How dumb is an Int Score of 7?

[BlueWitch]

If someone has an Intelligence Score of 7, what would they be like?

Would they speak in 3rd Person?

Hill Giant's have a 6. Would a 7 be any noticeable difference?

Bonus Question:
What about an Intelligence Score of 8?

[CharonsHelper]

I figure that Peter Griffin is about a 6-7 in both INT & WIS. So, a bit smarter than Peter Griffin or Forest Gump.

[Buufreak]

I figure that Peter Griffin is about a 6-7 in both INT & WIS. So, a bit smarter than Peter Griffin or Forest Gump.

As shown in the beginning of the movie, Forrest is merely a few points shy of IQ to make it into a regular class. Forrest is closer to an 8 or 9 than 6 or 7.

[GrayDeath]

Intelligence and IQ are not the same.

Int Score in D&D contains a lot of stuff ...well stuffed together.

An Int of 7 can be a more or less average guy with horrible memory, a Forest Gumpish guy, someone who simply never thinks things through, and so on.

Overall, I`d say "pretty dumb but fully functional in low complexity situations" should fit.

[Calthropstu]

If we go with "average intelligence" being a 10, and extrapolate that to IQ, IQ of 7 int would be around 70 which was just around forest gump's tested IQ in the movie. 70 can be functional, as forest gump was, but is slow to learn and will likely do things the way they were taught with little deviation because it works and improvisation is difficult for them. It's the cusp of "normal" and "mentally retarded." 80-90 is fully functional, if a bit slow. 60, or 6 in this case, would be fully mentally retarded. They might say simple things and think it profound, act somewhat like children and will likely follow the person who most seems capable of helping them. People who are nice to them will likely be able to win them over easily.

I don't believe I have ever met someone with iq 50 or below before, but "dumber than a box of rocks" is a saying that would most assuredly apply.

[Psyren]

Depending on class, I'd probably roleplay them like... Shagga son of Dolf from Game of Thrones maybe?

[Rynjin]

7 is slow, but not an idiot. You are essentially 10% worse at everything intelligence related than the average person, so in a standard classroom your 7 Int person would be the kid that if he studies hard can pull a solid B, but no matter how hard he tries he's probably never going to be a straight A student. Without that effort put into it, they're probably a D (or low C) student by default, as they simply don't retain information very well on a first pass.

Look at some average in-game scenarios for knowledge skills.

For common monsters (anything CR 1/2 or lower, so DC 5 or 10) they recognize them just as well as anyone else. Skeletons, goblins, spiders, etc. aren't going to be some unrecognizable creature to them. But remembering what those creatures DO is potentially another matter. Knowing a giant spider has eight legs, eight eyes, and is poisonous is easy enough; remembering WHAT that poison does, or that they can spit webs might be harder (as you only get one piece of information for hitting the DC and every 5 beyond it, and it's possible for you to miss the target on a DC 10 sometimes. Not often, but sometimes).

Where an average person's average roll on Trained Knowledge check is a 13, yours is an 11. That means to hit that base DC 15 to understand something you need to roll a 14 as opposed to the average person's 12, and will never be able to hit those harder DC 22+ checks at all; your comprehension simply ends at that point.

You are far, FAR from the "Me Grug. Me stupid." level of capacity at Int 7, that's more of an Int 3 thing (where you're barely sentient), and Int 5 is closer to what you might expect to find for someone who is actually handicapped.

You in your daily life probably know quite a few Int 7 people, it's just not really apparent without getting into a very long conversation with them, because in the grand scheme of things "below average" still isn't that dumb.

[Eladrinblade]

Came in here to say forrest gump or homer simpson. Technically "retarded" (oh boy, dont ban me mods, it's a real term) but not so dumb that you can't talk to them or anything.

You personally know a bunch of 8's.

[False God]

Do dumb people actually speak in 3rd person? Or is this something the media has perpetuated as a way of mocking stupid people? (this question is rhetorical).

They're probably about as bright as the average WalMart shopper. So, ya know, averagely dumb. Not exceedingly dumb. Not mentally handicapped. Not special needs. Just, not so quick. Might take them another round to solve a problem, might not be so quick to get a joke. Probably won't do so well with tough philosophical, political or mathematical questions.

Probably would be fine in every-day life. Especially in a pseudo medieval society where demands for skilled, knowledgeable workers is low.

[Sian]

I work with predominantly insurance takers that have trashed their smartphones to the point where there insurance have to pay for it to be repaired ... and I'd say that a depressingly high number of them would be hard pressed to achieve Int 7

[Tvtyrant]

D&D is exquisitely bad at mechanically mapping reality, but I would say an int 7 would be just below average enough to be noticeable in a short conversation. They would get confused easily, be unable to follow clear logic, and/or repeat catchy but weak arguments. They might insist that some obviously establishable fact is wrong because they already believe otherwise. "is that a Cadillac Continental? Yes it is!" If they get in a disagreement they quickly become emotional because they know they aren't going to win on logic but feel like they are right, or if they are easier going they might respond to disagreements by insisting all opinions are valid and no one can really know.

In other words, smart enough to get along in life but their intellectual insights are unimpressive. If they add to a conversation it is going to be through greater emotional depth or experience, not their logic.

[Elves]

If we go with "average intelligence" being a 10, and extrapolate that to IQ, IQ of 7 int would be around 70 which was just around forest gump's tested IQ in the movie.

IQ - Int score just doesn't work well, but if we're doing it, 18 would have to be more like ~140-150 (99.5-99.9 percentile), with extreme outliers not accounted for in the normal distribution method. Represent them with an NPC-only trait/template. So each point being 5 IQ could be ok. 14=120 (bright individual). By that count 7 is IQ 85.

[HouseRules]

I assume that Int represent formal education equivalent.

Int of 1 means an equivalent of 1st grade or year 2 education as an adult.
Int of 2 means an equivalent of 2nd grade or year 3 education as an adult.
Int of 3 means an equivalent of 3rd grade or year 4 education as an adult.
Int of 4 means an equivalent of 4th grade or year 5 education as an adult.
Int of 5 means an equivalent of 5th grade or year 6 education as an adult.
Int of 6 means an equivalent of 6th grade or year 7 education as an adult.
Int of 7 means an equivalent of 7th grade or year 8 education as an adult.
Int of 8 means an equivalent of 8th grade or year 9 education as an adult.
Int of 9 means an equivalent of 9th grade or year 10 education as an adult.
Int of 10 means an equivalent of 10th grade or year 11 education as an adult.
Int of 11 means an equivalent of 11th grade or year 12 education as an adult.
Int of 12 means an equivalent of 12th grade or year 13 education as an adult.
Int of 13 means an equivalent of Antegraduate Freshman education as an adult.
Int of 14 means an equivalent of Antegraduate Junior education as an adult.
Int of 15 means an equivalent of Antegraduate Senior education as an adult.
Int of 16 means an equivalent of Antegraduate Questionist education as an adult.
Int of 17 means an equivalent of Non-Thesis Masterate or Baccalaureate First Professional Degree education as an adult. examples include Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, Bachelor of Laws
Int of 18 means an equivalent of Thesis Masterate or Non-Baccalaureate First Professional Degree education as an adult. examples include Doctor of Medicine (US), Jurist Doctorate
Int of 19 means an equivalent of Specialized Masterate or Second Professional Degree education as an adult. examples include Master of Medicine, Master of Surgery, Master of Laws
Int of 20 means an equivalent of Doctorate or Third Professional Degree education as an adult. examples include Doctor of Medicine (non-US), Doctor of Laws

Through experience Wisdom, characters could be smarter.
However, Int measures formal education equivalent.

[Berenger]

Intelligence doesn't represent formal education. Skill points allocated to Knowledge skills represent formal education.

Also, maxed out Intelligence is no requirement to aquire academic grades and is certainly less useful than decent-ish Intelligence coupled with decent-ish Wisdom and / or Charisma. :smallbiggrin:

[Melcar]

If someone has an Intelligence Score of 7, what would they be like?

Would they speak in 3rd Person?

Hill Giant's have a 6. Would a 7 be any noticeable difference?

Bonus Question:
What about an Intelligence Score of 8?

Int 6 is equal to an IQ of 77!
Int 7 is equal to an IQ of 82!
Int 8 is equal to an IQ of 87!

[Firechanter]

We can probably only compare real world IQ distribution with the 3d6 distribution assumed by D&D for normal NPCs. (It is generally assumed that IQ follows a normal distribution within a given society.)
And yes, we'll have to assume that Int == IQ if we want to get anywhere with this comparison.

IRL, about 70% of people lie between IQs 85 and 115 -- defined as "normal" -- and 15% each are below or above these numbers.

This corresponds roughly to a range of 8-13 on 3d6.
(Which also shows that, as I like to point out in this kind of discussion, that not 90% of people will have 10s or 11s everywhere, which is a common fallacy in stat discussions. These are just _averages_.)

So in other words, some 15% of people would have Int 7 or less. So that's like, you walk on a street and count off people in your head: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, DING! -- on average, every 7th person will wade in the shallow end of the Intelligence pool. But not every 7th person is a drooling amoeba that speaks of themselves in 3rd person or can only use infinitives. Most of them will be just pretty limited in their cognitive capacities, have little imagination, poor abstract thought cabalities, be bad at logic and thus susceptible to logical fallacies.

What would Forrest Gump's Int score be? It's funny, intuitively and before I wrote this post, I'd have said 7. But now that I've checked the distribution, it'd probably be more like a 5, nibbling on 6. But after all, keep in mind, stupid is as stupid does.

[Conradine]

Int 7 means bad memory and slow learning. Still fully functional in everyday life.
I think mentally challenged people are best represented by very low Wisdom, which is the ability to perceive and quickly interact with the surroundings. Charisma gives easily the impression of intelligence.

An Int 7, Wis 15, Cha 13 person would probably considered smart although not very "deep".

[Fizban]

A person with Int 7 has a 45% chance of knowing "common knowledge" things, as opposed to the 55% of an Int 10 (that's DC 10, and before you exclaim that everyone knows X, remember how easy it is for late night shows to prove that wrong and how much stuff you've forgotten from school).

An average person with Int 7 has 1 skill point per level, the same as one with Int 9, as about 98% of the population have 2+int skill points and the minimum is 1. Because they start with 4 points, they can still remove the untrained restriction from up to four skills, or have as much as a +10 bonus on a non int skill (4 ranks profession, +3 skill focus, +1 wis, +1 masterwork tool). If the person is a human, they start with 8 skill points and gain 2 per level even at Int 7, because the human bonus comes after the int penalty- even the lowest Int human has as many skill points as the average member of another race, with enough to max out one skill and still dabble in up to four more.

A trained Expert with Int 7 has 4 skill points per level- less than the base of 6, but still twice as many as the average person.

A person with Int 7 is unable to learn Wizard spells, but still fully capable of learning Sorcery, Bardic Magic (including those adjusted 4 skill points per level), or any of the divine classes, and can take any Metamagic or Item Creation feat.

In sum, someone with Int 7 is really not very dumb at all.

[martixy]

~snikt~

Good statistical analysis.

I'll just give a brief summary:
The standard deviation of the IQ scale is 15 points.
The standard deviation of 3d6 is ~3 points. (2.96 more precisely)

Based on what Int models, this will manifest as cognitive impairment like higher reasoning and memory. Probably doesn't overlap with the IQ scale exactly, but you can now scale both measures correctly for the areas where they do.

[ekarney]

Without knowing other mental stats this is a rather difficult question to answer.

With that said, I'd like to add something to the equation - skills. While skills checks might not help us with comparisons to reality, they can help us extrapolate how a person in the D&D universe would cope with having high/low mental scores.

So, Intelligence governs the following skills: Appraise, Craft, Decipher Script, Disable Device, Forgery, Knowledge, Search, and Spellcraft.

Of those skills, the following require ranks in order to be used: Decipher Script, Disable Device, Knowledge, and Spellcraft, so to see how that may affect "Any one person at random" I'm gonna straight up remove them for the purpose of this post. A person with 3 int is going to do the exact same as someone with 30 int when it comes to using DD with no ranks.

So we're left with Appraise, Craft, Forgery and Search, which can be considered "innate" and we can use these to try and figure out how a D&D character with low Int interacts with the world.

Appraise: I'm going to focus solely on the use of "Appraise a common item" because most people don't really need to get super exact values of strange objects, when was the last time anyone reading this had to appraise uranium ingots? So for most of us, we can look at say, a garbage, oldish, car (like 2003ish) and go "oh that's probably worth $900" And that's us passing a DC12 appraise check (Which personally, knowing the prices of common items is a pretty easy thing, not sure why theres a 55% failure rate with 0 ranks assuming int 10)
From this, we can tell perhaps the low-int character doesn't have much of an eye for detail, and as such may be inattentive, or only looks at the big picture. Example: We see a 2003 Honda Civic, low-int character see's a car.

Craft: First of all, I find it really weird that craft isn't trained only, crafting most things requires at least some research, anyway, let's look at items the common person can achieve. Immediately we'll rule out alchemy, and traps as they require specialized skillsets. So a selection of craftables achievable by the common man are: Wooden utensils (DC 5), Whatever the hell a typical item is (DC 10), and on a good day, a high quality item, like a bell. (DC15) I'd like to note however, that whether I have a good day or not, as a person with average intelligence I have literally no idea how craft a goddamn bell. Anyway, High quality items are just about ruled out by our 7-int character (It now requires a 17 to make it or a 15% chance).
I feel like this loops in with appraise quite nicely, as having an eye for detail and not simply looking at the big picture does help in crafting. That being said, this may also indicate a lack of creativity.

Forgery: It's craft but copying. Same deal, sans creativity. Please don't exercise creativity while making forgeries, that's a real 7-int move.

Search: Int 7 or not, we know what searching is. This once again, comes back to looking at things on a large scale.


From this, I've concluded that a low-int character is mainly inattentive, which is odd, seeing as spot as listen are Wisdom skills. Now this lack of attention may come from a number of things, first and foremost, they spend all day daydreaming and all night nightdreaming, though likely the daydreams may be on events that have already occurred as a lack of creativity is possible too. Our second reason could be that the low int character isn't low int at all, and that 7 is just a result of them really not caring too much and being hasty to complete tasks - as hard as it is to craft a bell it's definitely a lot harder when you don't really care what you're doing and you're just trying to get it done ASAP.


Conclusion: Lack of attention and creativity sounds very familiar, and I'm now convinced I have an intelligence of 7.

I would have liked to go into how having a low int could interact with trained skills but honestly it's like 1:04am where I am and as a result of that my own intelligence penalty is getting worse by the minute.

[HouseRules]

Intelligence doesn't represent formal education. Skill points allocated to Knowledge skills represent formal education.

Not really.
Level 19: untrained skill
Level 20: 23 ranks

So knowledge does not represent formal education since you could get any number of ranks if you have enough skill points.

AD&D Thieves have a limit of 15 ranks per level under a bounded accuracy d100.
Convert this similar feature would mean that at no level could a character buy more than 3 ranks, but 3E does not have that limitation.

[Berenger]

I'm not sure what you mean.

[Elkad]

Int7 is the very bottom of normal, before they are noticeably mentally impaired in a first impression.

He was in my squad in the Army. Seemed like a normal guy, funny and likeable, at least for the first 15 minutes.

Try to explain how to read grids on a map (which takes like 15 minutes for most people to absorb) and he didn't understand it at all in the group setting.
2 hours of 1 on 1 instruction got him to understand it. Suddenly did several problems in a row, all correct.
The next day, he'd forgotten it all again. Every bit.

It wasn't just that.
He's the guy who stuck his rifle barrel in the dirt and then didn't check the barrel before firing.
He's the guy who completely mucked up the instructions when doing room-clearing training, and fired half a mag in my direction. He wasn't aiming at me, but it was damn close (inches).
He's the guy who never remembered to resize his parachute for his height, or had something else rigged wrong.
He's the guy who struggled at code books, and even something as basic as the phonetic alphabet was never routine to him.
He's the guy who forgot the combination to his locker every few weeks. (I know damn near every time it happened, because I'd shim it open for him, and he kept the combination written down inside his locker. Same lock for 3 years.)


He could land-nav (compass and landmarks) fine from a map. You just had to point at "we are here" and "go here", instead of giving him a grid. He'd take you right there, or zig-zag around rough terrain, or find the best cover, or whatever you wanted. Pull the map out again after 2 hours of walking, he could point to our position within 100m.

He was a great shot.
He had a gift for camouflage and stealth, including noticing others.
He knew a million jokes.
He got more than his fair share of initial attention from the ladies (especially considering his rather plain looks), but couldn't figure out why he could rarely close the deal.
He didn't get suckered by payday loans, pawn shops, or automatic paycheck deductions.


In D&D terms, his saddle would fall off occasionally. His flint&steel would be in the bottom of his pack instead of his pocket when he needed to burn a troll. He'd try to use holy water on lycanthropes, silver on fey, and cold iron on undead.
Not every time. Just often enough to be annoying.

[GrayDeath]

Int7 is the very bottom of normal, before they are noticeably mentally impaired in a first impression.

He was in my squad in the Army. Seemed like a normal guy, funny and likeable, at least for the first 15 minutes.

Try to explain how to read grids on a map (which takes like 15 minutes for most people to absorb) and he didn't understand it at all in the group setting.
2 hours of 1 on 1 instruction got him to understand it. Suddenly did several problems in a row, all correct.
The next day, he'd forgotten it all again. Every bit.

It wasn't just that.
He's the guy who stuck his rifle barrel in the dirt and then didn't check the barrel before firing.
He's the guy who completely mucked up the instructions when doing room-clearing training, and fired half a mag in my direction. He wasn't aiming at me, but it was damn close (inches).
He's the guy who never remembered to resize his parachute for his height, or had something else rigged wrong.
He's the guy who struggled at code books, and even something as basic as the phonetic alphabet was never routine to him.
He's the guy who forgot the combination to his locker every few weeks. (I know damn near every time it happened, because I'd shim it open for him, and he kept the combination written down inside his locker. Same lock for 3 years.)


He could land-nav (compass and landmarks) fine from a map. You just had to point at "we are here" and "go here", instead of giving him a grid. He'd take you right there, or zig-zag around rough terrain, or find the best cover, or whatever you wanted. Pull the map out again after 2 hours of walking, he could point to our position within 100m.

He was a great shot.
He had a gift for camouflage and stealth, including noticing others.
He knew a million jokes.
He got more than his fair share of initial attention from the ladies (especially considering his rather plain looks), but couldn't figure out why he could rarely close the deal.
He didn't get suckered by payday loans, pawn shops, or automatic paycheck deductions.


In D&D terms, his saddle would fall off occasionally. His flint&steel would be in the bottom of his pack instead of his pocket when he needed to burn a troll. He'd try to use holy water on lycanthropes, silver on fey, and cold iron on undead.
Not every time. Just often enough to be annoying.

Dang, that sounds a LOT like one of my earliest school friends.
Good old Alex, he was the Brawn (and the Sports) I was the Brains (and the Computer to play at^^). Sadly we ahve lost contact over 15 years ago....

And your whole section here made me want to include someone like that in my next NPC Cartridge. ^^

[ZamielVanWeber]

7 is about halfway to "dumbest moron who ever lived." The numbers, especially for int, scale downwards at an incredible rate since all forms of below average intelligence are contained in 6 digits across 4 tiers. Make of it what you will, but by numbers they are less than bright but by scale they are about half-way to Wheatly.

[Tvtyrant]

7 is about halfway to "dumbest moron who ever lived." The numbers, especially for int, scale downwards at an incredible rate since all forms of below average intelligence are contained in 6 digits across 4 tiers. Make of it what you will, but by numbers they are less than bright but by scale they are about half-way to Wheatly.

Yeah but since Dolphins are int 2, we know that 7 is actually quite smart. Int 3 is at "can hold a job" level.

[ZamielVanWeber]

Yeah but since Dolphins are int 2, we know that 7 is actually quite smart. Int 3 is at "can hold a job" level.

Int 3 is also "not totally disabled." If you suffer from a development disability so severe you struggle to string 2 words together you are int 3. They mushed a ton of concepts into one small area (to say nothing of assuming all animals had snake-like intelligence). As long as you avoid any extremes with 7 you are correct as the numbers simultaneously encompasses "moderately disabled" and "below average" and these concepts are generally not inclusive.

[schreier]

Someone used statistics to make correlations:

http://simantics.blogspot.com/2011/01/d-and-iq.html

INT IQ
3 57
4 66
5 72
6 78
7 83
8 88
9 93
10 98
11 102
12 107
13 112
14 117
15 122
16 128
17 134
18 143

[Firechanter]

Yeah but since Dolphins are int 2, we know that 7 is actually quite smart. Int 3 is at "can hold a job" level.

Correction: D&D assumes that dolphins are Int 2. There are biologists who argue that dolphins are barely less intelligent than humans. There are also others who think dolphins are overrated. Either way I would not count an rpg rulebook as authoritative source on the intelligence of marine mammals.

[Fizban]

You also have to remember that the animal max int=2 rule is probably pretty old. I'm pretty sure the basic ability score system is the same as it was back in 1e, which may have been taken from Chainmail before that, which was 1971 *Googles* Koko the gorilla was also born in 1971 and it looks like documentraries started popping up in the 80s. So the animal intelligence rule, which draws the cutoff at animals= no language, 3= language, was almost certainly written *before* there was obvious definitive proof that some animals could learn language.

Not that it's hard to update the rule if you want- just change animal max int to 3, assign 3s where desired, and remove the assumption that int 3= understand and read and write a language (which plenty of spots in the books seem to forget anyway).

[Tvtyrant]

Correction: D&D assumes that dolphins are Int 2. There are biologists who argue that dolphins are barely less intelligent than humans. There are also others who think dolphins are overrated. Either way I would not count an rpg rulebook as authoritative source on the intelligence of marine mammals.

Like I said, D&D is really bad at mapping RL. Dolphins are smarter then some individuals, so Int 7 is perfectly fine.

[Eldan]

My favourite way to answer these questions is to turn them around. 7 is a -2 modifier. 14 is a +2 modifier. Do you treat someone with a 14 intelligence as noticeably more intelligent than everyone else? It's the same difference from the average. Remember, if you roll straight dice, a peasant with an intelligence 3 is as common as a wizard with an intelligence 18.

[Firechanter]

Well yeah, Int 14 is pretty sharp, but not savant-like. As we've established, 7 and 14 lie just outside the standard deviation -- just outside of what is defined as "normal".

Nitpick: Int 18 will be more common than Int 3, as (in D&D) you can increase a lower score with level and age, but mental scores never drop (except by magic).

[Chauncymancer]

Int 7 is "Noticeably dumber than an orc, smarter than a troll but not by enough that you'd practically notice." So how ever stupid you play your trolls, ettins, and ogres is how dumb Int 7 is.

[Firechanter]

BTW, that's also an amusing thought: technically, Orcs and Ogres and whatnot should also have a similar spread, using 3d6 + whatever racial modifier they get. So Orcs might _on average_ have Int 8 but in fact 87% of them will have a score higher or lower than that. Similarly for Strength and other stats. (The question is, can they dump Int below 3?)
This quickly becomes scary if you imagine an Ogre that "rolled well" on Strength and greets you with a whopping Str 26 or whatever. Certainly not something you want to encounter as CR3.


Come to think of it, although I have bitched and complained about the PF Point Buy in the past (somehow I always end up with 1 point I don't know what to do with), I now have to admit it actually makes sense: you can shift points within 1 sigma at 1:1 cost, and the points get more expensive exactly when you leave the standard deviation. You might almost think they did this on purpose after careful thought, but that would require Paizo to actually do math and heed the results...

[Zanos]

Someone used statistics to make correlations:

http://simantics.blogspot.com/2011/01/d-and-iq.html

INT IQ
3 57
4 66
5 72
6 78
7 83
8 88
9 93
10 98
11 102
12 107
13 112
14 117
15 122
16 128
17 134
18 143

I use this, but generalize it to "roughly 5 iq per int point", which would make the PB minimum 90 IQ and the max 140 before racial adjustments. I think that's a decent range for PCs. So the dumbest PCs, even with a -2 int race, are not simpering morons, just slow.

[Alexvrahr]

I don't know the IQ scores of many people but I do have a general sense of how smart a lot of people are. Which may be inaccurate, but for the sake of argument a roll of 7 has about a 7% chance of coming up on 3d6. About 9% of rolls will be lower, about 84% higher. About 1/6 of the population would have an 'intelligence' of 7 or less which likely means you know several such people. An Intelligence of 7 corresponds to one of the stupidest adult people you know but not the absolute worst.