated subject must also be correct.

[Rainbownaga]

Remember that int is distinct from wis and that you can blame any failings of the former on the latter.

E.g. Planning 20 steps ahead but overlooking a relatively obvious variable and rendering the whole thing worthless.

Too bad wizards don't have to dump wisdom though.

[ufo]

I'm with the person who said "crowdsource it". You know all those times your character is facing a problem alone and another player gives you a critical piece of information you forgot or overlooked, only for the DM to tell that player that "you aren't there to tell them that!". If your group agrees, this would be a practical way of representing your character's wits under pressure.

[Segev]

I'm with the person who said "crowdsource it". You know all those times your character is facing a problem alone and another player gives you a critical piece of information you forgot or overlooked, only for the DM to tell that player that "you aren't there to tell them that!". If your group agrees, this would be a practical way of representing your character's wits under pressure.

A real easy way to quantify it into mechanics would be to have it be some sort of Int check. Assign a DC to the information and roll with your int bonus. If you make it, your character thinks of it. This can allow you to do this for any level of int amongst the PCs who are present: they all get to roll for the idea supplied by an absent player.

[NichG]

A real easy way to quantify it into mechanics would be to have it be some sort of Int check. Assign a DC to the information and roll with your int bonus. If you make it, your character thinks of it. This can allow you to do this for any level of int amongst the PCs who are present: they all get to roll for the idea supplied by an absent player.

This doesn't let you play someone who is smarter than the DM is in real life though, it just moves the problem from the player to the DM.

[Segev]

This doesn't let you play someone who is smarter than the DM is in real life though, it just moves the problem from the player to the DM.

Not quite. This moves the problem to the whole table, including players whose PCs aren't present (and who are but don't think they'd think of it IC).

You'll never truly be able to play somebody smarter than everybody involved in the writing process, outside of pure "can crunch numbers better" or "can magically think up solutions with results we don't have to explain the mechanism for."

(That latter is the source of the Hollywood Nerd trope that claims nerds are all crazy mad scientist inventors who build impossible machines. It's easy to showcase a nerd's intelligence by having him solve a scientific problem that nobody else has. We can all CONCEIVE of the flying car; accepting that Nerdroy McSmartypants is brilliant and thus built a working one is easy.)

[NichG]

Not quite. This moves the problem to the whole table, including players whose PCs aren't present (and who are but don't think they'd think of it IC).

You'll never truly be able to play somebody smarter than everybody involved in the writing process, outside of pure "can crunch numbers better" or "can magically think up solutions with results we don't have to explain the mechanism for."

The issue is that someone has to assess 'what information is relevant?' and 'what is the DC for that information?'. Generally, that person is going to be the DM. There might be something very smart that someone could do in the situation, but if the DM doesn't think of it then it can't be assigned a DC or provided even in case of very good rolls.


(That latter is the source of the Hollywood Nerd trope that claims nerds are all crazy mad scientist inventors who build impossible machines. It's easy to showcase a nerd's intelligence by having him solve a scientific problem that nobody else has. We can all CONCEIVE of the flying car; accepting that Nerdroy McSmartypants is brilliant and thus built a working one is easy.)

The thing is, that trope makes for extremely one-dimensional depictions of intelligence, because aside from stereotypes about what kinds of people can do what kinds of things, there's nothing really 'about' intelligence in the fact that a character went and built a flying car. Not to mention that if that's all there is to the character, they're going to end up doing lots of things that, in retrospect, the table can all agree were pretty dumb, or miss things that in retrospect the table can agree should have been obvious to a smart person.

Its the difference between playing a character who has 'powers' - narrative or otherwise - based on intelligence (e.g. playing a Wizard or mad scientist or whatnot) and playing a character who is simply supernaturally intelligent and actually projects that in a way that feels authentic.

[Segev]

The issue is that someone has to assess 'what information is relevant?' and 'what is the DC for that information?'. Generally, that person is going to be the DM. There might be something very smart that someone could do in the situation, but if the DM doesn't think of it then it can't be assigned a DC or provided even in case of very good rolls.I'd honestly just assess a flat DC - probably somewhere between 15 and 20 - for the "could your character have come up with this idea?" Int check. No assessing particular DCs; ideas wouldn't require any check at all to come up with if the player came up with them, so this is just a way to let those with the highest Int have more chances to come up with things through crowd-sourcing. It's not meant to be complicated or deep.

An even simpler way would be to just let PCs come up with ideas other players think of, with possibly an Int check that the highest result gets to be the one who thinks of it first. (Even then, this is just when the player who thinks of it either lacks a PC in the scene or doesn't want his PC to come up with it.)




The thing is, that trope makes for extremely one-dimensional depictions of intelligence, because aside from stereotypes about what kinds of people can do what kinds of things, there's nothing really 'about' intelligence in the fact that a character went and built a flying car. Not to mention that if that's all there is to the character, they're going to end up doing lots of things that, in retrospect, the table can all agree were pretty dumb, or miss things that in retrospect the table can agree should have been obvious to a smart person.

Its the difference between playing a character who has 'powers' - narrative or otherwise - based on intelligence (e.g. playing a Wizard or mad scientist or whatnot) and playing a character who is simply supernaturally intelligent and actually projects that in a way that feels authentic.That was sort of my point. The best we can really do is simulate it by looking towards the results we expect from high intelligence. Because we're just not that smart. Kind-of like we can look to the results we expect from superhuman strength without being able to test the theory with our own (less-than-)mighty thews.

[NichG]

I'd honestly just assess a flat DC - probably somewhere between 15 and 20 - for the "could your character have come up with this idea?" Int check. No assessing particular DCs; ideas wouldn't require any check at all to come up with if the player came up with them, so this is just a way to let those with the highest Int have more chances to come up with things through crowd-sourcing. It's not meant to be complicated or deep.

At 15 to 20, I think this is going to be an air-breathing mermaid situation. Raw stat checks are hard, and don't improve much. If you could assign the players at the table a real-life Int score, then ostensibly you want the mathematics to at least work out where on average the in-game character is permitted to use an idea at least as often as their equivalent-stat players come up with them. For a character with intelligence higher than those at the table, you'd at the very least want them to on average be able to come up with more than one idea per one idea that the actual players come up with. At DC 15, the Int 26 character can only use 70% of the ideas that the table comes up with. At DC 20, it's 45%. So you run the risk that the Int 26 person actually turns out to be systematically less intelligent than anyone at the table.

The other thing is, you're unlikely to apply this mechanic consistently every time anyone has anything that could be considered an idea (the game is just going to get bogged down if you were to do that). So whenever the check does come out, you're guaranteeing that the characters will be dumber than they have been on average, without giving any possibility of them actually being smarter.

If an idea is already out there on the table and you want to use the crowd-sourcing idea, why not just let anyone who wants to claim to be the one to come up with it do so if the other players are okay with it rather than putting an Int check to say 'are you really that clever'?



That was sort of my point. The best we can really do is simulate it by looking towards the results we expect from high intelligence. Because we're just not that smart. Kind-of like we can look to the results we expect from superhuman strength without being able to test the theory with our own (less-than-)mighty thews.

Well, my point is that you can. One level of emulation is to emulate the results, but that doesn't really help with the characterization any more than saying 'I'm playing a Wizard' would. A level above that is to try to emulate the thought processes - to think about 'what would it be like if I instantly understood everything?' and so on. That starts to get you towards understanding how the intelligence would influence the character's mannerisms and personality. And above that, you can actually think systematically about what ends up working and what doesn't, as far as thinking goes (e.g. actually make yourself smarter).

Aside from that, you can also take advantage of leverage. If I wanted to emulate super-strength in real life, I'd get a lever or pulley or other machine that acts as a strength multiplier, then hide it under a tablecloth. So you can do things to actually make yourself smarter by virtue of not actually being the character in the game by exploiting the leverage of that situation. For example, you can ask the DM 'what would happen if I did this?' without committing to that line of action, but the character can't ask the world that question without trying it. You can take 5 minutes to think of something that the character comes up with in 6 seconds. You can use written notes and the like.

[Segev]

All valid.

I would say you're probably right on the DC. I'm roughly modeling it off the idea that, were stats really restricted to 3-18, you could use a roll-under on a d20.

With that in mind, an 18 or less on a d20 is a 90% chance of success. An 18 stat in 3.5 gives a +4 bonus. To succeed on a 3+ is a 90% chance of success. So for an 18 to get a 90% chance to succeed, 3+4=7 must be the DC.

Compare to a 16, which rolling at-or-under gives an 80% chance of success, while in 3.5 gives a +3 bonus. To succeed on a 5+ on a d20 is an 80% chance of success. 5+3=8 would have to be the DC.

Unsurprisingly, bonuses going up at a 1:2 rate means the straight linear conversion isn't possibl, not simply by setting a flat DC. Besides, that still makes the higher-than-X stat auto-succeed, so you may as well go with the roll-under-stat on a d20 and just have those with 20+ Int auto-succeed.

Like I said, if you just want to allow PCs to share the ideas anyway, without rolling, go for it.

[woodlandkammao]

Honestly, Intelligence is less actual intelligence and more memory in 5e. Wisdom is the real intelligence.