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Thread: Intelligence is not a superpower
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2021-03-15, 03:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
No. That's a separate issue (DM metagaming). However you justify it, giving the NPCs information they can't have in-universe is wrong (IMO).
However, the INT vs WIS issue does act as a common smokescreen for this and related issues (on both sides). So while it's not a perfect one-sentence summary, it's a lot of it.Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2021-03-15, 03:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Given that DnD's wisdom stat doesn't even represent what's conventionally referred to as wisdom any more, merely awareness, and getting your character killed takes quite a bit of intentional effort on the players part ... I agree. The game (and most DMs) trains them to be unwise.
But also probably true IRL.
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2021-03-15, 03:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Those sorts of libraries do form a particular trope.
I could definitely see something where, if you happened to use a particular library as a magical location to do your research such as the Library of Leng, Thoth's Archives, or the Akashic Record, you could e.g. capture even unknowable things with Knowledge in exchange for, say, the loss of 1 sanity point per 5 points of your Knowledge check result...
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2021-03-15, 04:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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2021-03-16, 08:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Is it really unwise to walk into certain doom if you'll walk out victorious 99.9% of the time?
But also probably true IRL.
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2021-03-16, 09:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
It is the moment you play a game that doesn't hold your hand quite so heavily, the DM giving the players the freedom to step outside the heavily built in safety boundaries of the design, to stick out their PCs necks and pull the guillotine level themselves.
Or staying within tje system, by putting the PCs in a sandbox where the player can choose to have them face something far more powerful than it's possible to defeat, or push on without sufficient resources until they get overwhelmed.
To use an analogy, it's like the way many modern drivers have no idea how to really drive, because of things like automatic transmission, and more importantly the safety features built into modern cars. Of course, the analogy breaks down because we only have one life to give and there are no rezzes, so safety is better than learning to do it right.Last edited by Tanarii; 2021-03-16 at 09:27 AM.
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2021-03-16, 10:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Depends entirely on what game you are playing.
In Champions, intelligence is most certainly a super power.
In AD&D you couldn't cast spells unless you had a high enough Int for that spell level, meaning that intelligence literally gated your ability to use magic. An intelligence of 19-20 was rated as "supra genius" and higher than 20 was "godlike".
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2021-03-16, 12:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
I don't know Champions, so I'll not contest that point. See my note in the op.
However, in AD&D you could have very high INT and not be able to cast spells at all (e.g. by being a Fighter who rolled well on the 3d6-in-order method). Spellcasting is a superpower (with prerequisites). That doesn't mean anything about the prerequisites themselves being super powers.Last edited by PhoenixPhyre; 2021-03-16 at 12:42 PM.
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2021-03-16, 01:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Wisdom may not be well-defined in a prescriptive way, but given that the OP pretty much gave examples of both "High Int, low Wis" and "High Wis, low Int" characters, I think there's a pretty reasonable understanding of what it means at least by example.
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2021-03-16, 01:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
re: the int vs wis argument, the easy solution is to give your intelligent mastermind also a decent wisdom, and viceversa. this way you cover all the angles
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2021-03-16, 02:09 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Eh, I feel like this is kind of a meme too.
Remember when 4E came out, and if you didn't like how Marking worked it was because you were a nerd who didn't understand football? I must have forgotten the part in football where only one player can try to block someone at a time.
I mean, I'm not saying nobody has an Int-bias, it's certainly a thing that exists. But IDK it's really that common. For that matter, I've seen a lot of what you could maybe call an anti-Int trope: "Casters, particularly Wizards, are all absent-minded academics who don't grok the real world - that's why only someone 'grounded' can make a decent plan or notice the obvious."
Not to say that doesn't exist either. I recall hearing about a Wizard who fit that description pretty well, name started with a 'Q' I think ... But it's not a requirement! You can in fact have a caster who has common sense.Last edited by icefractal; 2021-03-16 at 02:14 PM.
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2021-03-16, 03:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Definitely. It's constantly on display as a subtext in these forums. Even if people wouldn't self-identify or even overtly claim that Intelligence is superior.
I should be clear, that's a pro-Intelligence bias, not necessarily a pro-Int bias. The stat is not the same thing, and the former (being real world) isn't necessarily even what people think it is. So really more a pro-pop-culture-cult-of-Intelligence bias.
And just so no one gets me wrong: I think that's understandable, because we're mostly smart folks around these parts. <-which is biased thinking. ;)Last edited by Tanarii; 2021-03-16 at 03:06 PM.
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2021-03-16, 04:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Smoking is a means of stress reduction. That nicotine strokes some nice bits of the brain. Smoked on and off for some years, but finally quit for good. The medical field is also somewhat infamous for it's incidence of drug abuse and alcoholism.
"They should know better."
Yeah, maybe. They are also human.
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In that edition you didn't get to boost any of your stats every few levels (Unless you were a Cavalier from UA ...) Comparing the numbers between TSR editions and WoTC editions has to take into account a few mechanical differences.Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2021-03-16 at 04:21 PM.
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2021-03-16, 04:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
I think there's also a difference between the sort of 'superintelligence is omnipotence' position (which I think is mostly championed by a smaller number of loud adherents than being representative of the zeitgeist) and the position that being able to use one's full knowledge and mental faculties when playing a character is likely to be more important than the game mechanical consequences of a 10 point difference in Strength or Dexterity or Constitution.
E.g. I'd trade a lot of mechanical power away to be able to bypass 'your character isn't smart enough to come up with that plan' or 'your character wouldn't think that way' at tables where the DM or players enforce things like that. But that's almost more about agency than about praise for intelligence.
Wisdom is a much better stat to justify metagaming anyhow because you can say 'its intuition, I don't have to explain how I know it or justify it with logic. This feels like the right choice.'Last edited by NichG; 2021-03-16 at 04:34 PM.
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2021-03-16, 04:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
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2021-03-16, 08:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Lol. Technically, I think, it's less "the real world" and more "but why wouldn't Fireball / Maze / Evards Black Tentacles / Faerie Fire / Haste / Summoning Giant Toads / whatever be the correct answer here?" that tends to trip him up.
He doesn't try to solve muggle problems, like a cliff. And, if the muggles ask for a solution to said cliff, it's anyone's guess whether he'll suggest Fly, Spider Climb, Feather Fall, Web, Polymorph, Summon Giant Spiders, Teleportation, Wall of Stone, Stone Shape, Polymorph Any Object, Otiluke's Telekinetic Sphere, Worldgate, Animate Objects, or Spelljamming.
I guess those could be considered missing the obvious, or not grounded, I suppose…
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2021-03-17, 10:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Broadly speaking, Intelligence is the ability to reason through things, as well as some memory, learning speed, etc.
Wisdom is pattern recognition based on experience and a deep understanding.
The guy with the engine? He may not ever do calculus. But he's seen enough engines, and deeply groks how the parts work together that when he sees or hears a problem, he immediately goes through all of the things leading to that and can probably guess the root cause in about a half second."Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"
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2021-03-17, 10:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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2021-03-17, 10:28 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Intelligence is not a superpower
Neither is dexterity, until you're running faster than the speed of sound or juggling 20 swords while riding a unicycle with 1 foot and playing the violin with the other.
I feel like your viewpoint is colored(more like stained) from being deeply embedded in a highly traditional academic environment.
There is a lot to unpack here and I'm too lazy to do it properly. I think I'll do the abridged versions.
1. Superhuman intelligence is a superpower. Like superhuman strength. It's kind of in the name.
2. The source books detail what's in the domain of intelligence. People not being able to tell charisma or wisdom apart from intelligence is those people's problem.
3. Intelligence is a nebulous collection of various cognitive abilities, and being intelligent does not mean that you are automatically better or even passably good at all of them. Heck, even rationality isn't terribly correlated to high IQ (https://www.popsci.com/the-intelligence-trap/) (which likely means little else than that rational intelligence isn't among the intelligence traits measured by IQ tests). So be very careful what you mean when you say "smart people".
4. There's probably a lot to be said about "pet models" and "hammering everything into conformance" that I'm not qualified enough to talk about. All I have are second hand accounts about the many pressures the academic systems puts on those within beyond the intellectual pursuits.
5. Your final plea is a decent one and the very first sentence of the first response already addresses the likely primary cause for your consternation. However it finds poor support in anything that came before.
My take on this is that intelligence as a superpower can take many different forms. From genuis level expertise in many fields, to near omniscience in a single specialized domain. A character might a brilliant planner, or a ridiculous fountain of knowledge, or a Holmesian deductive genius.
Also a 20 INT 5e wizard might not be batman (bounded accuracy - boo), but my 40 INT 3.5e wizard puts Batman to shame. He puts the genetically augmented love child of Batman, Tony Stark and Sherlock Holmes to shame. He plans his morning dump using at least a dozen Xanatos Gambits.
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2021-03-17, 10:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Well now I know it was endemic in the community, not just D&D. But at the time, I recall it was being heavily pushed in non-TSR books by Seimbeida & Wujcik. In TSR, many modules and eventually most of 2nd edition splat was built around the underlying concepts in RPG-elitism. So yes, it was TSR, but whether they were responding to the zeitgeist or pushing it I don't know. (Eventually all this led to The Forge and Ron Edwards and GNS.)
Planescape with its very annoying berk-this and berk-that and steam-punk art would never have happened without it. And of course a desire to take the infinite and mentally shrink it into something recognizable and manageable and with a consistent theme for a setting, which both of those played into.Last edited by Tanarii; 2021-03-17 at 10:57 AM.
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2021-03-17, 11:44 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
None of those things are actually mechanically defined. Nothing in the Intelligence ability score says that you're a good planner. That's entirely an out-of-RAW statement, imposed by personal choice. Or even particularly inventive. You know lots of things. You can reason from existing data fast. Doesn't mean you do, or that you're good at anticipating others' actions, or distinguishing bad assumptions that underly those "facts" or any of that. It's entirely unfounded in anything mechanical.
It's basically just a "I'm special, because special" thing that has no rules support whatsoever.Last edited by PhoenixPhyre; 2021-03-17 at 11:45 AM.
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2021-03-17, 12:06 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
But then what is the boundary between wisdom and experience?
The engine ticking thing is probably just experience. I can't see anyone ignorant of internal combustion engine repair/design, no matter how "wise" they are, as being able to diagnose such an issue. At least now without getting into the "so <foo> it's like magic" levels, at which point we are talking about comic book like super powers that run on plot.
Perhaps one issue is that the int / wis / cha stats in d&d have evolved over the editions and, what with this thread being in the general forum, we have people with different understandings of them. I've seen the intelligence stat go from knowledge & memory to puzzle solving & calculation speed, the wisdom stat go from a sort of "you ought to know better" to willpower & perception, and the charisma stat go from skill at dealing with other people to "strength of personality".
Here's one: Say you're on a rpg design team and you write up a subsystem. Lets go with d&d 4e skill challenges, the first version with it's muktiple flaws. Would high "intelligence", high "wisdom", or lots of previous rpg experience let you spot the flaw that the "harder = more rolls" design meant that pcs were more likely to succeed a "hard" challenge than an "easy" challenge (the game putting pc success rates at 65% to 75% and more rolls pushing results towards the averages)? Then which "stat" to catch the perverse incentive to fail challenges (originally the default suggestion was success bypassing a medium/easy fight or two, but fights were action & xp & loot when success had no other suggested reward)?
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2021-03-17, 12:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
I'd say that wisdom is (at least partially, and probably significantly) applied experience
Clearly.
Either.
The "int character" would do the calculations and be able to tell you the chances of success.
The "wis character" would, by experience, realize that single rolls tend to have more extreme results, and lots of rolls tend to "even out" over time. They might not know that there is an issue, but they'd have the experience to recognize that and look further.
The ideal situation is that the wis character prompts the int character to do the math, leveraging both of their strengths.
Wisdom, probably. The key insight here is that players might not want to bypass all encounters, and that in a game where xp and loot are the marks of progression, that if something is to be seen as a better alternative to combat, it has to provide at least the same level of rewards (compared to the "cost" of combat) in order to be an actually better result.
This could be done through game-theory-like analysis (actual mathematical game theory) but understanding human incentive and behavior seems like a more likely first signal that there's an issue.
So the two are actually similar - the "wis character" would be likely to recognize the potential problem, the "int character" can analyze the problem and determine the severity of it."Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"
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2021-03-17, 12:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
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2021-03-17, 01:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
I'm saying that assuming that an int 40 person is inherently a super batman is entirely outside both rules and normal meaning. It's an assertion without evidence.
Sure, you can make such a character. But it has little to do with the int score. You can have a high int character without those traits. Or a lower (relative) character with those traits. It's entirely orthogonal to the game. So saying that every level 20 wizard is by default a xanatos chess master is to go well outside the rules and claim benefits they don't get by default. It's cheating.Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2021-03-17, 09:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
So, to flip that on its head… the individual who thinks that *maybe* this should be tested? I call them "Wise" (or, really, I call those who *don't* realize that the math doesn't just "work", and needs to actually be *tested*… pejoratives that amount to "unwise".)
The person who is able to do the math, and test it? I call them "intelligent".
I worked at a software development company where I once made a statement to the effect of, "before I upload this code, written in a language I don't know, that will impact all our customers, to our live servers, I thought that maybe someone should test it". Being me, the code worked fine, despite my having never used that language before that day. But the fact that everyone could - and did - simply push code live without testing it? It seemed too unwise for my tastes, and that simple request changed company policy.
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Recognizing what is actually Incentivized by a set of rules? That's a tricky one. I know, because I'm good at some, bad at others.
"Experienced" can certainly help, yet there's plenty of times that fresh eyes can set what experienced ones cannot.
Guile, psychology, and… whatever combination of factors drive char-op can all help.
But I think that the biggest factor is the ability to set aside preconceived notions, and look at something for what it truly is. I don't have a name for that (outside the referential "see with eyes unclouded by hate").
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2021-03-18, 04:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
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?Last edited by martixy; 2021-03-18 at 04:14 AM.
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2021-03-18, 04:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
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.Last edited by NichG; 2021-03-18 at 04:59 AM.
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2021-03-18, 05:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Intelligence is not a superpower
Valid point. In general.
Practically, at the table, they probably do.
This is both true and false.
True in 3.5e, where the ability score description is a lot more spare and mechanically focused.
False in 5e, where Int explicitly covers memory.
(See OP's first post.)
So it's a toss up.
People usually don't stick to the rules that closely though. Most tables I've been at put memory under the purview of INT.
I do like however that a moderately good Autohypnosis bonus essentially gives you perfect memory. It's one of those unbounded game states 3.5 is famous for. Like pun pun and the d2 crusader.
Have I argued that somewhere?
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Reworking the Complete Adventurer Tempest PrC
Expanding the Pathfinder Called Shots system
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2021-03-18, 05:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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