We have size categories, why not intelligence categories?

[Greywander]

I was thinking about this. A lot of systems are designed under the assumption that you'll be facing foes of a similar size as you, then add Size as a game statistic with accompanying rules to govern how things change when you and your opponent aren't the same size. Not every system does this; some systems just make appropriate modifications to a monster's stats to account for it being larger or smaller. But a fair number do.

But I don't think I've seen a system that does the same thing with intelligence. And this can lead to some strange cases where a human PC has less intelligence than some animals. This also tends to restrict the intelligence values that animals can have; one point more and they're too close to human-level intelligence, one point less and they're virtually nonsentient. This makes it difficult e.g. to have one wolf that's smarter than another wolf. If we introduced a system for mental capacity that worked as an analogue to physical size, then these problems could be alleviated.

There's a lot of variance on how many categories we could have, or what the specific criteria would be for different levels, but I think we can broadly divide intelligence into four groups.

Nonsentient

This generally includes anything without a brain. I can see having two possible subcategories here. One could be Inanimate, and refers to anything that's not even alive, like a rock. Then again, such a category might be redundant, and it's not clear what mental stats would even represent in such a case.

The other category could be called Unthinking. As mentioned above, it includes anything without a brain: plants, fungus, bacteria, jellyfish, and so on. These are things that entirely lack the ability to make decisions, and instead merely respond to stimuli. Higher mental stats would symbolize more complex responses to a wider and more detailed list of stimuli. In some cases, entities in this category can even "learn" and change their response to a stimulus. However, this isn't true learning, merely a complex response to a complex set of stimuli; it is predictable and can be easily reproduced with the right stimuli.

Sentient

This covers anything that has a brain and is below human-level intelligence. It could be quite a broad category, and it can be difficult to divide it up into subcategories since there seems to be a lot of variance between different types of animals. There isn't necessarily a single metric for intelligence, as some animals are capable of certain intelligent behavior but not others, while a different animal is capable of the other intelligent behavior, but not the first. Instead of splitting intelligence up into different levels, it might make sense to create a checklist of intelligent behavior, e.g. using tools, being self-aware, using language, etc.

If we did break it down by level of intellect, however, the lowest level might be called Instinctual. These are animals that are capable of thinking and making decisions, but those decisions are almost entirely informed by instinct. They're also capable of learning new information, such as where to find food or what things or places might be dangerous. Not sure exactly what kinds of animals this might apply to, but one thing you could use it for is mindless undead (although those might be classed as nonsentient). Higher mental stats signify more complex and complete instincts that allow the creature to respond appropriately to a wider variety of situations. Higher mental stats can also indicate the creature has a greater capacity to learn and understand, though they'll always be primarily instinctual.

As you move up in intelligence, you'd start moving away from instinct and more towards learned behavior and logical thinking. You'd also likely start seeing social animals that opperate in packs and can coordinate with one another. These creatures are often ideal for domesticating since they're smart enough to learn but not so smart that are difficult to control. There might be more than one middling category, as this is a pretty broad set. Higher mental stats would generally correspond to learning more quickly or exhibiting more complex behavior (e.g. social behavior).

At the top would be Subsapient. These are creatures that fall just short of human-level intelligence, such as dolphins or apes. They can generally recognize their reflection in a mirror (i.e. they are self-aware), use tools and solve puzzles, do very basic math, and learn and use language. They fail at more abstact thinking that humans are capable of. Higher mental stats would have similar implications as it would for sapient creatures.

Sapient

Sapience is a tricky thing to define, as IRL only humans have it. Basically, this just refers to anything with human-level intelligence. In a fantasy world, this would doubtlessly apply to creatures like elves and dwarves, and most other humanoid races. Likewise, in a sci-fi setting, aliens would span all levels of intelligence, including this one. After all, it's easier for us to understand if an alien world is like our own, with it's own aliens animals and alien people.

Transcient (I basically made this word up; is there a more appropriate word?)

For beings of higher intelligence than humans. This could be gods, angels or devils, aliens, ancient precursors, family pets, etc. By its very nature, it's difficult for us to properly comprehend what this might look like. That said, there are a couple things we could do to roleplay an entity such as this. One would be to give them a greater capacity for abstract thinking. This could be represented by a higher ability with mathematics, possibly including thinking in higher dimensions (e.g. 4D or 5D).

Another would be heightened awareness. Two ways this could manifest would be in an apparent ability to see the future or read minds. In reality, they're doing neither of those things, it's just that they have a greater ability to take their knowledge of the current situation and predict potential outcomes, including the anticipation of unexpected complications. Likewise, they'd be more aware of things like body language and have a greater capacity for empathy, helping them to see things from the perspective of another person. If someone is rude to them, they might pick up on a number of cues that indicate that person might be severely stressed and anxious, rather than them just being a mean person.

These kinds of entities might also have an easier time overcoming their own feelings and doing the things they know to be best. If they know they should work out, then they will, and the temporary pain is less bothersome to them since they're more able to see ahead to the rewards. They're more able to resist eating food that isn't good for them. And so on and so forth. It's not that they don't have similar feelings to humans, they're simply more aware of the benefits of doing the things that they should that it makes it easier for them to overcome those feelings. This can also extend to things like feelings of revenge or jealousy or envy. It doesn't mean that they won't seek revenge, only that they won't allow themselves to be consumed by that desire and let it destroy them along with their enemy.

Anyway, thoughts on this? The effect would depend on the system you were putting it into, and it might work best with an original system. There would need to be some kind of accompanying rules for how creatures with different levels of intelligence interact with one another differently. It could also influence things like the ability to learn magic (if your dog can learn wizardry, and can also have a high Intelligence stat, then they might be a better wizard than you, even though you're technically smarter; on the other hand, wizardry would likely not even be available to anything below sapient or perhaps subsapient).

[rel]

This style of design has also been applied to strength, with power based systems often having a super strength ability and scale which is similar to size but a more pronounced change. Generally entities of different scale can't meaningfully interact so you can't blow up a battleship by stomping around on the deck for a few hours.

Your idea seems novel, I haven't seen categorisation applied to intelligence or body plan (the fundamental differences between say a human and a cow or the similarities between a human and an animated human skeleton) in a game yet.

[RedSand]

No offense but I don't really see why you would need to systemize this like that.

Size categories exist because you frequently need to quantify a thing's size relative to another thing so you know how they interact, in a different way then stats do. A gelatinous cube is bigger then a flesh golem but the flesh golem is built to be insanely strong and tough-you couldn't just say "oh this gelatinous cube is bigger so it must be given a higher strength score then the flesh golem". That doesn't realistically quantify how the cube interacts with the world. Intelligence, on the other hand, is an already extremely murky thing to quantify in real life, so it seems alright to me to just abstract it via a number.

[Breccia]

We had that in First Edition, but it was just a name given with their Int score.

[Bohandas]

Transcient (I basically made this word up; is there a more appropriate word?)

I think you mean "transcendent" or "transcendental". A transient would be a drifter or hobo.

[Composer99]

I'm inclined to think that size categories exist as an abstraction that provides some sort of game-mechanical utility.

So I guess the question is, what game-mechanical utility are you getting out of intelligence categories? For the purpose of game-mechanical utility, is the potential difference in intelligence between any two wolves significant enough that one of them might belong in a different category than the other?

In my "OGL fantasy heartbreaker", I don't really bother with categories, as such, but I do have two, you might say, "keywords" that are applicable: mindless and thinking.
- A mindless creature is, for instance, a gelatinous cube or a zombie.
- A thinking creature is any creature with an Intelligence of 3 or higher that understands at least one language.

(This means there are creatures that are neither mindless nor thinking.)

My goal isn't necessarily to have a sensible set of categories, but mechanics that are easy to hook other mechanics to - for instance, mindless creatures might be immune to charm or fear effects, or some spells might require that you target thinking creatures.


I think you mean "transcendent" or "transcendental". A transient would be a drifter or hobo.

If I'm not mistaken, Greywander's thinking of a step down from "omniscient" there, hence the neologism.

[LibraryOgre]

So, as mentioned, 1e and 2e divided Intelligence into categories, but they just corresponded to a range of numbers... a Low intelligence meant something between 5 and 7, inclusive. Very intelligent was 11 or 12. That's more or less what the size categories are, though they're a bit more nebulous... in some editions, dwarves are medium, in others they're small, and sometimes, it depends on their rolled height.

Rifts, on the other hand, has a few different kinds of strength, that run on roughly the same scale, despite being absolutely divorced from each other in numbers.
There's normal strength.
There's exceptional strength, which is normal strength, just with numbers at the theoretically higher end (16+, I think; but you can roll up to 30, and there's a ton of way to get bonuses).
There's Augmented (formerly bionic) Strength.
There's Robotic Strength.
There's Supernatural Strength.

Now, in theory, these run off the same number scale, but a 20 (normal/exceptional) strength and a 20 supernatural strength are WILDLY different.
Normal 20: Carry 400 pounds, punch does d4+5 damage
Augmented 20: Carry 400 pounds, punch does d4+5. Frequently have special modifiers to the carry weight, and if their strength is 24, they can do a power punch that will do 100 damage (or 1 mega-damage)
Robotic 20: Carry 500 pounds (25*PS), can do 2d6+5 with a normal punch, or 100 damage (1 mega damage) with a normal punch.
Supernatural 20: Carry 1000 pounds, punch does 3d6+5 on a restrained punch, 100-600 (1d6 mega-damage) for a normal punch, or 2d6 mega-damage for a power punch.

You will note: In these few ranges, absolutely none of it is related except for the number. Knowing someone has a 20 PS is meaningless unless you know what kind of PS they have, and someone with a 20 PS might be WILDLY stronger than someone else with a 20 PS.

[Greywander]

I think you mean "transcendent" or "transcendental". A transient would be a drifter or hobo.

If I'm not mistaken, Greywander's thinking of a step down from "omniscient" there, hence the neologism.
Correct, it was supposed to sit between sapient and omniscient (which probably should have been listed as the highest category of intelligence). "Scient" comes from the same root as "scientist", and "trans" means "across or beyond". So it was meant to mean something like "beyond human understanding" while being less than "omniscient" (which is "all-knowing").


I'm inclined to think that size categories exist as an abstraction that provides some sort of game-mechanical utility.

So I guess the question is, what game-mechanical utility are you getting out of intelligence categories? For the purpose of game-mechanical utility, is the potential difference in intelligence between any two wolves significant enough that one of them might belong in a different category than the other?
Just as an example, let's say we want to implement a mechanic that works in a similar fashion to grappling, but involving mental stats. As things are, all wolves would be equally capable, but under this system you could have some wolves with higher or lower mental stats than others, making them more or less competent with this new mechanic. But, as with grappling and size, this mechanic might not be as effective against creatures in higher intelligence categories. Or maybe it would be.

Right now, using D&D 5e as an example, you can't really introduce any kind of mechanics that allow for some wolves to be smarter than others, spanning the typical range of ability scores. I don't have a specific mechanic in mind that I'd want to introduce, but intelligence categories would be a prerequisite before I could even consider such a thing. My point is mostly that introducing something like this would open up the possibility of adding such mechanics. That said, there are some things it would affect immediately, such as making it so that not every animal absolutely sucks at INT saves and checks. There may be some situations where you want creatures of lesser intellect to perform worse, even if they have the same INT score as a higher intelligence creature, but you can specifically write that into the ability. This could also pave the way for things like mind control or manipulation abilities that only work on creature of lesser intelligence, e.g. things like Dominate Beast could be based off of intelligence level rather than creature type, or the Necromancer's Command Undead might only work on up to sentient undead, but not sapient undead.


So, as mentioned, 1e and 2e divided Intelligence into categories, but they just corresponded to a range of numbers... a Low intelligence meant something between 5 and 7, inclusive. Very intelligent was 11 or 12. That's more or less what the size categories are, though they're a bit more nebulous... in some editions, dwarves are medium, in others they're small, and sometimes, it depends on their rolled height.
But those are just fancy names given to specific ranges. You'll never get a wolf with 16 INT, for example, and if you did, they would be smarter than a 15 INT elf. With a system like this, a 15 INT wolf would be quite intelligent for a wolf, but still less intelligent than an 8 INT human. Well, maybe. It's possible, for example, for a smaller creature to have a higher carrying capacity than a larger creature if their STR score is high enough, and the same could be true here as well. The 8 INT human would still be of a higher intellect, but the 16 INT wolf might be, say, more "efficient". They have less understanding than their human companion, but they're more adaptive; they don't know what a book is, but they might be able to solve a simple puzzle more quickly.

One place this could manifest is with learning time. In D&D 5e (again, just using this as an example), the amount of downtime required to learn a new tool is decreased by having higher INT. So, for example, a high INT animal who is capable of tool use might learn just as quickly as a human would. Being of a lesser intellect might not affect the learn times, only whether or not that creature can learn to use tools at all.

[sandmote]

You could maybe reasonably tie particular skills to intelligence categories: for instance, a creature must be at least subsapient (although I don't like the implications of this term) to make checks involving technical knowledge like that gained by formally studying a subject.

I do prefer Inanimate and Unthinking to Nonsentient, partially because I think it could clarify why some effect doesn't work: exceptions that allow you to "trick" a jellyfish wouldn't work on a rock. Instinctual I also like as a category, but I'm worried about the implication of a specific term for creatures directly below humans. For categories above humans, I also can't think of an existing term. Although I do feel there should be at least three categories above sapient. I'm having trouble putting them into words, but I would expect illithids to be above sapient and below the category the elder brain falls into, but the elder brain to still fall below the "near-omniscient" category I'd expect of deific figures. I'm using illithids as an example case, but there's probably some similar sorting that could be done between outsiders.

Ending suggested categories:

Inanimate
Unthinking (able to process states)
Instinctual (able to react differently to the same stimulus based on other conditions such as past outcomes)
Sentient (capable of learning, at least by doing it first)
Sapient (able to abstractly test and experiment)
[Term pending] (sapient creature can follow along)
Transcient (beyond what sapients can follow but must be manually exposed to information)
Near Omniscient (deific levels of knowledge, where the being can simply be aware of information there's no real explanation of them knowing)

[Greywander]

I think I like the term "Mindless" better than "Unthinking". It just sounds a bit more natural.

As for creatures like apes, I'm fine with the term Subsapient as it's an accurate description. But depending on how many levels of intellect there are, it might make more sense to roll these very smart animals into Sapient and simply give them a lower INT score (this doesn't have to be D&D, but it's an easy example). If, for example, there's only one level between Mindless and Sapient, it really wouldn't make sense to lump apes, dolphins, and parrots in with, say, beetles and koalas. The main reason not to do this is if there's some kind of mechanical effect that results from being Sapient; it's basically classifying these animals as "people" rather than "animals", which raises a whole lot of moral/ethical/philosophical questions and creates the possibility for e.g. clerics and wizards. Though the idea of an orangutan wizard is pretty entertaining.

TL;DR, fantasy creatures aside, it's probably best that real life animals remain unambiguously animals, and not people. Otherwise, it gets wierd.

How about the following as levels of intellect?

Mindless
Instinctual
Crafty (trainable animals)
Cognizant (can use language and tools)
Sapient
Sublime
Transcendent
Omniscient

Everything between Mindless and Sapient (noninclusive) would fall under a broader label of Sentient, while everything above Sapient would fall under a broader label of Transcient. Some Cognizant creatures will use language or tools naturally, while others are capable of using them but must be trained first (e.g. a non-social creature who has no need for language). For levels above Sapient, it's difficult to define what they are or what special rules they might use. I'd imagine a lot would depend on the system. Based on what I stated in the OP, we could imagine that Transcient creatures might get advantage on Insight checks against a creature of lesser intellect (able to read them better and see things from their point of view more readily).

Hmm, we might need to define some kind of secondary statistic, similar to carrying capacity for Strength, that would scale with your INT score but also be affected by your level of intellect. The closest analogue I can think of is Memory, or your "carrying capacity" for learning things. Sounds like kind of a pain to integrate into an existing system (e.g. D&D), but if you built your system around it from the ground up it might work well. That said, I feel like intelligence is less about "how much" you can learn and more about "what" you can learn, e.g. intelligence requirements for certain types of abilities, and as long as you meet those requirements then you can qualify. As with carrying capacity, the requirement could be some combination of your actual INT score as well as your level of intelligence, so that a lesser intelligence with a high INT score might still be able to qualify.

You know, this could work really nicely for a system built around psychic powers. Maybe you could reframe some of the everyday things humans do as an expression of psychic ability, which is why animals can't do those things. Basically taking something mundane and reframing it as magical, then extrapolating that to higher intellect creatures who would have the same abilities, but stronger. For example, language could be a psychic ability, which is why higher intelligence is associated with telepathy. It's just taking language to the next level. Meanwhile, animals have a much more primitive psychic ability, so their forms of language (barking, calls, etc.) are more primitive as well.

Crafting could be another example of a "psychic ability". After all, crafting is essentially a creative act, and creation is the realm of the gods. Not even all gods, but generally an overdeity, that is, if any god at all in your setting is capable of such an act. An Omniscient entity using a crafting ability is basically how universes get created. Then again, this is sounding less like psionics and more like divine power. Humans are more divine than animals, and gods are more divine than humans. Hmm, maybe some potential for an in-setting conflict where you have the religious on one side who believe in divine power and atheists on the other side who believe that they've "unmasked" the false gods with their understanding of psionics.

[Herbert_W]

The closest analogue I can think of is Memory, or your "carrying capacity" for learning things.

I've held the opinion for a while that the so-called intelligence score in DnD ought to instead be called memory becasue "memory" is a more accurate representation of what the score does mechanically. A character with a higher int score cannot think, reason, or make decisions more adeptly because it is the player who does all of those things. What a character with a higher int can do is make more successful skill checks to remember information, be more effective with forms of magic that rely on memory, and (in 3e) learn more skills. That's all memory!

(There's also the fact that "orcs are stupid" is reminiscent of real-world nastiness in ways that have been discussed to death; we hopefully won't derail the thread by rehashing that here. I'll just say that "orcs have poor memories" sounds a lot nicer and would hopefully make for a more inviting and therefore potentially larger game.)

If you replace "intelligence" scores with "memory," which could very well remain mechanically exactly the same thing, that creates room for intelligence categories to be their own thing which has a clear purpose that's distinctly separate from what are now memory scores.

So, what purpose might I have in mind, I ask rhetorically? Why, it's to do that other thing which the current so-called intelligence score purports to (and does not) do: to represent a creature's ability to reason. This means, practically, how real-world humans could model that creature as players or as a DM. We would need at least four categories:


Nonthinking: Creatures in this category never make decisions. They either react on instinct, follow a preset routine, or do nothing at all. These creatures cannot be PCs - a player makes decisions for their character, and there are no decisions to be made here.
Limited thinking: Creatures in this category have some of the cognitive toolkit of humans, but not all of it. Players playing these creatures must remain mindful of these limitations, and may need to justify to the DM how their character could reach any given decision without the player "cheating" by using facilities which their character does not have.
Human-like thinking: Creatures in this category are capable of learning, abstracting, reasoning, etc. as humans are. A real-world human such as a player or DM can make decisions for them. In a normal game, all of the PCs are in this category.
Inhuman thinking: These creatures reason in ways that are beyond human comprehension. They may have a "higher" form of reasoning, or just a different one. Modelling the decision-making of these creatures in a game played by humans necessitates some shortcuts. Humans playing these creatures need help - they may get to peek at the DM's notes, to fudge rolls, to enjoy the effects of divination spells at-will without needing to cast the spell, or to discuss things with other players out-of-game even if their characters would normally not be able to communicate.


Categories two and four might be subdivided to represent which cognitive facilities are missing or added.

This has given me an idea for something that's a bit of a weird tangent from the current conversation:

We could also expand this system into one where, instead of an intelligence category, each creature has a cognitive faculty list. A creature could have some inhuman extra faculties while also missing some humans ones.

How would you like to play as something that doesn't understand the concept of groups, sets, or numbers - who literally cannot comprehend the forest for the trees - but which can see the future? You might foresee that a house will be destroyed by a man wearing furs, that another house will be destroyed by another man wearing furs, etc. - and when you tell your human wizard friend and his fighter friend about it, they get very upset and start working to protect a "village" (whatever that is; you've never seen one) from the "viking raid" (whatever that is; you've never seen one).


You know, this could work really nicely for a system built around psychic powers.

I can see a thematic connection here, but I don't see a game-design benefit to having intelligence categories be linked to a creatures psychic capability. Having these things run along the same scale is limiting. Having a creature with a low capability to understand the world but a high capacity to change it is a common horror trope. ("Oh no, he doesn't realize that the monsters he's killing are actually people!") A creature with a low ability to directly affect the world but a high intelligence is a common protagonist trope and a real worry for AI safety researchers. Tying intelligence categories to psychic power levels makes these archetypes impossible to represent in your system.

[Rynjin]

But I don't think I've seen a system that does the same thing with intelligence. And this can lead to some strange cases where a human PC has less intelligence than some animals.



When? Unless you're feebleminded (or the animal is supernaturally intelligent) this will never happen.

[Bohandas]

When? Unless you're feebleminded (or the animal is supernaturally intelligent) this will never happen.

Int damaging debuffs, diseases, and poisons can do it too

[LibraryOgre]

But those are just fancy names given to specific ranges. You'll never get a wolf with 16 INT, for example, and if you did, they would be smarter than a 15 INT elf. With a system like this, a 15 INT wolf would be quite intelligent for a wolf, but still less intelligent than an 8 INT human. Well, maybe.

Which is why I started talking about the charlie foxtrot that is Rifts strength categories.

The main advantage I see in this would come in 3.x and 5e, where ability damage is more prevalent. That 16 intelligence wolf would resist Int damage better than his 8 Int counterpart, of any species. But what that 16 would mean outside of that is the big question.

[Rilmani]

When I try to imagine homebrew (which arent’t spells) I like to remove the spells Bless and Bane from existence. And then I like to imagine one or two positive conditions (like Invisible) and negative effects which remove positive conditions or remove resources from them.

I think that the Sapience intelligence category could be interesting for player characters because sapient creatures can do amazing things when they cooperate. In that vein we should look at the Help action (in and out of combat), the Improvise action, the spell Aid, Luck points, and the spell Resistance. We all know that not all actions are created equal- Attack and Cast a Spell are quite dominant. So I reckon we should have a resource which lets a character take the Help action as a Reaction, then we augment the Help action from there. Pack creatures with Sentience tier intelligence can have this resource, but they have restrictions when using it, while a Sapient creature can use it to Help an enemy against a greater threat.

Let’s call this resource Synergy Points. When you take the Help action, you can transfer up to half of your maximum Synergy points to your ally. Your maximum Synergy is equal to a number related to your mental size category plus your lowest mental ability score. If you have the Tuned condition, at the start of your turn (if you are not Incapacitated) you recover 1d4 Synergy points. You can use your Reaction to take the Help action; you cannot do this again until you complete a Long Rest or until you spend 2 Synergy Points to refresh it as a Bonus Action.

Synergy Actions:
1. Stroke of Ingenuity (5 base cost): Make an untrained attack roll using Strength or Dexterity against a creature or object within 25 feet. On a hit, you deal 0 damage and must declare one damage type. The first time the target takes damage matching that type before the start of your turn, their Armor Class is reduced by 1 for each damage of the selected type they take (to a minimum AC of 10). This penalty lasts until the end of your next turn.

2. Terrain Clash (5 base cost): This can be take as part of the Attack Action. After a successful weapon attack against a creature in Difficult Terrain, roll a Strength (Survival) or Dexterity (Survival) check If your check exceeds the target’s Armor Class, they fall prone. If your attack was made with an improvised weapon, this action costs 2 fewer synergy points.

3. Defy Reason (3 base cost): As a reaction when you suffer massive damage or are reduced to 0 hit points, spend any number of hit dice and roll them. You regain 1 hit point per hit die and gain temporary hit points equal to the highest hit die’s result. Until you complete a short rest, you must use a bonus action to get up from Prone and you must roll a dexterity save whenever you are hit by an attack. On a roll of 1 or lower your armor (if any) is destroyed. If it is magical armor, its magical qualities are inactive for 1d4 days.

4. (Don’t) Break a Leg (2 base cost): As an Action choose one ally who can hear you. They gain a Synergy die, 1d4, which lasts until used or one hour elapses. Synergy dice can be used for ability checks which do not benefit from a proficiency bonus, saving throws against madness, and Honor saving throws.

So once again: Mental size category determines your maximum Synergy points and how many you can give to an ally through the Help action. Some attacks and conditions probably chip away at one’s synergy points.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've seen it done, generally either in two or three levels going downwards (Unthinking->Animal->Sapient) or in supers games like Aberrant going upwards from human (but Aberrant 2e lets you gain Scale on pretty much anything). It works, mostly because it avoids awkwardness like 'dogs suck at searching because they have minimum INT'.

I'd argue you also need an Algorithmic category for entities than can calculate, but can't 'think'.

[Greywander]

It does seem like it might be better to move away from a linear scale and more towards a checklist of traits. That said, an intelligence ladder could still be useful for some things, but it could potentially be compressed, say Mindless -> Sentient -> Sapient -> Transcient. For alien creatures, we could include an Aberrant category, but if it's just functionally equivalent to Sapient then maybe there isn't a point. Those with alien minds might just have radically different items checked off on the checklist. Likewise for AI/robots.

As for what the different intelligence levels mean, it might come down to getting (dis)advantage on contested INT checks, or getting (dis)advantage on certain types of INT checks, and so on. Or whatever the system equivalent is, if it's not D&D. If there isn't a useful application for these levels of intelligence, then there's no reason to keep them around.

For the checklist, we'd probably want a mix of crunchy and fluffy options. Can they use tools? Can they use language? Can they learn magic? (Might only apply to wizardry, as sorcerery is innate.) But then some fluffy options, like: Can they do abstract math (algebra, calculus, etc.)? Are they self-aware? And so on. It would probably take some work to come up with a good checklist.


When? Unless you're feebleminded (or the animal is supernaturally intelligent) this will never happen.
If you roll for stats you can start with as low as a 3. An ape has an INT score of 6; you have about a 2.8% chance of rolling a 6 or less using the standard of 4d6 drop the lowest. Which isn't a lot, but it still happens.

If anything, I can see value in the potential to have a "higher" intelligence who dumped their INT stat competing with a "lower" intelligence who has a high INT stat. It makes it less clear cut as to which creature is actually "smarter", instead highlighting how the two are different. Characteristics of a higher intelligence, such as the ability to use tools, read, and so on, give a clear advantage, but don't mean you can't still be outsmarted by an animal. In a way, it's similar to the comparison of martials and casters: a highly intelligent animal is like a martial who can rip things to shreds with weapon attacks, while a dumb human is like a caster who is much weaker with weapon attacks but has the capability to cast spells. It's not a straight comparison because one isn't clearly better than the other in every situation, and while the caster might come out on top the majority of the time, it's still going to lose often enough that it isn't a one-sided contest.

[Herbert_W]

For the checklist, we'd probably want a mix of crunchy and fluffy options. . . . It would probably take some work to come up with a good checklist.

There's a shortcut that could be used in order to avoid needing to come up with a good complete shortlist. Most people have a fairly good intuitive idea of how a person thinks, how a dog thinks, how a computer doesn't think, and how a person would appear to a dog. That could be used to establish a set of baselines which are then modified by (incomplete, growing) lists of more specific faculties.

This would have the advantage of simplifying presentation. Instead of each creature having a long list of faculties to read, remember, and apply, each would have a single easy-to-remember description plus a (usually small) number of modifiers.

Using the four categories of your compressed intelligence ladder, we'd have:


A mindless creature is similar to a modern computer. Mindless creatures act in accordance with preset rules. They cannot think or exercise creativity; if they appear clever, it was becasue they were cleverly instructed in anticipation of their present circumstance.
A sentient creature is similar to a dog. They are aware of their environment and themselves, and they can make decisions. However, they cannot engage in abstract reasoning or construct plans with multiple steps. For example, the notion of turning sideways so that they can fit through a hole while carrying a long stick in their mouth is at the very edge of their comprehension. Many sentient creatures have instinctual behavior which mimics a multistep plan, such as ambush predation.
A sapient creature is similar to an adult human. They are aware of their environment and themselves, can reason abstractly, plan, consider hypotheticals, be creative, etc. - basically everything that you can do.
A transcient creature can reason in ways that are beyond human understanding. A transcient creature may seem to humans as humans would seem to a dog: they do things and then stuff happens as they will, but with no comprehensible connection between the two. A transcient creature may appear to have supernatural powers even if it does not.


The more specific faculties could potentially be very very specific. For example, let's suppose that zombies are mindless in your campaign setting. That means that they can't understand language - but you want necromancers who create zombies to be able to control those zombies. The 5e solution to this problem is to allow the caster of the create undead spell to issue commands mentally, but granting zombies a specific mental faculty could make for some more interesting solutions. For example, zombies created by a certain ancient ritual could understand commands issued in a dead language (no pun intended), but not any other language (and only commands). Learning that language would prove extremely useful to necromancers who know that ritual. Heck, even just learning a few useful words and phrases from it would be of great value. This provides a reward for players that isn't just more gold or magic items with bigger numbers, a motivation for villainous necromancers to kidnap scholars, and an opportunity for a dramatic tables-turning when a BBEG marches up to the king's castle with his army of the dead, only to find out that the players know a few words of the dead language too!

[Rilmani]

I think that the Sapience intelligence category could be interesting for player characters because sapient creatures can do amazing things when they cooperate. In that vein we should look at the Help action (in and out of combat), the Improvise action, the spell Aid, Luck points, and the spell Resistance. We all know that not all actions are created equal- Attack and Cast a Spell are quite dominant. So I reckon we should have a resource which lets a character take the Help action as a Reaction, then we augment the Help action from there. Pack creatures with Sentience tier intelligence can have this resource, but they have restrictions when using it, while a Sapient creature can use it to Help an enemy against a greater threat.

Any rebuttal for the italicized text? If we want to talk strategic battlefield competence outside of training and experience (feats, maneuvers/superiority dice, proficiencies), I think that is the core around which intelligence “sizes” will matter.

What other angle, if any, should this quality affect? Is there any reason intelligence categories should not connect to cooperation at all?

[Herbert_W]

Any rebuttal for the italicized text?

You're not wrong, but I do think that you're suggesting adding something that DnD already has.

DnD is already a cooperative game where parties that work together do much better than parties which do not. Basic synergies like casters buffing martials, martials door blocking to protect casters, characters using the help action to ensure that a big limited-resource attack lands, etc. are bread and butter for this game. Characters plan to exploit those synergies as a natural extension of players planning to exploit those synergies, becasue both (most) characters and players are sapient. Likewise, players and characters plan to avoid anti-synergies such as devil's sightlocks screwing over the rest of the party with darkness.

I think that the italicized text is more appropriate as a description of a high-level consequence of the rules of a game than something that the game should directly model with a dedicated mechanic - and it's a consequence that DnD already models quite well.

Where the concept if intelligence categories is needed IMO is when a player and their character aren't in the same category, or when a DM and an NPC aren't in the same category. Players and DMs may need or appreciate extra guidance (meaning advice and/or mechanics) when roleplaying something whose mode of thinking is different from their own.

I do see some interaction between intelligence categories and cooperation being appropriate to model with rules, but those occur above and below the sapient level. Above the sapient level, creatures can influence the world in ways that humans can't understand - and there's no reason why that can't extend to cooperation. I would see it as appropriate for some above-sapient creatures to be able to e.g. use the help action as a free action once per round, at any range, by setting up favorable 'butterfly effect' chains. I can also see it as being appropriate to forbid certain forms of cooperation at the subsapient level. Outside of certain specific instinctual behaviors (such as swarming), cooperation requires planning and a rudimentary theory of mind, which subsapient creatures tend to not have.

[sandmote]

(There's also the fact that "orcs are stupid" is reminiscent of real-world nastiness in ways that have been discussed to death; we hopefully won't derail the thread by rehashing that here. I'll just say that "orcs have poor memories" sounds a lot nicer and would hopefully make for a more inviting and therefore potentially larger game.) I was trying to avoid bringing up the example, but this is why I've been opposed to a category including creatures very slightly below "sapient." I'd rather include orangutans in the sapient category than leave it unclear where other humanoids fall.


Though the idea of an orangutan wizard is pretty entertaining. So's Terry Pratchett's execution on the idea.


Any rebuttal for the italicized text? If we want to talk strategic battlefield competence outside of training and experience (feats, maneuvers/superiority dice, proficiencies), I think that is the core around which intelligence “sizes” will matter.

What other angle, if any, should this quality affect? Is there any reason intelligence categories should not connect to cooperation at all? I think the problem you're going to run into is that cooperation can be done between even unthinking creatures. It isn't necessarily the sort of cooperation that sapient creatures are likely to think of, but there are things like lichens and corals that include cooperation between species in different phyla for their mutual benefit. Many creatures considered sentient but not sapient can also work together, including various species that hunt in packs or form complicated family structures.

I vastly prefer Herbert's basic concepts for the categories, although I'd want plants, spiders, and dogs to fall into separate categories. We can make some sense of what dogs are thinking, despite them having less reasoning ability, but need a massive amount of research to understand anything a spider does; and the lines along which a plant processes and responds to information is limited to recording their response to stimuli as we observe it (or, I guess, figuring out which chemicals send the message).


For categories above humans, I also can't think of an existing term. Although I do feel there should be at least three categories above sapient. I'm having trouble putting them into words As another attempt on this, I suppose I'd expect it to be helpful to categorize creatures of increased understanding in a similar manner. There are those below us capable of having basic principles explained to them, and so should be creatures whose thinking can have the basics explained to us. There are creatures capable of some sort of reasoning or method for differentiating responses that's too different for us to follow, and think there should be such a category in both directions.

[Rynjin]

If you roll for stats you can start with as low as a 3. An ape has an INT score of 6; you have about a 2.8% chance of rolling a 6 or less using the standard of 4d6 drop the lowest. Which isn't a lot, but it still happens.

Is this a 5e thing? It wasn't labeled as 5e homebrew so I wasn't sure.

Previous editions did not have this issue; no animal had an intelligence greater than 2. Int 3 is the cutoff for sapience.

[Greywander]

Yup, the PHB offers a couple different ways of generating your ability scores. There are stat arrays and point buy (neither of which go any lower than 8), but you can also roll. 4d6, drop the lowest. Roll your own array, then assign as you please. It's more forgiving that some other methods of rolling stats (e.g. 3d6, in order), but it still has a chance of getting something less than 8, and all the way down to 3. Apes and dolphins, which are quite smart for a beast, have an INT score of 6. Giant eagles and giant owls go as high as 8, but they speak a language and should probably be considered sapient. There's a few more beasts in the 3 to 5 range, but most beasts have an INT of 1 or 2.

[awa]

2nd edition was worse there dolphins had an int of 11-12 most whales were dumber but still smarter than ogres. Though in looking that up I was surprised how much smart ogres and orcs were back than, I mean I suppose 8 to 6 isn't that big a difference but it feels like it to me.

[olskool]

Older edition sourcebooks (I can't seem to remember which one right now) had a thing called FIXED INT for animals like horses, dogs, and cats. They weren't "intelligent" as humans see Intelligence but they could follow certain directions based on how complex those directions were. Whenever the animal was given a command, you would try to roll UNDER the animal's INT score to have the animal execute that command (the older Proficiency system was "roll under." Thus, the higher the animal's INT was, the easier it was to train!

[Rynjin]

Yup, the PHB offers a couple different ways of generating your ability scores. There are stat arrays and point buy (neither of which go any lower than 8), but you can also roll. 4d6, drop the lowest. Roll your own array, then assign as you please. It's more forgiving that some other methods of rolling stats (e.g. 3d6, in order), but it still has a chance of getting something less than 8, and all the way down to 3. Apes and dolphins, which are quite smart for a beast, have an INT score of 6. Giant eagles and giant owls go as high as 8, but they speak a language and should probably be considered sapient. There's a few more beasts in the 3 to 5 range, but most beasts have an INT of 1 or 2.

Gotcha. I can see how it might be useful in some senses, but I don't think this needs to be made as complex as the OP in that case.

There really only needs to be two designations: sapient and non-sapient.

So while an Ape and someone with a low stat roll might both have Int 8, their intelligence is "different".

Int 16 (non-sapient) has strong problem solving skills and the ability to learn more than the average animal. Int 8 (sapient) is still orders of magnitude more intelligent in many ways, just due to simply processing and acting on information differently.

There is no need for "non-sentient" as a designator, because Int -- covers that. (I think; 5e does still have Int -- for vermin, constructs, plants, etc. right?) and due to the hard stat-caps for player characters present in 5e, "Transcient" or "super-sapient" characters are really just...super-intelligent. Int scores higher than 20, or in the case of gods, effectively infinite. Int -- in a different way.

[Herbert_W]

Gotcha. I can see how it might be useful in some senses, but I don't think this needs to be made as complex as the OP in that case. There really only needs to be two designations: sapient and non-sapient.

Well, that depends on what you expect intelligence categories to do.

Two categories would be perfectly adequate if you just want to avoid weirdness where player characters can end up dumber than animals, or effectively expand the range of intelligence scores without actually giving the int scale bigger or fractional numbers. (I'd still consider "int --" and "int effectively infinite" to be categories in the same way as NaN is a value, but maybe that's too nitpicky.)

If you want to provide guidance to people who are playing characters whose cognitive capabilities are dramatically different from their own, then more categories (and/or further modifiers to those categories) could be helpful.


. . . I've been opposed to a category including creatures very slightly below "sapient." I'd rather include orangutans in the sapient category than leave it unclear where other humanoids fall.

I'll preface this by saying that this might be a moot point since we might not want more categories anyways, and I don't know whether raising this question will help or make matters worse.

With that being said, what about human children? If we're going to portray them realistically, then infants will be in the same category or lower than adult apes and children will gradually climb the categories as they grow. Would you be comfortable with putting apes into a "slightly subsapient" category if it is explicitly acknowledged that they share this category with human children?

I think some people might be unconformable with the existence of a "slightly subsapient" category because of the fear that placing a creature in it would be seen as endorsing mistreatment of those creatures. Yet, as the example of human children shows, diminished mental capacity does not justify mistreatment. If anything, it implies a greater duty of care.

On the other hand, likening adult apes to human children still carries uncomfortable implications - just of a different sort - in a game where they are likely to be opponents in a combat encounter.

I'm beginning to suspect that modelling the thoughts and feelings of combat opponents in too much detail will always make people uncomfortable, becasue it draws attention to the fact that they have thoughts and feelings. Different models may provoke different types of discomfort, but the discomfort is always there - except when the model is abstract and impersonal.


I think the problem you're going to run into is that cooperation can be done between even unthinking creatures. It isn't necessarily the sort of cooperation that sapient creatures are likely to think of . . .

I agree, but I think that this is a reason to modify Rilmani's idea rather than to discard it. Intelligence category could very reasonably affect the type of cooperation that creatures exhibit (as you said, the type of cooperation that subsapient creatures exhibit isn't necessarily the same as what sapient creatures think of).

One point that I'd like the emphasize is that we don't need new mechanics to represent cooperation at the sapient level, becasue DnD characters already do that becasue players do that. (It'd be nice to bring back flanking bonuses, but that's neither strictly necessary nor really new.) Adding more complexity to model something that the game already models is just cost with no benefit. It's above and below that level that new mechanics could become useful.


I vastly prefer Herbert's basic concepts for the categories, although I'd want plants, spiders, and dogs to fall into separate categories. We can make some sense of what dogs are thinking, despite them having less reasoning ability, but need a massive amount of research to understand anything a spider does.

There's certainly room for a category in between "mindless/computer" and "sentient/dog" - I just can't think of one where both (a) the category itself is a helpful one to include in a game and (b) there's a commonly understood example that could be used to explain that category in a way that most people would understand.

That second concern is why I avoided having a "spider analogue" category: most people don't have a good idea of how a spider thinks. If you hand a DM a monster and tell them that it thinks like a spider, they won't be any the wiser about how to run it. (Or, worse, different people will have different ideas about how the spider-like creature should behave, leading to arguments.) Another complicating factor is that different species of spiders will get different lists of functions. If you hand a monster to a DM who does know about spiders and tell them that it thinks like one, they'll probably say "OK, but what species?"

I suspect that the best way to explain a spider-like mind to the average person is to start with a foundation of "mindless" and then add specific cognitive functions to that.

[Devils_Advocate]

I've held the opinion for a while that the so-called intelligence score in DnD ought to instead be called memory becasue "memory" is a more accurate representation of what the score does mechanically. A character with a higher int score cannot think, reason, or make decisions more adeptly because it is the player who does all of those things. What a character with a higher int can do is make more successful skill checks to remember information, be more effective with forms of magic that rely on memory, and (in 3e) learn more skills. That's all memory!
There's Investigation / Search / whatever, but that is kind of an edge case. And it ain't like Intelligence can represent general mental competence and at the same time be only one of three equally important mental stats! Honestly, if you just want more nuance to "how smart something is" in D&D than just a single score, just taking into account that there are two more to consider should help a bit.

Mostly, I like how "memory" is clearer than "intelligence", which is a lot more nebulous.


However, this isn't true learning, merely a complex response to a complex set of stimuli; it is predictable and can be easily reproduced with the right stimuli.
Well, "predictable" is relative. A sufficiently advanced mind might regard us as quite predicable. But saying that nonsentient learning is predictable by sapients gives some helpful guidance on how the categories interact with each other.

(You could decide that sapient beings are inherently unpredictable, and that's a valid setting decision, but I wouldn't include nondeterminism as part of any level of intelligence; that's something different.)


Maybe you could reframe some of the everyday things humans do as an expression of psychic ability, which is why animals can't do those things.
Isn't "Humans have mental capabilities that other species lack" kind of the going explanation?

(Yes, I know, you didn't intend for "psychic" to mean "mental" or "of the mind" in this context. Still, funny.)


it's basically classifying these animals as "people" rather than "animals", which raises a whole lot of moral/ethical/philosophical questions
As Herbert's post already touched on, you're not really avoiding those questions.

Humans don't all have the same level of intelligence. That's... a big part of why games like Dungeons & Dragons have Intelligence scores. To model those differences. You can define an upper bound as "the smartest human who ever lived" or "the smartest a human can be without artificially modifying or augmenting the brain", but the realistic lower bound is the lower bound of the rating system as a whole. And that's pretty much the degree of lack of intelligence sufficient for someone to be categorized as "not a person". Humans with all the mental activity of broccoli get called "vegetables". A human only as smart as the smartest dog is not going to be called "an animal" by most people, especially not in a sense of the word that doesn't include humans in general.

So, just because there are lower categories, "human-level intelligence" obviously isn't supposed to cover the full range of human intelligence. It's meant to cover everything from the smartest human to ?????, where ????? is rather conspicuously undefined. But leaving it vague where that line is drawn doesn't avoid the issues inherent in saying that that line exists.

There are basically three possibilities here:

1. Everyone below some level of intelligence is not a person, and thus is unworthy of the consideration given to persons, whether human or not. Why shouldn't the poor sell their babies to the rich to eat? Yum yum, delicious!

One can't fault the internal consistency of this position on its own, but one may feel moved to ask how it is that the less intelligent are less worthy of consideration.

2. Humans deserve greater consideration than other species because of something special about us other than intelligence.

What would that be? Is this difference demonstrable rather than purely hypothetical? How does this make humans deserve greater consideration?

3. The only thing that can make someone less deserving of consideration than someone else is their freely chosen actions, if that.

Bluntly: This is the ethical option. Every alternative is always gonna be some flavor of evil, regardless of which subcategory of sentient being you arbitrarily treat as being okay, or even more okay, to crap on. Devaluing others for things that aren't in their control is morally wrong. Which, let's be clear, does not mean that it's okay to devalue others for whatever choice you, uh, choose.

Note that I say "consideration". As I would hope would go without saying, I am not saying that everyone should be treated the same.

[sandmote]

There's certainly room for a category in between "mindless/computer" and "sentient/dog" - I just can't think of one where both (a) the category itself is a helpful one to include in a game and (b) there's a commonly understood example that could be used to explain that category in a way that most people would understand. I was thinking of how the DM should adjudicate illusory and "mind effecting" abilities. In this case I'd actually put most computers in the category between "mindless" and dog-level; a creature with that level of intelligence can fall for and recognize illusions, whereas a "mindless" creature cannot. While the edges between the "mindless" category and spider-level category would be fuzzy (as all these categories are) I kind of assumed this would be a helpful situation to quickly include and relatively common in-game (although I admit is wouldn't be as commonly understood in real life).


That second concern is why I avoided having a "spider analogue" category: most people don't have a good idea of how a spider thinks. If you hand a DM a monster and tell them that it thinks like a spider, they won't be any the wiser about how to run it. (Or, worse, different people will have different ideas about how the spider-like creature should behave, leading to arguments.) Another complicating factor is that different species of spiders will get different lists of functions. If you hand a monster to a DM who does know about spiders and tell them that it thinks like one, they'll probably say "OK, but what species?" I'd give it a more generic name, and was using plants, spiders, and dogs as examples. For instance, I'd put cats, horses, giant striders, varguilles, pegasi, and basic air/earth/fire/water elementals into the same intelligence category as dogs. While all these placements are debatable, my point is that it doesn't mean everything I would put in this category should be run the same way as the dog.


I suspect that the best way to explain a spider-like mind to the average person is to start with a foundation of "mindless" and then add specific cognitive functions to that. Arguably too detailed to really be helpful, but I do think making a checklist of traits would make it easier to avoid the uncomfortable things that can happen when attempting to make this sort of scale.

Then check boxes like "object permanence," "visual individual recognition," "olfactory individual recognition," and "self awareness," then let you mark off what a creature can or can't do. Then humans pick up the "object permanence," category at 8 months while never qualifying for "olfactory individual recognition" the way dogs do.

[brian 333]

My question is, how would this be useful in a mechanical sense?

Size=Strength is not always true, but larger things tend to also be stronger. Elephants are stronger than mice, for example. But a giant pillow golem would not be stronger than flesh golem half its size. And strength has nothing to do with how difficult a target is to hit or how small a door the monster can chase you through. Size has mechanical utility in the game.

It seems to me that the premise here is as a role-playing aid. Players will not be playing animals, so it isn't a useful tool for them. A DM already has discretion over how NPCs are played, so it is not a necessary tool for a DM.

I admire the creativity and consideration, and it may form the basis of a good training tool for DMs, but how would it be useful in a game? Adding another stat to track adds complexity to an already complex system. There needs to be a payoff that makes the complexity worthwhile.

[Greywander]

2. Humans deserve greater consideration than other species because of something special about us other than intelligence.
This is the view I hold, which should hopefully explain some of where I'm coming from.


3. The only thing that can make someone less deserving of consideration than someone else is their freely chosen actions, if that.

Bluntly: This is the ethical option. Every alternative is always gonna be some flavor of evil, regardless of which subcategory of sentient being you arbitrarily treat as being okay, or even more okay, to crap on. Devaluing others for things that aren't in their control is morally wrong. Which, let's be clear, does not mean that it's okay to devalue others for whatever choice you, uh, choose.
Gonna disagree for obvious reasons, but I can understand where you're coming from with this. I do want to point out some potential inconsistencies with this third view: Why is owning livestock okay but slavery is wrong? Why is eating meat okay but not cannibalism? I think there's a bit more nuance here than you're giving credit.

I'd probably represent this using a two-axis alignment system. On one axis, it goes from Humans are Special on one side to Humans are Animals on the other. The second axis would be the one that more closely resembles a Good-Evil axis, and runs from Animals are Precious to Animals are Worthless.

As you've noted, the Humans are Special view believes that humans have some inherent quality that sets them above animals. All this really means is that if you can save a human or an animal, but not both, you usually default to saving the human (unless they don't deserve saving, e.g. a serial killer). If combined with Animals are Worthless then there is no ethical component to how animals are treated. Animals can be abused or exploited as you please. By contrast, Animals are Precious would still see value in animals and consider it unethical to abuse them. Humans might be viewed as caretakers of nature, and thus in a place of superiority above animals but also responsible for their well-being. Eating an animal might be okay, but the animal would need to be raised and killed in a humane fashion, while eating a human is never okay because Humans are Special.

With Humans are Animals, a hierarchy might exist with humans at the top, but that hierarchy is a continuum instead of a hard division between two camps. The relative value of an animal compared to humans is always open to debate, and the possibility exists that another animal might dethrone humans and take the top spot in the hierarchy. The Animals are Worthless view then extends to include humans, eliminating ethical considerations entirely. By contrast, Animals are Precious is pushed to the extreme, likely leading to philosophies such as the belief that killing an ant is the same as killing a human.

All that said, there are likely many ways each of these alignments could be expressed, just like with the standard D&D alignments. I imagine that where you fall on this alignment system will have a big impact on how you feel about how near-sapient animals such as apes and dolphins should be handled. Though I suspect most people probably lean towards True Neutral instead of any extreme.

As for children vs. apes, it seems mechanically awkward to have a creature that changes intelligence levels (barring a radical transformations, e.g. a caterpillar turning into a butterfly). I'd probably keep children in the sapient category, but lower their INT score. An adult ape would then have a higher INT score than a human child, but be in a lower intelligence category, making them perform similarly (though some tasks may only depend on one or the other, not both). Then again, as I said earlier, it might be mechanically easier to upgrade near-sapient creatures to the sapient category but with a lower INT score. A lot will depend on both the system this is being implemented into, as well as the specific implementation.

I can see the potential for using the sapient category as a marker not just for intelligence, but also for whatever invisible quality sets humans above animals. For example, a vampire might be required to drain all the blood from a sapient creature to satisfy their thirst. Or an evil weapon might require you to feed it the souls of sapient creatures to fuel its abilities. And I realize that e.g. the value of a human soul is a totally different thing from how intelligent they are, but it's one of those things that are correlated closely enough that it's easier to just combine them. Kind of like how D&D 5e doesn't use separate categories for size and weight, but combines them together into one scale. Since humans are the only sapient creatures in real life, it's a bit awkward to imagine a fantasy creature that is just as intelligent as humans but doesn't have a human soul (or whatever that invisible quality is). The question of whether apes (or children) should be sapient or not then at least partly depends on if you want them to fullfil the requirement for sapience. This isn't just about evil weapons that eat souls, but could also apply to more positive things; for example, perhaps only sapient creatures can receive clerical power.

You could also just have a "has a soul" checkbox or something.

Again, a lot will depend on both the system and implementation. Setting details will also likely play a role. It's hard to talk specifics in the absence of these things.

[Vaern]

All you're really doing is rewriting existing text. "Mindless" would simply be replaced with "nonsentient." "Sentient" would simply be shortand for "a creature with an intelligence score." "Sapient" would refer to any creature with 3 or more intelligence, which is the game's defined threshold for "a creature with humanlike intelligence."

As for why we don't have intelligence categories: They just wouldn't work, at least not the way size categories do.
Size has a significant mechanical impact on the game. It determines the space a character occupies on the grid. It determines the equipment a character can use - gear made for a character of one size is simply not compatible with a creature of another size. The character gets a number of bonuses and penalties for its size.
In contrast, while a size category defines a character's attributes, an intelligence category would simply be defined by the character's attributes. A character with 20+ intelligence might be described as being transcendent, but that doesn't impart any benefits or restrictions beyond indicating that "this character has a very high intelligence score." It doesn't grant any special abilities beyond "Your intelligence modifier grants you more spell slots and a bonus to intelligence-based skill checks just like before, but now your modifier is slightly bigger."

[Rilmani]

All you're really doing is rewriting existing text. "Mindless" would simply be replaced with "nonsentient." "Sentient" would simply be shortand for "a creature with an intelligence score." "Sapient" would refer to any creature with 3 or more intelligence, which is the game's defined threshold for "a creature with humanlike intelligence."

As for why we don't have intelligence categories: They just wouldn't work, at least not the way size categories do.
Size has a significant mechanical impact on the game. It determines the space a character occupies on the grid. It determines the equipment a character can use - gear made for a character of one size is simply not compatible with a creature of another size. The character gets a number of bonuses and penalties for its size.
In contrast, while a size category defines a character's attributes, an intelligence category would simply be defined by the character's attributes. A character with 20+ intelligence might be described as being transcendent, but that doesn't impart any benefits or restrictions beyond indicating that "this character has a very high intelligence score." It doesn't grant any special abilities beyond "Your intelligence modifier grants you more spell slots and a bonus to intelligence-based skill checks just like before, but now your modifier is slightly bigger."
(If this is a reply to Greywander I’ll rewrite my misguided comment)


On the previous page I proposed that intelligence categories COULD define a character via a resource based on teamwork. Cooperation with others. They could be as simple as luck points or be as complex as spells, meaning a resource which is cultivated during a long rest, written as “we practiced/planned this teamwork maneuver while camping out,” long before the day’s fight was on the horizon. Or they could be halfway in between like the system in my post- an expansion of the Help action.

There are notable gaps in it, such as how the wording would need alteration for evil races with minions more akin to slaves than allies, but the core remains. If a creature fails a saving throw to a Feeblemind spell, I think most DMs would agree that their competence in battle has been limited. Primarily because DnD involves teamwork. Targets which suffer a feeblemind are not going to start eating fire or holding their weapon by the pointy end, sure, but I think their ability to follow plans has been obliterated. And one’s ability to follow a plan or take part in an improvised, cooperative action could be modeled via Intelligence Categories. The intent behind spells like Feeblemind and mental ability score damage could be realized in this new trait- intelligence categories! And then the opposite could be done: mental ascension does not have to be left up to GM fiat, it could be established with rules! Epic Boon: increase your Intellgence category by one step. Or an enhanced version of Enhance Ability, or the opposite of Bestow Curse, could provide a temporary int category increase. This enlightenment could be cool, it could be teamwork-based instead of merely helping spellcasters!


If we make a system, which could run the range of luck points, bardic inspiration, superiority dice, spells, or even item-crafting in complexity, then Intelligence Categories could indeed define a character- could empower a character, especially if one can temporarily CLIMB up an Int category. Like with the Enlarge/Reduce spell, but for Intelligence.

Beyond mechanics, what would “high intelligence score, low intelligence category” look like in practice? A magical or technological assistant (akin to an AI) could fit that. It could memorize thousands of phrases on command, but has minimal problem solving skills- like the Magic Mouth spell, or an animated calculator. I can’t picture one learning a new command quickly. And I can picture it repeatedly walking into a locked door without attempting to move the knob if its instructions did not account for a doorknob. Or perhaps they cannot understand or imagine what lying is. Alternatively animal companions in fiction like Pokémon would fit the bill, though intelligence score would vary, since they can mostly understand humans and other Pokémon. You tell me what sort of animals IrL can “talk” to animals outside their species. If I was an animal, I think A) growling and B) whimpering would be the limits for a low int score and low int category creature (when communicating with animals outside of their species).

Now what would a creature with a low intelligence score, but an intelligence category one tier above humans/humanoids act like? An empathic magic item. Not a sapient one, but one which is aligned with a virtue, sin, or other concept. It could not talk, but it can care about its wielder. It can determine that THIS battle is worth sacrificing itself to save its wielder. It can determine that its host is merely suffering and miserable, running themselves ragged, rather than genuinely attempting to pursue their shared cause. Or a location (natural shrine, haunted home, temple, wizard’s tower) with some animating force; it could hinder or aid effectively, in spite of limited capabilities. It could understand the core of someone beseeching to it.
A creature with a high intelligence score and a high intelligence category could be a superintelligence AI which governs a race, it could be a deity, it could an amalgamation of dead souls, or the very paragon of competence produced by some species/country- one of the greatest in their whole history (Arthur, a king equally competent at war and diplomacy, one who maintains a balance between virtues).

[Devils_Advocate]

I do think that explicitly listing different mental capabilities is probably the way to go. Basically, the OP suggests changing a one-dimensional model of intelligence into a two-dimensional model, and that's still not enough dimensions to cover the internal details of intelligence. One might think that it would at least be better, but I'm inclined to think that if each dimension is still pretty vague there will likely be a fair bit of ambiguity as to what is covered by which dimension (with an understanding that some things may be covered by both), whereas previously it was easier to say whether something was covered by just "intelligence" or not.

That said, these capabilities don't have to be treated as all being separate from each other, and depending on what they are that might not even make any sense. You need a theory of mind to understand that others can have false beliefs, and you need to understand that others can have false beliefs in order to engage in deliberate deception, for example. You could e.g. fold all of that into different levels of "theory of mind", but it might be more helpful to leave each specific as its own capability, which potentially has one or more prerequisites. So flowcharts ahoy, if you want to lay this stuff out visually at a glance; if you've seen Exalted's Charm trees, you know what I'm talking about.

Depending on how complicated you want to get, these things could still be rated at different levels too, and your Deception level could be limited by your Confusion-Understanding level, or something along those lines.


Gonna disagree for obvious reasons
Your reasons are not obvious to me.

I've thought about starting a thread asking about the philosophical underpinnings of human chauvinism, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I'm skeptical that a majority of its proponents actually share essentially the same motivations, though that wouldn't greatly surprise me either.


I do want to point out some potential inconsistencies with this third view: Why is owning livestock okay but slavery is wrong? Why is eating meat okay but not cannibalism? I think there's a bit more nuance here than you're giving credit.
How bad it is in practice to treat any particular group of beings as property depends on how that works. And the impression I get is that non-humans owned by humans are, if anything, on average worse off than humans owned by humans. Furthermore, the average human slave has almost certainly oppressed others more than has the average owned non-human, and thus is more deserving of being oppressed in turn on those grounds. Either way I look at it, it seems like, broadly and generally, the devaluation of non-humans is worse in practice.

If you mean "okay" in the sense of "socially acceptable", then that's not what I'm talking about. Social acceptability is relative. Slavery may well be okay in that sense, depending on what society we're discussing.

The thing about your two-axis model is that it's possible to value and devalue others bases on countless different distinctions: Intelligence, language use, moral agency, species, ethnicity, color, culture, religion, preferred flavor of toothpaste, whatever. And for every such division or sliding scale, we can talk about how much a given individual values others differently based on that distinction. But we can also talk about the degree to which someone values fairness, meaning not favoring anyone over anyone else on any arbitrary basis.

And a single individual can endorse some forms of unfairness but also endorse fairness, because someone's values aren't necessarily all part of a single coherent system. So that's at least one source of the "nuance" of which you speak, as I see it.


As for children vs. apes, it seems mechanically awkward to have a creature that changes intelligence levels (barring a radical transformations, e.g. a caterpillar turning into a butterfly).
I'm not seeing how a baby later reappearing radically changed as a toddler would be a problem. If anything, treating them as the same seems like the thing that would make things awkward. Most would probably prefer for a baby not to be born already fluent in a language, for example. Even modeling developmental stages at all is still doing way more than giving no guidance for how juveniles fit into the system, which is pretty much where D&D is at if I'm not mistaken.

You may dislike in principle using distinct categories for differences that are more of a continuous gradation, but, well. 1) That's a problem with such "intelligence levels" in general (and with the "size categories" that inspired this thread, for that matter), not just in this particular case. 2) Using only one category lowers the fidelity of the model! Having only "grey", with no distinction made between different shades, is less nuanced than only having "black" and "white".

Like, yeah, you can fiat that humans all fit into one category with differences between them covered by differences in Int score... but we're talking about the sort of differences that are supposed to be covered by this new thing you're introducing, instead of Int. So in that case, someone who doesn't want talking babies or whatever silliness has to ignore what a term normally means because you deliberately decided to miscategorize something. Again, that seems super awkward to me.


I'd probably keep children in the sapient category, but lower their INT score. An adult ape would then have a higher INT score than a human child, but be in a lower intelligence category, making them perform similarly (though some tasks may only depend on one or the other, not both).
The entire system starts to look overcomplicated and unnecessary basically precisely to the extent that a low Intelligence score in one category equates to a high score in another category.


humans are the only sapient creatures in real life
One could attempt to define "sapient" so that this is the case, but the definition would almost unavoidably be flagrantly contrived. And even if not, getting all "no true Scotsman" doesn't demonstrate anything beyond our ability to play games with words.

[Greywander]

I do think that explicitly listing different mental capabilities is probably the way to go. [...]
I think the biggest problem is finding a practical way to use it within the rules. I think the people calling this a solution in search for a problem aren't necessarily wrong. I think once we figure out how a more complex intelligence system can benefit the game, then it will become clearer what the best implementation will be. I think having different intelligence levels is something that could be useful, but ultimately if we can't find a practical use for those then there's not really any point in having them. I do suspect that a checklist of intelligence traits will probably be more useful, so I think you're probably right about that.


Your reasons are not obvious to me.
You gave one possible viewpoint. I said that I held that viewpoint. You called that viewpoint evil. I disagreed on account of holding that viewpoint and not considering myself evil.


Furthermore, the average human slave has almost certainly oppressed others more than has the average owned non-human, and thus is more deserving of being oppressed in turn on those grounds.
Yikes, we should probably just stop that line of conversation right there, as I don't see that going any place good.


If you mean "okay" in the sense of "socially acceptable", then that's not what I'm talking about.
Neither am I. I'll bet you that 99.9% of people who think it's morally okay to eat meat also think it's morally not okay to eat people. These people make a moral distinction between eating an animal and eating a person, most likely because they make a distinction between a person and an animal. This has nothing to do with social acceptance; while not the same, we can see a similar thing with various religion groups with dietary restrictions continuing to follow those restrictions, even though it's socially acceptable not to.


The thing about your two-axis model is that it's possible to value and devalue others bases on countless different distinctions:
That's why that two-axis model was hyper focused on the moral relationship between people and animals. That's the only thing it was concerned with. It doesn't really work to apply it more broadly, and certainly not as a general model of morality.


I'm not seeing how a baby later reappearing radically changed as a toddler would be a problem. If anything, treating them as the same seems like the thing that would make things awkward.
Mostly I'm just thinking that it would be more streamlined from a game mechanics perspective. That said, I'd expect children of a certain age to be Small instead of Medium size, so if we're willing to adjust the size category, why not the intelligence category?


One could attempt to define "sapient" so that this is the case, but the definition would almost unavoidably be flagrantly contrived. And even if not, getting all "no true Scotsman" doesn't demonstrate anything beyond our ability to play games with words.
You know, I'd thought "sapient" actually had been defined as "having human-like intelligence", but now that I look up some definitions that doesn't seem to be the case (unless they've changed it recently). Since I do believe that there is something special about humans that sets them apart from animals (which partially includes intelligence, but intelligence itself is not the thing), it makes sense to me to reserve sapience as a quality only for humans. But I can see what you mean. For someone holding a view that humans are just another type of animal, it wouldn't make sense to do that.

You know, it's weird, but when we talk about traits that are uniquely human, it's not so much things to do with intelligence anymore. We've found animals that use language, or tools, or are self aware. No, the things that are uniquely human are... endurance running and the ability to throw things. You know, things that most of us have never done (okay, maybe we toss something every once in a while, but no where near the level of a baseball pitcher). And things that are very physical and not intellectual (when humans are known for being both smarter and weaker than a lot of other animals).

[Yakk]

Flipping the script, ElfQuest has a size stat. And I feel it would work great in D&D.

Brawn/Dex/Size/Int/Wis/Cha.

Size and its modifiers would have very natural consequences. A Dragon might have Size 50, for example, dealing +20 damage on every melee attack. At the same time, Size wouldn't add to accuracy, just damage.

Similarly, it would replace Con as a modifier to HD.

The idea of the "size category" would sort of float away and matter less. Some creatures would take up "more space", but that might not be directly related to size (a 10' 10' 10' cube is larger than a 10' 10' thin sheet, and a 10' 5' horse different than a 10' 10' ogre). You'd get back some of the 3e size category modifiers, but less table based and more direct mechanics.

How much you can lift would be Brawn+Size, for example.

[Devils_Advocate]

In retrospect, I should have just said "acceptable" instead of "socially acceptable"... Let me attempt to clarify. There are a number of different ways to characterize good versus evil:

1. Kindness versus cruelty
2. Decreasing suffering versus increasing suffering
3. Fairness and impartiality versus unfairness and partiality
4. Treating others as ends in themselves versus treating others as only means to one's ends
5. Allowing others to choose for themselves what will happen to them versus seizing control of their lives

and so on and so forth. And they don't always agree with each other! It may be that someone wants to suffer in a way that makes minimizing suffering incompatible with maximizing individual autonomy, and so picking one of those means going against the other.

But, the thing is, these characterizations strongly tend to agree with each other most of the time. Allowing each individual self-determination is generally gonna be fairer than one individual deciding what happens to everyone. Regarding others as only means to your personal ends will probably cause more suffering than the alternative. And so on and so forth. This is why these different formulations of what good and evil are can be considered different characterizations of the same thing and not just descriptions of different things. Strictly speaking, they're different categories, but they're sufficiently subtly different that any two of them mostly overlap in practice. And that phenomenon isn't particular to this subject. All words, and all concepts, are to some degree vague. (http://bactra.org/Russell/vagueness/)

At the same time, it's possible to instead say that something unkind, unfair, oppressive, etc. is "good" and that something kind, fair, egalitarian, etc. is "evil". At this point, it might seem that these words are being used in entirely different senses than discussed above. But the weird thing is that existing alongside each other isn't limited to "moral" values that are only ultimately incompatible in ways that usually don't come up. Someone can endorse as "good" something that's evil according to their own general moral principles!

And that sort of special pleading strikes me as very different from saying "I think that these different ways of characterizing good and evil all have their own merits, and I'm not convinced that any one of them is right". At that point, you're saying, "I favor this other thing over good in all of the normal senses of the word". Even if we consider "good" and "evil" to be relative to an arbitrary set of principles, any one of which is allowed to generally oppose most others, we're talking about something that is "evil" under most of the principles under consideration.

As I mentioned above, sometimes you have to pick one principle over another. And at the point where you go "You know what, not being a bastard in all of these ways is important to me, but being a a bastard in this one way is more important to me than all of those principles put together", "evil" seems like an apt term. Like, yeah, you may still be acting your highest applicable "moral" principle, but it's an evil moral principle. And, like, not even ambiguously. Rather than falling into some grey area, it goes against the overlapping "don't be a bastard" stuff in general, and we're even talking about someone who believes in that stuff! Like, yeah, your good principles may serve to mitigate this evil one, but they also mean that you know that the evil one is wrong.

Now, it's possible for someone to characterize "right" and "wrong" terms of other principles that all support each other but are totally compatible with being a bastard. Possibly even an utter bastard. But at that point, you're talking about stuff so far removed from the normal meanings of these terms as to constitute something else entirely. Bizzaro World evil "morality" that goes against goodness in every normal sense (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/258) isn't a different formulation of ethics, it's an alternative to ethics. We can still accurately apply broader terms like "value system", but if it recommends radically different courses of action from ethical theories in general, then it makes more sense to regard it as a distant relative, off in a different branch of the same family tree.


You gave one possible viewpoint.
I disagree. There's a huge difference between thinking that non-humans aren't capable of suffering and thinking that their suffering is irrelevant, for example. That some broad, abstract description like "the perspective that humans are special" applies to both does not make them the same viewpoint. The conclusion may be the same, but I'm talking about the reasons for the conclusion.


I said that I held that viewpoint. You called that viewpoint evil. I disagreed on account of holding that viewpoint and not considering myself evil.
You seem to imply that you believe that only an evil individual can have any evil viewpoint. Furthermore, you also seem to imply that being evil is more than just having an evil viewpoint; that being evil is something else that is in some way a prerequisite for an evil viewpoint.

Otherwise you're rather begging the question, saying in essence "I don't think that one of my viewpoints is evil because I consider myself not to have evil viewpoints". That's like saying that someone is an unmarried man because he's a bachelor; there's no causality there, just rephrasing. And to the extent that "he's a bachelor" means "the word 'bachelor' describes him", it's outright backwards. If you're using words in a sane fashion, you don't decide to call something something at random and then assume that it meets the definition of that term, you choose which terms to use based on your understanding of what you're describing. Right?


Yikes, we should probably just stop that line of conversation right there, as I don't see that going any place good.
I don't see this discussion starting in a good place.


That's why that two-axis model was hyper focused on the moral relationship between people and animals. That's the only thing it was concerned with. It doesn't really work to apply it more broadly, and certainly not as a general model of morality.
Well, it seems straightforward enough to generalize it into a "Who does this character care about, and how much?" sort of thing. But really my point was that one's position within this particular system is not unrelated to more general principles. There are plenty of values statements that make no mention of "people" and "animals" but are only compatible with one place on that grid.


Mostly I'm just thinking that it would be more streamlined from a game mechanics perspective.
I mean... you're talking about adding complexity to the game, so just not using this tool to model the sorts of differences that it's intended to model might well be easier, but at that point you're arguing for just not having it in general.


You know, I'd thought "sapient" actually had been defined as "having human-like intelligence"
"Human-like" needs a fair bit of context to be able to serve as a meaningful qualifier.

As I mentioned already, using words at all normally means choosing which words to use based on your understanding of what you're describing. And that includes only using the same sense of the same word for things that are similar somehow. What I'm getting at is that if "intelligence" literally has any meaning at all, then any intelligence will be like human intelligence. They'll both have everything that the word "intelligence" covers in common! Like, even if it's ambiguous what intelligence is, just saying "Each of these things is intelligence" means that there's some sort of similarity.

You could talk about whether something has all of the mental capabilities of a human, but then you run right back into the whole "Humans don't all have the same metal capabilities" thing. The least mentally capable human is brain dead. Now, you can say that that isn't a human in the relevant sense, but the obvious follow-up question to that is: What is the relevant sense? Where do you want to draw this line? Even recursive definitions need base cases in order to actually, y'know, work. In order to specify something, you gotta, well... specify it.

That said, whether that's even necessary does depend on what you want to do. If you're not looking to provide abstract guidance on what sorts of things different creatures are capable of, just numeric bonuses, then maybe it's fine to just leave it vague? Obviously GMs will want to assign intelligence levels to things based on what they're capable of conceptually, but you could leave it at "There is no guidance on how to use it, and what a rating means will vary wildly from one table to another". Lots of people dislike that, but if you're just putting something together for free in your spare time, saying "I don't feel like deciding what this means, so if you wanna actually use the system you kinda gotta finish designing it yourself" honestly seems pretty fair.

... On the third hand, if you actually want to use this at your own table, you have to decide how to decide what gets what rating, so maybe include what you come up with as one suggestion of how to potentially use this, with a few notes on how it might be used differently?


Since I do believe that there is something special about humans that sets them apart from animals (which partially includes intelligence, but intelligence itself is not the thing), it makes sense to me to reserve sapience as a quality only for humans.
Bit odd to have a specific category for one species. Besides, isn't this obviously where elves and dwarves and hot humanoid aliens are supposed to fall?

I imagine that what you're thinking is that humans will be the only known real species that uses this category. Which gets to one thing that rubs me the wrong way: Saying "Members of other species could have the same basic non-superficial qualities that make humans special, but I refuse to consider the possibility that any other creature on Earth might have those qualities" seems... not good? It certainly isn't very intellectually honest.

[Herbert_W]

All you're really doing is rewriting existing text. [...] As for why we don't have intelligence categories: They just wouldn't work, at least not the way size categories do.
Size has a significant mechanical impact on the game.

Rilmani has already replied here, but I’d like to take my own stab at an answer: I think you're missing the point. The game was built around having size categories and not having intelligence categories. Of course intelligence categories would do nothing if you were to just drop them into the game and change nothing else - but where is being proposed here is to rebuild certain parts of the game around intelligence categories, so that they will do something.

What, specifically, might they do? I'll give you two examples of situations where intelligence categories could help:

The DM is setting up an encounter with a mindflayer, who is far smarter than the DM is IRL. The mindflayer has the opportunity to prepare spells in anticipation for the encounter. How can the DM determine what someone smarter than himself would do?
A PC is under the effect of a Feeblemind spell. The player has solved a puzzle, but it's obvious that their character wouldn't have been able to do so due to the spell.

Both of these situations would be handled under the current rules by . . . well, DM discretion because the rules don't cover them. The DM might decide to 'cheat' and retroactively decide what spells the mindflayer prepared after the encounter begins, but that's just their prerogative. Likewise, the DM might decide to intervene and prevent a player from sharing their solution to a puzzle. (Or they might not.)

With intelligence categories, there could be rules (or at least more specific guidance) that means that the DM doesn’t need to exercise as much discretion.

I think we can agree that reducing the necessity for DM discretion can be a good thing, right? I mean, there's a reason why games have rules and don't just use DM discretion for everything - DMs can make mistakes, rules give a game predictability and a feeling of non-arbitraryness, and players tend to dislike 'mother may I?'


As for children vs. apes, it seems mechanically awkward to have a creature that changes intelligence levels (barring a radical transformations, e.g. a caterpillar turning into a butterfly).

Mostly I'm just thinking that it would be more streamlined from a game mechanics perspective. That said, I'd expect children of a certain age to be Small instead of Medium size, so if we're willing to adjust the size category, why not the intelligence category?

I think that treating growing through intelligence categories like growing through size categories is the right way to go here.

Individual adventures almost always take place on a timescale where significant growth (other that gaining levels) doesn't happen. A character who is a child at the beginning of an adventure will still be close-enough the same age at the end of it.

If there's ever a child that's appears later as an adult, there's bound to have been a timeskip involved. The process of that child changing size and intelligence categories doesn't need to happen onscreen, for the same reason as the time spent doing not-adventure that the PCs presumably spent can happen offscreen.

Heck, dragons are well-known for coming in different size categories (with correspondingly different CR). If the awkward business of dragons growing can happen off screen, then so can the awkward business of children's mental growth.


There are basically three possibilities here:

[...]
3. The only thing that can make someone less deserving of consideration than someone else is their freely chosen actions, if that.

Bluntly: This is the ethical option.

I'm going to nitpick the way that you're framing this debate. The question that we need to ask here is not "under what circumstances is someone less worthy than others of ethical consideration?" but rather "under what circumstances is an entity someone, as opposed to something, and therefore potentially worthy of consideration?"


Let me attempt to clarify. There are a number of different ways to characterize good versus evil:

1. Kindness versus cruelty
2. Decreasing suffering versus increasing suffering
3. Fairness and impartiality versus unfairness and partiality
4. Treating others as ends in themselves versus treating others as only means to one's ends
5. Allowing others to choose for themselves what will happen to them versus seizing control of their lives

and so on and so forth. And they don't always agree with each other!

For a moment there, it sounded like you were beginning to describe moral foundations theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory). You took this description in another direction, but I do think that moral foundations theory can offer an important insights here: some people disagree on moral matters due to having, not just different beliefs, but fundamentally different values.

I think that you are overstating how broadly and how reliably these various principles for a consensus. It's difficult to provide examples without straying into banned topics, becasue a lot of the ongoing debates in our society that stem from differing foundations are political, but I'll hint to some examples by noting that conservatives tend to value all foundations, liberals tend to skew towards care and fairness, and libertarians value liberty almost exclusively.

I also think that you are overreaching when you state that all of these foundations point towards the same thing. Sure, they usually agree - but if they can disagree at all, then they aren't really the same thing. They might at best be indicators of the same underlying thing, in the same way as a digital and mechanical pressure gauge might both measure (each with their own errors) the pressure in the same tire - but then it becomes an open question what that thing is. (Is it objective moral rightness? Is it the promotion of the survival of the tribe during our recent evolutionary history? Is it coincidence? Is it optimal behavior for genetic fitness in a species that lives in tribes?)


Flipping the script, ElfQuest has a size stat. And I feel it would work great in D&D.

I've thought of something similar, although it seemed off-topic here.

On advantage of having size modifiers is that it's provide an opportunity to redefine the words "small," "large," etc. to be relative rather than absolute. For example, a maneuver that allows a character to trip creatures up to large in size would refer to creatures that are large relative to them - and if they are under an Enlarge Person spell then the absolute size of creature that they can trip automatically increases without adding awkward wording to the maneuver.

One disadvantage is that size scores could interact in awkward ways with the combat grid. The grid itself is granular, and it expects questions such as "how many squares does this creature occupy?" to have integer answers. (Of course, this assumes that we're using a combat grid. That is, I'll admit, an assumption that I'm inclined to make. I've never played without one and while I imagine it'd be awkward I can't be sure.)

[Devils_Advocate]

I also think that you are overreaching when you state that all of these foundations point towards the same thing. Sure, they usually agree - but if they can disagree at all, then they aren't really the same thing. They might at best be indicators of the same underlying thing, in the same way as a digital and mechanical pressure gauge might both measure (each with their own errors) the pressure in the same tire - but then it becomes an open question what that thing is.
Huh? Oh, come on...


This is why these different formulations of what good and evil are can be considered different characterizations of the same thing and not just descriptions of different things. Strictly speaking, they're different categories, but they're sufficiently subtly different that any two of them mostly overlap in practice. And that phenomenon isn't particular to this subject. All words, and all concepts, are to some degree vague. (http://bactra.org/Russell/vagueness/)
Sure, you can ignore every sentence in the above quote except for the first as though the rest of them didn't already address your objections above, but isn't that rather disingenuous? What's the point of preemptively dealing with likely potential responses if someone just goes and pretends I didn't? RUDE.

I think that the most charitable assumption here is that you missed the sentences beyond the first. Which, like, fair enough, I guess. My post was pretty long, and so was yours, I'm not going to claim that I didn't skim over a few parts of it to a degree. Maybe it'll turn out that I missed something from you, too, in which case my apologies.

On the other hand, maybe my meaning wasn't sufficiently clear for you to get what the hell I was talking about. So let me try to illustrate with an example.

Likely many reading this have heard the old question "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?"

My experience has been that people commonly treat this as equivalent to "Can an event happen without being observed?" But that really doesn't make sense, because if unobserved events don't occur, then a tree can't fall if no one is around, now can it? Whether it ever really happens or not, an unobserved event occurring is part of the hypothetical scenario under consideration. Rather obvious in retrospect, isn't it?

No, the issue that the question gets to is that of what the word "sound" means. Is it a type of perception, or a type of phenomenon that leads to that type of perception, or the combination of the two, or what?

Now, "sound" is one of the more basic words that one would be expected to learn from example rather than by formal definition. It is explained to a child that that the honk of a horn, the meow of a cat, and the music that comes from a speaker are all sounds. And in nearly every case that we use the word "sound", a type of phenomenon has caused a type of perception. So taking "sound" to mean the perception or its cause or both are all totally consistent with the normal usage of the word, because they normally occur together. So one might well expect different people to consequently form different but equally valid generalizations. We do not speak the same language. (https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=640)

But frankly, I don't think that that gives an accurate sense of what we normally think of when we say the word "sound"! I don't think that we spend most of the time consciously aware that our perceptions are personal internal states instead of just "how the world is". I suspect that the naive, intuitive concept that the word "sound" maps to by default is, under examination, a conflation. And in that sense, the question essentially equates to "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it result in an auditory perception that exists independent of anyone to experience it?"

And that's consistent with the common interpretation of the question. People don't intuitively think about there being an external stimulus followed by an internal response, just the "one event" of "sound", so the only question is whether "it happens" or "it doesn't". Which is a confused understanding of the world, but the one that we actually use by default most of the time, because most of the time it works just fine, to the extent that added internal details required for greater accuracy seriously aren't worth the cost in efficiency.

It's not like total accuracy is possible. Abstractions are imprecise by nature. The only fully accurate model of the universe is the universe. The map is not the territory. But you can't fold the territory up and carry it with you.

So, let's assume, if only for the sake of argument, that our naive concept of sound is a conflation of different, separate things. Like assuming for the sake of argument that it's possible for a tree to fall when no one's around. In that case...

What is sound? What distinguishes sounds from things that aren't sounds? What does the word "sound" really mean?

My hope is that by this point, the reader has a sense of why such questions might be considered misguided. And, more generally, a sense that there might be something to the notion that questions can be misguided.

I myself have, in past arguments, implicitly assumed that a word's meaning is somehow fully precise and invariable, rather than vague and contextual. Which is preposterous, really, given how understanding that language doesn't work like that is a fundamental skill of normal communication. But the most insidious assumptions are the ones that we don't realize we're making. So my hope is that simply explicitly calling attention to this behavior will be sufficient for most readers to recognize it as a mistake, if they don't already.

So let us acknowledge that a single word not only can but as a rule does have more than one meaning, with some meanings overlapping with each other almost fully while others may diverge entirely. Here's the kicker: That applies to the word "meaning" too! We don't use "meaning" itself to only talk about exactly one entirely precise thing! There are different senses of "means", and something that means something in one sense may not mean it in another, possibly subtly different, sense. No wonder this all can get so confusing.

To explore some of the different types of things that "meaning" can mean, let us consider the hardest philosophical question: Is a hot dog a sandwich? (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/268)

Wittgenstein and Austin approach the question from a practical perspective. If you call a hot dog a "sandwich", will someone who knows the terms "hot dog" and "sandwich" understand what you intend to refer to? If not, then you've failed to choose a word that conveys your intent. Presumably you're speaking in the first place because you want someone to know what the hell you're talking about.* So if treating "sandwich" as covering hot dogs interferes with that, then don't do so! Does that make the definition of "sandwich" dissatisfyingly inelegant? If you say so, nerd, but we're going for accurate here. Elegant can get lost.

One possible objection is that if a word refers to exactly what it's understood to refer to, then a fully accurate definition includes e.g. how the word is used in a secret code -- even though its role there is based on being counter to normal usage! But, of course, the point here is to give a practically useful definition. Covering every conceivable usage is not only impossible, it's not worth the effort. Like remaining constantly aware of the distinction between our perceptions and their causes.

Okay, but... There's still a way in which it feels like "sandwich" is a word for a certain type of thing, and also that a hot dog is a thing of that type. The concept here is that of "natural kinds", but I don't intend to posit that conceptual divisions exist independent of and are discovered, rather than created, by our minds. The point, for me, is that we tautologically cannot conceive of anything except as we conceive of it, so the very idea of ever understanding uninterpreted objective reality is lunacy. So, given that we only can ever have knowledge of anything as seen through the lenses of our own minds, let's work with what we've got, says I.

Suffice to say that, while "hotdog-excluding" definitions of a word can be arbitrarily complex, "hotdog-including" definitions are by nature simple. Don't let my terminology fool you into thinking that they're maximally inclusive, though! "Natural kinds" contrast to "artificial kinds" in a way seemingly analogous to the contrast between natural objects and artificial objects. That is to say, "natural" specimens shouldn't "seem to have pieces cut out of them" but neither should they "appear to have bits stuck on".

Hotdog-excluding metaethics gives us, essentially, moral relativity: Whatever people think is right is right, whatever people think is wrong is wrong, and so on and so forth. There's not really a lot of room for philosophical debate there. Mostly just empirical questions of what people say is right and wrong.

My intent has been to discuss good and evil in an admittedly vague hotdog-including sense, but I don't mean to imply that I am using the only hotdog-including sense of "good" and "evil".

Hopefully that clarifies my position somewhat.

*Insert obvious joke to the effect that this is the opposite of the case for most philosophers.


I'm going to nitpick the way that you're framing this debate. The question that we need to ask here is not "under what circumstances is someone less worthy than others of ethical consideration?" but rather "under what circumstances is an entity someone, as opposed to something, and therefore potentially worthy of consideration?"
Hard disagree. I don't think that that's a recipe for being ethical. If anything, I think that it's a recipe for being unethical.

Wait, what? We may disagree where the line should be drawn -- e.g. whether at "personhood" or at "sentience" -- but there still needs to be a line. We need to decide which things even have moral rights.

Not at all. Let me illustrate with an example.

I think that most of us can agree that it's bad in general to make an innocent suffer against its will. Maybe there are cases where it's preferable to something worse, but it's still bad.

Now, a mindless, inanimate object -- a rock, for example -- seems like the sort of thing that would be excluded from moral consideration, if exclusion from moral consideration is being done at all. But making an innocent rock suffer against its will seems to me, if anything, especially evil, as you'd have to go out of your way to give the rock the capacity to suffer and a will not to do so.

Oh, come on. You're conflating different states of the same object. Conferring certain properties on something can change it into someone deserving of protection!

But if you decided to leave the rock unprotected because you've rated its state as "not a moral concern", you may be putting yourself in a situation where you can't defend it later when you think you should. Now, we may be talking about a scenario too unlikely to be worth considering, but that's a matter of which costs and benefits apply in practice. To give a more plausible scenario, would you say that we shouldn't worry about a computer simulation developing sentience because it's not sentient now?

Well, I'm not endorsing limiting our consideration to presently existent beings...

But then how are you endorsing limiting it? The other obvious possibility is saying that something bad is generally okay, e.g. that it's only wrong to make some subcategory of innocent entities suffer against their will, and that it's fine to do that to something that "lacks self-awareness" or whatever. That's horrible! Even if compassion for others won't sway you, there's an appeal to enlightened self-interest to be made here: Are the odds precisely zero that some future superintelligent supercomputer will conclude that the ego is fundamentally illusory, and there is no self to be aware of? In that event, do you want it to consequently be fully okay with torturing you? Or would it be better, even just for you personally, if it just strongly preferred not to torture, contingent on nothing?

The worst case here is deciding that it's okay to cause suffering, violate preferences, or whatever because "it's not someone". The best case I can see is not doing that. I don't see how you're going to do better than just preventing suffering, satisfying preferences, or whatever and not worrying about whether "it's someone". What value does that add?


For a moment there, it sounded like you were beginning to describe moral foundations theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory). You took this description in another direction, but I do think that moral foundations theory can offer an important insights here: some people disagree on moral matters due to having, not just different beliefs, but fundamentally different values.

I think that you are overstating how broadly and how reliably these various principles for a consensus. It's difficult to provide examples without straying into banned topics, becasue a lot of the ongoing debates in our society that stem from differing foundations are political, but I'll hint to some examples by noting that conservatives tend to value all foundations, liberals tend to skew towards care and fairness, and libertarians value liberty almost exclusively.
So... there is broad consensus that some things ("care", "fairness") are good and some opposing things ("harm", "unfairness") are evil, but some "morality" cares about things other than whether something is good or evil in the normal, common-sense senses of those words, even favoring evil over good in some cases. That's... pretty much what I was saying before? And glancing through the sources indicates that the "lawful" virtues are slightly negatively correlated with the "good" ones, which seems to support my position.

Furthermore, I'm skeptical that the lawful values represent some sort of alternate consensus. If anything, I'm inclined to think that they more often take the form of disagreement, some of them inherently.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/355/607/670
Now, it's possible to say that right and wrong are culturally relative, but that's not what lawful people typically do. Rather, the relevant mad-lib is "[My in-group] champion(s) [our shared values], which [our enemies] oppose(s). Hence, the sides of the conflict between us are not morally equal! Harm that we do them is justified, potentially, by what we are fighting for. Harm that they do us is all the more wicked for the ends towards which that harm is put."

The idea is that differing values are not all equal; that virtue isn't devotion to any arbitrary values; that values can be evil as well as good. But that raises an obvious question: Are your values good, or are they evil? You can appeal to the very values you're trying to justify, but someone with directly opposed values can do exactly the same thing, and neither of you will bring someone who doesn't already share those values over to your side with such "preaching to the choir". From the perspective of an unbiased third party, your rhetorical positions are symmetrical.

To an unbiased third party, which of your positions is good and which is evil is a matter of how your values relate to other values, not how they relate to themselves! Does one of you favor kindness, while the other advocates cruelty? Fairness, opposed to unfairness? Liberation versus oppression? And so on and so forth.

[brian 333]

What, specifically, might they do? I'll give you two examples of situations where intelligence categories could help:

The DM is setting up an encounter with a mindflayer, who is far smarter than the DM is IRL. The mindflayer has the opportunity to prepare spells in anticipation for the encounter. How can the DM determine what someone smarter than himself would do?
A PC is under the effect of a Feeblemind spell. The player has solved a puzzle, but it's obvious that their character wouldn't have been able to do so due to the spell.

Both of these situations would be handled under the current rules by . . . well, DM discretion because the rules don't cover them. The DM might decide to 'cheat' and retroactively decide what spells the mindflayer prepared after the encounter begins, but that's just their prerogative. Likewise, the DM might decide to intervene and prevent a player from sharing their solution to a puzzle. (Or they might not.)

With intelligence categories, there could be rules (or at least more specific guidance) that means that the DM doesn’t need to exercise as much discretion.

I think we can agree that reducing the necessity for DM discretion can be a good thing, right? I mean, there's a reason why games have rules and don't just use DM discretion for everything - DMs can make mistakes, rules give a game predictability and a feeling of non-arbitraryness, and players tend to dislike 'mother may I?'

You have described what you see as a problem, but you have not demonstrated how your proposed solution avoids, prevents, mitigates, or solves it. Adding a separate mechanic that does something already mechanically explained just adds complexity.

For example, there is no mechanical difference between a Str 20 goblin and a Str 20 giant. Both can lift the same weight, bend the same bars, break the same chains, etc. Size category has exactly zero impact on the Strength ability.

The difference is that a small creature, regardless of Strength Ability Score, can fit through smaller openings than giant ones.

How does that apply to Int and Int Categories? Well, it really doesn't. You are using two mechanics to do the same things. A child with 18 Int, with experience playing chess, will beat an adult with 9 Int at chess. I know. I taught a smart seven year old to play chess. He got tired of beating me.

What about an animal? Well, ravens and crows consistently outsmart the people who try to test their intelligence. Rather than declare all animals Int 2 and then create a new mechanic to allow them to act as if they are Int 5, why not simply assign them Int 5? How does a new mechanic offer any benefits that the old one does not?

Let us use your specific examples as a starting point:


The DM is setting up an encounter with a mindflayer, who is far smarter than the DM is IRL. The mindflayer has the opportunity to prepare spells in anticipation for the encounter. How can the DM determine what someone smarter than himself would do?

Okay, show me how the proposed solution makes this problem easier to handle? Ultimately, there will be DM Fiat involved, and the mind flayer will have retroactively been assumed to have the needed spell available. (I used to use Ability Checks for this. Opposed or versus DC as appropriate.)

Having a category that says 'this guy always outsmarts that one' will prove as unsatisfying to players as the current system is claimed to be. In the end, the DM will have to come up with a narrative that solves the problem, just as is required in the current system.

I do not see any benefit to the proposal, so let's take it from theoretical to practical.

A giant cannot fit through a rabbit hole, and a goblin cannot walk up stairs with 6 foot risers. A dragon can easily cross a 12 foot wide gulley, but a goblin cannot leap across. The size category helps me determine that. The size category has mechanical utility which the Ability Scores do not cover.

What mechanical utility is derived from the proposal that is not currently part of the existing Int Ability Score?

[awa]

For example, there is no mechanical difference between a Str 20 goblin and a Str 20 giant. Both can lift the same weight, bend the same bars, break the same chains, etc. Size category has exactly zero impact on the Strength ability.



You say that but depending on edition the 20 str giant can lift several times what the goblin can because as size small its lifting capacity is halved and the giants is doubled or more depending on how big it actually is. Thus their is a precedent for two characters with the same str not actually being equally strong.

Personally I think it would be most useful not as a mechanical thing but just as a lore thing. Because as it its hard to say how smart a thing is supposed to be, is an ogre a very dim person or a very clever bear. (because those are very different thing and will function very different as an adversary)
Additional its all complicated by the 3 to 18 spread either you cram all the animals into that 1-2 range which limits our ability to differentiate them or some players are basically unplayable.

If we use 5th edition idea that an ape has an int of 6 we are either talking about special fantasy apes that are near human or we are saying that an int of 6 does not represent a viable character because the cognitive limitations of even a chimp render them nonviable for any conventional adventure.

This would solve that. If we were using a third edition system it would have the obvious purpose of allowing exceptional animals enough skill points to actually do their thing. With 5th edition I'm actually not certain what mechanical effect it would have.

[Goobahfish]

I just have a 'simple-minded' trait which basically means non-linguistic thinking for animals. That way they can have a high Intellect but there are obvious limits to what they can and can't do.

The rest of these abilities, predicting minds, fast computation etc are probably better modelled as traits. I mean you could have a mind-reading idiot afterall.