Effects of Wisdom Damage?

[Palanan]

What are the effects of slowly progressing Wisdom damage, as it falls below average and begins the long drift towards the low single digits?

I have a PC in my game who’s losing Wisdom day by day, and I’d like ideas on how to describe the feeling and its wider effects. So far I’ve presented it as a sense of being increasingly disconnected, as if living in some mental bubble where thoughts are crisp and clear, but the outer world is becoming ever blurrier, with cause and effect increasingly less obvious.

So far this has covered just the first few points of Wisdom damage. How would the next few points of damage feel?

[Segev]

I can't vouch for this, as I have never experienced it, but I'm told that one's inhibitions and judgment are depleted by drunkenness. While the motor control and slurred speech probably shouldn't manifest, a sense of the "bad idea juice" being increasingly present in his behavior might be appropriate.

Wisdom links to perception and willpower, mechanically. It also is the stat that lets you read other people.

Rather than disconnectedness, as his Wisdom falls, he might start to become more comfortable around others. Too much so. He can't read them, and slowly stops realizing that he is failing to do so. So if it was funny with the dock hands over beer, it's funny with the Duchess in her formal ball. And when she doesn't laugh, she obviously didn't get it: repeat the punch line louder. Perhaps with cruder sound effects backing it up.

It is NOT stupidity. He can still be smart, if he was before. But smarts tell you how to do something. Wisdom tells you whether or not it's a good idea.

[Jowgen]

Reduction of awareness in all departments. As in, unaware of their environment, other people's moods/motives, the potential repercussions of a given action... that sorta stuff. It's literally acting before you think combined with not paying sufficiently close attention.

[Psyren]

Basically have them act as if they got hit with Mind Fog. They should be absent-minded, have trouble focusing, and be prone to miss details (both environment and conversational). Mechanically you already know how it plays out - weaker perceptive ability and will saves, which ties to the above.

Other characters should watch them more closely during this time as well - they may miss crucial details if they aren't warned, and sudden changes in behavior could stem from outside influence or even possession due to their hampered state.

[frogglesmash]

Large wisdom penalties are often used to represent insanity, probably because they become increasingly disconnected from the world and end up having difficulty telling what is and isn't real.

[ZamielVanWeber]

As wisdom depletes it becomes harder to notice things. First important details will be missed but eventually they will struggle to tell even basic things apart. Wisdom is also tied to memory, so they will become more forgetful as time goes on, culminating in a struggle to remember not critical details from mere moments ago.

[Briton]

One fun affect to roleplay as wisdom decreases, so does reacting thoughtfully or just instinctively. The thought process can begin to shorten

[MHCD]

I can't vouch for this, as I have never experienced it, but I'm told that one's inhibitions and judgment are depleted by drunkenness. While the motor control and slurred speech probably shouldn't manifest, a sense of the "bad idea juice" being increasingly present in his behavior might be appropriate.

Wisdom links to perception and willpower, mechanically. It also is the stat that lets you read other people.

Rather than disconnectedness, as his Wisdom falls, he might start to become more comfortable around others. Too much so. He can't read them, and slowly stops realizing that he is failing to do so. So if it was funny with the dock hands over beer, it's funny with the Duchess in her formal ball. And when she doesn't laugh, she obviously didn't get it: repeat the punch line louder. Perhaps with cruder sound effects backing it up.

It is NOT stupidity. He can still be smart, if he was before. But smarts tell you how to do something. Wisdom tells you whether or not it's a good idea.


Basically have them act as if they got hit with Mind Fog. They should be absent-minded, have trouble focusing, and be prone to miss details (both environment and conversational). Mechanically you already know how it plays out - weaker perceptive ability and will saves, which ties to the above.

Other characters should watch them more closely during this time as well - they may miss crucial details if they aren't warned, and sudden changes in behavior could stem from outside influence or even possession due to their hampered state.

These are some especially good ones here. Look to examples of drunken behavior (less "whoo, party!" and more "dude, what were you thinking?"), or even what you've seen from others or experienced on your own from taking antihistamines for allergies or any other drug that might leave someone "hazy". If a high wisdom creature is very "present", a low wisdom creature is "absent". As wisdom decreases, the character becomes increasingly disconnected from reality - beginning with being less perceptive (including socially as Segev discussed), and down a path that leads to being unable to communicate, completely suggestible, or both.

Have you ever suffered from acute sleep deprivation, like trying to pull multiple all-nighters in a row? That's an easy way to feel the effects of a wisdom penalty or wisdom damage, from losing sense and senses to poor decision making to being "out of it" to becoming increasingly loopy. Later stages of wisdom damage could even have the character alternating between total catatonia and zany insanity.



One fun affect to roleplay as wisdom decreases, so does reacting thoughtfully or just instinctively. The thought process can begin to shorten

I think of a higher wisdom score representative of the ability to see things simply and with clarity, to even work out complex thought process instinctively (animals operating on nothing but instinct even have higher wisdom scores than most humanoids; I would then take it the other direction: the more the wisdom score is decreased, the more the character's thought process lengthens, as it takes increasingly longer to notice things or work a thought out in their mind, to the point where they eventually just can't "get" even the simplest ideas, plans, conversations, and so on.

[Necroticplague]

Well, let's look at what the rules are, and extrapolate from this
-Decrease to the following skills: Lucid Dreaming, Autohypnosis, Control Shape, Heal, Listen, Profession, Sense Motive, Survival, Spot. The running theme here seems to be that you aren't as capable of noticing things. You have a harder time telling a dream from real life, or even noticing you're body isn't as you might prefer
-Alcohol and hallucinations lower your Wisdom (Alcohol and deformity [madness]). To, things that put you 'out of touch' with what the world actually is
-Lowered Will saves. It becomes easier to convince you magically that an idea was your own, when it wasn't (like mental reverse-pickpocketing) [mind-effecting things like Suggestion]; And it similarly becomes harder to tell illusions from actual objects.
-At WIS 0, you become stuck in a deep sleep filled with nightmares. Of interesting note is that it's deep sleep, not 'a coma-like stupor', like the other mental stats

Going from all this, the main symptom of lowered Wisdom is that you're ever increasingly unable to distinguish things. If it was getting progressively worse, I imagine normal perceptions would become fuzzier and harder to pinpoint, like you're in a dream. You might overlook some things that are there, while seeing some things that aren't. As it progresses, your perceptions become further disconnected from reality until you eventually don't realize that you never even actually woke up, still stuck in your own dreams entirely disconnected from the real world. I believe the sleep deprivation analogy someone else used earlier to be rather apt.