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PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-07, 10:43 PM
Note: I don't know how much this affects communities other than this forum, and especially discussions of D&D-based games.

One thing I've noticed is a presumption on these forums that being super smart (D&D specific: high INT score) also means that
* you're super prepared
* you're super paranoid
* you can accurately predict and understand what other people are thinking even if you've never met them
* you can adapt instantly (or very quickly) to changing circumstances
* you rarely if ever make mistakes or have holes in your defenses--if you do, it's because the author is handing you the idiot ball.
* you can learn anything faster, even completely non-intellectual things
* you're better at tactics, possibly even superhumanly good

In my opinion, that doesn't follow either from the rules (of D&D specifically here) or from anything like real-world experience.

Rules

Here's 5e's description of the Intelligence ability score:


Intelligence, measuring reasoning and memory
...
Intelligence measures mental acuity, accuracy of recall, and the ability to reason.

Intelligence Checks
An Intelligence check comes into play when you need to draw on logic, education, memory, or deductive reasoning. The Arcana, History, Investigation, Nature, and Religion skills reflect aptitude in certain kinds of Intelligence checks.
...
The DM might call for an Intelligence check when you try to accomplish tasks like the following:

* Communicate with a creature without using words
* Estimate the value of a precious item
* Pull together a disguise to pass as a city guard
* Forge a document
* Recall lore about a craft or trade
* Win a game of skill


and here's 3e's (from the SRD):


Intelligence determines how well your character learns and reasons. This ability is important for wizards because it affects how many spells they can cast, how hard their spells are to resist, and how powerful their spells can be. It’s also important for any character who wants to have a wide assortment of skills.

You apply your character’s Intelligence modifier to:

The number of languages your character knows at the start of the game.
The number of skill points gained each level. (But your character always gets at least 1 skill point per level.)
Appraise, Craft, Decipher Script, Disable Device, Forgery, Knowledge, Search, and Spellcraft checks. These are the skills that have Intelligence as their key ability.


Note what it applies to: learning and reasoning. You pick up new knowledge fast. You can reason quickly from existing knowledge. Note that reading or understanding people and their motivations isn't listed. Neither is tactics. Or preparation. Or anything on that first list, really.

Real world
I grew up around smart people. I went to school with smart people (Physics undergrad, Physics PhD). I've interacted with a lot of people of varying degrees of intelligence. In my experience, smart people are no less likely to make stupid mistakes, especially outside of their area of focus. They're more generally prone to having egos that blind them to the flaws in their reasoning. They're just as prone to confirmation bias and other such errors of thought. And they're effortlessly out-maneuvered and out "thought" in anything like a social scenario by those with much less intelligence but better people skills. And they're way more likely to make stupid mistakes in things that aren't easily amenable to logic or for which the information is lacking. They have one tool, rational thought. And since they're so good at that one tool, they often think themselves into pits that someone with a bit more epistemic humility (and better perception) avoid.

I call them "brilliant idiots." Get a physicist talking outside of his field and often they'll end up acting like they can fix everything (it's a stereotype for a reason--it's actually quite true). But the tools that serve them so well in the very well behaved world of particles and solids fail miserably when applied to humans. Or even things like chemistry or programming--don't ask a physicist to program something if you want it to work consistently or be easy to maintain. Been there, done that. Scientific code is miserable from an engineering standpoint. Heck, just being able to solve the equations of motion of a ball doesn't make you very good at actually catching one. And most people who can do physical things well do so not by understanding the theory (although that happens as well) but through practice until the muscles move without conscious thought.

And most super-smart, super-educated people I've known have been quite rigid in their beliefs, especially in their specialty. They have their pet model and they'll hammer everything into conformance. And if something doesn't work, they tend to reject that reality and substitute their own. Or blame reality rather than their model. They've thought themselves into a corner and solve the issues by declaring that it's the real world that's at fault.


An experimentalist brings a graph to a theoretician, asking "why does it do that" (pointing to a particular part of the curve)? The theoretician thinks for a moment, then confidently gives a complicated explanation. About half-way through, the experimentalist says "wait, you're holding it upside down". The theoretician turns it over, looks at it for a second, and continues on his same explanation of why it's like that.

Hey, no one said physicists had senses of humor. They're surgically removed as part of the PhD entrance process.


On the other hand, I've met lots of people without much formal education and without much "intelligence" who were deep wells of understanding about people and things. Who could diagnose a failing engine by listening to it. Who could get to the heart of a complicated interpersonal matter with a single question, despite not having training. Who had gut instincts that led them right way more than the super smart people's best logic. Especially in matters of who to trust.

Game
So here's my plea.

To DMs--don't have your super-smart people be perfect. Give them flaws, blind spots, etc. just like anyone else. Let the party, if they find those blind spots, exploit them and surprise the bad guy. That's not the idiot ball. Being super smart doesn't mean you're perfect or that you thought of all the angles. And it certainly doesn't give you access to other ways of finding out what the players are up to.

To players--accept that your INT 20 wizard is great at academics. But isn't Batman. And doesn't have to be a super paranoid uber-optimizer 5D chess master. In fact, the game is generally better (IMO) the fewer such people that there are.

Pex
2021-03-08, 12:11 AM
Intelligence as superpower is an excuse for the DM to metagame the BBEG to thwart player ingenuity and/or their character abilities. It's supposed to be a "challenge" which to these DMs means near impossible. Players need to be super smart themselves and sometimes rely on luck. They need to learn the lesson there's always someone more powerful how dare they think their characters are all that.

There is merit to the idea that it is ok once in a while for the party to face an opponent not in the party's ideal. The Paladin will fight a flying creature who keeps its distance. The Sorcerer will find himself surrounded in melee. The Warlock will face a Helmed Horror :smallwink:. However, there is a difference between being a true challenging encounter and playing against your players. I do not care for the DMs who do the latter on purpose. It takes practice and learning from others for those who really want to know the difference and not be DM as adversary.

Rynjin
2021-03-08, 12:20 AM
Intelligence does not necessarily imply preparation in a vacuum.

But an adventuring Wizard, or other hyper-intelligent character should be. They have the capacity to remember, learn, and reason through problems relevant to their experience. Life and death problems, ways an enemy spellcaster can disable or kill you, common monstrous threats and their weaknesses...these are your area of expertise, not theoretics and academia. Lacking in your area of expertise implies incompetence, and most PCs and BBEGs are not (nor should they be) incompetent.

Absolutely, your wizard who hangs out in his tower researching new spells all day, or who works for the local magic shop manufacturing items to sell should not be hyper-paranoid beyond maybe advanced passive protections for their valuables (because if you CAN Sepia Snake Sigil as an easy thief deterrent, why wouldn't you?), but an adventurer? They absolutely should be Batman. This goes for any adventurer, and all the more for ones with tons and tons of options, which Wizards have in spades.

Saintheart
2021-03-08, 12:39 AM
Heck, just being able to solve the equations of motion of a ball doesn't make you very good at actually catching one. And most people who can do physical things well do so not by understanding the theory (although that happens as well) but through practice until the muscles move without conscious thought.

Somewhat unrelated, but I doubt a world-class outfielder does any sort of conscious cogitation when he's in the act of assessing where to stand to catch the ball. What's going on is not the dreadful Richard Dawkins clanger that at some level mathematical computations must be happening. It's plain old biofeedback and pattern recognition together with remembering advice from old and retired outfielders, said biological base having been put in place standing in a thousand outfields on a thousand summer afternoons over his youth and having somehow managed not to fall victim to terminal boredom in the interim.

Academics believe that conducting lectures about the principles of avionics results in birds being able to fly.

That being said: intransigence, ego, hindsight bias, and the desperation to rationalise rather than throw out a theory are all human conditions, not aspects confined to which side of the (really daft) normal distribution IQ chart you fall upon. In short: being a moron does not require low intelligence, nor high intelligence. If there is a single intelligence that can be measured at all, which might make the subject of an INT score far more interesting :)

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-08, 12:51 AM
That being said: intransigence, ego, hindsight bias, and the desperation to rationalise rather than throw out a theory are all human conditions, not aspects confined to which side of the (really daft) normal distribution IQ chart you fall upon. In short: being a moron does not require low intelligence, nor high intelligence. If there is a single intelligence that can be measured at all, which might make the subject of an INT score far more interesting :)

Oh absolutely. My point was that smart people are just as prone to such cognitive biases and issues as less smart people. Being good at academic stuff (which is all a high INT means) doesn't free you from that.

And I've known many highly educated, quite intelligent people who have...irrational...beliefs. Ones that directly contradict the things they study. Humans are complex and are good at compartmentalizing our lives and believing multiple mutually inconsistent things simultaneously.

And for everyone, paranoia is a mental disorder. And high INT people aren't necessarily any better at accurately judging risk than anyone else. Knowing something and living that way are very different things. As an example, the number of nurses and doctors that smoke tobacco is way too high. And surgeons are known to be disproportionately risk takers and adrenaline junkies.

NichG
2021-03-08, 01:14 AM
Note: I don't know how much this affects communities other than this forum, and especially discussions of D&D-based games.

One thing I've noticed is a presumption on these forums that being super smart (D&D specific: high INT score) also means that
* you're super prepared
* you're super paranoid
* you can accurately predict and understand what other people are thinking even if you've never met them
* you can adapt instantly (or very quickly) to changing circumstances
* you rarely if ever make mistakes or have holes in your defenses--if you do, it's because the author is handing you the idiot ball.
* you can learn anything faster, even completely non-intellectual things
* you're better at tactics, possibly even superhumanly good

In my opinion, that doesn't follow either from the rules (of D&D specifically here) or from anything like real-world experience.


Do you think there's a place in fiction or tabletop RPGs to depict characters who do have some or all of those characteristics, putting aside whether they should follow from a particularly named attribute?

Mechalich
2021-03-08, 01:18 AM
you can learn anything faster, even completely non-intellectual things

In the d20 system, where a higher intelligence score is directly related to getting more skill points, and skill points are broadly fungible (in Pathfinder they explicitly are, a change that makes the game less complicated but also explicitly makes Int more valuable as a stat) this is directly true according to the rules. For a class that has no features beyond skills, like the Expert, higher intelligence directly increases their power.


On the other hand, I've met lots of people without much formal education and without much "intelligence" who were deep wells of understanding about people and things. Who could diagnose a failing engine by listening to it. Who could get to the heart of a complicated interpersonal matter with a single question, despite not having training. Who had gut instincts that led them right way more than the super smart people's best logic. Especially in matters of who to trust.

None of these examples are things that would be primarily mediated by Intelligence, or an Intelligence related skill, in d20. You're describing a Listen check, a series of charisma based skill checks, and the generalized application of the Wisdom stat.

Now this is important in that characters with high Intelligence who lack a correspondingly high Wisdom or Charisma (or whatever the appropriate proxies are in other games), are going to face some difficulties. The reverse is true of course, to the point that one of the 2e books about clerics had a section titled something like 'all sense and no brains' as player advice.


Academics believe that conducting lectures about the principles of avionics results in birds being able to fly.

More reasonably, academics may believe that conducting lectures about the principles of avionics results in people being able to fly planes. This is still untrue, but learning the principles of avionics absolutely does make it possible to learn other parts of piloting faster and it equips potential pilots with the tools to handle unfamiliar piloting challenges better than if otherwise unequipped.

Extend this outward to 'super-intelligence' and you get what might be called a synergistic superpower. Essentially, high intelligence makes the reasoned application of other abilities more effective, and potentially super-high intelligence makes them more effective in a logarithmic or exponential fashion.

In D&D, of course, arcane magic is a superpower, and high intelligence makes arcane magic better - both directly in the form of bonus spells, but also indirectly by providing more points for skills associated with arcane magic, and more knowledge of creatures, places, and items with which to leverage arcane magic. For example, a higher Knowledge (the planes) score, significantly increases the utility of Planar Binding. In a superheroes game, you can easily synergize super-intelligence alongside a power like Cyberkinesis or Mind Control as a matter of targeting. Knowing how the world works matters an awful lot when you are trying to manipulate it.


To players--accept that your INT 20 wizard is great at academics. But isn't Batman. And doesn't have to be a super paranoid uber-optimizer 5D chess master. In fact, the game is generally better (IMO) the fewer such people that there are.

At least in terms of 3.X d20, INT 20 isn't even scratching the bottom of 'super-intelligence.' Int 20 is the first measurable increment above peak human achievement, so maybe marginally smarter a generalized 'genius.' However, characters can, and do, easily spike their Int into the 40s by higher levels, which is to say we're talking about characters who are as far above Isaac Newton as Isaac Newton is above a Golden Retriever. This sort of extreme value at least feels like it should be a fundamentally different sort of conceptual space, which is I think were a lot of the intelligence as superpower concepts spring from.

Lord Raziere
2021-03-08, 01:21 AM
*slow clap, builds until uproarious applause*

OP needed to be said. fully agree. and sometimes thinking out something rationally is just overthinking it. and some times an intelligent person can be stuck in analysis paralysis, being able to see all the possible options but not knowing which one to choose so that something is done.

high Int doesn't make you a mastermind, it just makes you a better encyclopedia.

JoeJ
2021-03-08, 01:56 AM
I agree with this as a general rule for characters with a high intelligence score, but I think there is room to have a BBEG for whom intelligence as a superpower is their specific shtick; an Ozymandias. But to play fair, it should be obvious early in the campaign what the PCs are up against, and there should only be one Ozymandias. (Except in the superhero genre. If you're running a supers game, go nuts.)

Saintheart
2021-03-08, 02:39 AM
Do you think there's a place in fiction or tabletop RPGs to depict characters who do have some or all of those characteristics, putting aside whether they should follow from a particularly named attribute?

Certain elements of the Isekai genre. Most particularly the wish-fulfilment ones. Albeit that's because the main character looks supernaturally prepared or capable because they already know memes, mathematical rules, or logic that aren't consciously known to the occupants of the fictional world. e.g. Harry Potter and the Natural 20.

Morty
2021-03-08, 02:52 AM
This is an important thing to remember, because I see it come up a lot. Even beyond roleplaying games, there's an old and resilient tendency to portray "smart" characters like this in media. Here's the thing, though: there's no such thing as one "intelligence" trait in real life. What we label as "intelligence" or someone being "smart" is a variety of different traits that are sometimes related and sometimes aren't. An intelligence attribute in any RPG is just a mechanical abstraction covering some particular aptitudes.

Mechalich
2021-03-08, 03:30 AM
I agree with this as a general rule for characters with a high intelligence score, but I think there is room to have a BBEG for whom intelligence as a superpower is their specific shtick; an Ozymandias. But to play fair, it should be obvious early in the campaign what the PCs are up against, and there should only be one Ozymandias. (Except in the superhero genre. If you're running a supers game, go nuts.)

Ozymandias is an interesting example because he's a character who has successfully leveraged super-intelligence into phenomenal wealth. Wealth, of course, is a form of power. However, very importantly, in a world in which supernatural abilities can be purchased - whether by hiring supers to work for you, buying mystical items, or any number of other methods - wealth is a superpower. In D&D this is very clear, as nay number of threads based on the premise of infinite wealth have made obvious.

Which is to say that if intelligence can be reliably used to generate massive wealth, then it is very clearly a superpower. Now, in the real world the answer is clearly no. While high intelligence and massive wealth are highly correlated, the majority of the people in the upper percentage brackets of intelligence are of modest means and a huge variety of external effects - most notably wealth status at birth - have a greater influence on the ability to accumulate wealth than pretty much any internal traits, and the further one goes back in time the more this is so.

In a fantasy world though, well, things might be different. In particular, in a wide range of magical systems the deliberate application of magical practice to wealth generation should be able to accumulate massive wealth with relative ease - even if the spellcaster in question isn't a particularly talented businessman and has to fork over the majority of their accumulated gains to a partner. Of course, the reason this is easy tends to be that fantasy worlds are often poorly constructed and there are mass-market economic applications of magic available so low-hanging as to be functionally underground.

In fact this is probably one of the reasons intelligence is treated so often as a superpower - many TTRPG players are in fact significantly better at mathematics and possess better business acumen than the people who design TTRPG or just general fantasy settings (this is not a high bar). Which means that those players can easily identify means by which an exploit can be utilized to obtain vast wealth in-universe, and they justify taking advantage of this exploit by saying that their character is a genius (and certain real world fortunes have been made in more or less this fashion, so it's not that implausible). And this redoubles because most RPG settings aren't built to handle characters with phenomenal wealth (2e AD&D contained specific advice to DMs to disallow characters who were born wealthy) and quickly breaks the game.

Satinavian
2021-03-08, 03:34 AM
Note: I don't know how much this affects communities other than this forum, and especially discussions of D&D-based games.

One thing I've noticed is a presumption on these forums that being super smart (D&D specific: high INT score) also means that
* you're super prepared
* you're super paranoid
* you can accurately predict and understand what other people are thinking even if you've never met them
* you can adapt instantly (or very quickly) to changing circumstances
* you rarely if ever make mistakes or have holes in your defenses--if you do, it's because the author is handing you the idiot ball.
* you can learn anything faster, even completely non-intellectual things
* you're better at tactics, possibly even superhumanly good
Let's see.

Intelligence does not make you prepared. But it sure is helpful if you are preparing. Preparing is when you have time to think stuff over and act on extrapolation. That plays right to the strengths of intelligence

Intelligence does not make you paranoid.

Intelligence does not make you better at understanding people at all. It might help you understand complex plans made by other people though. If you get access to them.

Intelligence does not help you adapt fast. In fact there is research indicating that having more knowledge leads to slower decision making, so the opposite effect may be applicable.

Intelligence does not prevent mistakes.

Intelligence does help you to learn faster a lot of things. It does not help you train your body or develop muscle memory/reflexes.

Intelligence sure does help you get better at tactics. It is not a substitute to experience or knowledge but tactics involve a lot of memorized procedures and a lot of guessing outcomes of actions, so intelligence is extremely helpful.


Or even things like chemistry or programming--don't ask a physicist to program something if you want it to work consistently or be easy to maintain. Been there, done that. Scientific code is miserable from an engineering standpoint.Wholeheartly disagree. Becoming software developer is one of the most common occurences for trained theoretical physicists that switch occupations and don't pursue a university career. That is certainly not because they are bad at it, it is because of how easy it is and how much overlap in skills tends to exist. Sure, they tend to start of with a lot oif bad coding habits but they tend to bring better skills than nearly every other kind of career changer.




To summarize :

Intelligence is not a replacement for experience. An expert/professional in X will always produce produce way better results than some amateur who is only sinificantly more intelligent. But add experience/expert knowledge to the intelligent person and they will in most cases get ahead.

MoiMagnus
2021-03-08, 03:57 AM
Intelligence should be as much a superpower as the other ability scores.

If you're allowing a high Dex low Str character to defy gravity doing acrobatics [like Legolas' bridge run (https://youtu.be/3kNqc5Hrh0M?t=140), for example] that would (1) definitely needs a lot of strength to even approach them IRL and (2) just be impossible IRL, then it make sense to have the "Movie superintelligence" be used too. (Especially in 5e where Int is one of the weakest ability score). [And to have high Wis essentially mindread peoples at will, etc]

If you're restraining the other ability scores to be physically realist, then yes, high Int should absolutely be restrained in the same way, and you're totally right that the bonus peoples assume high Int would give are completely overblown. And, as you noted, that's probably the interpretation the nearest from the rules.

icefractal
2021-03-08, 04:15 AM
Even to the extent that tying it to stats makes sense, Intelligence alone gets too much credit - I'd say that the whole "prepared for anything" thing is as much Wisdom as it is Intelligence.

But really, I think it is mostly orthogonal to stats. People sometimes come at it from the other end too - if a character doesn't have 20+ Int, it's unrealistic for them to make plans or think things through? Well I'm flattered you think I'm a super-genius (since I'm the one making these plans), but I'm really not. :smalltongue:

As far as "assumed plans", like "I cast the right divinations and ask the right questions to find out who my foes are, what they're going to do, and how to deal with them. My character would know how to do all that, so just tell me the info"? To me, that's abstracting the entire game out of the game. So, not a fan.

King of Nowhere
2021-03-08, 04:31 AM
Your experience with smart people is different than mine. You seem to have met the arrogant, stuck-up type. A lot of smart, educated people are very humble. As they say, very few people are learned enough to realize the depth of their ignorance.
That said, in my experience arrogance seem a most common flaw of mathematicians. And no, they are no smarter than a chemist or biologist or economist or anyone else.

But yes, smart people tend to be smart in specific circumstances, and no better than anyone else at everything else.

That said, i tend to characterize smart people with strenghts and flaws. They have some established fields of expertise, where they are most unlikely to get anything wrong. And they have blund spots that are more easily exploitable. They often come when the characters are surprised by something unforeseen, or kicked out of their comfort zone.
I established exactly one villain as having no significant weaknesses whatsoever; given that he's a unique person, and an 800 years old immortal, it's acceptable; he's the main villain exactly because of that. Even then, he's characterized as the best in the world in only a couple of fields; he's knowledgeable on everything, but for a specific question outside his specific field he will defer to a specific expert. He's very good at people's skills, but professional spies can fool him. and of course he'll draw wrong conclusion if presented with wrong/incomplete facts.
His main "power" is that he's resourceful and focused and immortal, so if he puts his mind to a task, he will find a way. Eventually.

In my experience, the whole "this character is smart so he should know better" is most common in players trying to talk themselves out of their god wizard having failed at something. But then, my sample is a grand total of 1 player, not enough to be significant.
Even then, i use the areas of expertise approach to figure out if the character really should know better

NichG
2021-03-08, 04:42 AM
Certain elements of the Isekai genre. Most particularly the wish-fulfilment ones. Albeit that's because the main character looks supernaturally prepared or capable because they already know memes, mathematical rules, or logic that aren't consciously known to the occupants of the fictional world. e.g. Harry Potter and the Natural 20.

Or things like Death Note, Code Geass, Sherlock, or even aspects of Dr Who, White Collar, Psych, the Mentalist, Black List, the Great Pretender...

But this is more about clarifying the argument. Is the issue e.g. players saying 'I invested in Int, so the GM should tell me what the BBEG's plans are and what spells he has prepared on the basis of this handwriting sample' when actually to do that they should have 30 ranks in Forgery and a bunch of Factotum levels or a backstory involving training from a secretive guild of investigative assassins rather than Int? Or is it that such a portrayal shouldn't be supported by the GM at all regardless of build? Or even, if the player happens to correctly guess the BBEG's plans out of character on their own (say, based on reading the GM) then, regardless of build or characterization, they should generally not use that? Or is it primarily an argument about GM limits rather than player limits?

Basically, is the issue the stat, or is the argument that the portrayal of a certain style of hyper competence is generally incompatible with tabletop games and/or good fiction?

Saintheart
2021-03-08, 05:38 AM
Or things like Death Note, Code Geass, Sherlock, or even aspects of Dr Who, White Collar, Psych, the Mentalist, Black List, the Great Pretender...

But this is more about clarifying the argument. Is the issue e.g. players saying 'I invested in Int, so the GM should tell me what the BBEG's plans are and what spells he has prepared on the basis of this handwriting sample' when actually to do that they should have 30 ranks in Forgery and a bunch of Factotum levels or a backstory involving training from a secretive guild of investigative assassins rather than Int? Or is it that such a portrayal shouldn't be supported by the GM at all regardless of build? Or even, if the player happens to correctly guess the BBEG's plans out of character on their own (say, based on reading the GM) then, regardless of build or characterization, they should generally not use that? Or is it primarily an argument about GM limits rather than player limits?

Basically, is the issue the stat, or is the argument that the portrayal of a certain style of hyper competence is generally incompatible with tabletop games and/or good fiction?

Off the cuff? I think it comes down to the difference between passive fiction and the RPG, with an inversion of the rule that a character can only be as smart as the writer.

Taking Sherlock/Psych/Lie to Me/Mentalist or similar, I would hazard that the thrill we get from watching those characters in action is in the revelation of the mystery by the protagonist, a character who has abilities that are basically a black box to us. We don't know how they work, and they defy pedestrian logic. We don't know (until after the event) how the mental leaps are taken by which the protagonist figures out the solution ahead of us. And when the protagonist does explain it to us (as he inevitably does) we get a big dose of enjoyment out of the fact the solution was so simple in hindsight, but the protagonist has the ability to see that simplicity from when the answer was opaque to us. It's sort of akin to the prestige of a magic trick, where the magician produces something where we can't easily figure out how we did it ... but unless we're complete philistines, we usually don't want to know how he did it. We don't want to see the magic at work. Because the magic is ultimately that of the writer's hand: he determined the twist and how Sherlock/Psych/Lie to Me worked it out all ahead of time, he knows the pledge, the turn, and the prestige and how to play them best to the audience. And - as I suspect most literary professors have forgotten - the more you know about how the magic works, the less magic there is, and the more you take the beautiful butterfly out of the wild and leave it stone dead, splayed out on some pinboard, gathering dust in some darkened archive somewhere.

I hazard that the type of player you're talking about, the one running the INT 2000 character and who expects to be given the DM's entire dastardly plan in one thought bubble, well, he's the guy who thinks that he is entitled to the same level of plot knowledge as the writer. Understandable reasoning, but also wrong. And this is one of the problems I have with the idea that a RPG is just a collaborative story: well, no, it isn't, and this phenomenon is one of the reasons why. If it's a collaborative story, with no particular division between DM and players, then things like characters suddenly arising to uncover the plot with a single INT roll shouldn't bother anybody. And yet they do, QED. I suspect the reason comes down to this: the RPG is closer to a collaborative performance, the drama of the adventure's narrative being what is performed ... but it is not a performance where all the players get the same script at the same time. And that, in turn, is because the players are both performers and audience, which is also why it's a Role Playing Game.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-08, 10:34 AM
Intelligence is not a replacement for experience. An expert/professional in X will always produce produce way better results than some amateur who is only sinificantly more intelligent. But add experience/expert knowledge to the intelligent person and they will in most cases get ahead.

In my experience, the benefit from intelligence (if you can even boil it down to a single parameter) hits a cap in most affairs. The set of things that benefit strongly from academic expertise (which is really where intelligence shines) is much more limited than most people imagine.


Even to the extent that tying it to stats makes sense, Intelligence alone gets too much credit - I'd say that the whole "prepared for anything" thing is as much Wisdom as it is Intelligence.

But really, I think it is mostly orthogonal to stats. People sometimes come at it from the other end too - if a character doesn't have 20+ Int, it's unrealistic for them to make plans or think things through? Well I'm flattered you think I'm a super-genius (since I'm the one making these plans), but I'm really not. :smalltongue:

As far as "assumed plans", like "I cast the right divinations and ask the right questions to find out who my foes are, what they're going to do, and how to deal with them. My character would know how to do all that, so just tell me the info"? To me, that's abstracting the entire game out of the game. So, not a fan.

Agreed. That was most of my point--most of those things attributed to Intelligence are really more related to a combination of Wisdom and Charisma, at least in D&D terms.


Or things like Death Note, Code Geass, Sherlock, or even aspects of Dr Who, White Collar, Psych, the Mentalist, Black List, the Great Pretender...

But this is more about clarifying the argument. Is the issue e.g. players saying 'I invested in Int, so the GM should tell me what the BBEG's plans are and what spells he has prepared on the basis of this handwriting sample' when actually to do that they should have 30 ranks in Forgery and a bunch of Factotum levels or a backstory involving training from a secretive guild of investigative assassins rather than Int? Or is it that such a portrayal shouldn't be supported by the GM at all regardless of build? Or even, if the player happens to correctly guess the BBEG's plans out of character on their own (say, based on reading the GM) then, regardless of build or characterization, they should generally not use that? Or is it primarily an argument about GM limits rather than player limits?

Basically, is the issue the stat, or is the argument that the portrayal of a certain style of hyper competence is generally incompatible with tabletop games and/or good fiction?

The stat, as written, is fine. The "I should be allowed to break the game because I'm smart" or other such things, which mostly rely on bypassing the actual game and harming the fun of everyone else, while ignoring everything in the actual rules about what high INT means. Characters like that work really well in published fiction, because the author can cheat. Batman does have a superpower--it's called Authorial Fiat.

And GMs shouldn't do it either--in fact, I've seen it more from GMs (and discussion about GMs) than from players. Players accept, in my experience, that they're bounded by what the world and the rules say. GMs often want bad guys who aren't holding the idiot ball, by which they mean are hyper-competent and never make mistakes. Because super smart or something. Including being able to literally cheat and gain access to information that they couldn't have (ie things that the players, not the characters, were discussing).


Do you think there's a place in fiction or tabletop RPGs to depict characters who do have some or all of those characteristics, putting aside whether they should follow from a particularly named attribute?

In fiction? Sure. It works really well, because the author can stack the deck and knows the end from the beginning. In tabletop RPGs, it's a lot harder to do right. Because there's a shared ruleset and a shared world and no single person has all the access. And there's a game element.

Plus, if they really were that hyper-competent, the party would stand no chance of success. They'd be crushed at the instant they potentially became a threat in the future.


Off the cuff? I think it comes down to the difference between passive fiction and the RPG, with an inversion of the rule that a character can only be as smart as the writer.

Taking Sherlock/Psych/Lie to Me/Mentalist or similar, I would hazard that the thrill we get from watching those characters in action is in the revelation of the mystery by the protagonist, a character who has abilities that are basically a black box to us. We don't know how they work, and they defy pedestrian logic. We don't know (until after the event) how the mental leaps are taken by which the protagonist figures out the solution ahead of us. And when the protagonist does explain it to us (as he inevitably does) we get a big dose of enjoyment out of the fact the solution was so simple in hindsight, but the protagonist has the ability to see that simplicity from when the answer was opaque to us. It's sort of akin to the prestige of a magic trick, where the magician produces something where we can't easily figure out how we did it ... but unless we're complete philistines, we usually don't want to know how he did it. We don't want to see the magic at work. Because the magic is ultimately that of the writer's hand: he determined the twist and how Sherlock/Psych/Lie to Me worked it out all ahead of time, he knows the pledge, the turn, and the prestige and how to play them best to the audience. And - as I suspect most literary professors have forgotten - the more you know about how the magic works, the less magic there is, and the more you take the beautiful butterfly out of the wild and leave it stone dead, splayed out on some pinboard, gathering dust in some darkened archive somewhere.

I hazard that the type of player you're talking about, the one running the INT 2000 character and who expects to be given the DM's entire dastardly plan in one thought bubble, well, he's the guy who thinks that he is entitled to the same level of plot knowledge as the writer. Understandable reasoning, but also wrong. And this is one of the problems I have with the idea that a RPG is just a collaborative story: well, no, it isn't, and this phenomenon is one of the reasons why. If it's a collaborative story, with no particular division between DM and players, then things like characters suddenly arising to uncover the plot with a single INT roll shouldn't bother anybody. And yet they do, QED. I suspect the reason comes down to this: the RPG is closer to a collaborative performance, the drama of the adventure's narrative being what is performed ... but it is not a performance where all the players get the same script at the same time. And that, in turn, is because the players are both performers and audience, which is also why it's a Role Playing Game.

Basically this.

This was prompted by a conversation where the other person felt that it was totally fine to let the bad guy make plans based on things that the DM knew that the character couldn't know (or wasn't established to be able to know). Basically presuming that the bad guy had the party under 24/7 perfect, undetectable surveillance including thought detection. And that it damaged their immersion if the party were able to "outthink that super smart person" because he could just totally predict every move they'd make.

To me, that sounded like the worst form of antagonistic DM metagaming and rife for risk of railroading. Sorry, but even super smart people have blind spots. And just being super smart doesn't let you read the script. Especially if there isn't supposed to be a script at all.

Willie the Duck
2021-03-08, 11:28 AM
I think there are multiple competing and compounding issues.

First is the love affair with the concept of intelligence, to which I think this alludes:

In my experience, the benefit from intelligence (if you can even boil it down to a single parameter) hits a cap in most affairs. The set of things that benefit strongly from academic expertise (which is really where intelligence shines) is much more limited than most people imagine.
Look, we're all nerd here. We've all met 'that guy' -- the one that was told what a bright young wo/man they were from a very young age, and maybe even has the numerical scores (for all that's worth) to back it up*. Said 'that guy' believes that their high intelligence makes them a cut above other people in some way**, doesn't recognize their own limitations, and thinks overly much of their own expertise' ability to solve any and all problems (or maybe they are just jerks).
*although I've heard the tale of doing so well on an IQ test that 'all the testing people had to come over to see that I wasn't cheating' so often I assume that must be something they tell kids when they are merely doing routine anti-cheat checks
**or are actually insecure and this is posturing

My advice is to leave 'that guy' to do their thing. There's a 'that guy' down the block who thinks looks or money or whatever is awesome as well, and in gaming circles the Int boosters have to compete with the lich boosters, tiefling boosters, katana boosters, Drizzt boosters (now mostly extinct), 'I have this perfect build' guys, RAW-boosters, and all other flavors of fandom there can be in gaming.

Beyond that is the issues to which I think these apply:

I agree with this as a general rule for characters with a high intelligence score, but I think there is room to have a BBEG for whom intelligence as a superpower is their specific shtick; an Ozymandias. But to play fair, it should be obvious early in the campaign what the PCs are up against, and there should only be one Ozymandias. (Except in the superhero genre. If you're running a supers game, go nuts.)

Do you think there's a place in fiction or tabletop RPGs to depict characters who do have some or all of those characteristics, putting aside whether they should follow from a particularly named attribute?

Generally, I condense this down to two issues:
One (1) is the issue that the Int score in TTRPGs is (mostly) tied to some kind of book learning, knowledge skill aptitude, occasionally general tendency to gain skills (PF/3e's skill point rules, or TSR-era's # of free languages known), or flat out wizarding; yet it is sometimes mixed with the overall concept of being tactical or strategic genius (possibly taken to ridiculous levels), despite there being plenty of examples (in fiction and real life) where the great-at-book-learning-or-wizarding character is anything but a brilliant general or mastermind (absent minded professor, etc.).

Two (2) is the concept of brilliant mastermind at all (in fiction and especially in gaming).

To the first, yes really there should be two separate scores you might afix to a character -- Int and wizarding prowess (whether those two should go together I leave to another discussion), and... Brilliance? Genius? Something other than Intelligence. Whatever term we all agree a character like Ozymandias and Sherlock have, but Cobra Commander lacks.

To the second, yes quite often the method that the GM makes a villain seem intelligent if to give them some level of omniscience -- knowing stuff they shouldn't, not being fooled by things they should, sometimes just having the NPCs working in unison despite not being in communication. All of this is 'cheap' on some level, but on the other hand, if the DM isn't themselves a tactical genius, there are a limited number of ways for them to emulate this concept, if that's against what they think their PCs should be pitted in a given situation. At least it is better than PC computer games, where they make an opponent more challenging by letting them cheat in every conceivable way (Civilization games, I am looking at you).

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-08, 11:44 AM
Note: I don't know how much this affects communities other than this forum, and especially discussions of D&D-based games.

One thing I've noticed is a presumption on these forums that being super smart (D&D specific: high INT score) also means that
* you're super prepared
* you're super paranoid
* you can accurately predict and understand what other people are thinking even if you've never met them
* you can adapt instantly (or very quickly) to changing circumstances
* you rarely if ever make mistakes or have holes in your defenses--if you do, it's because the author is handing you the idiot ball.
* you can learn anything faster, even completely non-intellectual things
* you're better at tactics, possibly even superhumanly good


IMO this arises in part from the practice in media of lazy writers depicting smart characters as "magical geniuses", using buttpulls of "ah but I knew that all along" and "I anticipated all eventualities" in place of doing the hard work of actually building up the character's smart-cred from the start. It's a subset of "revealed character trait" syndrome, in which characters get tagged with a descriptor as "the smart guy", or "the strong guy" or "the charming guy" or "the magic-using guy", and that is what passes for character-building.

Gamers then just emulate that.

There are even threads here where it's proposed that super-smart characters get to retroactively establish "facts" within the "fiction" of the game, or learn secrets they don't have any direct access to, just to make them "look as smart" as they're supposed to be.

OldTrees1
2021-03-08, 12:14 PM
Imagine someone with high Wisdom and high Intelligence. Let's call that Int 16 Wis 16.

Now imagine someone with Int 22 and Wis 22.

This is someone with deep knowledge about many topics (exact depth and breadth can vary) and is very aware of the current situation. Given time and inclination they can make predictions. Well, anyone can make predictions, but their predictions are more likely to be accurate.

Now, this does not mean they know about all topics. Someone that knows a lots about other people will predict them better than someone studying worms while living under a rock. So gaps makes sense, but those gaps might or might not be relevant to the trope.

For example Xanatos is an example of someone with High Int, Wis, and Cha. They specialized in knowing how people worked. So they created plans with many possible victory conditions such that every outcome would satisfy at least a small victory despite the other setbacks. They did have blind spots. Xanatos did not know enough about magic to beware the eye of odin, nor understand that Goliath would not see Xanatos' love for Fox as a weakness to exploit, nor understand biotech enough to oust Sevarius. However in their domain of expertise, they were very good at predicting outcomes.

JoeJ
2021-03-08, 12:24 PM
This was prompted by a conversation where the other person felt that it was totally fine to let the bad guy make plans based on things that the DM knew that the character couldn't know (or wasn't established to be able to know). Basically presuming that the bad guy had the party under 24/7 perfect, undetectable surveillance including thought detection. And that it damaged their immersion if the party were able to "outthink that super smart person" because he could just totally predict every move they'd make.

To me, that sounded like the worst form of antagonistic DM metagaming and rife for risk of railroading. Sorry, but even super smart people have blind spots. And just being super smart doesn't let you read the script. Especially if there isn't supposed to be a script at all.

That sounds like the GM forgot that:

1) The BBEG is supposed to be defeated in the end.
2) By the PCs.
3) Due to choices made by the players, and not because the GM was leading them by the nose.

Tanarii
2021-03-08, 12:57 PM
First is the love affair with the concept of intelligence, to which I think this alludes:

Look, we're all nerd here. We've all met 'that guy' -- the one that was told what a bright young wo/man they were from a very young age, and maybe even has the numerical scores (for all that's worth) to back it up*. Said 'that guy' believes that their high intelligence makes them a cut above other people in some way**, doesn't recognize their own limitations, and thinks overly much of their own expertise' ability to solve any and all problems (or maybe they are just jerks).
*although I've heard the tale of doing so well on an IQ test that 'all the testing people had to come over to see that I wasn't cheating' so often I assume that must be something they tell kids when they are merely doing routine anti-cheat checks
**or are actually insecure and this is posturingThe Cult of Intelligence runs very strong in TRPGs, college folk, and folks working STEM fields (including IT). The Cult of Science is one branch office of it. The Bohemian Cult (think literature & poetry reading) is another.

The thing is ... the vast majority of very smart folks I met when I was younger didn't ever do much with it. Even as I got older, I've met a bunch of people that think they're so damn intelligent compared to other people, but struggle to get a career going, struggling through a series of jobs instead.

Intelligence is nice but knowing what you want to do, ambition, work ethic, or motivation is better.

KineticDiplomat
2021-03-08, 01:08 PM
Well, “realistically” none of the ability stats are super powers. I know some people with a mean bench press who would not comfortably sword fight half a dozen men at once, Boston marathon types who none the less don’t take well to the idea of camping let alone resisting copious physical harm, and some extremely attractive and charming people who cannot actually negotiate the fate of nations and sway parties with severely opposed interests moments after walking into a room, and in one case a superior pianist whose nimble fingers did not turn her into a sniper.

In reality, none of the attributes of RPGs can deliver remotely at the level we routinely expect, and even in those cases where they might help they are broken into many, many sub categories.

Telok
2021-03-08, 01:31 PM
Honestly for a long long time I've accepted that the D&D style int/wis/cha stats are just as much a weird game construct as D&D style hit points. It doesn't pay to examine them too closely because they have too much in them that's so simplified it can't be mapped back to reality.

For the rest of it I would posit that much of the issue comes from confusing correlation with causation and experience with potential. Does high intelligence (however you may define that) cause social incontinence? Does it cause someone to be incapable of listening to a pinging automobile engine? Does low (again, whatever definition you're using) cause people to be highly socially capable? Does it cause mechanical aptitude? If the answer is "no" then you're talking about correlations, and the cause is something else. Prehaps a society pushes highly intelligent people towards areas of difficult abstract reasoning that is mainly academic in nature? Which could cause them to be less experienced in the areas of persuasive conversation, reading other peoples emotional states, and automotive repair?

Correlation is not causation. Potential is not experience.

As for intellect being a super power, it totally can be. Play a supers game where the human ability average is 10 on a 5 to 15 scale, build a character with 90 intellect. That's just as much a super power as a character with a 90 strength, agility, speed, or personality. What it does will depend on the exact game rules, your ability to play the character, and what the DM thnks about it.

JoeJ
2021-03-08, 01:38 PM
As for intellect being a super power, it totally can be. Play a supers game where the human ability average is 10 on a 5 to 15 scale, build a character with 90 intellect. That's just as much a super power as a character with a 90 strength, agility, speed, or personality. What it does will depend on the exact game rules, your ability to play the character, and what the DM thnks about it.

And if you want inspiration, the comics have shown about a bazillion different ways that both heroes and villains can use their super intelligence as a power.

Xervous
2021-03-08, 01:47 PM
Feels like a lot of emotional baggage is getting dredged up here so I’ll keep it short.

No duh bad storytelling is bad.

No duh bypassing play in a group event that’s supposed to be about play can be bad.

And no duh, house rules are things of legend and lore that feed all manner of horror stories.

Batcathat
2021-03-08, 01:51 PM
As for intellect being a super power, it totally can be. Play a supers game where the human ability average is 10 on a 5 to 15 scale, build a character with 90 intellect. That's just as much a super power as a character with a 90 strength, agility, speed, or personality. What it does will depend on the exact game rules, your ability to play the character, and what the DM thnks about it.

Despite the thread title, I don't think anyone is denying that super intelligence could be a super power, but rather that high intelligence on its own can't justify some of the things it's routinely used to justify in fiction.

JoeJ
2021-03-08, 02:03 PM
Despite the thread title, I don't think anyone is denying that super intelligence could be a super power, but rather that high intelligence on its own can't justify some of the things it's routinely used to justify in fiction.

AIUI, the OP's complaint was about GMs who use high intelligence as an excuse to screw over the PCs. I think that's a legitimate complaint, but I think the problem in that case is not the idea of intelligence as a power per se, but rather a GM who applies that concept in a way that is not fair to the other players.

Xervous
2021-03-08, 02:11 PM
AIUI, the OP's complaint was about GMs who use high intelligence as an excuse to screw over the PCs. I think that's a legitimate complaint, but I think the problem in that case is not the idea of intelligence as a power per se, but rather a GM who applies that concept in a way that is not fair to the other players.

Regardless of the justification, the GM is still screwing over the PCs because that’s what the GM wants to do. If this is what everyone signed up for, great. If not, then it’s a problem.

JoeJ
2021-03-08, 02:16 PM
Regardless of the justification, the GM is still screwing over the PCs because that’s what the GM wants to do. If this is what everyone signed up for, great. If not, then it’s a problem.

Absolutely. High intelligence is just the excuse, and not any better of one than anything else. I mean, how often do Lex Luthor, Dr. Sivana, or the Ultra-Humanite ultimately win?

Quertus
2021-03-08, 02:18 PM
I am pretty strongly in agreement with the OP here. I think that there is space for *some* of those things, but that simply having high "Intelligence" is insufficient to guarantee such results.


Intelligence does not necessarily imply preparation … but an adventurer? They absolutely should be Batman. This goes for any adventurer, and all the more for ones with tons and tons of options, which Wizards have in spades.

Perhaps if the world were run honest, only those Wizards predisposed to being Batman would survive, and thus this statement would inherently be true.


But really, I think it is mostly orthogonal to stats. People sometimes come at it from the other end too - if a character doesn't have 20+ Int, it's unrealistic for them to make plans or think things through? Well I'm flattered you think I'm a super-genius (since I'm the one making these plans), but I'm really not. :smalltongue:

Lol. There is also the role-playing element - is it reasonable for your character to see the things that you see? If so, that's a great argument; if not, it's an obfuscation.


As far as "assumed plans", like "I cast the right divinations and ask the right questions to find out who my foes are, what they're going to do, and how to deal with them. My character would know how to do all that, so just tell me the info"? To me, that's abstracting the entire game out of the game. So, not a fan.

Ditto.


Or things like Death Note, Code Geass, Sherlock, or even aspects of Dr Who, White Collar, Psych, the Mentalist, Black List, the Great Pretender...

But this is more about clarifying the argument. Is the issue e.g. players saying 'I invested in Int, so the GM should tell me what the BBEG's plans are and what spells he has prepared on the basis of this handwriting sample' when actually to do that they should have 30 ranks in Forgery and a bunch of Factotum levels or a backstory involving training from a secretive guild of investigative assassins rather than Int? Or is it that such a portrayal shouldn't be supported by the GM at all regardless of build? Or even, if the player happens to correctly guess the BBEG's plans out of character on their own (say, based on reading the GM) then, regardless of build or characterization, they should generally not use that? Or is it primarily an argument about GM limits rather than player limits?

Basically, is the issue the stat, or is the argument that the portrayal of a certain style of hyper competence is generally incompatible with tabletop games and/or good fiction?

Wow, what a dense/rich topic!

I imagine we'll each have our own opinion on this.

Certainly, there are plenty of GMs and plenty of modules which advocate the opposition utilizing intelligence to plan for things beyond what the GM has considered. In "Halls of the High King", Flamsterd is written as intentionally provoking the PCs to attack him, and his defenses are written as "assume that they defeat anything that the PCs throw at him". Can one player legitimately be expected to provide a challenge for multiple?

For players or GM, to what extent should they be limited to characters that they can successfully roleplay?

For players, to what extent should they require the system to empower them with these abilities, to what extent should they get GM buy-in, and to what extent should they rely on player skill?

Specific questions of what does the *GM* think would be required to get this information (your handwriting analysis example), and what to do when the *player* is able to deduce things that they want their character to know (your "reading the GM" example being one particular edge case of that larger question) could be informative for creating a general theory, or even worthy of analysis for their own sake.

Kelb_Panthera
2021-03-08, 02:30 PM
With 3.5 at least, there's a detail that might throw a monkey-wrench in your criticism; int focused characters are superhumanly intelligent by mid-level.

That level 17+ wizard isn't just smarter than anybody you have ever or will ever meet, he's so smart as to make Einstein and Hawking look like blithering idiots by comparison. It's so far beyond anything we, as a species, have ever experienced as to be effectively alien.

3 is barely sapient.
10 is the average human
18-20 are men like Einstein

The average 17+ wizard is rocking a 24 at minimum and a min-maxed one could be as high as 36 without getting into esoteric, questionable system trickery. At the extreme, the wizard is as much more intelligent than Hawking as Hawking is smarter than Koko the gorilla that was taught sign-language. It's an utterly immense difference that's difficult to fathom.

Taking some liberties with the implications isn't just acceptable, it's necessary to portray it as even vaguely accurate.

Willie the Duck
2021-03-08, 02:37 PM
The Cult of Intelligence runs very strong in TRPGs, college folk, and folks working STEM fields (including IT). The Cult of Science is one branch office of it. The Bohemian Cult (think literature & poetry reading) is another.

The thing is ... the vast majority of very smart folks I met when I was younger didn't ever do much with it. Even as I got older, I've met a bunch of people that think they're so damn intelligent compared to other people, but struggle to get a career going, struggling through a series of jobs instead.

Intelligence is nice but knowing what you want to do, ambition, work ethic, or motivation is better.
Oh, I know. I manage a department full of programmers, developers, and a few lawyers, and the battles over who are 'the smart ones' is amazing (and yes, there are a lot of people on this and boards like it who I imagine work in a place very similar). I also, like the OP, grew up in the intelligentsia culture, and honestly until my head injury injected a nice batch of humility along with some diminished verysmartness, was one of those guys. Nowadays I tend to use 'competent' as my go-to adjective, alongside 'smart' as roughly 'highly able to successfully navigate through life while accomplishing ones goals.' Regardless, my primary point was that worrying overly much about a Cult of Intelligence person overly valuing raw intelligence (in a TRPG) is like worrying about the guy who thinks overly highly of their salary, or sportscar, or that their fandom (comic, anime, Star Wars vs Trek, etc.) is objectively superior to other peoples, etc.


AIUI, the OP's complaint was about GMs who use high intelligence as an excuse to screw over the PCs. I think that's a legitimate complaint, but I think the problem in that case is not the idea of intelligence as a power per se, but rather a GM who applies that concept in a way that is not fair to the other players.
Definitely. Bad GMs are also an eternal thing. To me, I think the real question is whether a given system fosters that kind of thinking or not. Since we started with D&D style stats, I guess I'll think on D&D --
I think D&D does a few things that might contribute to the notion that the Wizard/Magic User stat also correlates to being a successful mastermind (examples: illithids and obviously liches and other monsters often types as evil genius schemer types have genius (17-18) intelligences, or the modern equivalent), but not much that a mastermind villain should be played omnisciently. The most I can think of is that in certain editions there aren't a lot of ways that a enemy genius monsters (illithid, lich, elder dragon) could do to stop a well-prepared group of high-level PC monster-slayers except break the rules somehow. Some things like 3e scry-and-die are otherwise very hard to stop, and this can push starting DMs to respond with something akin to 'uh, well, they would have thought of that and had countermeasures in place.' Other than that, I don't know exactly what they system is doing. I think it is mostly just straight up DMs not always being great, and the solution to that is more experience, being willing to accept critique, and groups being willing to work with DMs to grow.

Xervous
2021-03-08, 02:45 PM
With 3.5 at least, there's a detail that might throw a monkey-wrench in your criticism; int focused characters are superhumanly intelligent by mid-level.

That level 17+ wizard isn't just smarter than anybody you have ever or will ever meet, he's so smart as to make Einstein and Hawking look like blithering idiots by comparison. It's so far beyond anything we, as a species, have ever experienced as to be effectively alien.

3 is barely sapient.
10 is the average human
18-20 are men like Einstein

The average 17+ wizard is rocking a 24 at minimum and a min-maxed one could be as high as 36 without getting into esoteric, questionable system trickery. At the extreme, the wizard is as much more intelligent than Hawking as Hawking is smarter than Koko the gorilla that was taught sign-language. It's an utterly immense difference that's difficult to fathom.

Taking some liberties with the implications isn't just acceptable, it's necessary to portray it as even vaguely accurate.

I’d be quicker to point to skill points for 3.5e

If we are going off classic assumptions that cap standard humans at level 6 it’s the 9+ extra levels the wizard has that are doing the heavy lifting for stuff like knowledge: magical intrusion countermeasures or what have you. The L15 10 INT barbarian who picked up proficiency from a feat is still +5 ahead of L6 18 INT Einstein. But for all these numbers we could be asking about the difficulty of climbing a tree...

JoeJ
2021-03-08, 02:58 PM
The most I can think of is that in certain editions there aren't a lot of ways that a enemy genius monsters (illithid, lich, elder dragon) could do to stop a well-prepared group of high-level PC monster-slayers except break the rules somehow. Some things like 3e scry-and-die are otherwise very hard to stop, and this can push starting DMs to respond with something akin to 'uh, well, they would have thought of that and had countermeasures in place.' Other than that, I don't know exactly what they system is doing. I think it is mostly just straight up DMs not always being great, and the solution to that is more experience, being willing to accept critique, and groups being willing to work with DMs to grow.

What do the PCs do to keep their enemies from scrying them? Surely that would be happening after they've interfered with the BBEG's plans a couple of times. Assuming they have some protective strategy that works (and they should), the BBEG should be doing the same thing.

AdAstra
2021-03-08, 03:09 PM
Yup, not much more to add. Intelligence is a fuzzy enough thing in real life and really doesn't map well onto an RPG, and there's a hell of a lot of fiction that treats being a genius or even just very smart as magic that lets you never be wrong or lack competence in anything.

NichG
2021-03-08, 03:24 PM
The stat, as written, is fine. The "I should be allowed to break the game because I'm smart" or other such things, which mostly rely on bypassing the actual game and harming the fun of everyone else, while ignoring everything in the actual rules about what high INT means. Characters like that work really well in published fiction, because the author can cheat. Batman does have a superpower--it's called Authorial Fiat.

And GMs shouldn't do it either--in fact, I've seen it more from GMs (and discussion about GMs) than from players. Players accept, in my experience, that they're bounded by what the world and the rules say. GMs often want bad guys who aren't holding the idiot ball, by which they mean are hyper-competent and never make mistakes. Because super smart or something. Including being able to literally cheat and gain access to information that they couldn't have (ie things that the players, not the characters, were discussing).

In fiction? Sure. It works really well, because the author can stack the deck and knows the end from the beginning. In tabletop RPGs, it's a lot harder to do right. Because there's a shared ruleset and a shared world and no single person has all the access. And there's a game element.


So imagine a homebrew Xanatos class for D&D (or just abilities in some non-D&D system) with the following mechanics available, in both cases as something PCs can get access to:

Mastermind - Once per session, you can retroactively change off-screen planning decisions made about gear loadout, purchases, arrangement of spaces you control (such as positions and presence of traps).

Confident Conclusion - Once per session, you can issue a hypothesis about some circumstances within the game or setting and the GM responds truthfully with one of 'true', 'partially true', or 'false'.

Paranoid Contingency - The character is never surprised, and may act in surprise rounds following ambush (or otherwise cannot be unable to act due to lack of preparedness or due to not expecting a sudden attack). Whenever the character would be totally off guard and unable to act during ambush (such as if they are attacked while asleep, attacked through a wall, etc), they may choose to actually have been somewhere else within 100ft of that location, having left a decoy in place in anticipation of this circumstance.

Bat Shark Repellent - Once per day, the character can become immune to a single specific source of threat - a particular spell, a particular type of weapon (including for example the natural weapons of a particular type of creature, but not 'all natural weapons'), etc on the basis of having prepared a counter for exactly that threat. This can't be as broad as 'immune to this creature' or 'immune to my enemies' or 'immune to fire'. The immunity lasts for the remainder of the scene in which it is used.

Calm Mien - The character gains immunity to imposed existential horror, fear effects such as dragon fear that are instinctual rather than magical mind control, or other such forms of conceptually- or situationally- induced madness or paralysis.

Would something like that be okay in your book, since it doesn't tie those attributes to Intelligence in particular but rather constitutes dedicated training and experience (or at least, commitment to that particular archetype), and are equally available to PCs and BBEGs and come with the attendant opportunity cost of e.g. having to sink 5 levels into these things if its D&D.

Or is it still problematic because of how abilities like this interact with gameplay and/or narrative structure?

How about if it goes even further with a capstone ability? Such as Rewrite the Plot - Once per session, the character can narrate a theory explaining the factors and forces behind recent events to at least 80% of the people involved in those events. If no strong evidence can be brought forward to strictly disprove this theory, reality is rewritten such that the character's theory is exactly how things happened. If evidence that this theory is impossible is provided, the character suffers (X consequence) as backlash. The existence of such evidence is not enough to stop this power - someone has to point it out. Rewrite the Plot cannot openly change the current state of affairs as visible within the scene - someone who was wounded can't be healed or someone who is present can't actually be somewhere else. However, it can modify offscreen elements such as making it so someone who was thought to be dead was actually faking it.



Two (2) is the concept of brilliant mastermind at all (in fiction and especially in gaming).

To the first, yes really there should be two separate scores you might afix to a character -- Int and wizarding prowess (whether those two should go together I leave to another discussion), and... Brilliance? Genius? Something other than Intelligence. Whatever term we all agree a character like Ozymandias and Sherlock have, but Cobra Commander lacks.

To the second, yes quite often the method that the GM makes a villain seem intelligent if to give them some level of omniscience -- knowing stuff they shouldn't, not being fooled by things they should, sometimes just having the NPCs working in unison despite not being in communication. All of this is 'cheap' on some level, but on the other hand, if the DM isn't themselves a tactical genius, there are a limited number of ways for them to emulate this concept, if that's against what they think their PCs should be pitted in a given situation. At least it is better than PC computer games, where they make an opponent more challenging by letting them cheat in every conceivable way (Civilization games, I am looking at you).

Well, this is sort of my question to the OP. If we added a Guile stat to D&D, and someone min-maxed a character to have 40 Guile, would that actually resolve this issue? If we added explicit mechanics that specified how a PC or villain could pay for being this sort of mastermind, does that resolve it? Or is the objection to people liking to depict this archetype at all? Because the original post feels to me like it could be read as 'Intelligence gets too much credit, some of these things are Wisdom/unspecified stat', as 'players try to use a high stat to justify getting things that they haven't paid for', as 'hypercompetent characters are Mary Sues and have no place in fiction at all', or as 'people are overly fond of this particular archetype and its getting old, give it a break please'.

Willie the Duck
2021-03-08, 03:28 PM
What do the PCs do to keep their enemies from scrying them? Surely that would be happening after they've interfered with the BBEG's plans a couple of times. Assuming they have some protective strategy that works (and they should), the BBEG should be doing the same thing.
It's been too long since I've been able to get a 3e group going, but I recall it being a real problem for PCs as well (especially if you have enough minions or known associates that you can't have 'magic item of non-scrying' on everyone). Kind of a epic arms race of 'why hasn't someone pulled the trigger on a war of extinction yet?' corollary to the Tippyverse. I'm sure someone will correct me on the specifics. I'm trying to find ways that the system itself encourages this negative DM tendency, and not coming up with much (so if this example has a hole in it, all the more to my main point that I'm not finding much).

I think perhaps what is missing is more discussions on what makes a good gaming experience and a good GM in the actual game books. That there is a cottage industry* in GM-ing advice blogs kinda points out that the issue. Everyone has to start gaming at some point, and GMing is a learned skill. There are more than a few known pitfalls, and it'd be good to see more of them expressly mentioned in the core books (the things most gamer will see, unlike anything we can put up in these forums).
*does it count as an industry if there's no money in it? :smalltongue:


Well, this is sort of my question to the OP. If we added a Guile stat to D&D, and someone min-maxed a character to have 40 Guile, would that actually resolve this issue? If we added explicit mechanics that specified how a PC or villain could pay for being this sort of mastermind, does that resolve it? Or is the objection to people liking to depict this archetype at all? Because the original post feels to me like it could be read as 'Intelligence gets too much credit, some of these things are Wisdom/unspecified stat', as 'players try to use a high stat to justify getting things that they haven't paid for', as 'hypercompetent characters are Mary Sues and have no place in fiction at all', or as 'people are overly fond of this particular archetype and its getting old, give it a break please'.

There certainly are more than a few subjects in the mix. OP could certainly clarify more regarding what they'd like to see the most discussion. I'd be glad to do a deep dive on whichever they like.

Telok
2021-03-08, 03:47 PM
What do the PCs do to keep their enemies from scrying them? Surely that would be happening after they've interfered with the BBEG's plans a couple of times. Assuming they have some protective strategy that works (and they should), the BBEG should be doing the same thing.

Warrior types? Not a bloody thing, even after being warned and offered assistance in getting defenses.

That's why when it was the BBEGs turn to use the tactic the mundanes were the scry targets and got scragged on round 2 before they did anything more than scratch off some temp hp. The cleric lasted another round and a half soloing a cr+3 fight. It took two additional attempts to get the psion who was out pawning magic trash at the time. That one finally went down (1 round KO) to 8 level 12 rogues camping the tavern with the party corpses and using scroll wealth-mancy to escape detection and overwhelm defenses (over 50d6+(more than 40) and some misc. saves). I think we were 16th level.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-08, 03:51 PM
With 3.5 at least, there's a detail that might throw a monkey-wrench in your criticism; int focused characters are superhumanly intelligent by mid-level.

That level 17+ wizard isn't just smarter than anybody you have ever or will ever meet, he's so smart as to make Einstein and Hawking look like blithering idiots by comparison. It's so far beyond anything we, as a species, have ever experienced as to be effectively alien.

3 is barely sapient.
10 is the average human
18-20 are men like Einstein

The average 17+ wizard is rocking a 24 at minimum and a min-maxed one could be as high as 36 without getting into esoteric, questionable system trickery. At the extreme, the wizard is as much more intelligent than Hawking as Hawking is smarter than Koko the gorilla that was taught sign-language. It's an utterly immense difference that's difficult to fathom.

Taking some liberties with the implications isn't just acceptable, it's necessary to portray it as even vaguely accurate.

So? The rules don't say that having INT > X means you're omnicompetent. The INT score affects exactly and only what it says it affects. It doesn't give you hidden capabilities.

In that sense, INT is not a superpower. Super smart people may (depending on the rest of the characterization) have the listed powers, but it doesn't happen just by having super intelligence. The two are largely orthogonal (largely, because there are limits at the low end of intelligence where some of the powers don't make much sense).

The 5D chessmasters of the supers worlds don't just have "Super Intelligence". Instead, they have "Super Intelligence, Super Preparedness, (etc as appropriate)".


So imagine a homebrew Xanatos class for D&D (or just abilities in some non-D&D system) with the following mechanics available, in both cases as something PCs can get access to:

Mastermind - Once per session, you can retroactively change off-screen planning decisions made about gear loadout, purchases, arrangement of spaces you control (such as positions and presence of traps).

Confident Conclusion - Once per session, you can issue a hypothesis about some circumstances within the game or setting and the GM responds truthfully with one of 'true', 'partially true', or 'false'.

Paranoid Contingency - The character is never surprised, and may act in surprise rounds following ambush (or otherwise cannot be unable to act due to lack of preparedness or due to not expecting a sudden attack). Whenever the character would be totally off guard and unable to act during ambush (such as if they are attacked while asleep, attacked through a wall, etc), they may choose to actually have been somewhere else within 100ft of that location, having left a decoy in place in anticipation of this circumstance.

Bat Shark Repellent - Once per day, the character can become immune to a single specific source of threat - a particular spell, a particular type of weapon (including for example the natural weapons of a particular type of creature, but not 'all natural weapons'), etc on the basis of having prepared a counter for exactly that threat. This can't be as broad as 'immune to this creature' or 'immune to my enemies' or 'immune to fire'. The immunity lasts for the remainder of the scene in which it is used.

Calm Mien - The character gains immunity to imposed existential horror, fear effects such as dragon fear that are instinctual rather than magical mind control, or other such forms of conceptually- or situationally- induced madness or paralysis.

Would something like that be okay in your book, since it doesn't tie those attributes to Intelligence in particular but rather constitutes dedicated training and experience (or at least, commitment to that particular archetype), and are equally available to PCs and BBEGs and come with the attendant opportunity cost of e.g. having to sink 5 levels into these things if its D&D.

Or is it still problematic because of how abilities like this interact with gameplay and/or narrative structure?

How about if it goes even further with a capstone ability? Such as Rewrite the Plot - Once per session, the character can narrate a theory explaining the factors and forces behind recent events to at least 80% of the people involved in those events. If no strong evidence can be brought forward to strictly disprove this theory, reality is rewritten such that the character's theory is exactly how things happened. If evidence that this theory is impossible is provided, the character suffers (X consequence) as backlash. The existence of such evidence is not enough to stop this power - someone has to point it out. Rewrite the Plot cannot openly change the current state of affairs as visible within the scene - someone who was wounded can't be healed or someone who is present can't actually be somewhere else. However, it can modify offscreen elements such as making it so someone who was thought to be dead was actually faking it.

Well, this is sort of my question to the OP. If we added a Guile stat to D&D, and someone min-maxed a character to have 40 Guile, would that actually resolve this issue? If we added explicit mechanics that specified how a PC or villain could pay for being this sort of mastermind, does that resolve it? Or is the objection to people liking to depict this archetype at all? Because the original post feels to me like it could be read as 'Intelligence gets too much credit, some of these things are Wisdom/unspecified stat', as 'players try to use a high stat to justify getting things that they haven't paid for', as 'hypercompetent characters are Mary Sues and have no place in fiction at all', or as 'people are overly fond of this particular archetype and its getting old, give it a break please'.

In a hypothetical game where such fourth-wall-violating abilities are normal, that would be acceptable. It establishes that this is a power of this particular character. It's not just an unstated consequence of "being really smart".

As to the second question--I wouldn't like a Guile stat personally, but if it existed and had those powers as its description, I'd accept it (if the rest of the system was acceptable). Because then, having high Guile really is those powers. By definition.

I object to people smuggling in things to intelligence that
a) belong to other ability scores
b) constitute going beyond the rules purely for munchkinry.

I also feel, personally, that "hypercompetent" characters do not interact well with TTRPGs and especially poorly with D&D. It's an archetype that can work in other fiction due to the different constraints, but not one that works well (in my opinion) in D&D, for many reasons. It rarely plays well with the rest of the party (overshadowing or boring the rest of them by monopolizing the narrative) and warps the entire game's narrative around its own needs. And handles failure exceptionally poorly, which is a bad thing for a game where failure is always on the table (or should be).

Willie the Duck
2021-03-08, 04:13 PM
I also feel, personally, that "hypercompetent" characters do not interact well with TTRPGs and especially poorly with D&D. It's an archetype that can work in other fiction due to the different constraints, but not one that works well (in my opinion) in D&D, for many reasons. It rarely plays well with the rest of the party (overshadowing or boring the rest of them by monopolizing the narrative) and warps the entire game's narrative around its own needs. And handles failure exceptionally poorly, which is a bad thing for a game where failure is always on the table (or should be).

Out of curiosity, three questions:
1) For a guileless player wanting to play a character with a decent amount of guile, what would you consider your preferred method?
2) For something like a mystery/detective game, what are your thoughts on clue mechanics, where a specific roll, instead of direct 'we check the ____ for missing ____' might uncover a useful clue?
3) If you the GM plans a "hypercompetent" antagonist character, have a set villain plan or lair or course of action prepared, and the players come up with a course of action you did not foresee, but honestly believe said character would have, what is the correct response?

I'm not advocating any specific thing, just trying to get a bead on your preferences. These are situations where I think clear best solutions are not easy or forthcoming.

Morty
2021-03-08, 05:53 PM
With 3.5 at least, there's a detail that might throw a monkey-wrench in your criticism; int focused characters are superhumanly intelligent by mid-level.

That level 17+ wizard isn't just smarter than anybody you have ever or will ever meet, he's so smart as to make Einstein and Hawking look like blithering idiots by comparison. It's so far beyond anything we, as a species, have ever experienced as to be effectively alien.

3 is barely sapient.
10 is the average human
18-20 are men like Einstein

The average 17+ wizard is rocking a 24 at minimum and a min-maxed one could be as high as 36 without getting into esoteric, questionable system trickery. At the extreme, the wizard is as much more intelligent than Hawking as Hawking is smarter than Koko the gorilla that was taught sign-language. It's an utterly immense difference that's difficult to fathom.

Taking some liberties with the implications isn't just acceptable, it's necessary to portray it as even vaguely accurate.


So? The rules don't say that having INT > X means you're omnicompetent. The INT score affects exactly and only what it says it affects. It doesn't give you hidden capabilities.

In that sense, INT is not a superpower. Super smart people may (depending on the rest of the characterization) have the listed powers, but it doesn't happen just by having super intelligence. The two are largely orthogonal (largely, because there are limits at the low end of intelligence where some of the powers don't make much sense).

The 5D chessmasters of the supers worlds don't just have "Super Intelligence". Instead, they have "Super Intelligence, Super Preparedness, (etc as appropriate)".


Indeed, the rules are clear on what a high-level wizard's intelligence allows them to accomplish. It lets them cast spells that lesser spellcasters can't even comprehend. Depending on their skill selection, it might also give them a wealth of arcane knowledge. But there's really no need to extrapolate it onto entirely unrelated capabilities.

Mechalich
2021-03-08, 05:55 PM
So? The rules don't say that having INT > X means you're omnicompetent. The INT score affects exactly and only what it says it affects. It doesn't give you hidden capabilities.

In that sense, INT is not a superpower. Super smart people may (depending on the rest of the characterization) have the listed powers, but it doesn't happen just by having super intelligence. The two are largely orthogonal (largely, because there are limits at the low end of intelligence where some of the powers don't make much sense).

The 5D chessmasters of the supers worlds don't just have "Super Intelligence". Instead, they have "Super Intelligence, Super Preparedness, (etc as appropriate)".


Comic books function on comic book logic and they do indeed allow hyper-intelligent characters to leverage their intelligence in unfair ways, most allowing for ridiculously unfair gadget-crafting that bears no resemblance to actual advanced production and assembly in the real world - things like Iron Man building a particle accelerator in his basement or Ant Man building a quantum realm tunneling machine (whatever that even is) in the back of a van.

This cheat is based mostly on implementation - they're giving the hyper-intelligent character free resources representative of money, time, and the work of skilled laborers. Many procedural or thriller shows do that same thing - giving the title character a whole posse of supporters who serve as the instruments through which their intelligence linked abilities are made manifest. The Mentalist is actually a very good example of this because Jane literally treats the team of highly trained state officers who work with him as extensions of his consciousness.

So, again, as I mentioned in earlier posts, intelligence can become a superpower if the appropriate resources are acquired to maximize its leverage. This is one reason mastermind-type BBEG's tend to be CEOs or Generals or otherwise in charge of a vast array of resources. Take those away, and their threat drastically diminishes

Now, the trick is that, in fantasy games, all of the resources and leverage, and so forth that makes intelligence an awesome resource and arguably a superpower at superhuman levels, get rolled up under the umbrella of 'magic.' High Int makes you better at magic, and magic can provide for wealth, or for minions, or for civic authority, or for raw materials, or basically any other need. A wizard is already more powerful than a warrior, make them smarter too and of course their supremely dominant.

In 3.5 D&D we can actually model this mechanically. You can build characters out for any class/race combination but just arbitrarily start them with an Int of 30. Such a massive boost to stats will benefit every character to some degree, but it's going to help the fighter only minimally, the cleric only moderately, the rogue significantly, and it turns the wizard into a god.

Ultimately, every stat becomes a super-power if you increase it enough. Str, Dex, and Con, are well established tropes as such: super-strength, super-speed, super-toughness. Super-Int, Super-Wis, and Super-Cha are harder, but they still exist.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-08, 05:57 PM
Out of curiosity, three questions:
1) For a guileless player wanting to play a character with a decent amount of guile, what would you consider your preferred method?
2) For something like a mystery/detective game, what are your thoughts on clue mechanics, where a specific roll, instead of direct 'we check the ____ for missing ____' might uncover a useful clue?
3) If you the GM plans a "hypercompetent" antagonist character, have a set villain plan or lair or course of action prepared, and the players come up with a course of action you did not foresee, but honestly believe said character would have, what is the correct response?

I'm not advocating any specific thing, just trying to get a bead on your preferences. These are situations where I think clear best solutions are not easy or forthcoming.

1. DMs should be aware and feed the player the things the character, based on the rules and the characterization, should know as part of the planning. More work for the DM, but open honest work.
2. I'd be ok with that, modulo details. But I want it to be explicit, not implicit.
3. Do better next time. Giving the NPC a mulligan after the fact doesn't sit well with me. After all, I have much more info and time to plan. So missing something is on me. If you're going to mulligan, give the party fair warning at session 0 (in generalities) and allow them the same benefit.

And I agree that this part comes down to personal taste and priorities.

icefractal
2021-03-09, 02:02 AM
In 3.5 D&D we can actually model this mechanically. You can build characters out for any class/race combination but just arbitrarily start them with an Int of 30. Such a massive boost to stats will benefit every character to some degree, but it's going to help the fighter only minimally, the cleric only moderately, the rogue significantly, and it turns the wizard into a god.Because Wizards use Int for casting. A high Int doesn't turn the Sorcerer or Cleric into a god, and those classes have the magic to get wealth/minions/civic authority like the Wizard does.

No question that casters have more tools to enable plans - but they have those tools because of their class, not because of their Int stat. You don't need a superhuman Int to make effective use of spells.

Now as far as whether it's unfair to compare character to player knowledge, I think "how my own spells work" is definitely in the character-knowledge wheelhouse. Seeking out someone else who has one very specific feat/PrC to combine with a second specific feat, neither of which the PC has? Ok, that's stretching it. But things like "I could cast multiple divinations and compare the results" or "I could use this spell that makes permanent minions .... to make permanent minions!" would be pretty odd not to realize.

WindStruck
2021-03-09, 03:01 PM
Statistics will show that intelligence plays quite a significant role in one's success in life. From academic and scientific career potential, to people skills, managing your money effectively, being able to forsee consequences of your actions, knowing that lottery tickets are not a good investment, looking before you cross the street, knowing plastic bags are not children's toys (and never needing such warning labels).. everything adds up to a more productive life with more good things happening to you and less bad things happening to you.

But that said, you could probably look at Sherlock Holmes novels, but go no further than that. You might not be a mind reader, but you can probably tell that a guy who has a bunch of empty pizza boxes in his living room both likes pizza, and is a slob.

Batcathat
2021-03-09, 03:07 PM
Statistics will show that intelligence plays quite a significant role in one's success in life. From academic and scientific career potential, to people skills, managing your money effectively, being able to forsee consequences of your actions, knowing that lottery tickets are not a good investment, looking before you cross the street, knowing plastic bags are not children's toys (and never needing such warning labels).. everything adds up to a more productive life with more good things happening to you and less bad things happening to you.

I would argue that quite a few of those areas aren't really dependent on intelligence, whether in the IQ or the D&D sense of the word. There are plenty of intelligent people with astoundingly bad judgement (including things like money management and plastic bag uses) and "people skills" are pretty much textbook charisma or possibly wisdom in D&D terms or EQ in IRL terms.

Not that high intelligence isn't good for a lot of things in life, of course, but not all of them.

Pex
2021-03-09, 05:29 PM
Bat Shark Repellent - Once per day, the character can become immune to a single specific source of threat - a particular spell, a particular type of weapon (including for example the natural weapons of a particular type of creature, but not 'all natural weapons'), etc on the basis of having prepared a counter for exactly that threat. This can't be as broad as 'immune to this creature' or 'immune to my enemies' or 'immune to fire'. The immunity lasts for the remainder of the scene in which it is used.



HAHAHA

I absolutely get this reference. I rolled my eyes at that scene.

Tanarii
2021-03-09, 05:36 PM
Statistics will show that intelligence plays quite a significant role in one's success in life.
No they don't. They very much show that it doesn't.

Kami2awa
2021-03-09, 07:05 PM
Oh absolutely. My point was that smart people are just as prone to such cognitive biases and issues as less smart people. Being good at academic stuff (which is all a high INT means) doesn't free you from that.

And I've known many highly educated, quite intelligent people who have...irrational...beliefs. Ones that directly contradict the things they study. Humans are complex and are good at compartmentalizing our lives and believing multiple mutually inconsistent things simultaneously.


I think part of it is that if you are very knowledgeable, you know about a lot of true things that sound unbelievable. Steam engine in ancient Roman Egypt? Yep, absolutely true. A worm that detaches its abdomen, which swims away and mates independently of the worm itself? That's real. An experiment in what happens if you give LSD to elephants? Yep, that happened.

There's a BBC program called "QI" which is based on this - it's a near-impossible comedy quiz based on knowledge (or really, lack thereof) of such unlikely facts. The Unbelievable Truth, a BBC radio show, is similarly based on convincing other contestants of the truth or not of unlikely (but true) facts.

So in the face of the weirdness of reality, it's quite easy to give credence to equally bizarre ideas such as conspiracy theories or paranormal phenomena, that just might be real.

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
https://www.britannica.com/animal/palolo-worm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD

Mechalich
2021-03-09, 07:52 PM
No they don't. They very much show that it doesn't.

Higher intelligence is correlated with higher income and a large number of other positive life outcomes. The correlation is well established across a wide-range of studies. It's not especially strong, because intelligence is difficult to measure and there's a lot of co-founding factors, but it's a detectable and durable a result as just about anything in social science.

But this isn't really surprising. It's simply a result that says 'better inputs lead to better outputs.' Which, yeah, it would be pretty weird if that wasn't true. If you could come up with a metric that approximated any of the core D&D attributes, a higher score in any of them would probably correlated with better life outcomes (even something like increased dexterity drops your chances of, for example, dying in an auto accident).

Increased intelligence has in-game benefits in D&D, but so do all the other stats. These benefits may or may not be balanced, but that's not really the issue proposed by this thread. The question is rather whether or not there is some threshold where, having increased the score enough, intelligence becomes 'super-intelligence' and the player acquires some sort of specialized benefits.

Arguably, perhaps there should be. Super-strength, for instance, becomes transformational at a certain point. A character who can run through walls, leap tall buildings, and carry a truck on their back simply is not relating to their environment in the same way as someone who's just 'really strong.' The same is true of super-constitution (ie. superhuman durability), in that such a character can just ignore things, like cars, if they want too. And 3.5 D&D has a super-charisma build too - the diplomancer - which is built around the idea that if a character has stratospheric personal magnetism society will literally fall down at their feet.

A super-intelligence character, in D&D, might potentially be called the 'know-it-all' build. There are few, if any, knowledge checks I'm aware of that top DC 40. As such a character with a +30 to all knowledge skills can take 10 and make any possible knowledge check, meaning they, in a mechanical sense, know everything. That seems fairly transformational to me.

Tanarii
2021-03-09, 07:59 PM
Higher intelligence is correlated with higher income and a large number of other positive life outcomes. The correlation is well established across a wide-range of studies.It really isn't. Almost all studies show that there isn't any significant correlation. Meanwhile there is a very strong correlation with perseverance (or "Grit").

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-09, 08:34 PM
It really isn't. Almost all studies show that there isn't any significant correlation. Meanwhile there is a very strong correlation with perseverance (or "Grit").

There's a threshold below which it's strongly correlated. But that threshold is pretty low. Certainly well below "ordinary smart". And after that, the correlation is poor and plausibly becomes negative for very high values. But I don't have data for that last bit.

Tanarii
2021-03-09, 09:51 PM
There's a threshold below which it's strongly correlated. But that threshold is pretty low. Certainly well below "ordinary smart". And after that, the correlation is poor and plausibly becomes negative for very high values. But I don't have data for that last bit.
It may be that significantly below average compared to average has some kind of correlation I'm not aware of. But correlation for even above average was all from studies that are decades out of date at this point. Everything points to many measures of "success" (which is a stupidly subjective metric btw) being determined mostly by personality and attitude.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-09, 10:31 PM
It may be that significantly below average compared to average has some kind of correlation I'm not aware of. But correlation for even above average was all from studies that are decades out of date at this point. Everything points to many measures of "success" (which is a stupidly subjective metric btw) being determined mostly by personality and attitude.

Yeah. Combine that with the fact that most psychometrics doesn't replicate and is mostly based on very poor samples (college psych students, mostly) and you get a bunch of things that aren't that meaningful no matter how you slice it.

Just going on personal experience (not exactly scientific, I know), traditional markers for intelligence only loosely correlate with anything other than ability to learn academic stuff, and that's swamped by drive and motivation. I've known a fair number of really smart kids who sucked at school because they couldn't bring themselves to care enough to do anything. Usually the kind who coasted through earlier grades and so didn't know how to work once things required effort. Heck, I was in that same boat. Gras school was a major wake-up call.

AdAstra
2021-03-10, 07:15 PM
So imagine a homebrew Xanatos class for D&D (or just abilities in some non-D&D system) with the following mechanics available, in both cases as something PCs can get access to:

Mastermind - Once per session, you can retroactively change off-screen planning decisions made about gear loadout, purchases, arrangement of spaces you control (such as positions and presence of traps).

Confident Conclusion - Once per session, you can issue a hypothesis about some circumstances within the game or setting and the GM responds truthfully with one of 'true', 'partially true', or 'false'.

Paranoid Contingency - The character is never surprised, and may act in surprise rounds following ambush (or otherwise cannot be unable to act due to lack of preparedness or due to not expecting a sudden attack). Whenever the character would be totally off guard and unable to act during ambush (such as if they are attacked while asleep, attacked through a wall, etc), they may choose to actually have been somewhere else within 100ft of that location, having left a decoy in place in anticipation of this circumstance.

Bat Shark Repellent - Once per day, the character can become immune to a single specific source of threat - a particular spell, a particular type of weapon (including for example the natural weapons of a particular type of creature, but not 'all natural weapons'), etc on the basis of having prepared a counter for exactly that threat. This can't be as broad as 'immune to this creature' or 'immune to my enemies' or 'immune to fire'. The immunity lasts for the remainder of the scene in which it is used.

Calm Mien - The character gains immunity to imposed existential horror, fear effects such as dragon fear that are instinctual rather than magical mind control, or other such forms of conceptually- or situationally- induced madness or paralysis.

Would something like that be okay in your book, since it doesn't tie those attributes to Intelligence in particular but rather constitutes dedicated training and experience (or at least, commitment to that particular archetype), and are equally available to PCs and BBEGs and come with the attendant opportunity cost of e.g. having to sink 5 levels into these things if its D&D.

Or is it still problematic because of how abilities like this interact with gameplay and/or narrative structure?

How about if it goes even further with a capstone ability? Such as Rewrite the Plot - Once per session, the character can narrate a theory explaining the factors and forces behind recent events to at least 80% of the people involved in those events. If no strong evidence can be brought forward to strictly disprove this theory, reality is rewritten such that the character's theory is exactly how things happened. If evidence that this theory is impossible is provided, the character suffers (X consequence) as backlash. The existence of such evidence is not enough to stop this power - someone has to point it out. Rewrite the Plot cannot openly change the current state of affairs as visible within the scene - someone who was wounded can't be healed or someone who is present can't actually be somewhere else. However, it can modify offscreen elements such as making it so someone who was thought to be dead was actually faking it.



Well, this is sort of my question to the OP. If we added a Guile stat to D&D, and someone min-maxed a character to have 40 Guile, would that actually resolve this issue? If we added explicit mechanics that specified how a PC or villain could pay for being this sort of mastermind, does that resolve it? Or is the objection to people liking to depict this archetype at all? Because the original post feels to me like it could be read as 'Intelligence gets too much credit, some of these things are Wisdom/unspecified stat', as 'players try to use a high stat to justify getting things that they haven't paid for', as 'hypercompetent characters are Mary Sues and have no place in fiction at all', or as 'people are overly fond of this particular archetype and its getting old, give it a break please'.

Some of the class abilities are neat, though the Alert feat does most of what Paranoid Contingency does. However, DnD has few to no abilities that outright retcon events the way many of these abilities do. It very much changes the nature of things, though not in an inherently bad way.

I think Guile would not be a very fun stat as described because I really don't think cleverness should be codified in game terms at all. It'd be like GMs going "no your character can't think to do that because they have 8 Int" but even worse. Good ideas and clever planning should be something the players do, not something their characters are barred from or fed based on their numbers. Having a Guile stat would likely encourage the latter further.

NichG
2021-03-10, 07:55 PM
Some of the class abilities are neat, though the Alert feat does most of what Paranoid Contingency does. However, DnD has few to no abilities that outright retcon events the way many of these abilities do. It very much changes the nature of things, though not in an inherently bad way.

I think Guile would not be a very fun stat as described because I really don't think cleverness should be codified in game terms at all. It'd be like GMs going "no your character can't think to do that because they have 8 Int" but even worse. Good ideas and clever planning should be something the players do, not something their characters are barred from or fed based on their numbers. Having a Guile stat would likely encourage the latter further.

I mean, a lot of this is to understand the OP's position, though I do tend to put abilities like these in systems I'm designing for my own campaigns - both D&D variants and completely separate ones. My design philosophy tends to be something along the lines of, abilities/expenditures aren't there to give players permission to do something they might be able to do anyhow via their out-of-character attributes, they should always strictly add new capabilities or affordances or determine things which are entirely within the game world. At the same time, I'm not going to hold tasks that engage with OOC ability sacrosanct and avoid creating mechanics which might help with those things. If you're very clever and can read me and figure out what I'm thinking (regardless of character attributes), fine! If another player wants to buy a power that makes me tell them what I'm thinking from time to time, that's also fine.

What I do tend to hold sacrosanct is decision power and ability to express their motives, both for PCs and NPCs. So I'm not going to make a power that lets you convince someone that they should go and kill the person they love just on your say-so, but it'd be fine for there to be a power that would e.g. read an NPC's motivations out transparently to reveal whether there happens to be anything they would prioritize over the person they love, such that they'd sacrifice their love to preserve that thing.

But that's my own design philosophy, and I wouldn't assume that another poster would necessarily share it.

HeraldOfExius
2021-03-12, 12:01 PM
Intelligence should be as much a superpower as the other ability scores.

If you're allowing a high Dex low Str character to defy gravity doing acrobatics [like Legolas' bridge run (https://youtu.be/3kNqc5Hrh0M?t=140), for example] that would (1) definitely needs a lot of strength to even approach them IRL and (2) just be impossible IRL, then it make sense to have the "Movie superintelligence" be used too. (Especially in 5e where Int is one of the weakest ability score). [And to have high Wis essentially mindread peoples at will, etc]

If you're restraining the other ability scores to be physically realist, then yes, high Int should absolutely be restrained in the same way, and you're totally right that the bonus peoples assume high Int would give are completely overblown. And, as you noted, that's probably the interpretation the nearest from the rules.

This pretty much summarizes how I feel about this. If having a physical ability score of 40 gives you super powers, then a mental ability score of 40 should probably also give you super powers. If the person with a physical ability score of 40 is just the guy at the gym, then the person with 40 intelligence is just the guy who knows a lot of pi.

Beleriphon
2021-03-14, 12:58 PM
Absolutely. High intelligence is just the excuse, and not any better of one than anything else. I mean, how often do Lex Luthor, Dr. Sivana, or the Ultra-Humanite ultimately win?

For Luthor define win.

On the other side, Mr Fantastic is super intelligent, and its basically a superpower. Being stretch is a weird quirk he has, but being super intelligent is his thing.

Mechalich
2021-03-14, 08:04 PM
This pretty much summarizes how I feel about this. If having a physical ability score of 40 gives you super powers, then a mental ability score of 40 should probably also give you super powers. If the person with a physical ability score of 40 is just the guy at the gym, then the person with 40 intelligence is just the guy who knows a lot of pi.

This hits on a question of thresholds, specifically how is 'super' defined.

D&D ability scores scale linearly, but DCs are static. It is reasonable to talk of 'super-powers' as the ability to automatically succeed at any challenge possible on any roll.

This is how the Diplomancer build works - a simple DC 50 check changes someone from hostile to helpful. Any character with a Charisma of 110 - and thus a +50 to the check, absolutely has a superpower, they have the ability to literally talk anyone into being their friend. That's an extreme example, I hope no one has a 110 Cha, but getting a character who has a +50 to Diplomacy and a trick to ignore rolled 1s is quite doable.

For intelligence a character with a high enough Int and the correct skill investments could essentially make any knowledge check and any spellcraft check automatically. Plausibly such a character effectively plays with the Monster Manual open. In the context of D&D, that's a super-power, it's not all encompassing, but it's definitely a special ability.

NichG
2021-03-14, 08:45 PM
This hits on a question of thresholds, specifically how is 'super' defined.

D&D ability scores scale linearly, but DCs are static. It is reasonable to talk of 'super-powers' as the ability to automatically succeed at any challenge possible on any roll.

This is how the Diplomancer build works - a simple DC 50 check changes someone from hostile to helpful. Any character with a Charisma of 110 - and thus a +50 to the check, absolutely has a superpower, they have the ability to literally talk anyone into being their friend. That's an extreme example, I hope no one has a 110 Cha, but getting a character who has a +50 to Diplomacy and a trick to ignore rolled 1s is quite doable.

For intelligence a character with a high enough Int and the correct skill investments could essentially make any knowledge check and any spellcraft check automatically. Plausibly such a character effectively plays with the Monster Manual open. In the context of D&D, that's a super-power, it's not all encompassing, but it's definitely a special ability.

The problem usually comes from an argument along the lines of 'if it's a thing that could be known, there should be some Knowledge skill and check DC to know it'. Which for the record I think does not follow, but I can empathize with being tired of having to argue against that over and over.

Quertus
2021-03-14, 09:34 PM
getting a character who has a +50 to Diplomacy and a trick to ignore rolled 1s is quite doable.

You only need a +49, and 1s aren't auto-failures on skill checks.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-14, 09:39 PM
This hits on a question of thresholds, specifically how is 'super' defined.

D&D ability scores scale linearly, but DCs are static. It is reasonable to talk of 'super-powers' as the ability to automatically succeed at any challenge possible on any roll.

This is how the Diplomancer build works - a simple DC 50 check changes someone from hostile to helpful. Any character with a Charisma of 110 - and thus a +50 to the check, absolutely has a superpower, they have the ability to literally talk anyone into being their friend. That's an extreme example, I hope no one has a 110 Cha, but getting a character who has a +50 to Diplomacy and a trick to ignore rolled 1s is quite doable.

For intelligence a character with a high enough Int and the correct skill investments could essentially make any knowledge check and any spellcraft check automatically. Plausibly such a character effectively plays with the Monster Manual open. In the context of D&D, that's a super-power, it's not all encompassing, but it's definitely a special ability.


The problem usually comes from an argument along the lines of 'if it's a thing that could be known, there should be some Knowledge skill and check DC to know it'. Which for the record I think does not follow, but I can empathize with being tired of having to argue against that over and over.

I agree with NichG. There is no guarantee (especially out of the rather...specific...circumstances of 3e played forum-style) that all things that are known to anyone are knowable.

I've got lots of things in my setting that no one knows. Certainly not any mortal. Period. You can have INT 30 and expertise in all the right skills (using 5e)...and not even be able to roll for those things. And when you have one-off monsters or creatures, or things that are newly made--you don't know those things. DC NOPE. You might be able to figure things out relatively fast, given information, but you need that experience. On your first shot, you know nothing about them. Because no one does.

Being super smart doesn't give you access to information you don't have. It lets you reason from facts you do have, but you're just as vulnerable to mistaken facts, deception, or anything else as anyone else. If you have the wrong facts, being super smart just lets you make bigger mistakes by extrapolating from lesser information.

On the other hand, someone who grew up around the bog-sneeches (a rare species found only in one little valley in nowhere-land that aren't written about anywhere) will know lots about them even if they have INT 8 and no INT-based skills. Because of their everyday experience. Whereas someone from outside that valley will no nothing about the bog-sneeches, no matter how smart and learned they are.

It's why I'm firmly opposed to fixed DCs for anything knowledge related. Because the circumstantial factors take it from DC 0 to DC NOPE.

Mechalich
2021-03-14, 09:57 PM
I agree with NichG. There is no guarantee (especially out of the rather...specific...circumstances of 3e played forum-style) that all things that are known to anyone are knowable.

I've got lots of things in my setting that no one knows. Certainly not any mortal. Period. You can have INT 30 and expertise in all the right skills (using 5e)...and not even be able to roll for those things. And when you have one-off monsters or creatures, or things that are newly made--you don't know those things. DC NOPE. You might be able to figure things out relatively fast, given information, but you need that experience. On your first shot, you know nothing about them. Because no one does.

Being super smart doesn't give you access to information you don't have. It lets you reason from facts you do have, but you're just as vulnerable to mistaken facts, deception, or anything else as anyone else. If you have the wrong facts, being super smart just lets you make bigger mistakes by extrapolating from lesser information.

On the other hand, someone who grew up around the bog-sneeches (a rare species found only in one little valley in nowhere-land that aren't written about anywhere) will know lots about them even if they have INT 8 and no INT-based skills. Because of their everyday experience. Whereas someone from outside that valley will no nothing about the bog-sneeches, no matter how smart and learned they are.

It's why I'm firmly opposed to fixed DCs for anything knowledge related. Because the circumstantial factors take it from DC 0 to DC NOPE.

Okay, but that's a specific set of house rules that you have made for your setting. You're making a choice to reduce the value of in-character knowledge and the utility of powers like divination (whose entire purpose is to all characters to learn the unknown). Your initial post complains about people making assumptions about the utility of intelligence that are not based on your specific house rules.

I'm not saying you're wrong to reduce the value of raw knowledge in your setting - in 3e especially there's plenty of evidence that even moderately optimized characters regularly exceed expected skill values by huge margins - but there's a difference between 'intelligence is not a superpower' and 'I have made intelligence not a superpower anymore.'

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-14, 10:02 PM
Okay, but that's a specific set of house rules that you have made for your setting. You're making a choice to reduce the value of in-character knowledge and the utility of powers like divination (whose entire purpose is to all characters to learn the unknown). Your initial post complains about people making assumptions about the utility of intelligence that are not based on your specific house rules.

I'm not saying you're wrong to reduce the value of raw knowledge in your setting - in 3e especially there's plenty of evidence that even moderately optimized characters regularly exceed expected skill values by huge margins - but there's a difference between 'intelligence is not a superpower' and 'I have made intelligence not a superpower anymore.'

Playgrounder's error[1] in play here. Exacerbated by the fact that common forum understanding of RAW isn't really the rules at all.

Those aren't house rules, at least in 5e. 5e explicitly says that the DM decides the difficulty of a check[2]. And they aren't in 3e either--at least in the stuff I've read, there's no "know everything is a DC X check that you can always roll" rule. "I can remember things I've never learned" isn't anywhere in those rules. They all presume that the threshold question has been met. Beyond that, the guidelines are explicitly only that, guidelines. And you're encouraged to make them setting specific.

[1] I hate using the term fallacy. You're assuming 3e, and particularly one cramped, non-textual reading of those rules, the one that the forums call "RAW", the one that minimizes the role of the DM and assumes that all optimization and cheese is in play and anyone saying otherwise is houseruling. When in fact it's the other way around--you're presuming certain things about DMs and settings by making those assumptions in the first place.

[2] specifically, the 5e DMG says for all checks:


When deciding whether to use a roll, ask yourself two questions:

* Is a task so easy and so free of conflict and stress that there should be no chance of failure?
* Is a task so inappropriate or impossible--such as hitting the moon with an arrow--that it can't work?

If the answer to both these questions is no, some kind of roll is appropriate.


Saying "no, no matter your STR score you can't hit the moon with an arrow" or "no, no matter your INT score you can't know this" isn't a house rule at all. It's hard, cold, solid RAW.

And here's the 3.5e PHB on the matter:

The DM decides what is actually impossible and what is merely practically impossible. Characters with very high skill modifiers are capable of accomplishing incredible, almost unbelievable tasks, just as characters with very high combat bonuses are.

This is after stating that a task considered practically impossible has a DC of 40, 60, or even higher (or it carries a modifier of +20 or more to the DC). So practically impossible things have an unbounded DC. Really impossible things (as decided entirely and exclusively by the DM) don't have a DC at all. You just fail.

And here's the section about Knowledge checks:


Check: Answering a question within your field of study has a DC of 10 (for really easy questions), 15 (for basic questions), or 20
to 30 (for really tough questions)[3]. In many cases[4], you can use this skill to identify monsters and their special powers or vulnerabilities. In general, the DC of such a check equals 10 + the monster’s HD. A successful check allows you to remember a bit of useful information about that monster. For every 5 points by which your check result exceeds the DC, the DM can give another piece of useful information.
...
Try Again: No. The check represents what you know, and thinking about a topic a second time doesn’t let you know something that you never learned in the first place

There is clearly no "I have a +50, so I know everything. It's all mights and can and in many cases.

[3] But remember that the DM can (and is instructed to) add circumstance modifiers of any value they happen to choose to represent the real difficulty.
[4] in many cases directly means that it doesn't apply to all cases. Otherwise they'd not have said that statement.

NichG
2021-03-14, 10:14 PM
Okay, but that's a specific set of house rules that you have made for your setting. You're making a choice to reduce the value of in-character knowledge and the utility of powers like divination (whose entire purpose is to all characters to learn the unknown). Your initial post complains about people making assumptions about the utility of intelligence that are not based on your specific house rules.

I'm not saying you're wrong to reduce the value of raw knowledge in your setting - in 3e especially there's plenty of evidence that even moderately optimized characters regularly exceed expected skill values by huge margins - but there's a difference between 'intelligence is not a superpower' and 'I have made intelligence not a superpower anymore.'

There's a non-house-rules way of arguing it. If you want to live by RAW, you die by RAW - only those things explicitly printed as having a Knowledge check DC are able to be known by Knowledge, and no DC is given for things harder than 'really tough questions in a given field' - therefore, anything harder than a 'really tough question' is outside of the scope of Knowledge. Anything which would belong to a field for which there isn't an explicitly printed Knowledge skill is outside of the scope of Knowledge, and there's no reason under RAW that an argument to allow a particular thing to fall under the umbrella of X because 'it's the closest' must be followed. If Knowledge(Religion) did not exist, that doesn't mean that knowing about Undead is now a Knowledge(Planes) check because that's the closest thing - it means that there is no skill check to know about Undead.

There is no Knowledge skill for 'what the BBEG's plans are'. There is no Knowledge skill for 'what tactic could I execute that would guarantee me victory in this encounter?'. Knowing a secret that would let you blackmail the Duke need not be so easy as 'a really tough question in the field of Nobility and Royalty', and therefore it need not be assumed by RAW that there is a corresponding DC.

If we want to talk RAI, that's fine, but under RAI we enter into the discussion that Knowledge skills represent information gleaned from study, which means that an interpretation such as 'anything you get out of a Knowledge skill is something that the character had to have read or been told at some point in time' can establish pretty severe limits as well.

King of Nowhere
2021-03-15, 03:14 AM
This pretty much summarizes how I feel about this. If having a physical ability score of 40 gives you super powers, then a mental ability score of 40 should probably also give you super powers. If the person with a physical ability score of 40 is just the guy at the gym, then the person with 40 intelligence is just the guy who knows a lot of pi.

Then again, there are different levels of superhuman.
The guy with str 40 could pick up a car, possibly a van, but he definitely could not pick up an aircraft carrier.
The guy with con 40 could shrug off a shotgun to the face, he may survive being hit by a cannon, but he certainly won't survive a close nuclear explosion.
The guy with int 40 can be an expert at more fields than any person can, he can know more stuff without having to look it up, he can mentally solve complex equations faster than you can type them on the calculator... but he's still got limits.

Even superhuman characters - especially superhuman characters - have limits. In a narrative, it is more important to establish those limits than to establish the full extent of their power

icefractal
2021-03-15, 03:57 AM
Those aren't house rules, at least in 5e. 5e explicitly says that the DM decides the difficulty of a check[2].Ok, but this whole discussion makes little sense in 5E. In that edition, neither your Int or your skill bonuses are going that far outside the normal human range, so "what abilities does being a hyper-genius who could answer the most difficult of normal questions while drunk and asleep give you?" isn't even a question, because you can't play one of those.

As far as the more general point of what Knowledge checks do or don't cover, I'm of two minds.

On the one hand, no, I don't think you should be able to roll "Knowledge (the BBEG's plans)" or "Knowledge (what's inside this sealed vault that nobody has ever opened and the builder disappeared without telling anyone)". And hitting a DC 35 isn't so hard that it should reasonably give you every secret of the universe.

On the other hand, Knowledge rolls are already somewhat niche. And if you make anything actually important be "special and unknowable", they become a pointless trap for people to waste skill points on. Especially if you have "sage" NPCs who do know the relevant info when sought out. That's a double whammy of suck - not only are those skills you took worthless, but you'll never be as cool as the NPCs are.


Oh, and on the third hand - a lot of the time I see hyper-intelligence at its most superpower-like on this forum, it's as part of a thought experiment. In those cases, there is no GM, and no established facts about the setting or the character's history in that setting. So in that case, what would you use besides the character's stats/skills?

NichG
2021-03-15, 05:13 AM
Ok, but this whole discussion makes little sense in 5E. In that edition, neither your Int or your skill bonuses are going that far outside the normal human range, so "what abilities does being a hyper-genius who could answer the most difficult of normal questions while drunk and asleep give you?" isn't even a question, because you can't play one of those.

As far as the more general point of what Knowledge checks do or don't cover, I'm of two minds.

On the one hand, no, I don't think you should be able to roll "Knowledge (the BBEG's plans)" or "Knowledge (what's inside this sealed vault that nobody has ever opened and the builder disappeared without telling anyone)". And hitting a DC 35 isn't so hard that it should reasonably give you every secret of the universe.

On the other hand, Knowledge rolls are already somewhat niche. And if you make anything actually important be "special and unknowable", they become a pointless trap for people to waste skill points on. Especially if you have "sage" NPCs who do know the relevant info when sought out. That's a double whammy of suck - not only are those skills you took worthless, but you'll never be as cool as the NPCs are.


There's sort of a ratchet thing here, though - this idea that all skills should be interpreted as being as powerful as the most powerful skill you can come up with means you get a sort of mental power creep about what a skill check should accomplish. If Knowledge skills only let you know things that, say, exist in a library somewhere in the setting, would you rather have Knowledge or Jump? Knowledge or Decipher Script? Knowledge or Survival? Knowledge or Use Rope? Knowledge or Climb? Even something like Knowledge and >5 Tumble? Knowledge and Heal?

It only makes Knowledge seem weak compared to things like Diplomacy (which can be a build-defining skill), Hide/Move Silently (also build-defining), Spot/Listen (okay everyone should have this), Autohypnosis (this just has random good stuff), and potentially UMD.

Depending which skills you look at, you could draw the conclusion that individual skills in general aren't really supposed to be character-defining investments, but are really supposed to be secondary augments to a game centered more on class abilities and feats. One might say 'what about Rogues or other skill-monkey characters?', but note that rather than having a higher skill cap than others, they just get to be broader.

So anyhow, I'm not saying this has to be one way or another, but rather that there's an entire design space here and I'd place this as a 'table preference' kind of thing. Not allowing Knowledge to be a particular kind of super-power doesn't automatically make it a trap - there's a very wide middle ground there that still constitutes a viable game system, and where things land will be a combination of campaign specificity and taste.



Oh, and on the third hand - a lot of the time I see hyper-intelligence at its most superpower-like on this forum, it's as part of a thought experiment. In those cases, there is no GM, and no established facts about the setting or the character's history in that setting. So in that case, what would you use besides Intelligence / Knowledge skills?

In other theory-craft discussions, there's a standard that things which depend on GM adjudication are off the table, rather than assuming a very permissive GM. For example, spell invention is possible but explicitly requires adjudication, so people usually don't invoke it in theoretical optimization discussions. So the answer here could be 'since it requires a permissive GM to go beyond DCs that are explicitly in the books, we can't assume access to it in TO and must find another way'.

King of Nowhere
2021-03-15, 05:41 AM
In other theory-craft discussions, there's a standard that things which depend on GM adjudication are off the table, rather than assuming a very permissive GM. For example, spell invention is possible but explicitly requires adjudication, so people usually don't invoke it in theoretical optimization discussions. So the answer here could be 'since it requires a permissive GM to go beyond DCs that are explicitly in the books, we can't assume access to it in TO and must find another way'.
disagreement here - a lot of the things total optimization does are stuff that not even a very permissive dm would allow.
i'd rather say that TO is based on the idea that the rules be taken literally instead of interpreted

NichG
2021-03-15, 06:02 AM
disagreement here - a lot of the things total optimization does are stuff that not even a very permissive dm would allow.
i'd rather say that TO is based on the idea that the rules be taken literally instead of interpreted

Agree that TO is based on the idea that the rules be taken literally, but there are places in the rules that outright call for adjudication. For example, the rules say that the DC of a Knowledge check for a 'really tough question' is 20-30, but outside of specific published DCs the GM is specifically asked to determine how hard a given question is and what field of study if any it belongs to.

So in that case, you could do 'TO under the assumption that the GM rules in favor of the player when a ruling is demanded' or 'TO under the assumption that the GM rules against the player when a ruling is demanded'. Anything else besides those two extremes basically will reduce to ambiguity. However, if you do the former, then something like 'the first thing I do is invent a Cantrip with no XP cost that permanently grants a Salient Divine Ability of my choice to the spell's target' is valid, and there's basically no discussion to be had - it's like the version of Pun Pun where the Sarrukh ability is taken to allow the player to author arbitrary rules text. The more restrictive version of TO is to say, okay, you can only use things where (outside of rule zero) a GM would have no choice under RAW but to allow it. That gets you the version of Pun Pun where he can't write rules text but can grab any written ability that exists in the rules.

Edit: And for what its worth, and to not miss the point of this thread... It would be completely reasonable for someone to post a thread saying e.g. 'hey, stop trying to bring TO stuff to my table, it isn't going to work and its dumb'. Which is sort of a super-set of what I feel this thread is about, e.g. bringing these sorts of arguing-the-GM-into-submission types of viewpoints to an actual table and expecting them to be honored.

Quertus
2021-03-15, 07:58 AM
@PhoenixPhyre - you come off very… one-sided in your descriptions. Which makes me curious whether it's an actuate depiction of your stance or not.

So, suppose that… Draconians or Warforged never existed in D&D. And you make them in your world, as a *new*, never before seen creature.

PC is looking at +50 or higher bonus to knowledge checks.

Player asks for a knowledge check, you say "DC nope!"?

You describe the monster, player mages educated guesses based on those descriptions (dragon, wings, flying, "elemental" magical abilities, spell resistance // Construct, living, sentient, crit immunities).

Do you really run a world where the players are more knowledgeable than their characters? Do you just not give the players the information that they would need to think about things? Or do you not "DC nope!" as hard as you make it sound? (Or, I suppose, do you have players who lack the ability to make educated guesses… or some other option i haven't considered?)

I ask because I *also* do "DC nope!", but allow perceivable information to be summized.


On the other hand, Knowledge rolls are already somewhat niche. And if you make anything actually important be "special and unknowable", they become a pointless trap for people to waste skill points on. Especially if you have "sage" NPCs who do know the relevant info when sought out. That's a double whammy of suck - not only are those skills you took worthless, but you'll never be as cool as the NPCs are.

Strongly agree. If some NPC "sage" (Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, often laments just how clueless and ignorant one can be, and still claim the title of "sage") can know a thing, PCs who have invested in the appropriate Knowledge should, as well. (To my players who may question my adherence to this: the sage who made the "DC nope" roll *was lying*.)

NichG
2021-03-15, 08:09 AM
I'll just raise here that you're making an assumption that the way this hypothetical sage has information is through Knowledge.

But you wouldn't (hopefully) use a character's Knowledge to determine how much they remember about an adventure they had or a conversation they had.

Why is it unreasonable that an NPC who, say, found Acererak's true tomb, ventured in just enough to go Nope!, and retired somewhere safe might know the location, if Knowledge could not?

Morty
2021-03-15, 08:36 AM
If a player character is trying to use a high knowledge check to find out something they couldn't have plausibly learned, the right answer is usually to make it clear there's nothing about it in their sources of knowledge. This can be useful information in its own right, as it lets the player know that they've run into something obscure and undocumented and informs their expectations. "Whatever it is, there's nothing about it in the Imperial Academy of Goodebarrylok" is a pretty definitive statement. You can also give them information about related subjects that might be useful.

Really though, this just demonstrates that attributes aren't created equal and intelligence is a considerably more abstract concept than strength. "Intelligence" isn't a superpower. Tactical acuity might be, or a wealth of obscure knowledge. Or, as it usually happens, arcane magic that requires intelligence to study and practice. At least it's better than wisdom.

King of Nowhere
2021-03-15, 09:34 AM
Strongly agree. If some NPC "sage" can know a thing, PCs who have invested in the appropriate Knowledge should, as well. (To my players who may question my adherence to this: the sage who made the "DC nope" roll *was lying*.)

objection: if some npc knows who is the killer on account of having witnessed it, your pc cannot know it just by rolling knowledge.
knowledge means having access to the corpus of what is knows around. some things are not known by anyone except those few who witnessed it exactly. if it's not written in any book - but there is a lone survivor who saw it - then knowledge won't tell you what it is. and it won't help some random npc "sage" either.

objection 2: your wizard is geared towards casting spells; he has a whole build dedicated to spellcasting. and he just happens to have maximized his ranks in knowledge, something with very little cost for his build. somebody who invested his whole build into knowing stuff should be more knowledgeable, under the general principle that a generalist should not be able to beat a specialist in the specialist's own field.
since the rules are not particularly functional and some builds have broken power levels, i made the specialized expert class - linked in my signature - specifically to try to model the npc "sage" who has no spells, no combat training, no class abilities to speak of, but who *will* roll higher than you in his specific field of expertise

of course, each instance has to be judged specifically. but it makes no sense - and would be both immersion breaking, and liable to create a boring invincible heroTM to me - that just because someone has one more level to get one extra rank in skill checks, then he gets to be the foremost world expert of... EVERYTHING

EDIT: I prefer to fluff knowledge by field of expertise. "so your wizard has summoned a lot of demons and he has done many mission involving demons and he has studied demons a lot, so he's officially a demon expert, you get to know the really obscure stuff there, even npc that are higher level than you and should have a higher modifier than you still come and ask your counsel when it comes to demons."
"on the other hand, you never interacted with dragons and never had much interest in them. so, while your high knowledge check means you still know a lot of stuff about dragons, for the really deep knowledge a specific expert of dragons will be needed. to your character, dragons are like that topic you studied during your second year of university and never looked back again afterwards".
it's like, there is a sort of similarity in the search and disarm traps, in that everyone can make the check, but only a rogue can beat traps above a certain DC. Well, i don't want to put down specific numbers, but during the campaign everyone is getting a few "expert of X" badges depending on what their characters actually do, and being an expert on X means you can know better.

Ultimately, though, I treat "not being an expert at X" as just another plot obstacle, and thus liable to be overcome in many ways. If you are looking for very specific stuff on dragons, the easier way is to look for a specific expert - and if you have a decent network of contacts and influences, it shouldn't even require any roll - but if you decide that your character is going to hole up in a library and spend a few weeks researching dragons, i am definitely willing to let you find the answers yourself.

Tanarii
2021-03-15, 09:34 AM
I ask because I *also* do "DC nope!", but allow perceivable information to be summized.
Perceivable information is perceivable. It's DC Automatic.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-15, 09:59 AM
Perceivable information is perceivable. It's DC Automatic.

Or at most depends on a Wisdom (Perception) check.

A few responses (without quotes):

@"No point in doing this in 5e because you can't get that far off"--this entire thread was sparked by a conversation in the 5e forums about letting villains with INT > 20 "read the DM's mind" and gain access to the players' plans (that they couldn't be explained to have done without that) to show that they're super-smart and thus know everything about everyone. So yeah.

@Quertus: I'm relatively free with things you can perceive. And you can figure out a lot that way. But you can't know it in advance, just by thinking hard. And honestly, I'm not so concerned about monster metagaming, because it backfires a lot. I may at most say "how does your character know that?" I'm much more concerned with people (including especially DMs) using high INT as an excuse why they're immune to mistakes. And pushing back against the "if the villain or chess-master character has flaws, it's because he was handed the idiot ball" mentality very common on these forums. The idea that high INT can replace all the other statistics and is basically a guaranteed win. Basically, the whole "I'm a wizard, so I'm super smart, so I've prepared for everything" schrodinger's wizard concept that gets thrown around is entirely outside the game. "super smart" == "paranoid and batman" has no rules support whatsoever. And it's lazy and bad worldbuilding, fit only for the worse kinds of comics.

kyoryu
2021-03-15, 10:07 AM
@PhoenixPhyre - you come off very… one-sided in your descriptions. Which makes me curious whether it's an actuate depiction of your stance or not.

So, suppose that… Draconians or Warforged never existed in D&D. And you make them in your world, as a *new*, never before seen creature.

PC is looking at +50 or higher bonus to knowledge checks.

Player asks for a knowledge check, you say "DC nope!"?

You describe the monster, player mages educated guesses based on those descriptions (dragon, wings, flying, "elemental" magical abilities, spell resistance // Construct, living, sentient, crit immunities).

Do you really run a world where the players are more knowledgeable than their characters? Do you just not give the players the information that they would need to think about things? Or do you not "DC nope!" as hard as you make it sound? (Or, I suppose, do you have players who lack the ability to make educated guesses… or some other option i haven't considered?)

I ask because I *also* do "DC nope!", but allow perceivable information to be summized.

DC Nope! for the win. (Also, DC yep!).

In Fate, this tends to get rolled up in the big ball we call "fictional positioning" - the idea that actions have to be plausible to even warrant a roll. Start by saying what it is you're trying to do, and if the answer is "that doesn't make sense", then you don't get to roll.

In your case, with a previously unknown creature? The character won't know anything. You can give them information that they might be able to extrapolate based on observable criteria (and I do believe in being generous with that), but I'd also make it clear that said information is a guess and an extrapolation.

"Yeah, the creature looks kind of like something that's half-man, half human. Its skin is oily and black, kind of like a black dragon's. You're really not sure, but you do recall that a black dragon is resistant to acid, so this thing might be too."

(realistically this'd probably be a few back and forths. Volunteering non-factual information is basically leading the characters on)

And agreed with others that perceivable info is just perceived, and the GM should be excessively free with that. The character is there and actually seeing it, the player has to play twenty questions", which is no fun. Also, "roll to not be stupid" isn't particularly fun gameplay most of the time - "here's the info, what are you going to do about it" is. In some cases, a perception/wisdom/whatever check to put some non-obvious pieces together might be called for.

Lord Raziere
2021-03-15, 10:39 AM
@Quertus: I'm relatively free with things you can perceive. And you can figure out a lot that way. But you can't know it in advance, just by thinking hard. And honestly, I'm not so concerned about monster metagaming, because it backfires a lot. I may at most say "how does your character know that?" I'm much more concerned with people (including especially DMs) using high INT as an excuse why they're immune to mistakes. And pushing back against the "if the villain or chess-master character has flaws, it's because he was handed the idiot ball" mentality very common on these forums. The idea that high INT can replace all the other statistics and is basically a guaranteed win. Basically, the whole "I'm a wizard, so I'm super smart, so I've prepared for everything" schrodinger's wizard concept that gets thrown around is entirely outside the game. "super smart" == "paranoid and batman" has no rules support whatsoever. And it's lazy and bad worldbuilding, fit only for the worse kinds of comics.

Yeah, and even real Batman and Lex Luthor have limitations to their preparedness in that their ability to do so is tied to societal benefits of money, technology, the companies they run and thus the public face they present, with Batman having a further limitation in that most of the stuff he has could pass for stylized spy gadgets or cutting edge modern stuff.

like crazy prepared type of guys are better the more down to earth you can make them, because if the all powerful wizard is prepared thats not real impressive, magic can do anything so you can come up with reasoning for them to have any spell. its playing the preparedness game on easy mode.

a rogue that sets up traps, uses alchemy and has to physically scout out their foe on the other hand? that someone I'd rather do the preparation playstyle with, because your more likely to find a paranoid mindset among spies and scoundrels, but not have any of the overpowered magic to make that suspicious paranoid nature invincible, and you need to be creative and work within the limits you have. I'd rather wizards just be researchers who are focused on their area of study and all the quirks that come with it.

though the wizard university trope has become a little too common, the teacher/apprentice set up should come back, make that knowledge a bit more individually taught and less standardized and centralized.

King of Nowhere
2021-03-15, 12:10 PM
this entire thread was sparked by a conversation in the 5e forums about letting villains with INT > 20 "read the DM's mind" and gain access to the players' plans (that they couldn't be explained to have done without that) to show that they're super-smart and thus know everything about everyone.

awww, that's lazy/bad dming. when i throw around those kind of mastermind villains, i use on them the same principle i use on the players, "is there a reasonable way they could have found out about this?"
and the answer is most likely yes! because I've been good at placing those villains in unsuspecting places. Heck, one of them actually managed to place one of his henchmen as a party cohort. That revelation was among my finest dming moments.
Or there was the part where the players directly asked the villain for informations, because they thought the villain was their ally. The villain gave them the requested information on the location of plot items and quest locations, all very helpful; then he went to the party's enemies and told them "the heroes are going to be in this place in the near future, set up an ambush". And since the villain did not take any direct or apparent part in it, but it was a third party who was resposible for the ambushes, the players never suspected the villain - and went to him again to ask for more "directions". :smallbiggrin:

it's always a good time when i can reveal my mastermind villain's unsuspectable sources of information

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-15, 12:23 PM
Intelligence is not clairvoyance or telepathy, that's for damn sure.

Charisma is not mind control.

Tanarii
2021-03-15, 01:11 PM
Or at most depends on a Wisdom (Perception) check.
OTOH, deducible information from what's been perceived may be (in 5e) an Intelligence (Investigation) check. That's where we start getting into "how much can a demi-god level Intelligence (Int 20) person figure out on the fly and in short time from immediately perceivable information at hand".

Keeping in mind that Int 18-19 is already top 2% of the population. (IQ 130+ if we go by old-school IQ systems, which is pretty questionable, but still).

kyoryu
2021-03-15, 01:21 PM
Tabletop gamers over-value intelligence and under-value wisdom.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-15, 02:27 PM
Tabletop gamers over-value intelligence and under-value wisdom.

This is the one-sentence summary of my point. It may be because TT gaming is (traditionally) a nerd hobby, and nerds are Team Intellect (again traditionally), so it's sort of revenge/payback for being mocked. See? I'm smart so I'm god (in this game world)! Also a plausible explanation for the commonality of Guy at the Gym issues.

NichG
2021-03-15, 02:45 PM
Would you really be fine with the initial scenario of a DM saying a BBEG anticipated the party's plans in every contingency if the only thing the DM did differently was move the 20 from Int to Wis on the villain's character sheet? I feel like the semantic thing is a bit of a distraction from the substantive problem...

Xervous
2021-03-15, 02:46 PM
Tabletop gamers over-value intelligence and under-value wisdom.

Now why am I thinking of INT as the memory, WIS as the circuitry, and CHA as the webpage’s UI?

Tortured analogies and lost sleep probably.

Morty
2021-03-15, 02:55 PM
In all fairness, properly valuing wisdom is difficult because it's an undefined mess of an attribute that doesn't actually have much to do with actual wisdom of any kind.

Quertus
2021-03-15, 03:18 PM
I'll just raise here that you're making an assumption that the way this hypothetical sage has information is through Knowledge.

But you wouldn't (hopefully) use a character's Knowledge to determine how much they remember about an adventure they had or a conversation they had.

Why is it unreasonable that an NPC who, say, found Acererak's true tomb, ventured in just enough to go Nope!, and retired somewhere safe might know the location, if Knowledge could not?

If the books you're reading weren't written by the future people and brought back via Teleport Through Time, or by people asking questions about the future through Divinations, your world is suboptimal.

Color blue to taste.

(I'm not a fan of Knowledge skills. No, I've never made a character whose backstory was that they were reading their own (temporally-displaced) journals as the excuse for their knowledge skills, why do you ask?)

(Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, isn't reading books - he's writing them. Much more fun than making knowledge checks, IMO)


@Quertus: I'm relatively free with things you can perceive. And you can figure out a lot that way. But you can't know it in advance, just by thinking hard. And honestly, I'm not so concerned about monster metagaming, because it backfires a lot. I may at most say "how does your character know that?" I'm much more concerned with people (including especially DMs) using high INT as an excuse why they're immune to mistakes. And pushing back against the "if the villain or chess-master character has flaws, it's because he was handed the idiot ball" mentality very common on these forums.

Well, we're definitely on the same side on "int <> immune to mistakes" (and on including especially DMs).

But I though it might be very appropriate for this thread if, you know, figuring things out based on observations was somehow Int-based…


In your case, with a previously unknown creature? The character won't know anything. You can give them information that they might be able to extrapolate based on observable criteria (and I do believe in being generous with that), but I'd also make it clear that said information is a guess and an extrapolation.

"Yeah, the creature looks kind of like something that's half-man, half human. Its skin is oily and black, kind of like a black dragon's. You're really not sure, but you do recall that a black dragon is resistant to acid, so this thing might be too."

(realistically this'd probably be a few back and forths. Volunteering non-factual information is basically leading the characters on).

"half-man, half human"? :smallamused:

Suppose you've got the corpse of one of these creatures to study. You've never seen one alive. But you can evaluate its skin, organs, bones, fluids, circulatory and nervous system. You can compare the set of its eyes, the shape of its scales, every feature to known creatures.

What you can learn is based on…

Player skill? Knowledge (Int) check?


Tabletop gamers over-value intelligence and under-value wisdom.

Strongly agree!

For the example by @kyoryu, I would hope that Wisdom would strongly help in recognizing assumptions (and contradictions to those assumptions).

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-15, 03:20 PM
Would you really be fine with the initial scenario of a DM saying a BBEG anticipated the party's plans in every contingency if the only thing the DM did differently was move the 20 from Int to Wis on the villain's character sheet? I feel like the semantic thing is a bit of a distraction from the substantive problem...

No. That's a separate issue (DM metagaming). However you justify it, giving the NPCs information they can't have in-universe is wrong (IMO).

However, the INT vs WIS issue does act as a common smokescreen for this and related issues (on both sides). So while it's not a perfect one-sentence summary, it's a lot of it.

Tanarii
2021-03-15, 03:21 PM
Tabletop gamers over-value intelligence and under-value wisdom.
Given that DnD's wisdom stat doesn't even represent what's conventionally referred to as wisdom any more, merely awareness, and getting your character killed takes quite a bit of intentional effort on the players part ... I agree. The game (and most DMs) trains them to be unwise. :smallyuk:

But also probably true IRL. :smallamused:

NichG
2021-03-15, 03:56 PM
If the books you're reading weren't written by the future people and brought back via Teleport Through Time, or by people asking questions about the future through Divinations, your world is suboptimal.

Color blue to taste.

(I'm not a fan of Knowledge skills. No, I've never made a character whose backstory was that they were reading their own (temporally-displaced) journals as the excuse for their knowledge skills, why do you ask?)

(Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, isn't reading books - he's writing them. Much more fun than making knowledge checks, IMO)


Those sorts of libraries do form a particular trope.

I could definitely see something where, if you happened to use a particular library as a magical location to do your research such as the Library of Leng, Thoth's Archives, or the Akashic Record, you could e.g. capture even unknowable things with Knowledge in exchange for, say, the loss of 1 sanity point per 5 points of your Knowledge check result...

Batcathat
2021-03-15, 04:01 PM
In all fairness, properly valuing wisdom is difficult because it's an undefined mess of an attribute that doesn't actually have much to do with actual wisdom of any kind.

Indeed. If it's hard for everyone to agree on a definition of intelligence, it's probably twice as hard for wisdom (whether in game or in reality).

Willie the Duck
2021-03-16, 08:36 AM
Given that DnD's wisdom stat doesn't even represent what's conventionally referred to as wisdom any more, merely awareness, and getting your character killed takes quite a bit of intentional effort on the players part ... I agree. The game (and most DMs) trains them to be unwise. :smallyuk:
Is it really unwise to walk into certain doom if you'll walk out victorious 99.9% of the time?:smallbiggrin:


But also probably true IRL. :smallamused:
Well, there we get back to the Original Post and PhoenixPhyre's "brilliant idiots." Again I agree with the existence of the trend, but consider worrying about it to be fruitless.

Tanarii
2021-03-16, 09:26 AM
Is it really unwise to walk into certain doom if you'll walk out victorious 99.9% of the time?:smallbiggrin:
It is the moment you play a game that doesn't hold your hand quite so heavily, the DM giving the players the freedom to step outside the heavily built in safety boundaries of the design, to stick out their PCs necks and pull the guillotine level themselves.

Or staying within tje system, by putting the PCs in a sandbox where the player can choose to have them face something far more powerful than it's possible to defeat, or push on without sufficient resources until they get overwhelmed.

To use an analogy, it's like the way many modern drivers have no idea how to really drive, because of things like automatic transmission, and more importantly the safety features built into modern cars. Of course, the analogy breaks down because we only have one life to give and there are no rezzes, so safety is better than learning to do it right.

Democratus
2021-03-16, 10:24 AM
Depends entirely on what game you are playing.

In Champions, intelligence is most certainly a super power.

In AD&D you couldn't cast spells unless you had a high enough Int for that spell level, meaning that intelligence literally gated your ability to use magic. An intelligence of 19-20 was rated as "supra genius" and higher than 20 was "godlike".

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-16, 12:41 PM
Depends entirely on what game you are playing.

In Champions, intelligence is most certainly a super power.

In AD&D you couldn't cast spells unless you had a high enough Int for that spell level, meaning that intelligence literally gated your ability to use magic. An intelligence of 19-20 was rated as "supra genius" and higher than 20 was "godlike".

I don't know Champions, so I'll not contest that point. See my note in the op.

However, in AD&D you could have very high INT and not be able to cast spells at all (e.g. by being a Fighter who rolled well on the 3d6-in-order method). Spellcasting is a superpower (with prerequisites). That doesn't mean anything about the prerequisites themselves being super powers.

kyoryu
2021-03-16, 01:05 PM
Wisdom may not be well-defined in a prescriptive way, but given that the OP pretty much gave examples of both "High Int, low Wis" and "High Wis, low Int" characters, I think there's a pretty reasonable understanding of what it means at least by example.

King of Nowhere
2021-03-16, 01:51 PM
re: the int vs wis argument, the easy solution is to give your intelligent mastermind also a decent wisdom, and viceversa. this way you cover all the angles

icefractal
2021-03-16, 02:09 PM
This is the one-sentence summary of my point. It may be because TT gaming is (traditionally) a nerd hobby, and nerds are Team Intellect (again traditionally), so it's sort of revenge/payback for being mocked. See? I'm smart so I'm god (in this game world)! Also a plausible explanation for the commonality of Guy at the Gym issues.Eh, I feel like this is kind of a meme too.

Remember when 4E came out, and if you didn't like how Marking worked it was because you were a nerd who didn't understand football? I must have forgotten the part in football where only one player can try to block someone at a time. :smalltongue:

I mean, I'm not saying nobody has an Int-bias, it's certainly a thing that exists. But IDK it's really that common. For that matter, I've seen a lot of what you could maybe call an anti-Int trope: "Casters, particularly Wizards, are all absent-minded academics who don't grok the real world - that's why only someone 'grounded' can make a decent plan or notice the obvious."

Not to say that doesn't exist either. I recall hearing about a Wizard who fit that description pretty well, name started with a 'Q' I think ... :smallwink: But it's not a requirement! You can in fact have a caster who has common sense.

Tanarii
2021-03-16, 03:02 PM
I mean, I'm not saying nobody has an Int-bias, it's certainly a thing that exists.
Definitely. It's constantly on display as a subtext in these forums. Even if people wouldn't self-identify or even overtly claim that Intelligence is superior.

I should be clear, that's a pro-Intelligence bias, not necessarily a pro-Int bias. The stat is not the same thing, and the former (being real world) isn't necessarily even what people think it is. So really more a pro-pop-culture-cult-of-Intelligence bias. :smallamused:

And just so no one gets me wrong: I think that's understandable, because we're mostly smart folks around these parts. <-which is biased thinking. ;)

KorvinStarmast
2021-03-16, 04:20 PM
As an example, the number of nurses and doctors that smoke tobacco is way too high. And surgeons are known to be disproportionately risk takers and adrenaline junkies. Smoking is a means of stress reduction. That nicotine strokes some nice bits of the brain. Smoked on and off for some years, but finally quit for good. The medical field is also somewhat infamous for it's incidence of drug abuse and alcoholism.
"They should know better."
Yeah, maybe. They are also human.

Here's the thing, though: there's no such thing as one "intelligence" trait in real life. What we label as "intelligence" or someone being "smart" is a variety of different traits that are sometimes related and sometimes aren't. An intelligence attribute in any RPG is just a mechanical abstraction covering some particular aptitudes. *golf clap*

It really isn't. Almost all studies show that there isn't any significant correlation. Meanwhile there is a very strong correlation with perseverance (or "Grit").
On the outside of the door to my Commanding Officer's stateroom hung this quotation, mounted on a brass plaque:
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
― Calvin Coolidge (Mid 80's, but all I can say is that this has earned a place in my box of useful thought alongside Teddy Roosevelt's little bit about "It's not the critic who counts ..."

It is the moment you play a game that doesn't hold your hand quite so heavily, the DM giving the players the freedom to step outside the heavily built in safety boundaries of the design, to stick out their PCs necks and pull the guillotine level themselves. Best DM advice I ever got was, regarding players,
"Give 'em enough rope.
Some will make a nice macrame hammock with it, others will hang themselves."

In AD&D you couldn't cast spells unless you had a high enough Int for that spell level, meaning that intelligence literally gated your ability to use magic. An intelligence of 19-20 was rated as "supra genius" and higher than 20 was "godlike". In that edition you didn't get to boost any of your stats every few levels (Unless you were a Cavalier from UA ...) Comparing the numbers between TSR editions and WoTC editions has to take into account a few mechanical differences.

NichG
2021-03-16, 04:29 PM
I think there's also a difference between the sort of 'superintelligence is omnipotence' position (which I think is mostly championed by a smaller number of loud adherents than being representative of the zeitgeist) and the position that being able to use one's full knowledge and mental faculties when playing a character is likely to be more important than the game mechanical consequences of a 10 point difference in Strength or Dexterity or Constitution.

E.g. I'd trade a lot of mechanical power away to be able to bypass 'your character isn't smart enough to come up with that plan' or 'your character wouldn't think that way' at tables where the DM or players enforce things like that. But that's almost more about agency than about praise for intelligence.

Wisdom is a much better stat to justify metagaming anyhow because you can say 'its intuition, I don't have to explain how I know it or justify it with logic. This feels like the right choice.'

Tanarii
2021-03-16, 04:54 PM
E.g. I'd trade a lot of mechanical power away to be able to bypass 'your character isn't smart enough to come up with that plan' or 'your character wouldn't think that way' at tables where the DM or players enforce things like that. But that's almost more about agency than about praise for intelligence.
Hah! If that was an option I'd have been willing to play with a lot more TSR-era RP-elitist DMs.

Quertus
2021-03-16, 08:45 PM
"Casters, particularly Wizards, are all absent-minded academics who don't grok the real world - that's why only someone 'grounded' can make a decent plan or notice the obvious."

Not to say that doesn't exist either. I recall hearing about a Wizard who fit that description pretty well, name started with a 'Q' I think ... :smallwink: But it's not a requirement! You can in fact have a caster who has common sense.

Lol. Technically, I think, it's less "the real world" and more "but why wouldn't Fireball / Maze / Evards Black Tentacles / Faerie Fire / Haste / Summoning Giant Toads / whatever be the correct answer here?" that tends to trip him up.

He doesn't try to solve muggle problems, like a cliff. And, if the muggles ask for a solution to said cliff, it's anyone's guess whether he'll suggest Fly, Spider Climb, Feather Fall, Web, Polymorph, Summon Giant Spiders, Teleportation, Wall of Stone, Stone Shape, Polymorph Any Object, Otiluke's Telekinetic Sphere, Worldgate, Animate Objects, or Spelljamming.

I guess those could be considered missing the obvious, or not grounded, I suppose…

kyoryu
2021-03-17, 10:25 AM
Broadly speaking, Intelligence is the ability to reason through things, as well as some memory, learning speed, etc.

Wisdom is pattern recognition based on experience and a deep understanding.

The guy with the engine? He may not ever do calculus. But he's seen enough engines, and deeply groks how the parts work together that when he sees or hears a problem, he immediately goes through all of the things leading to that and can probably guess the root cause in about a half second.

Willie the Duck
2021-03-17, 10:27 AM
Hah! If that was an option I'd have been willing to play with a lot more TSR-era RP-elitist DMs.

Do you think that had more to do with the TSR ruleset/DM guidance, the people you played with, everyone's age at the time, or some other factor?

martixy
2021-03-17, 10:28 AM
Intelligence is not a superpower

Yea, neither is strength, until it gets to lifting boulders and snapping trees with your bare hands.
Neither is dexterity, until you're running faster than the speed of sound or juggling 20 swords while riding a unicycle with 1 foot and playing the violin with the other.

I feel like your viewpoint is colored(more like stained) from being deeply embedded in a highly traditional academic environment.

There is a lot to unpack here and I'm too lazy to do it properly. I think I'll do the abridged versions.

1. Superhuman intelligence is a superpower. Like superhuman strength. It's kind of in the name.
2. The source books detail what's in the domain of intelligence. People not being able to tell charisma or wisdom apart from intelligence is those people's problem.
3. Intelligence is a nebulous collection of various cognitive abilities, and being intelligent does not mean that you are automatically better or even passably good at all of them. Heck, even rationality isn't terribly correlated to high IQ (https://www.popsci.com/the-intelligence-trap/) (which likely means little else than that rational intelligence isn't among the intelligence traits measured by IQ tests). So be very careful what you mean when you say "smart people".
4. There's probably a lot to be said about "pet models" and "hammering everything into conformance" that I'm not qualified enough to talk about. All I have are second hand accounts about the many pressures the academic systems puts on those within beyond the intellectual pursuits.
5. Your final plea is a decent one and the very first sentence of the first response already addresses the likely primary cause for your consternation. However it finds poor support in anything that came before.

My take on this is that intelligence as a superpower can take many different forms. From genuis level expertise in many fields, to near omniscience in a single specialized domain. A character might a brilliant planner, or a ridiculous fountain of knowledge, or a Holmesian deductive genius.

Also a 20 INT 5e wizard might not be batman (bounded accuracy - boo), but my 40 INT 3.5e wizard puts Batman to shame. He puts the genetically augmented love child of Batman, Tony Stark and Sherlock Holmes to shame. He plans his morning dump using at least a dozen Xanatos Gambits.

Tanarii
2021-03-17, 10:56 AM
Do you think that had more to do with the TSR ruleset/DM guidance, the people you played with, everyone's age at the time, or some other factor?Well now I know it was endemic in the community, not just D&D. But at the time, I recall it was being heavily pushed in non-TSR books by Seimbeida & Wujcik. In TSR, many modules and eventually most of 2nd edition splat was built around the underlying concepts in RPG-elitism. So yes, it was TSR, but whether they were responding to the zeitgeist or pushing it I don't know. (Eventually all this led to The Forge and Ron Edwards and GNS.)

Planescape with its very annoying berk-this and berk-that and steam-punk art would never have happened without it. And of course a desire to take the infinite and mentally shrink it into something recognizable and manageable and with a consistent theme for a setting, which both of those played into. :smallyuk:

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-17, 11:44 AM
Yea, neither is strength, until it gets to lifting boulders and snapping trees with your bare hands.
Neither is dexterity, until you're running faster than the speed of sound or juggling 20 swords while riding a unicycle with 1 foot and playing the violin with the other.

I feel like your viewpoint is colored(more like stained) from being deeply embedded in a highly traditional academic environment.

There is a lot to unpack here and I'm too lazy to do it properly. I think I'll do the abridged versions.

1. Superhuman intelligence is a superpower. Like superhuman strength. It's kind of in the name.
2. The source books detail what's in the domain of intelligence. People not being able to tell charisma or wisdom apart from intelligence is those people's problem.
3. Intelligence is a nebulous collection of various cognitive abilities, and being intelligent does not mean that you are automatically better or even passably good at all of them. Heck, even rationality isn't terribly correlated to high IQ (https://www.popsci.com/the-intelligence-trap/) (which likely means little else than that rational intelligence isn't among the intelligence traits measured by IQ tests). So be very careful what you mean when you say "smart people".
4. There's probably a lot to be said about "pet models" and "hammering everything into conformance" that I'm not qualified enough to talk about. All I have are second hand accounts about the many pressures the academic systems puts on those within beyond the intellectual pursuits.
5. Your final plea is a decent one and the very first sentence of the first response already addresses the likely primary cause for your consternation. However it finds poor support in anything that came before.

My take on this is that intelligence as a superpower can take many different forms. From genuis level expertise in many fields, to near omniscience in a single specialized domain. A character might a brilliant planner, or a ridiculous fountain of knowledge, or a Holmesian deductive genius.

Also a 20 INT 5e wizard might not be batman (bounded accuracy - boo), but my 40 INT 3.5e wizard puts Batman to shame. He puts the genetically augmented love child of Batman, Tony Stark and Sherlock Holmes to shame. He plans his morning dump using at least a dozen Xanatos Gambits.

None of those things are actually mechanically defined. Nothing in the Intelligence ability score says that you're a good planner. That's entirely an out-of-RAW statement, imposed by personal choice. Or even particularly inventive. You know lots of things. You can reason from existing data fast. Doesn't mean you do, or that you're good at anticipating others' actions, or distinguishing bad assumptions that underly those "facts" or any of that. It's entirely unfounded in anything mechanical.

It's basically just a "I'm special, because special" thing that has no rules support whatsoever.

Telok
2021-03-17, 12:06 PM
Wisdom is pattern recognition based on experience and a deep understanding.

The guy with the engine? He may not ever do calculus. But he's seen enough engines, and deeply groks how the parts work together that when he sees or hears a problem, he immediately goes through all of the things leading to that and can probably guess the root cause in about a half second.

But then what is the boundary between wisdom and experience?

The engine ticking thing is probably just experience. I can't see anyone ignorant of internal combustion engine repair/design, no matter how "wise" they are, as being able to diagnose such an issue. At least now without getting into the "so <foo> it's like magic" levels, at which point we are talking about comic book like super powers that run on plot.

Perhaps one issue is that the int / wis / cha stats in d&d have evolved over the editions and, what with this thread being in the general forum, we have people with different understandings of them. I've seen the intelligence stat go from knowledge & memory to puzzle solving & calculation speed, the wisdom stat go from a sort of "you ought to know better" to willpower & perception, and the charisma stat go from skill at dealing with other people to "strength of personality".

Here's one: Say you're on a rpg design team and you write up a subsystem. Lets go with d&d 4e skill challenges, the first version with it's muktiple flaws. Would high "intelligence", high "wisdom", or lots of previous rpg experience let you spot the flaw that the "harder = more rolls" design meant that pcs were more likely to succeed a "hard" challenge than an "easy" challenge (the game putting pc success rates at 65% to 75% and more rolls pushing results towards the averages)? Then which "stat" to catch the perverse incentive to fail challenges (originally the default suggestion was success bypassing a medium/easy fight or two, but fights were action & xp & loot when success had no other suggested reward)?

kyoryu
2021-03-17, 12:30 PM
But then what is the boundary between wisdom and experience?

I'd say that wisdom is (at least partially, and probably significantly) applied experience


The engine ticking thing is probably just experience. I can't see anyone ignorant of internal combustion engine repair/design, no matter how "wise" they are, as being able to diagnose such an issue.

Clearly.


Here's one: Say you're on a rpg design team and you write up a subsystem. Lets go with d&d 4e skill challenges, the first version with it's muktiple flaws. Would high "intelligence", high "wisdom", or lots of previous rpg experience let you spot the flaw that the "harder = more rolls" design meant that pcs were more likely to succeed a "hard" challenge than an "easy" challenge (the game putting pc success rates at 65% to 75% and more rolls pushing results towards the averages)?

Either.

The "int character" would do the calculations and be able to tell you the chances of success.

The "wis character" would, by experience, realize that single rolls tend to have more extreme results, and lots of rolls tend to "even out" over time. They might not know that there is an issue, but they'd have the experience to recognize that and look further.

The ideal situation is that the wis character prompts the int character to do the math, leveraging both of their strengths.


Then which "stat" to catch the perverse incentive to fail challenges (originally the default suggestion was success bypassing a medium/easy fight or two, but fights were action & xp & loot when success had no other suggested reward)?

Wisdom, probably. The key insight here is that players might not want to bypass all encounters, and that in a game where xp and loot are the marks of progression, that if something is to be seen as a better alternative to combat, it has to provide at least the same level of rewards (compared to the "cost" of combat) in order to be an actually better result.

This could be done through game-theory-like analysis (actual mathematical game theory) but understanding human incentive and behavior seems like a more likely first signal that there's an issue.

So the two are actually similar - the "wis character" would be likely to recognize the potential problem, the "int character" can analyze the problem and determine the severity of it.

martixy
2021-03-17, 12:34 PM
None of those things are actually mechanically defined. Nothing in the Intelligence ability score says that you're a good planner. That's entirely an out-of-RAW statement, imposed by personal choice. Or even particularly inventive. You know lots of things. You can reason from existing data fast. Doesn't mean you do, or that you're good at anticipating others' actions, or distinguishing bad assumptions that underly those "facts" or any of that. It's entirely unfounded in anything mechanical.

It's basically just a "I'm special, because special" thing that has no rules support whatsoever.

I apologize, but I do not understand half the sentences here, nor what rules have to do with anything.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-17, 01:15 PM
I apologize, but I do not understand half the sentences here, nor what rules have to do with anything.

I'm saying that assuming that an int 40 person is inherently a super batman is entirely outside both rules and normal meaning. It's an assertion without evidence.

Sure, you can make such a character. But it has little to do with the int score. You can have a high int character without those traits. Or a lower (relative) character with those traits. It's entirely orthogonal to the game. So saying that every level 20 wizard is by default a xanatos chess master is to go well outside the rules and claim benefits they don't get by default. It's cheating.

Quertus
2021-03-17, 09:43 PM
Here's one: Say you're on a rpg design team and you write up a subsystem. Lets go with d&d 4e skill challenges, the first version with it's muktiple flaws. Would high "intelligence", high "wisdom", or lots of previous rpg experience let you spot the flaw that the "harder = more rolls" design meant that pcs were more likely to succeed a "hard" challenge than an "easy" challenge (the game putting pc success rates at 65% to 75% and more rolls pushing results towards the averages)? Then which "stat" to catch the perverse incentive to fail challenges (originally the default suggestion was success bypassing a medium/easy fight or two, but fights were action & xp & loot when success had no other suggested reward)?


Either.

The "int character" would do the calculations and be able to tell you the chances of success.

The "wis character" would, by experience, realize that single rolls tend to have more extreme results, and lots of rolls tend to "even out" over time. They might not know that there is an issue, but they'd have the experience to recognize that and look further.

The ideal situation is that the wis character prompts the int character to do the math, leveraging both of their strengths.



Wisdom, probably. The key insight here is that players might not want to bypass all encounters, and that in a game where xp and loot are the marks of progression, that if something is to be seen as a better alternative to combat, it has to provide at least the same level of rewards (compared to the "cost" of combat) in order to be an actually better result.

This could be done through game-theory-like analysis (actual mathematical game theory) but understanding human incentive and behavior seems like a more likely first signal that there's an issue.

So the two are actually similar - the "wis character" would be likely to recognize the potential problem, the "int character" can analyze the problem and determine the severity of it.

So, to flip that on its head… the individual who thinks that *maybe* this should be tested? I call them "Wise" (or, really, I call those who *don't* realize that the math doesn't just "work", and needs to actually be *tested*… pejoratives that amount to "unwise".)

The person who is able to do the math, and test it? I call them "intelligent".

I worked at a software development company where I once made a statement to the effect of, "before I upload this code, written in a language I don't know, that will impact all our customers, to our live servers, I thought that maybe someone should test it". Being me, the code worked fine, despite my having never used that language before that day. But the fact that everyone could - and did - simply push code live without testing it? It seemed too unwise for my tastes, and that simple request changed company policy.

-----

Recognizing what is actually Incentivized by a set of rules? That's a tricky one. I know, because I'm good at some, bad at others.

"Experienced" can certainly help, yet there's plenty of times that fresh eyes can set what experienced ones cannot.

Guile, psychology, and… whatever combination of factors drive char-op can all help.

But I think that the biggest factor is the ability to set aside preconceived notions, and look at something for what it truly is. I don't have a name for that (outside the referential "see with eyes unclouded by hate").

martixy
2021-03-18, 04:05 AM
I'm saying that assuming that an int 40 person is inherently a super batman is entirely outside both rules and normal meaning. It's an assertion without evidence.

Sure, you can make such a character. But it has little to do with the int score. You can have a high int character without those traits. Or a lower (relative) character with those traits. It's entirely orthogonal to the game. So saying that every level 20 wizard is by default a xanatos chess master is to go well outside the rules and claim benefits they don't get by default. It's cheating.

There isn't a specific measure of intelligence, broadly. Even IQ tests only measure a certain subset of intelligence characteristics. In that sense, satisfactory evidence will never exist.

But let me get to my primary argument, because I'm not even sure what we're talking about anymore:
1. Superhuman cognitive abilities are absolutely a superpower. By definition.
2. Cognitive abilities are covered by the 3 mental stats in D&D - Int, Wis and Cha. A subset of those is covered by the Int score in the game. A character with an extremely high score therefore has a superpower and would be able to do things outside the realm of normal human ability.
3. When talking about intelligence we need to disambiguate between the Int score, and normal meaning of "intelligence", which is why apart from the first sentence I use "cognitive abilities" to substitute the normal meaning.


I will assume "such a character" means a "super batman". We don't really have a good definition of all of Batman's abilities and they change from writer to writer and continuity to continuity. So all this talk is by necessity highly subjective and nebulous. When you say "those traits" I have no idea what traits you are talking about.

But you can go by what the source books say is covered by the INT score, and a character with a high INT score will be exceptional in the domains of cognition and knowledge covered by that score. For example, a character with high INT and low CHA might be bad at predicting individual people's behaviour, but might be able to model in his head the flow of a panicked crowd.

I can tell you however that class affiliation and "xanatos chess mastery" are orthogonal. And while for a true chessmaster, all mental stats play a role, IMO the intelligence score covers the majority of cognitive abilities required to be a xanatos chessmaster.

And I have absolutely no clue what you mean by "It's cheating". Who is cheating at what? And how?

NichG
2021-03-18, 04:58 AM
There isn't a specific measure of intelligence, broadly. Even IQ tests only measure a certain subset of intelligence characteristics. In that sense, satisfactory evidence will never exist.

But let me get to my primary argument, because I'm not even sure what we're talking about anymore:
1. Superhuman cognitive abilities are absolutely a superpower. By definition.
2. Cognitive abilities are covered by the 3 mental stats in D&D - Int, Wis and Cha. A subset of those is covered by the Int score in the game. A character with an extremely high score therefore has a superpower and would be able to do things outside the realm of normal human ability.
3. When talking about intelligence we need to disambiguate between the Int score, and normal meaning of "intelligence", which is why apart from the first sentence I use "cognitive abilities" to substitute the normal meaning.


I will assume "such a character" means a "super batman". We don't really have a good definition of all of Batman's abilities and they change from writer to writer and continuity to continuity. So all this talk is by necessity highly subjective and nebulous. When you say "those traits" I have no idea what traits you are talking about.

But you can go by what the source books say is covered by the INT score, and a character with a high INT score will be exceptional in the domains of cognition and knowledge covered by that score. For example, a character with high INT and low CHA might be bad at predicting individual people's behaviour, but might be able to model in his head the flow of a panicked crowd.

I can tell you however that class affiliation and "xanatos chess mastery" are orthogonal. And while for a true chessmaster, all mental stats play a role, IMO the intelligence score covers the majority of cognitive abilities required to be a xanatos chessmaster.

And I have absolutely no clue what you mean by "It's cheating". Who is cheating at what? And how?

The ability scores in D&D do not form a complete coverage - saying e.g. that something is a cognitive ability so it must be under one of the mental ability scores would not follow.

For example, the game mechanics to actually memorize a string of numbers is a trained-only skill. If you don't have ranks in Autohypnosis, no matter how high the character's Int, Wis, or Cha are, using a dice roll to memorize something cannot be done. Without that investment, remembering things is a function of the player's cognitive ability, not the character's. There is no roll to determine the correct spell that a character should cast in a situation - that's assigned to the player's cognitive ability, and there is no investment or advancement within the game world that makes a character mechanically better or worse at that task.

So, in that sense, arguing that a character's high Int should let them get some game-mechanical advantage outside of what the game mechanics actually assign to the Int attribute is a form of 'cheating'. Same as if you argued 'well, super-human Dexterity means insane reaction times and super-fast reflexes, so a Dexterity of 40 should let a character run faster than the speed of sound' - when Dexterity, regardless of how it might be introduced, does not impact a character's Movement statistic.

martixy
2021-03-18, 05:30 AM
The ability scores in D&D do not form a complete coverage - saying e.g. that something is a cognitive ability so it must be under one of the mental ability scores would not follow.

Valid point. In general.
Practically, at the table, they probably do.


For example, the game mechanics to actually memorize a string of numbers is a trained-only skill. If you don't have ranks in Autohypnosis, no matter how high the character's Int, Wis, or Cha are, using a dice roll to memorize something cannot be done. Without that investment, remembering things is a function of the player's cognitive ability, not the character's. There is no roll to determine the correct spell that a character should cast in a situation - that's assigned to the player's cognitive ability, and there is no investment or advancement within the game world that makes a character mechanically better or worse at that task.
This is both true and false. :smallbiggrin:

True in 3.5e, where the ability score description is a lot more spare and mechanically focused.
False in 5e, where Int explicitly covers memory.
(See OP's first post.)
So it's a toss up.

People usually don't stick to the rules that closely though. Most tables I've been at put memory under the purview of INT.
I do like however that a moderately good Autohypnosis bonus essentially gives you perfect memory. It's one of those unbounded game states 3.5 is famous for. Like pun pun and the d2 crusader.


So, in that sense, arguing that a character's high Int should let them get some game-mechanical advantage outside of what the game mechanics actually assign to the Int attribute is a form of 'cheating'. Same as if you argued 'well, super-human Dexterity means insane reaction times and super-fast reflexes, so a Dexterity of 40 should let a character run faster than the speed of sound' - when Dexterity, regardless of how it might be introduced, does not impact a character's Movement statistic.

Have I argued that somewhere?

NichG
2021-03-18, 05:49 AM
Have I argued that somewhere?

Yes, as an indirect example to establish a 'super power' category as distinct, and thereby implicitly justifying broadening what things should be covered:



Neither is dexterity, until you're running faster than the speed of sound or juggling 20 swords while riding a unicycle with 1 foot and playing the violin with the other.

Tanarii
2021-03-18, 05:55 AM
People usually don't stick to the rules that closely though. Most tables I've been at put memory under the purview of INT.
I do like however that a moderately good Autohypnosis bonus essentially gives you perfect memory. It's one of those unbounded game states 3.5 is famous for. Like pun pun and the d2 crusader.In 5e, it comes from a feat. The PC remembering something the player doesn't recall (ie happened earlier in the game session or a previous one) in the heat of the moment when the info is needed right now would be an Int check with the DM setting the automatic success, a DC, or automatic failure. In 5e, a High Int score means up to a +5 bonus to that score, or up to +11/+17 if it's a subset of Investigation or a Lore skill.



Have I argued that somewhere?In theory yes, by giving a laundry list of things not covered by Int scores in any edition of D&D. (If you weren't talking about D&D, possibly no.)

martixy
2021-03-18, 06:13 AM
In theory yes, by giving a laundry list of things not covered by Int scores in any edition of D&D. (If you weren't talking about D&D, possibly no.)

Ah, assumption miscommunication. Disregard that. I was not thinking in terms of D&D rules, but abstractly and failed to convey that.

My latest post summarizing my position explicitly does not make this mistake.


Yes, as an indirect example to establish a 'super power' category as distinct, and thereby implicitly justifying broadening what things should be covered:

Though I am uncertain what creating a distinct category has to do with broadening the scope of a certain ability. (I feel this word is getting a bit overused) but these are kind of orthogonal.

Tanarii
2021-03-18, 06:45 AM
Ah, assumption miscommunication. Disregard that. I was not thinking in terms of D&D rules, but abstractly and failed to convey that.

My latest post summarizing my position explicitly does not make this mistake.

Which is the OP entire point. Folks thinking about Intelligence based on non-rule terms, and granting it in-game effectively super powers as a result.

This actually goes for Wisdom even more so, since the game meaning of Wisdom ability score is even less connected to what people, think of as wisdom out of game. It's just that folks don't tend to give Demi-god or superhero level abilities for a 20 Wisdom, even if they attribute extra things to it that have nothing to do with the stat. With Intelligence, they often do.

martixy
2021-03-18, 07:41 AM
Which is the OP entire point. Folks thinking about Intelligence based on non-rule terms, and granting it in-game effectively super powers as a result.

On one hand, I agree with that point. (Haven't I reiterated my agreement several times over across multiple posts already?) In the sense that reasoning about people's motivations should the under Charisma, and not folded into Int. Or that Int is exploded into additional skills like Knowledge/Lore - any expertise should fall under those skills. That's kind of obvious.

But unless there is a tactics skill, tactics should fall under int (most logically IMO). And unless there is a "speed learning" skill, attributes related to learning (which is under int) such as speed and efficiency of learning, also fall under int. (Explicit refutation of several statements from OP's first post.)

I understand if he wanted to rant about how people don't think enough what should be part of int and what isn't, but he went about it in a very roundabout way.

And rather critically, the thread title is woefully misleading, which is where I started my conversation.

TL;DR
See thread title, click on thread, expecting conversation based on listed topic. Take several posts to find out people are talking about something completely unrelated. (And potentially bow out when you can't find common language with anyone...?)

Batcathat
2021-03-18, 07:51 AM
See thread title, click on thread, expecting conversation based on listed topic. Take several posts to find out people are talking about something completely unrelated. (And potentially bow out when you can't find common language with anyone...?)

While I agree the thread title is rather misleading (it feels like every tenth post in this thread is someone new seemingly only having read the title and saying that super intelligence is a super power) the very start of the OP is pretty much "people interpret high intelligence to mean X, Y and Z which it doesn't according to the rules".

Tanarii
2021-03-18, 08:08 AM
TL;DR
See thread title, click on thread, expecting conversation based on listed topic. Take several posts to find out people are talking about something completely unrelated. (And potentially bow out when you can't find common language with anyone...?)
Oh yeah, been there, when I've seen thread title, already formulated my response in my head, clicked on thread, and posted without really reading the OP, just skimming it.

martixy
2021-03-18, 08:16 AM
While I agree the thread title is rather misleading (it feels like every tenth post in this thread is someone new seemingly only having read the title and saying that super intelligence is a super power) the very start of the OP is pretty much "people interpret high intelligence to mean X, Y and Z which it doesn't according to the rules".

Which I also addressed. Notably even before people pointed it out. But we keep talking about the initial misunderstanding.
Good summary though.


Oh yeah, been there, when I've seen thread title, already formulated my response in my head, clicked on thread, and posted without really reading the OP, just skimming it.

I do actually make it a habit to read the OP. But it wasn't coherent enough for me to understand which of 2 possible arguments OP is making, so I covered both. But people latched on to the wrong interpretation without ever acknowledging what I got right. (I guess "Yep, you got it right here" isn't much of a conversation maker.)

Edit: To be honest, my initial hope for this thread was to find interesting ways in which intelligence (and wisdom and charisma, and their derived skills) can be a superpower. For example - maybe a character with 40 int can hold like 10 active thoughts in his head at the same time.

Willie the Duck
2021-03-18, 08:31 AM
I do actually make it a habit to read the OP. But it wasn't coherent enough for me to understand which of 2 possible arguments OP is making, so I covered both. But people latched on to the wrong interpretation without ever acknowledging what I got right. (I guess "Yep, you got it right here" isn't much of a conversation maker.)
So the blame for the way this turned out is the OPs for being unclear, and everyone else for focusing on your error, not you for making one, do I have this right? I would think a better strategy would be saying something like, 'yes, you are correct, my mistake. Now, on to my other point...'


Edit: To be honest, my initial hope for this thread was to find interesting ways in which intelligence can be a superpower.
Good, that sounds like something we could all work on. Let's focus on that. What kind of framework -- rule structure (something like was mentioned (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24960543&postcount=39)on page 1), or how to run a super-intelligent NPC villain (just by having them actually be crazy-prepared, as short cuts to this end result was the OP's primary complaint)?

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-18, 08:37 AM
Not the first time this has been discussed in these forums, but, part of the disconnect here is pretty core to RPG discussions/disputes.

What are the attributes on a character sheet in an RPG? What do they represent, and what is the decision process when assigning them? Fiction-layer-first, or mechanics-layer-first?

1) "This character is strong, and therefore should have a high Strength characteristic, and things affected by having a high Strength will therefore reflect that the character is strong."

-or-

2) "Based on the mechanical effects of a high Strength characteristic, I am going to assign this character a high Strength, and therefore they interact with the rules affected by Strength more advantageously."


When looking at an Intelligence characteristic, the former will say that the character has a high INT because it represents the character being intelligent in at least some ways, while the latter will say that INT only reflects the specific mechanical effects of INT, nothing more.

The latter also leads to a giant pet peeve of mine in gaming -- the player who says, at least internally, "My character doesn't need the mechanical effects of a high INT, and therefore I can use INT as a dump stat, and use my own knowledge and analytical ability instead, as long as I can cleverly avoid rolling anything." Imagine how much pushback there would be at most gaming tables if someone said "I don't need to give my character a high STR, I'm very strong so I can work around it" or "I'm a marathon runner so I don't need to waste a good roll / more points on a high CON."

martixy
2021-03-18, 08:49 AM
Good, that sounds like something we could all work on. Let's focus on that. What kind of framework -- rule structure (something like was mentioned (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24960543&postcount=39)on page 1), or how to run a super-intelligent NPC villain (just by having them actually be crazy-prepared, as short cuts to this end result was the OP's primary complaint)?

Actually there's 2 aspects of this.

1. What would superhuman... well, anything really entail.
2. How can we emulate its effects in game.

A superhuman tactician would be able to appraise a certain terrain flawlessly and for example call upon his knowledge of all battles waged in the last 100 years (so one is superhuman ability to model hypothetical scenarios, the other superhuman memory).

In game that might be emulated by the Paranoid Contingency ability from the post you linked.

Also, retconning is the first, and most obvious method of emulating superhuman mental capacities. But is it the only possible method?

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-18, 08:52 AM
Good, that sounds like something we could all work on. Let's focus on that. What kind of framework -- rule structure (something like was mentioned (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24960543&postcount=39)on page 1), or how to run a super-intelligent NPC villain (just by having them actually be crazy-prepared, as short cuts to this end result was the OP's primary complaint)?


Those sorts of retroactive abilities, etc, are a complaint I have about a lot of post-Forge systems, really.

To me there's zero difference between "Once per X you may declare that the character actually prepared for this already and therefore gets Y bonus against the attack", etc... and effing Calvinball.

Tanarii
2021-03-18, 09:42 AM
2) "Based on the mechanical effects of a high Strength characteristic, I am going to assign this character a high Strength, and therefore they interact with the rules affected by Strength more advantageously."
Its this one. Unless a specific game says otherwise. It started out as this one, it's also ways been this one, and yes, it's not uncommon for people to make incorrect assumptions based on the name of the stat.

The RPG community would have been better served if the original six stats had been called Melee Fighting, Arcane Casting, Clerical Casting, Dodging and Missile Fire, Extra Hit Points, and Henchmen and Followers.

martixy
2021-03-18, 09:50 AM
Its this one. Unless a specific game says otherwise. It started out as this one, it's also ways been this one, and yes, it's not uncommon for people to make incorrect assumptions based on the name of the stat.

The RPG community would have been better served if the original six stats had been called Melee Fighting, Arcane Casting, Clerical Casting, Dodging and Missile Fire, Extra Hit Points, and Henchmen and Followers.

This thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?627233-Getting-rid-of-ability-scores) would like to disagree with you.

Quertus
2021-03-18, 09:58 AM
Not the first time this has been discussed in these forums, but, part of the disconnect here is pretty core to RPG discussions/disputes.

What are the attributes on a character sheet in an RPG? What do they represent, and what is the decision process when assigning them? Fiction-layer-first, or mechanics-layer-first?

1) "This character is strong, and therefore should have a high Strength characteristic, and things affected by having a high Strength will therefore reflect that the character is strong."

-or-

2) "Based on the mechanical effects of a high Strength characteristic, I am going to assign this character a high Strength, and therefore they interact with the rules affected by Strength more advantageously."


When looking at an Intelligence characteristic, the former will say that the character has a high INT because it represents the character being intelligent in at least some ways, while the latter will say that INT only reflects the specific mechanical effects of INT, nothing more.

The latter also leads to a giant pet peeve of mine in gaming -- the player who says, at least internally, "My character doesn't need the mechanical effects of a high INT, and therefore I can use INT as a dump stat, and use my own knowledge and analytical ability instead, as long as I can cleverly avoid rolling anything." Imagine how much pushback there would be at most gaming tables if someone said "I don't need to give my character a high STR, I'm very strong so I can work around it" or "I'm a marathon runner so I don't need to waste a good roll / more points on a high CON."


Those sorts of retroactive abilities, etc, are a complaint I have about a lot of post-Forge systems, really.

To me there's zero difference between "Once per X you may declare that the character actually prepared for this already and therefore gets Y bonus against the attack", etc... and effing Calvinball.

I have no love of retroactive abilities, either (unless they involve actual Chronomancy). They're the "win button" that removes the actual gameplay.

Your other stance is interesting. You prefer "fiction first" ("the rules are the map") over "rules first" ("the rules are the territory"), disliking the latter because it leads to bad role-playing. But do you still dislike "rules first" when it is coupled good role-playing? Do you like fiction first coupled with bad role-playing?

Or… systems which don't have as many mental stats as D&D… how do you take to people effectively arbitrarily assigning their characters level of competence in those missing stats?

Or… people in this thread have disagreed regarding what different stats cover. How do you feel about people role-playing differently based on those different interpretations?

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-18, 10:11 AM
Its this one. Unless a specific game says otherwise. It started out as this one, it's also ways been this one, and yes, it's not uncommon for people to make incorrect assumptions based on the name of the stat.

The RPG community would have been better served if the original six stats had been called Melee Fighting, Arcane Casting, Clerical Casting, Dodging and Missile Fire, Extra Hit Points, and Henchmen and Followers.

Which is a valid preference, but not absolute truth.

Many systems, and many gamers, take the other view -- the mechanical representation of the character gets a high X attribute because the character is X.

Telok
2021-03-18, 10:13 AM
...fer "fiction first" ("the rules are the map") over "rules first" ("the rules are the territory"), disli...

Confused about the stuff in parentheses. Requesting clarification.

Satinavian
2021-03-18, 10:14 AM
Those sorts of retroactive abilities, etc, are a complaint I have about a lot of post-Forge systems, really.

To me there's zero difference between "Once per X you may declare that the character actually prepared for this already and therefore gets Y bonus against the attack", etc... and effing Calvinball.
No, those are fine. They are certainly not Calvinball as they usually have very well defined boundaries. Instead they are more like equippment kits assumed to contail all the tools you would need for a certain range of tasks without requiring you to prepare them in detail. Or like spell component pouches which follow the same idea of "just assume that the character prepared all cheapcomponents for all spells he might want to cast".

Morty
2021-03-18, 10:41 AM
The latter also leads to a giant pet peeve of mine in gaming -- the player who says, at least internally, "My character doesn't need the mechanical effects of a high INT, and therefore I can use INT as a dump stat, and use my own knowledge and analytical ability instead, as long as I can cleverly avoid rolling anything." Imagine how much pushback there would be at most gaming tables if someone said "I don't need to give my character a high STR, I'm very strong so I can work around it" or "I'm a marathon runner so I don't need to waste a good roll / more points on a high CON."

What is the lower limit of an intelligence attribute needed to analyze a situation or come up with a good plan? The comparison with strength and constitution doesn't really land, because as has been emphasized multiple times in this tread, it's a lot harder (or even impossible) to quantify intelligence. Strength is in fact the easiest attribute to measure out of the "traditional" selection.

As far as knowing things, well, knowledge skills exist for a reason. Or backgrounds and other mechanical means of deciding what the character is and isn't familiar with.

martixy
2021-03-18, 10:46 AM
Confused about the stuff in parentheses. Requesting clarification.

There is a concept know as map and territory. The territory is basically the truth/reality as it is. The map is your perception or model of the truth/reality.

I first learned about this idea from a book by an AI researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky on Rationality:
https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
(He didn't invent it, just borrowed it.)

Well, originally these were a series of blog posts, which he later turned into a book (still available for free to read at the link above). Also, he wrote a long Harry Potter fanfiction (how I discovered the author in the first place) titled Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which tells you what happens when you bring logic and reason to the Potterverse.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-18, 11:15 AM
What is the lower limit of an intelligence attribute needed to analyze a situation or come up with a good plan? The comparison with strength and constitution doesn't really land, because as has been emphasized multiple times in this tread, it's a lot harder (or even impossible) to quantify intelligence. Strength is in fact the easiest attribute to measure out of the "traditional" selection.

As far as knowing things, well, knowledge skills exist for a reason. Or backgrounds and other mechanical means of deciding what the character is and isn't familiar with.

Especially since "analyzing a situation" and "coming up with a good plan" isn't listed as part of the Intelligence stat in the first place!

I'm of the "the rules do exactly and only what they say they do" camp. Anything outside of that is up to the player (in cooperation with the DM), not the character. The rules are a game UI[1], a translation layer to handle some of the common cases of interactions. The default is free-form roleplay--the rules exist to take some of the burden off of the players and the DM by codifying interactions.

So no, super-high STR isn't a super-power. It just means you're better at things covered by the STR score. Super-high DEX doesn't make you move faster. Super-high WIS doesn't let you perceive things that aren't perceptible. Super-high CHA doesn't let you mind-control people.

And super-high INT isn't even correlated with being a good planner or being paranoid. Both of those are personality traits, not governd or influenced by the ability scores more than tangentially. Or with good tactics--tactical ability isn't listed. It's up to the player. And even wolves show pretty darn good tactics with their 3 INT. So the bar is really really low. It's rare that a PC has lower than an 8 INT, which is just slightly sub-normal. Not "drooling monosyllablic moron" territory. Just...not academically inclined. (Stereotyped, not real) jock. And those guys are pretty darn good at sports tactics.

[1] this does not obviate the need for a good thematic and mechanical fit between the rules and the subject matter of the game. Playing Civilization with a real-time FPS interface wouldn't be so fun. Neither would the reverse case. But the rules aren't a map of the territory, nor are they the territory itself. They're a set of conventions and common language to resolve uncertainty. Nothing more, nothing less.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-18, 12:12 PM
I have no love of retroactive abilities, either (unless they involve actual Chronomancy). They're the "win button" that removes the actual gameplay.

Your other stance is interesting. You prefer "fiction first" ("the rules are the map") over "rules first" ("the rules are the territory"), disliking the latter because it leads to bad role-playing. But do you still dislike "rules first" when it is coupled good role-playing? Do you like fiction first coupled with bad role-playing?


It's not just cases where it results in bad RP, it's also where it results in broken engagement/immersion because the rules produce nonsensical results around the edges and yet are given primacy over the obvious fiction-layer results. The "impossible platonic ideal" system is one wherein rules-first and fiction-first are indistinguishable.




Or… systems which don't have as many mental stats as D&D… how do you take to people effectively arbitrarily assigning their characters level of competence in those missing stats?

Or… people in this thread have disagreed regarding what different stats cover. How do you feel about people role-playing differently based on those different interpretations?


I would hope that a game missing those stats simply didn't "hit" those things, the way that a "medieval fantasy" game doesn't have computer or automotive skills. Some games don't have "characteristics" as such, no STR, no INT, etc, it's all just skills, named/narrative traits, etc. A game where how smart the character is matters, but with zero way to map "this is an exceptionally smart character", would IMO be a broken system.

There is room for good-faith disagreement over what the stats cover, what they mean. I would only be bothered if there was clearly bad intent behind the difference, such as trying to cheap out on a dump stat and then insisting that a different invested-in stat covered most of the same things.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-18, 12:20 PM
No, those are fine. They are certainly not Calvinball as they usually have very well defined boundaries. Instead they are more like equippment kits assumed to contail all the tools you would need for a certain range of tasks without requiring you to prepare them in detail. Or like spell component pouches which follow the same idea of "just assume that the character prepared all cheapcomponents for all spells he might want to cast".


I'm talking about mechanics that, for example, allow the character to retroactively change established facts, events, or explanations, to "emulate" things like "I realized what your plan was all along!" See, for example, Oceans 13, where the it looks like the team has been bested, and then they explain that no, they'd realized all along that a double-cross was going on, so they crossed the cross.




Confused about the stuff in parentheses. Requesting clarification.


It's an analogy... if the fiction layer -- PCs, NPCs, the setting, actions and interactions, etc -- is the actual landscape, the territory... then the rules are the map of that territory.

Which is the original thing, and which is the approximation?

When the map disagrees with the landscape, which is right? Can you cross a river on a bridge that the map shows is there, even though the physical bridge collapsed years ago?

Morty
2021-03-18, 01:00 PM
So no, super-high STR isn't a super-power. It just means you're better at things covered by the STR score. Super-high DEX doesn't make you move faster. Super-high WIS doesn't let you perceive things that aren't perceptible. Super-high CHA doesn't let you mind-control people.


It does bear keeping in mind that just having a very high strength score usually isn't enough to pull off anything like examples of "super strength" from myth and fiction. Systems that incorporate characters strong like superheroes or demigods frequently have discrete abilities to represent that.

Democratus
2021-03-18, 01:11 PM
RPG gaming is collaboratively creating fiction. If intelligence-as-superpower serves the fiction, then that's exactly what it should be.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-18, 01:31 PM
It does bear keeping in mind that just having a very high strength score usually isn't enough to pull off anything like examples of "super strength" from myth and fiction. Systems that incorporate characters strong like superheroes or demigods frequently have discrete abilities to represent that.

Depends on the system.

HERO, for example... base STR is 10, normal stops at 20, superhuman goes up to 60 or more depending on campaign scale.

60 STR is enough to lift 100 tons, leap ridiculous distances, and punch through a bunker wall.

NichG
2021-03-18, 01:36 PM
On one hand, I agree with that point. (Haven't I reiterated my agreement several times over across multiple posts already?) In the sense that reasoning about people's motivations should the under Charisma, and not folded into Int. Or that Int is exploded into additional skills like Knowledge/Lore - any expertise should fall under those skills. That's kind of obvious.

But unless there is a tactics skill, tactics should fall under int (most logically IMO). And unless there is a "speed learning" skill, attributes related to learning (which is under int) such as speed and efficiency of learning, also fall under int. (Explicit refutation of several statements from OP's first post.)


High strength is a super power - in D&D a sufficiently high strength score can let you lift a 10 ton boulder, which is a superhuman accomplishment.

There's no existing skill that specifies breaking (as in literally destroying) laws of physics. However, things have Break DCs that determine the strength check needed to destroy them.

Therefore, a very high Strength should allow a character to destroy gravity as a universal law, end society's enforcement of a legal contact, or metagame arbitrarily ('breaking the fourth wall').

That kind of argument is the problem with 'everything not granted explicitly to an ability should implicitly be assigned to one' combined with the way that the concept of 'beyond human ability' extends the set of things to be assigned to an open set that could contain anything. It's similar to the 'magic is a broad concept, so there's no basis to say that a character shouldn't be able to invent a spell that does any particular thing they like'

What's the Charisma check DC to convince the ocean to get out of the way out of concern about you getting wet?

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-18, 02:11 PM
It does bear keeping in mind that just having a very high strength score usually isn't enough to pull off anything like examples of "super strength" from myth and fiction. Systems that incorporate characters strong like superheroes or demigods frequently have discrete abilities to represent that.

And that's my point. The score alone isn't enough. You need an ability that says you can do it. And really, that ability alone is enough. You could have a creature that isn't particularly dextrous, but can sprint at the speed of sound. Etc.

Telok
2021-03-18, 03:14 PM
What's the Charisma check DC to convince the ocean to get out of the way out of concern about you getting wet?

In Exalted or similar games? Good question, I'm not conversant enough in their specific mechanics. Also plausable in Toon or possibly the Diskworld setting.

And thanks for the map explanations guys. I've met the idea before just not in that exact wording. It's another analogy that I feel is imprecise in important ways, similar to the "rules = user interface" as an all encompassing rpg rules analogy.

<deleted a lot not on topic>

Perhaps also hindering discussion is what people think superpowers are. I've seen write ups of the Sherlock Holmes literary character in d&ds and hero system at different point levels. Was human fighter with 20 int & wis in ad&d a "better" representation than a 200 point hero system with a literal "amazing deduction" power? Was a d&d 3.5 with 30 int and tons of skill points "better" than a 100 point hero with some skills taken to 19- on 3d6? And in game terms does it matter that only one of those can actually investigate if their player can't figure out the right questions to ask?

NichG
2021-03-18, 03:51 PM
In Exalted or similar games? Good question, I'm not conversant enough in their specific mechanics. Also plausable in Toon or possibly the Diskworld setting.

This is kind of the point about needing an explicit framework that enables such things in order for them to be justified, not just identifying some things as super-human and as a result opening up the boundaries to anything else that could be called super-human.

Systems and setting materials set out what's reasonable and suggest things about how the world fundamentally works, but of course they only cover a bounded region of the world they're trying to establish. So this is all about what should going outside the bounds give an individual player the right to insist on (as opposed to having a group consensus to extend things to that area in a specific way).

Tanarii
2021-03-18, 03:52 PM
RPG gaming is collaboratively creating fiction.
No, it is not. It might be for some people. But that is not a universal statement with a value of True.


Which is a valid preference, but not absolute truth.

Many systems, and many gamers, take the other view -- the mechanical representation of the character gets a high X attribute because the character is X.Which is why I caveated my statement with unless the system tells you otherwise. Especially since I know playgrounders fallacy bugs you. :smallwink:

But I'll revise it to, it's historically accurate to the intended use of stats in the original source, D&D. People's perceptions changed to misusing/extending them, and I can't with certainty and without going back to reread the descriptions of all editions be sure they didn't change the purpose as that misuse/extension continued repeatedly.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-18, 05:25 PM
In Exalted or similar games? Good question, I'm not conversant enough in their specific mechanics. Also plausable in Toon or possibly the Diskworld setting.

And thanks for the map explanations guys. I've met the idea before just not in that exact wording. It's another analogy that I feel is imprecise in important ways, similar to the "rules = user interface" as an all encompassing rpg rules analogy.

<deleted a lot not on topic>

Perhaps also hindering discussion is what people think superpowers are. I've seen write ups of the Sherlock Holmes literary character in d&ds and hero system at different point levels. Was human fighter with 20 int & wis in ad&d a "better" representation than a 200 point hero system with a literal "amazing deduction" power? Was a d&d 3.5 with 30 int and tons of skill points "better" than a 100 point hero with some skills taken to 19- on 3d6? And in game terms does it matter that only one of those can actually investigate if their player can't figure out the right questions to ask?

In a D&D type game, superpowers are best described via features. Feats, class features, racial features, etc. Not via stats at all. Because that way they're explicit and can be seen by everyone. This means less bickering about scope and vision.

Even skill ranks are a bad fit, unless those skills have explicit "if your modifier is >x, you can...".

JoeJ
2021-03-19, 12:02 AM
In a D&D type game, superpowers are best described via features. Feats, class features, racial features, etc. Not via stats at all. Because that way they're explicit and can be seen by everyone. This means less bickering about scope and vision.

Even skill ranks are a bad fit, unless those skills have explicit "if your modifier is >x, you can...".

The problem really isn't that the is GM giving the NPC super intelligence powers, it's that they're giving them powers that operate by fiat, outside of the regular rules. In D&D, you can easily give an NPC the ability to cast one or more of the existing divination spells X number of times per day, and now they can anticipate what the PCs will do. But because you're playing by the existing rules, the PCs have a chance to figure out a way to either counter or work around that ability and regain the upper hand. For other fantasy games, you can usually find similar powers that will do what is needed.

Fiat abilities... well, an NPC that operates by fiat can work occasionally (he official M&M game world has several), but usually only for a one-shot adventure because they get old fast. They're not a good choice for a campaign BBEG.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-19, 12:19 AM
The problem really isn't that the is GM giving the NPC super intelligence powers, it's that they're giving them powers that operate by fiat, outside of the regular rules. In D&D, you can easily give an NPC the ability to cast one or more of the existing divination spells X number of times per day, and now they can anticipate what the PCs will do. But because you're playing by the existing rules, the PCs have a chance to figure out a way to either counter or work around that ability and regain the upper hand. For other fantasy games, you can usually find similar powers that will do what is needed.

Fiat abilities... well, an NPC that operates by fiat can work occasionally (he official M&M game world has several), but usually only for a one-shot adventure because they get old fast. They're not a good choice for a campaign BBEG.

Agreed. And divination and such have limits (especially in 5e). But honestly, if a DM came out and said "this guy's really good at seeing through anyone so you can expect anything you plan to be known to him," I'd almost be ok with that. It would annoy me, but I could live with it off the game was fun.

I just dislike hidden rules. Hiding (or finding) powers in intersections of other rules where none of them actually say anything like that and it's just assumed based on extrapolations and inference and such is, to me, cheating. The rules exist for the game. If they're going to be useful, we all have to know them and agree on them. Which is best done in the open.

I'm not even averse to granting PCs cool tricks. But I want them to be explicit, not hidden between the lines. Because that way I can plan and use them to make better sessions. If we work together, the game is better. And that takes a meeting of the minds as to what is possible. And hidden rules obatruct that meeting of the minds.

Democratus
2021-03-19, 07:32 AM
No, it is not. It might be for some people. But that is not a universal statement with a value of True.

Yes it is. Universally.

DM: You are in x situation, what do you do?
Player: My character reacts to the situation like this.

That's collaborative fiction.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-19, 08:27 AM
Yes it is. Universally.

DM: You are in x situation, what do you do?
Player: My character reacts to the situation like this.

That's collaborative fiction.

This again.

Claiming that the character-first, "actor stance" approach to gaming, conducted without regard for the effects on "The Story", is "collaborative fiction", is like claiming each person living their life is engaged in "collaborative fiction" -- and while that claim might appear to certain sorts of hardcore postmodernists, it's pure bollocks.

Claiming that the rules-first approach, that regards the PC as a playing piece is an elaborate free-form boardgame, is "collaborative fiction", is even more ridiculous.

"All gaming is storytelling" is simply and plainly an attempt to elevate one approach/stance/style of gaming, a personal preference, to a supposed universal truth. But it's nothing new, it's been going on since the old days of Usenet in the mid 90s, with for example David Berkman "advocated a style of play based around 'what was good for the story', not what the mindless dice or needs of simulation would call for. 'Advocated' as is 'this is the best way, any other way is stupid' type of advocating."

http://whitehall-paraindustries.com/Theory/Threefold/rpg_theory_bad_rep.htm

Willie the Duck
2021-03-19, 08:33 AM
Oh good, we get to have another soon-to-be-locked flamewar over the definitions of broad terms like game and fiction. I'll bring the marshmallows.


Those sorts of retroactive abilities, etc, are a complaint I have about a lot of post-Forge systems, really.

To me there's zero difference between "Once per X you may declare that the character actually prepared for this already and therefore gets Y bonus against the attack", etc... and effing Calvinball.

I wasn't hoping specifically to speak about those individual rules, so much as just asking if people wanted to discuss rules structures overall vs. discussing advice on playing smart villains, but it looks like the horse has left the barn on that. Anyways...


No, those are fine. They are certainly not Calvinball as they usually have very well defined boundaries. Instead they are more like equippment kits assumed to contail all the tools you would need for a certain range of tasks without requiring you to prepare them in detail. Or like spell component pouches which follow the same idea of "just assume that the character prepared all cheapcomponents for all spells he might want to cast".

I'm talking about mechanics that, for example, allow the character to retroactively change established facts, events, or explanations, to "emulate" things like "I realized what your plan was all along!" See, for example, Oceans 13, where the it looks like the team has been bested, and then they explain that no, they'd realized all along that a double-cross was going on, so they crossed the cross.
I agree with both sides, depending on which type of mechanics, and what we mean by Calvinball. Calvinball has (at least) two components-- things being determined as they progress and as the need calls for it, and being a form of codified cheating. There are things that are determined at the time they are needed that I personally consider reasonable (wild cards in a card game, for instance), so long as they fit an established rules structure and have an established set of boundaries. I wouldn't have much problem with a game having a 'well prepared' ability a less-than-cagey player could give their character that effectively represents 'my character is better at planning than I am and thus this 10 lb. object in my pack is the thing they would know to bring that I didn't.' The distinction is that there should be established rules for what that could be -- if it is a D&D-like party going treasure-hunting in the mountains, the item could be a block and tackle, as the character would realize that dragging large amounts of treasure (or injured party members) up and down mountains becomes massively problematic with just rope, etc. If the party winds up meeting a mountain creature, and decides that the best avenue towards getting the treasure is to seduce them, it couldn't suddenly become a bouquet of roses, because that's drifting into Oceans 13/bad-Batman-gambit-plot territory.

Satinavian
2021-03-19, 09:11 AM
To give an example :

Splittermond has a magic school for fate magic with a subschool for prophecies. One of the spells within, called preparation, allows for a certain duration to retroactively have packed an item below a certain size and cost which is rationalized as being hinted as useful by a vision granted by the spell.

I would not think this ability is problematic. Even if it could theoretically be a bouquet of roses.

Taevyr
2021-03-19, 09:18 AM
are TTRPG's a form of collaborative storytelling: Yeah, I don't see how you can doubt this. There's nothing forcing it to be a particularly good/deep story, but there's always some plot, even if it's simply "are you a bad enough group to kill Tiamat". A B-Movie plot to excuse entering a scripted dungeon with specific encounters tailored for min-max-combat-lovers is still a plot, just an excuse plot.

Are TTRPG's mainly, of hell forbid exclusively, a form of collaborative storytelling: Hell no. In the previous example, I think it's pretty clear that the plot is merely a framework for combat simulation. It's up to player preference, which can swing completely between combat, rp'ing, some exploration if the DM likes prepping that, etc. A group like that might not even care about the story so long as they can fight challenging opponents, which is a perfectly fine playstyle. They might go through every conversation spamming bluff/diplomacy checks, and just continue from there, which is a perfectly fine playstyle. And I'd hesitate to call it collaborative storytelling, as they're basically just fighting highly challenging trains on the DM's plot rails.


Yes it is. Universally.

DM: You are in x situation, what do you do?
Player: My character reacts to the situation like this.

That's collaborative fiction.

That sounds more like a logic problem/fictional problem solving than necessarily being part of a story, but I'll give you that.

However, that isn't general tabletop. Tabletop is generally something like this

DM: You are in x situation, what do you do?
Player: My character reacts to the situation like this. *rolls*
DM: Sorry, you didn't roll well enough. Try something else or take 20/Good roll, you successfully resolve x.

Again, the game-ifying of it is key. The fact that failure or success might not depend on what makes the best story, but a random die roll, is key. And any given group can play it more like "what makes the best story" and largely spurn dice rolls, it's a perfectly fine playstyle. But storytelling needn't be the focus, and even if it is, always has a degree of trade-off with the random factor involved. Unless you just throw away the dice and play pretend, which would also be a perfectly fine playstyle. It just wouldn't be tabletop anymore.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-19, 09:31 AM
Oh good, we get to have another soon-to-be-locked flamewar over the definitions of broad terms like game and fiction. I'll bring the marshmallows.


Wouldn't happen if there wasn't a repeated effort to define RPGs such that only one subjectively-preferred approach to RPGs counts as an RPG.




I wasn't hoping specifically to speak about those individual rules, so much as just asking if people wanted to discuss rules structures overall vs. discussing advice on playing smart villains, but it looks like the horse has left the barn on that. Anyways...


I may have misunderstood the question, then. What rules structures were you thinking of?




I agree with both sides, depending on which type of mechanics, and what we mean by Calvinball. Calvinball has (at least) two mechanics -- things being determined as they progress and as the need calls for it, and being a form of codified cheating. There are things that are determined at the time they are needed that I personally consider reasonable (wild cards in a card game, for instance), so long as they fit an established rules structure and have an established set of boundaries. I wouldn't have much problem with a game having a 'well prepared' ability a less-than-cagey player could give their character that effectively represents 'my character is better at planning than I am and thus this 10 lb. object in my pack is the thing they would know to bring that I didn't.' The distinction is that there should be established rules for what that could be -- if it is a D&D-like party going treasure-hunting in the mountains, the item could be a block and tackle, as the character would realize that dragging large amounts of treasure (or injured party members) up and down mountains becomes massively problematic with just rope, etc. If the party winds up meeting a mountain creature, and decides that the best avenue towards getting the treasure is to seduce them, it couldn't suddenly become a bouquet of roses, because that's drifting into Oceans 13/bad-Batman-gambit-plot territory.


I don't have a problem with "standard gear" or "toolkit" equipment rules in general, but more because they overall reduce bookkeeping and nitpicking.

Where I draw the line is when the character has "Schrodinger's gear" or "always has exactly the right thing"... "I just happened to pack my bat-shark-repellent!" even though the sharks are in a tank in the supervillain's lair in the middle of the Sahara Desert. "You see, Robin, I knew that..." Ugh.

More broadly, what I really loath are abilities that exist outside the character, or allow the player to make retroactive changes.

"The docking clamps holding their ship fail to disengage, and they can't undock to chase us as we escape!" "Why?" "Last time they did repairs they used a cheaper second-hand part that wasn't any good." -- the player gets to establish a fact about the setting and the actions of NPCs that is completely disconnected from their character's actions, and took place in the past.

"My character is so smart that they knew all along that Dr Williams was a traitor, so I did X to thwart their scheme!" -- retroactive, not related to anything the character or player had done previously, allows the player to no-sell the natural outcome of the previous in-setting events and actions... by invoking a zero-effort player-layer ability.

Tanarii
2021-03-19, 09:32 AM
Yes it is. Universally.

DM: You are in x situation, what do you do?
Player: My character reacts to the situation like this.

That's collaborative fiction.
No. If you need to catch up, here's multiple pages on the matter: Collaborative Storytelling is a meaningless phrase (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?545883-Why-collaborative-storytelling-is-a-meaningless-phrase)
(I was shown to be wrong on the title of that thread by the way, Collaborative Storytelling can haz meaning. It's just nowhere near universal, as the discussion showed. And explicitly, your example was demonstrated to be incorrect multiple times.)

If you want to try and explain why you're wrong in detail, start a thread and cross link it here. I'll be happy to shoot it down again at length.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-19, 09:45 AM
To give an example :

Splittermond has a magic school for fate magic with a subschool for prophecies. One of the spells within, called preparation, allows for a certain duration to retroactively have packed an item below a certain size and cost which is rationalized as being hinted as useful by a vision granted by the spell.

I would not think this ability is problematic. Even if it could theoretically be a bouquet of roses.


It's not problematic, because it establishes at the moment of casting an in-setting event that later explains the roses.

Problematic would be using the ability at the moment the roses are needed, and then saying "Well actually when we were buying gear two days ago I happened to buy roses." It immediately brings to mind a cartoon character pulling a bouquet out of hammerspace for comedic effect. Or children playing make-believe and one of them pulling a "I knew that all along" out of their butt to no-sell another kid's statement.



are TTRPG's a form of collaborative storytelling: Yeah, I don't see how you can doubt this. There's nothing forcing it to be a particularly good/deep story, but there's always some plot, even if it's simply "are you a bad enough group to kill Tiamat". A B-Movie plot to excuse entering a scripted dungeon with specific encounters tailored for min-max-combat-lovers is still a plot, just an excuse plot.

Are TTRPG's mainly, of hell forbid exclusively, a form of collaborative storytelling: Hell no. In the previous example, I think it's pretty clear that the plot is merely a framework for combat simulation. It's up to player preference, which can swing completely between combat, rp'ing, some exploration if the DM likes prepping that, etc. A group like that might not even care about the story so long as they can fight challenging opponents, which is a perfectly fine playstyle. They might go through every conversation spamming bluff/diplomacy checks, and just continue from there, which is a perfectly fine playstyle. And I'd hesitate to call it collaborative storytelling, as they're basically just fighting highly challenging trains on the DM's plot rails.



That sounds more like a logic problem/fictional problem solving than necessarily being part of a story, but I'll give you that.

However, that isn't general tabletop. Tabletop is generally something like this

DM: You are in x situation, what do you do?
Player: My character reacts to the situation like this. *rolls*
DM: Sorry, you didn't roll well enough. Try something else or take 20/Good roll, you successfully resolve x.

Again, the game-ifying of it is key. The fact that failure or success might not depend on what makes the best story, but a random die roll, is key. And any given group can play it more like "what makes the best story" and largely spurn dice rolls, it's a perfectly fine playstyle. But storytelling needn't be the focus, and even if it is, always has a degree of trade-off with the random factor involved. Unless you just throw away the dice and play pretend, which would also be a perfectly fine playstyle. It just wouldn't be tabletop anymore.

There's also "what would this person do in this situation?", which can totally disregard "what makes the best story".

"The best story" might feature weeks of investigation building up to a reveal of the villain's hidden plan, and who the villain really is... and then weeks more of back and forth trying to thwart the plan.

What the character might do, however, is something that reveals what's really going on half way through session one... blowing up "The Story".

And in that moment, when the player has to decide "am I going to forgo this action for The Story, or am I going to stay true to the character?", we're looking at what the player's focus actually is.



No. If you need to catch up, here's multiple pages on the matter: Collaborative Storytelling is a meaningless phrase (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?545883-Why-collaborative-storytelling-is-a-meaningless-phrase)
(I was shown to be wrong on the title of that thread by the way, Collaborative Storytelling can haz meaning. It's just nowhere near universal, as the discussion showed. And explicitly, your example was demonstrated to be incorrect multiple times.)

If you want to try and explain why you're wrong in detail, start a thread and cross link it here. I'll be happy to shoot it down again at length.

Good call.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-19, 10:27 AM
Note: I don't know how much this affects communities other than this forum, and especially discussions of D&D-based games.

One thing I've noticed is a presumption on these forums that being super smart (D&D specific: high INT score) also means that
* you're super prepared
* you're super paranoid
* you can accurately predict and understand what other people are thinking even if you've never met them
* you can adapt instantly (or very quickly) to changing circumstances
* you rarely if ever make mistakes or have holes in your defenses--if you do, it's because the author is handing you the idiot ball.
* you can learn anything faster, even completely non-intellectual things
* you're better at tactics, possibly even superhumanly good

In my opinion, that doesn't follow either from the rules (of D&D specifically here) or from anything like real-world experience.

Rules

Here's 5e's description of the Intelligence ability score:


and here's 3e's (from the SRD):


Note what it applies to: learning and reasoning. You pick up new knowledge fast. You can reason quickly from existing knowledge. Note that reading or understanding people and their motivations isn't listed. Neither is tactics. Or preparation. Or anything on that first list, really.

Real world
I grew up around smart people. I went to school with smart people (Physics undergrad, Physics PhD). I've interacted with a lot of people of varying degrees of intelligence. In my experience, smart people are no less likely to make stupid mistakes, especially outside of their area of focus. They're more generally prone to having egos that blind them to the flaws in their reasoning. They're just as prone to confirmation bias and other such errors of thought. And they're effortlessly out-maneuvered and out "thought" in anything like a social scenario by those with much less intelligence but better people skills. And they're way more likely to make stupid mistakes in things that aren't easily amenable to logic or for which the information is lacking. They have one tool, rational thought. And since they're so good at that one tool, they often think themselves into pits that someone with a bit more epistemic humility (and better perception) avoid.

I call them "brilliant idiots." Get a physicist talking outside of his field and often they'll end up acting like they can fix everything (it's a stereotype for a reason--it's actually quite true). But the tools that serve them so well in the very well behaved world of particles and solids fail miserably when applied to humans. Or even things like chemistry or programming--don't ask a physicist to program something if you want it to work consistently or be easy to maintain. Been there, done that. Scientific code is miserable from an engineering standpoint. Heck, just being able to solve the equations of motion of a ball doesn't make you very good at actually catching one. And most people who can do physical things well do so not by understanding the theory (although that happens as well) but through practice until the muscles move without conscious thought.

And most super-smart, super-educated people I've known have been quite rigid in their beliefs, especially in their specialty. They have their pet model and they'll hammer everything into conformance. And if something doesn't work, they tend to reject that reality and substitute their own. Or blame reality rather than their model. They've thought themselves into a corner and solve the issues by declaring that it's the real world that's at fault.


An experimentalist brings a graph to a theoretician, asking "why does it do that" (pointing to a particular part of the curve)? The theoretician thinks for a moment, then confidently gives a complicated explanation. About half-way through, the experimentalist says "wait, you're holding it upside down". The theoretician turns it over, looks at it for a second, and continues on his same explanation of why it's like that.

Hey, no one said physicists had senses of humor. They're surgically removed as part of the PhD entrance process.


On the other hand, I've met lots of people without much formal education and without much "intelligence" who were deep wells of understanding about people and things. Who could diagnose a failing engine by listening to it. Who could get to the heart of a complicated interpersonal matter with a single question, despite not having training. Who had gut instincts that led them right way more than the super smart people's best logic. Especially in matters of who to trust.

Game
So here's my plea.

To DMs--don't have your super-smart people be perfect. Give them flaws, blind spots, etc. just like anyone else. Let the party, if they find those blind spots, exploit them and surprise the bad guy. That's not the idiot ball. Being super smart doesn't mean you're perfect or that you thought of all the angles. And it certainly doesn't give you access to other ways of finding out what the players are up to.

To players--accept that your INT 20 wizard is great at academics. But isn't Batman. And doesn't have to be a super paranoid uber-optimizer 5D chess master. In fact, the game is generally better (IMO) the fewer such people that there are.

Going back to the original post, I largely agree.

Some of the things that players want raw INT to apply to are things that really come from training, experience, or learning in specific fields. Just being "smart" doesn't make someone a brilliant tactician, or automatically better prepared, or hyper-observant, or somehow able to read people perfectly. Sherlock in Elementary isn't able to read people because he's just that smart, he's able to read people because he's also hyper-aware (to such an extent that it's painful), and more importantly, because he has put tremendous study into HOW to read people.

One of the things the WW games do well is separate out certain traits that other games tend to conflate. Intelligence, Wits, and Perception are separate.

Anyone who has been around a university for a while, or spent much time online, has known That Guy, the one who is an expert in one particular field, and thinks that makes them an expert in all fields, and always the smartest person in the room, and never wrong. And they seem to get into gaming disproportionately.

There's a similar problem with Charisma... it's often treated as a superpower in and of itself... the Diplomancer problem, expecting broad and impossible power from a non-superhuman characteristic. "If I'm persuasive enough, I can convince the king to name me his heir, and then commit suicide."

JoeJ
2021-03-19, 11:42 AM
To give an example :

Splittermond has a magic school for fate magic with a subschool for prophecies. One of the spells within, called preparation, allows for a certain duration to retroactively have packed an item below a certain size and cost which is rationalized as being hinted as useful by a vision granted by the spell.

I would not think this ability is problematic. Even if it could theoretically be a bouquet of roses.

The DC Heroes game had an Omnigadget, which the player didn't define until it was used. It had actual rules, and the point cost was based on how many different things you could declare it to be. In M&M you can get the same effect by spending a hero point to edit the scene, or to perform a power stunt with your gear. In both games, there's a resource cost to keep it from being overused to the detriment of the game.

Satinavian
2021-03-19, 12:35 PM
A scene editing power would be too far for my taste as well. With the above power, preparing the item is still something the character does and it is clear how and when he gets the information necessary to do so. That feels different.

Rynjin
2021-03-19, 04:32 PM
A scene editing power would be too far for my taste as well. With the above power, preparing the item is still something the character does and it is clear how and when he gets the information necessary to do so. That feels different.

It works great in M&M, but the whole system is basically built around the Hero Point economy; without them, any given task maxes out at around a 55% chance of success, so players are encouraged to dump them in pretty much every fight and then gain more by allowing the GM to screw them over in specific ways via their Complications.

So the "edit a scene" function has a pretty big opportunity cost in raw numbers power, so you'd better get a lot of bang for your buck.

icefractal
2021-03-19, 04:41 PM
As far as what falls into character skill vs player skill overall, my standpoint is simple - the things the players enjoy doing themselves should be player skill, the things they don't should be character skill.

There is no "right" answer for this. There exists a continuum where one end is full-contact LARPing, and the other is "give the GM your character sheet, including goals/personality/etc, and a few weeks later they'll tell you how the campaign went" - ie. treating all decisions as character-based, not player-based. And anywhere along that continuum is equally "valid".

So if your group likes tactical decisions, then the tactics should be player controlled (as they are in 3.x for example). If they don't, it should be abstracted (as in Fate, where "flanking position" is an aspect you create). If the group likes trying to persuade NPCs with their own social skills, they should do that, and if they don't then it should be down to rolls. Neither one is "more correct", they're only correct or incorrect for a given group.

So why is it the character's Strength that matters to lift something, but the player's actual ability to solve a puzzle that matters? Because those players enjoy solving puzzles but don't enjoy competitive weightlifting. And that's it, no other justification is necessary.


Of course, this can be frustrating when your preferences don't match the rest of the group. If you want to solve puzzles but everyone else wants to roll Int-checks (or vice-versa), it's a mismatch, and you've either got to put up with it or find a better suited group.

But that doesn't mean you can call your preference an objective truth. I mean, I don't particularly like the Horror genre, but I'm not going to go around saying "Horror isn't a valid genre for RPGs" because that would be stupid.

JoeJ
2021-03-19, 04:42 PM
It works great in M&M, but the whole system is basically built around the Hero Point economy; without them, any given task maxes out at around a 55% chance of success, so players are encouraged to dump them in pretty much every fight and then gain more by allowing the GM to screw them over in specific ways via their Complications.

So the "edit a scene" function has a pretty big opportunity cost in raw numbers power, so you'd better get a lot of bang for your buck.

It's also limited in that it's not intended as a way to change something in a scene that has already been established, but to establish something that fills in the blanks. For example, if you're fighting in a chemistry lab you could use Edit a Scene to say that there is a vial of acid within reach, but you couldn't use it to say that you're actually in a railroad station.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-19, 05:58 PM
It's also limited in that it's not intended as a way to change something in a scene that has already been established, but to establish something that fills in the blanks. For example, if you're fighting in a chemistry lab you could use Edit a Scene to say that there is a vial of acid within reach, but you couldn't use it to say that you're actually in a railroad station.

I'm actually quite fine with this style. I've thought about including it as an option for Inspiration in 5e: you can declare one detail about the scene as long as it doesn't contradict established fact. DM can veto, but that doesn't burn your Inspiration point. The later is there to stop "and there's really a Holy Avenger on the table!" Or "and the boss is willing to just surrender!"

Never done it, because lazy.

Lucas Yew
2021-03-20, 04:45 AM
As far as what falls into character skill vs player skill overall, my standpoint is simple - the things the players enjoy doing themselves should be player skill, the things they don't should be character skill.

There is no "right" answer for this. There exists a continuum where one end is full-contact LARPing, and the other is "give the GM your character sheet, including goals/personality/etc, and a few weeks later they'll tell you how the campaign went" - ie. treating all decisions as character-based, not player-based. And anywhere along that continuum is equally "valid".

So if your group likes tactical decisions, then the tactics should be player controlled (as they are in 3.x for example). If they don't, it should be abstracted (as in Fate, where "flanking position" is an aspect you create). If the group likes trying to persuade NPCs with their own social skills, they should do that, and if they don't then it should be down to rolls. Neither one is "more correct", they're only correct or incorrect for a given group.

So why is it the character's Strength that matters to lift something, but the player's actual ability to solve a puzzle that matters? Because those players enjoy solving puzzles but don't enjoy competitive weightlifting. And that's it, no other justification is necessary.


Of course, this can be frustrating when your preferences don't match the rest of the group. If you want to solve puzzles but everyone else wants to roll Int-checks (or vice-versa), it's a mismatch, and you've either got to put up with it or find a better suited group.

But that doesn't mean you can call your preference an objective truth. I mean, I don't particularly like the Horror genre, but I'm not going to go around saying "Horror isn't a valid genre for RPGs" because that would be stupid.

I wish my sig wasn't already filled up, as it seems that I really like this very nugget of wisdom.

Witty Username
2021-03-22, 02:03 AM
Game
So here's my plea.

To DMs--don't have your super-smart people be perfect. Give them flaws, blind spots, etc. just like anyone else. Let the party, if they find those blind spots, exploit them and surprise the bad guy. That's not the idiot ball. Being super smart doesn't mean you're perfect or that you thought of all the angles. And it certainly doesn't give you access to other ways of finding out what the players are up to.

To players--accept that your INT 20 wizard is great at academics. But isn't Batman. And doesn't have to be a super paranoid uber-optimizer 5D chess master. In fact, the game is generally better (IMO) the fewer such people that there are.

Eh, I have found that players that are playing "super paranoid uber-optimizer 5D chess masters" will do so regardless of their characters intelligence.
I have personally found wisdom to be more frustrating, because it matters for so many more things mechanically, as dm, you get to the point where you can't actually hide information from players (insight is almost game breaking at social encounters). Meanwhile, int applies to almost nothing (especially if perception gets used in place of investigation).

For smart monsters, the big thing is can they recognize classes in my mind. the one with no armor and weapons and a large book is a wizard, the one in plate and a great sword is a fighter. And possibly which saves they are likely to have. Past that they may decide to run earlier.

Morty
2021-03-22, 07:35 AM
This thread reminds me of why I've grown dissatisfied with the traditional attribute spreads (strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc.) and became eager to explore other means of representing aptitudes.

Tanarii
2021-03-22, 09:05 AM
I have personally found wisdom to be more frustrating, because it matters for so many more things mechanically, as dm, you get to the point where you can't actually hide information from players (insight is almost game breaking at social encounters). Meanwhile, int applies to almost nothing (especially if perception gets used in place of investigation).

Yeah, that's definitely a problem with the DM turning Insight and Perception into superpowers. They're amazingly useful in a campaign where there are lots opponents using Deception and Stealth, of course. But Insight isn't mind reading, and Perception just lets you spot/hear/smell things that there is a less than 100% chance you might otherwise overlook.

The biggest problem with Perception as a superpower is how DMs handle traps. The majority of work when it comes to traps requires Investigation, or player skill. Perception just gives you extra details to work with. It shouldn't directly reveal any component of a trap, unless it's really basic and obviously perceivable trigger (e.g. a tripwire). Ditto for secret doors / hidden compartments.

Edit: since you're using 5e names for skills, I'm specifically talking about 5e here.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-22, 11:52 AM
This thread reminds me of why I've grown dissatisfied with the traditional attribute spreads (strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc.) and became eager to explore other means of representing aptitudes.

Unfortunately, a lot of the attempts just end up with different odd edge cases and overlaps/conflations.

"We split agility from dexterity, but combined strength and endurance!"
"We just give you three, Physical, Mental, and Social!"
"There are no characteristics, just a long list of skills!"

Democratus
2021-03-22, 12:38 PM
No. If you need to catch up, here's multiple pages on the matter: Collaborative Storytelling is a meaningless phrase (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?545883-Why-collaborative-storytelling-is-a-meaningless-phrase)
(I was shown to be wrong on the title of that thread by the way, Collaborative Storytelling can haz meaning. It's just nowhere near universal, as the discussion showed. And explicitly, your example was demonstrated to be incorrect multiple times.)

If you want to try and explain why you're wrong in detail, start a thread and cross link it here. I'll be happy to shoot it down again at length.

{Scrubbed}

People creating a story together is collaborative fiction. This includes a DM giving a situation and the players saying how their characters react.

{Scrubbed}

Morty
2021-03-22, 12:42 PM
Unfortunately, a lot of the attempts just end up with different odd edge cases and overlaps/conflations.

"We split agility from dexterity, but combined strength and endurance!"
"We just give you three, Physical, Mental, and Social!"
"There are no characteristics, just a long list of skills!"

I don't see any problems with any of those. It helps if you stop expecting attributes to simulate anything realistically, which they can never do, and treat them as tools for a job.

NichG
2021-03-22, 12:51 PM
{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

People creating a story together is collaborative fiction. This includes a DM giving a situation and the players saying how their characters react.

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

A thing taking place and that thing being the central purpose of an activity around which the parameters of the activity should be decided are different. Best to acknowledge that different people can want different things out of the endeavor rather than trying to tell people what they actually want.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-22, 12:51 PM
{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

People creating a story together is collaborative fiction. This includes a DM giving a situation and the players saying how their characters react.

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}


Not really.

Start with the fact that not all gamers are "creating a story together".




A thing taking place and that thing being the central purpose of an activity around which the parameters of the activity should be decided are different. Best to acknowledge that different people can want different things out of the endeavor rather than trying to tell people what they actually want.


Plus this. But that never stopped the "all gaming is storytelling, even if you don't want it to be, even if that ruins it for you" crowd from insisting they know better.

Batcathat
2021-03-22, 01:18 PM
Start with the fact that not all gamers are "creating a story together".

Aren't they? It might not be the main focus of every group but I can't think any game, any style, where it's not true. Even a story that's nothing but the GM presenting monster after monster and the players deciding how to stab them is still a story, I'd say. Do you have any examples of what you mean?

OldTrees1
2021-03-22, 01:36 PM
Aren't they? It might not be the main focus of every group but I can't think any game, any style, where it's not true. Even a story that's nothing but the GM presenting monster after monster and the players deciding how to stab them is still a story, I'd say. Do you have any examples of what you mean?

One side is taking a reasonable premise (RPGs are collaborative and happen to create stories) but jumping to conclusions (what is best for the story is relevant).

The other side is rejecting the reasonable premise rather than the leap in logic.

Then you have responses like NichG's where they point


A thing taking place and that thing being the central purpose of an activity around which the parameters of the activity should be decided are different. Best to acknowledge that different people can want different things out of the endeavor rather than trying to tell people what they actually want.

Indeed
A book is a weight, but not everyone uses a book for the purpose of it being a weight.

Willie the Duck
2021-03-22, 02:10 PM
I may have misunderstood the question, then. What rules structures were you thinking of?
Honestly was trying to leave it open. Just... anything. Mechanisms in place for the GM to play someone better at strategic thinking than they are, particularly if it isn't the old 'enemy knows everything the GM does' method. I tend to lean hard on the idea that the best rules facilitate play for the least experienced gamers (including actual kids), as the most experienced gamers barely need rules structures to keep the game going.


One side is taking a reasonable premise (RPGs are collaborative and happen to create stories) but jumping to conclusions (what is best for the story is relevant).

The other side is rejecting the reasonable premise rather than the leap in logic.

And in all cases the thread premise will be ignored for a chance to bang the drum for their own perceived side once again.


I don't see any problems with any of those. It helps if you stop expecting attributes to simulate anything realistically, which they can never do, and treat them as tools for a job.
I generally wouldn't merge strength and endurance while splitting agility and dexterity, as either the attributes should be narrow of broad, consistently. Social/Mental/Physical seems fine, especially in a game where each of them is highlighted well. Just having a long list of skills generally isn't actually just skills, though, as there are usually a bunch of other things that are analogous to Hit Points and similar (they just don't stop in the middle for attributes, which are this odd in-between land that somehow gained primacy in most systems).

Tanarii
2021-03-22, 03:18 PM
I'm actually happier with skills than with attributes, despite growing up on D&D. The problem is "natural talent" isn't really reflected very well in them, as in things that reasonably can be done untrained, with varying degrees of success depending on your relevant talent.

OTOH that's kind of overrated. Either they shouldn't be a roll if anyone can do them, or everyone can just have a minimal chance of untrained success, or you can add feat-alikes that modify skills like "Coordinated, add 20% to piloting and parrying skills, including untrained".

Morty
2021-03-22, 05:16 PM
I generally wouldn't merge strength and endurance while splitting agility and dexterity, as either the attributes should be narrow of broad, consistently. Social/Mental/Physical seems fine, especially in a game where each of them is highlighted well. Just having a long list of skills generally isn't actually just skills, though, as there are usually a bunch of other things that are analogous to Hit Points and similar (they just don't stop in the middle for attributes, which are this odd in-between land that somehow gained primacy in most systems).

I see the concern regarding the first one, but I'm not sure if it's necessarily a problem. I've seen systems do that, though I haven't tried them out in practice. Even if split, both agility and dexterity are very useful to many concepts, while even the combined attribute of "strong and tough" is pretty narrow as far as problem-solving goes.


I'm actually happier with skills than with attributes, despite growing up on D&D. The problem is "natural talent" isn't really reflected very well in them, as in things that reasonably can be done untrained, with varying degrees of success depending on your relevant talent.

OTOH that's kind of overrated. Either they shouldn't be a roll if anyone can do them, or everyone can just have a minimal chance of untrained success, or you can add feat-alikes that modify skills like "Coordinated, add 20% to piloting and parrying skills, including untrained".

The line between "natural talent" and "learned skill" is blurry and indistinct enough in real life that I'm not convinced it's worth dwelling too much on in game rules. That there are some things that everyone should be able to attempt is true, but it's also something many systems struggle with anyway.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-22, 05:23 PM
The line between "natural talent" and "learned skill" is blurry and indistinct enough in real life that I'm not convinced it's worth dwelling too much on in game rules. That there are some things that everyone should be able to attempt is true, but it's also something many systems struggle with anyway.

Honestly, I'm of the (very strong) opinion that everyone should be able to attempt anything in the "skill" arena (as opposed to, say, spellcasting or things covered by class features).

Not a rogue? Still should be able to (try to) find traps. Not "trained" in Arcana? You can still try to decipher those runes. Won't be as good at it, but go right ahead.

Proficiency/training/"skill points" should make you better and possibly unlock other features, but shouldn't gate ability to attempt.

Tanarii
2021-03-22, 06:19 PM
Honestly, I'm of the (very strong) opinion that everyone should be able to attempt anything in the "skill" arena (as opposed to, say, spellcasting or things covered by class features).
That depends entirely on the game conceit (e.g. adventures know adventuring things; this game is about ninjas and super spies doing ninja & super spy things), and frankly on the era as well. Modern and future games require specialization / trained skills.

I mean, it's a valid design method to require an Engineering Class to do engineering-type things with engineering-type class features. Or Hacker class to use it's features.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-22, 06:56 PM
That depends entirely on the game conceit (e.g. adventures know adventuring things; this game is about ninjas and super spies doing ninja & super spy things), and frankly on the era as well. Modern and future games require specialization / trained skills.

I mean, it's a valid design method to require an Engineering Class to do engineering-type things with engineering-type class features. Or Hacker class to use it's features.

Note the parenthetical in the quote. Things like spellcasting (the fantasy equivalent of Star-Trek engineering or Shadowrun hacking) I'm fine with requiring a "class feature". But in a system like D&D that has "general" skills not uniquely tied to a class, anything covered by those should be open access, with "training" only modulating difficulty. IMO.

Willie the Duck
2021-03-22, 09:16 PM
I see the concern regarding the first one, but I'm not sure if it's necessarily a problem. I've seen systems do that, though I haven't tried them out in practice. Even if split, both agility and dexterity are very useful to many concepts, while even the combined attribute of "strong and tough" is pretty narrow as far as problem-solving goes.

Oh, I can imagine uses. For instance, westerns could have dexterity for the never-miss gunslinger, agility for the guy who never gets hit/sneaks around a lot (and if all of that came under one stat, it would be the power stat of the game), and then 'strong and tough' for the bar-room brawler. Just highlights what I think is the important part -- you have to have an idea of how much each stat is going to effect the game before you decide how they are split out.

Rynjin
2021-03-23, 12:32 AM
This thread reminds me of why I've grown dissatisfied with the traditional attribute spreads (strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc.) and became eager to explore other means of representing aptitudes.


Unfortunately, a lot of the attempts just end up with different odd edge cases and overlaps/conflations.

"We split agility from dexterity, but combined strength and endurance!"
"We just give you three, Physical, Mental, and Social!"
"There are no characteristics, just a long list of skills!"

I like the FFd6 attribute spread:

Power: Raw energy and strength. Note: not just physical strength, but magical might. Determines damage with many weapons and spell power for some spells.
Resolve: Endurance (HP primarily).
Dexterity: speed, agility, coordination. Determines damage with a few weapons.
Mind: knack for lore and magic.

Plus the derived stats:

HP: Derived from Resolve
MP: Derived from Mind
Avoidance: Basically armor class; derived from Dex.

Force: Derived from a combination of Power and Resolve; determines ability DC with some abilities and spells.
Finesse: Derived from a combination of Dexterity and Mind; determines maximum skill ranks you can have in a given skill and ability DC with some abilities and spells.

Satinavian
2021-03-23, 02:14 AM
I see the concern regarding the first one, but I'm not sure if it's necessarily a problem. I've seen systems do that, though I haven't tried them out in practice. Even if split, both agility and dexterity are very useful to many concepts, while even the combined attribute of "strong and tough" is pretty narrow as far as problem-solving goes.
I have played some and if it is not a system where dexterity is the firearm skill and firearms are the most common weapons for everyone, it ends up with dexterity being a dump-stat for everyone safe some specialists. It is not that you can't find uses for dexterity, it is that none of those use are things that most characters care for.

For fantasy systems, agility+dexterity is not a good idea ime.


Note the parenthetical in the quote. Things like spellcasting (the fantasy equivalent of Star-Trek engineering or Shadowrun hacking) I'm fine with requiring a "class feature". But in a system like D&D that has "general" skills not uniquely tied to a class, anything covered by those should be open access, with "training" only modulating difficulty. IMO.
Shadowrun hacking has always been skill based and so is starship engineering in many space opera rpgs. And that is not bad. The only thing skill based via class based does here is allowing hybrids or people picking it up later and those are all viable concepts in the corresponding fiction.

As for untrained stuff, there should be a lot untrained people simply can't do, no roll allowed. There are other things where everyone should have a chance. But most skill based systems already have mechanisms for both and while one might argue about particular implementations, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

Morty
2021-03-23, 06:56 AM
Honestly, I'm of the (very strong) opinion that everyone should be able to attempt anything in the "skill" arena (as opposed to, say, spellcasting or things covered by class features).

Not a rogue? Still should be able to (try to) find traps. Not "trained" in Arcana? You can still try to decipher those runes. Won't be as good at it, but go right ahead.

Proficiency/training/"skill points" should make you better and possibly unlock other features, but shouldn't gate ability to attempt.

In fairness, rogues being required to deal with traps is something 20 years past its expiration date, attributes notwithstanding.


Oh, I can imagine uses. For instance, westerns could have dexterity for the never-miss gunslinger, agility for the guy who never gets hit/sneaks around a lot (and if all of that came under one stat, it would be the power stat of the game), and then 'strong and tough' for the bar-room brawler. Just highlights what I think is the important part -- you have to have an idea of how much each stat is going to effect the game before you decide how they are split out.

It is difficult to argue about it in a vacuum, yes. And I generally thing it's more useful to talk about it in terms of what character concepts are being enabled and how many situations the attribute can be applied to rather than trying to reflect any real traits.


I have played some and if it is not a system where dexterity is the firearm skill and firearms are the most common weapons for everyone, it ends up with dexterity being a dump-stat for everyone safe some specialists. It is not that you can't find uses for dexterity, it is that none of those use are things that most characters care for.

For fantasy systems, agility+dexterity is not a good idea ime.

I have heard of it happening in Warhammer Fantasy RP 4E, so there's something to it. Of course, WFRP also has separate Weapon Skill and Ballistic Skill attributes as a holdover from the wargame. I know the Conan 2d20 RPG also splits it into agility and "coordination", but I haven't played it (much as I'd like to).

Telok
2021-03-23, 12:12 PM
In fairness, rogues being required to deal with traps is something 20 years past its expiration date, attributes notwithstanding.

Also in fairness that was a misreading of a poorly explained subsystem/class ability and it was never intended by the designers to be run that way.

Unfortunately that still happens. I wonder if that's part of the issues. One dev putting "Int is memory and smarts" type things in the player chatacter chapter, another putting "Don't roll if its obvious" in a different chapter or book, and nowhere are there actual useful examples of what/when to roll. Then everyone brings in their personal interpretation of "smarts" and "obvious", which of course won't match two different (and probably not really communicating) developers ideas of them.

I mean, I'm doing a rewrite of the DtD40k7e1.6 book and there's a perception skill but the "how hard" chart is basically a prototype for the 5e D&D chart. In a system with everything from 2d10 to 'roll 10d10, keep best 8, reroll 1s' what does "hard difficulty: target number 20" mean? An orc a half mile away? A jumbo jet at 50k feet? I don't know and I don't know what the original author intended. So for my rewrite I checked some military research on how far away people spot and ID stuff, wrote a chart based on that and the numbers normal people would roll when looking for stuff, and then went and found picture examples to include. And now people playing that game will have a shared expectation of what the skill means.

Plus it turns out that 10 keep 8 really is a perception superpower, which is fine as that matches the tone of the game and exceeds normal human maximums anyways.