Intelligence is not a superpower

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

Rules

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

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

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

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

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

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

You apply your character’s Intelligence modifier to:

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

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

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

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

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

Spoiler: A joke that's too close to the truth to be funny

Show

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

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

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

Game
So here's my plea.

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

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

[Pex]

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

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

[Rynjin]

Intelligence does not necessarily imply preparation in a vacuum.

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

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

[Saintheart]

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

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

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

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

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

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

[NichG]

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

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

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

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

[Mechalich]

you can learn anything faster, even completely non-intellectual things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Lord Raziere]

*slow clap, builds until uproarious applause*

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

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

[JoeJ]

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

[Saintheart]

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

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

[Morty]

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

[Mechalich]

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

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

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

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

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

[Satinavian]

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

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

Let's see.

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

Intelligence does not make you paranoid.

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

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

Intelligence does not prevent mistakes.

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

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

Or even things like chemistry or programming--don't ask a physicist to program something if you want it to work consistently or be easy to maintain. Been there, done that. Scientific code is miserable from an engineering standpoint.

Wholeheartly disagree. Becoming software developer is one of the most common occurences for trained theoretical physicists that switch occupations and don't pursue a university career. That is certainly not because they are bad at it, it is because of how easy it is and how much overlap in skills tends to exist. Sure, they tend to start of with a lot oif bad coding habits but they tend to bring better skills than nearly every other kind of career changer.




To summarize :

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

[MoiMagnus]

Intelligence should be as much a superpower as the other ability scores.

If you're allowing a high Dex low Str character to defy gravity doing acrobatics [like Legolas' bridge run, for example] that would (1) definitely needs a lot of strength to even approach them IRL and (2) just be impossible IRL, then it make sense to have the "Movie superintelligence" be used too. (Especially in 5e where Int is one of the weakest ability score). [And to have high Wis essentially mindread peoples at will, etc]

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

[icefractal]

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

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

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

[King of Nowhere]

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

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

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

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

[NichG]

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

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

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

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

[Saintheart]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basically this.

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

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

[Willie the Duck]

I think there are multiple competing and compounding issues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Max_Killjoy]

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

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

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

Gamers then just emulate that.

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

[OldTrees1]

Imagine someone with high Wisdom and high Intelligence. Let's call that Int 16 Wis 16.

Now imagine someone with Int 22 and Wis 22.

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

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

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

[JoeJ]

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

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

That sounds like the GM forgot that:

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

[Tanarii]

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

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

The Cult of Intelligence runs very strong in TRPGs, college folk, and folks working STEM fields (including IT). The Cult of Science is one branch office of it. The Bohemian Cult (think literature & poetry reading) is another.

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

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

[KineticDiplomat]

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

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

[Telok]

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

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

Correlation is not causation. Potential is not experience.

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

[JoeJ]

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

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

[Xervous]

Feels like a lot of emotional baggage is getting dredged up here so I’ll keep it short.

No duh bad storytelling is bad.

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

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

[Batcathat]

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

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

[JoeJ]

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

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