Intelligence is not a superpower

[NichG]

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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