D&D 5E So 5 Intelligence Huh

[Yardiff]

As had been said before no game is perfect. On the Pathfinder forums there are people who talk about successful npcs such as a bank manager with a 3 int or a blacksmith with a 3 str or a dancer with a 3 dex all with a straight face and well within the rules because banker and blacksmith are professions which is covered by wis and dancer is perform which is covered by cha all because you can pump skill point into the skill. Even some of the paizo staff said 'just because the rules allow it doesn't mean it should be done'.

 

[BoldItalic]

He doesn't really, though. He has trained to overcome his deficiency, but that deficiency is still there. The skill itself is not intelligence.

No, he hasn't trained to overcome the deficiency - the deficiency was never there. Skills are not necessarily the result of training, they can be innate, as in this case.

The skills focus on becoming better at aspects, sure.

At least we agree on that

The skills have to be learned, where the stat is inherent.

Humour me. Where in the book does it say that?

Ability scores can be increased as part of the level-up procedure, so they can't be described as entirely innate, can they?

By contrast, skills are, with one exception, determined entirely at character creation. (The exception is when a Bard joins the College of Lore at Level 3 and gains three more skills). Apart from that, skills cannot be augmented at all. Skills cannot be trained. (Tools and languages can be trained by spending downtime, but skills can't). Therefore, Bards, aside, a character's skills are innate at the point of creation. You may pretend to yourself that they are the result of childhood training but that is your interpretation, it is not demanded by the rules. I choose to make a different interpretation, one that is consistent with there being no general mechanism in the rules for gaining new skills. In my interpretation, skills are innate.

He's nowhere near average at reasoning. At best, he's average at investigation only, which is hardly the only type of reasoning.

At least we are now agreed that Investigation represents a type of reasoning.

He's woefully deficient at all the other sorts of reasoning.

Such as? Deductive reasoning is covered by Investigation and inductive reasoning is covered by Wisdom. Is there some other type of reasoning that I don't know about, that is built into the game somewhere?

 

[BoldItalic]

Let me get this straight. If Lefty with a 5 int and an investigation of +1 you'd roleplay as an average int character, does that mean that if Lefty had and average int (10 to 11) and an investigation of +4 you'd roleplay him as highly intelligent?

Yes, in the sense of being able to solve intellectual problems by deduction. He has the same facility for doing that as an Int 18-19 character without the relevant skills. I'd say Lefty-Plus is pretty brainy and I would (try to) role-play him a such.

Likewise, if vanilla Lefty goes up in levels and his Proficiency Bonus goes up making him better at Investigation rolls, I would try to role-play him a little smarter each time, though I'm not sure I'd actually succeed. Certainly, if we make him level 20 so his Investigation checks reach the dizzy heights of +9 (equivalent to an unskilled mind of Int 28) I would feel obliged to try to role-play him as a genius at problem solving even if he still can't read and write.

Is that a problem? You don't have to do it my way

 

[Yardiff]

Yes I'd have a problem with that, mostly because its totally foreign to the way I play. Are you the GM? If not have you talked to ANY GM about how you think skills and abilities work together?


EDIT: and I THINK its totally foreign to the way most play.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

EDIT: and I THINK its totally foreign to the way most play.

That's probably just a case of the typical human behavior of assuming that everyone else, at at least most of everyone else, thinks and feels the same way that you do - rather than an actual fact.

 

[BoldItalic]

Yes I'd have a problem with that, mostly because its totally foreign to the way I play. Are you the GM? If not have you talked to ANY GM about how you think skills and abilities work together?


EDIT: and I THINK its totally foreign to the way most play.

Ah.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Yes, sometimes I'm the DM and sometimes I'm not. When I'm the DM, I don't interfere with the way players role-play their characters. The people I play with do fun things, and that's enough.

If I'm not the DM and I role-play my character my way, and if it's fun all round, I'd be a bit miffed if a DM told me I was doing it wrong, or not portraying my character according to his prejudices. But I've never yet met a DM in the flesh who did that (and I've been playing since 1977). Maybe I'm just lucky?

Now, on this forum, I presume that a fair proportion of people posting are DMs, at least sometimes, and I'm happy to exchange views. That's what I come here for, to broaden my horizons. This thread has certainly been an eye-opener. People have described a way of role-playing the gestalt of abilities and skills that characters represent, that is different from the one that seems natural to me. That's great, I've learnt something. About how some other people do role-playing.

But what I'm also seeing, from some posters, is an insistence that their way is the only right way and any other way (e.g. mine) is wrong. A dogmatic insistence that their interpretation of the game is right and anyone else (including me) who thinks differently is having badwrongfun. Again, I've learnt something, but not very much. I already knew that narrow-mindedness lurks around every corner of the internet.

But, hey! I've got extra material now, if I want to portray narrow-minded and dogmatic NPCs.

 

[Mallus]

Are you the GM? If not have you talked to ANY GM about how you think skills and abilities work together?

I'm usually the DM for my D&D group.

I don't care how my players interpret their PCs mental stats. I want them to create interesting & amusing fictional characters that entertain me (err... and themselves, of course!). I don't care if they get, ahem, creative in their interpretation(s) of what dumb, foolish, and/or socially-maladjusted means during actual play.

You want to interpret low INT as terribly uneducated but inherently fairly smart? Great! Just don't bore me and/or get on the rest of the group's nerves.

To my mind, the best way to judge (if you're inclined to be all judge-y) someone's role-playing ability is with the following questions: Where you entertained by what their PC did & said during the session? Do you fondly recall what their PC said & did years later?

If 'yes' to the first question they're a good role-player. If 'yes' to both they're great.

 

[Yardiff]

As I've said before, this is probably just me (all my exp from 1977ish, not exactly sure when I actually started)....

Coming up with creative ways to explain how your low mental ability isnt really low, is bending over backwards to not have to roleplay a low mental ability. If you don't want to play a low mental ability character don't give it a low mental ability.

 

[Mallus]

As I've said before, this is probably just me (all my exp from 1977ish, not exactly sure when I actually started)....

Coming up with creative ways to explain how your low mental ability isnt really low, is bending over backwards to not have to roleplay a low mental ability.

I started a few years later, around the mid-1980s with AD&D in high school. My take-away from old-school D&D was smart & cautious play was the assumed default, i.e. if you did dumb things at critical moments your PC would die. Before making it to 2nd level.

Because before D&D is anything else, it's a game. And you're not supposed to play a PC to lose -- no matter what their stats are.

Sure, your INT 5 PC might talk like "ME AM THUD! UMM... HUZZAH!". But that didn't mean you played him stupid when it counted. You played to win, i.e get gold/XP and level up. You played smart -- to the best of your ability -- while sounding like a complete idiot.

Or at least that was the ideal. Sometimes you were bored -- or, you know, a teenager -- and smart & cautious went right out the window, regardless of how high PCs INT and WIS were. You went in fireballs-a-blazin'. Before estimating the volume of the room and/or corridor...

Actually, things haven't changed all that much for my group.

 

[BoldItalic]

As I've said before, this is probably just me (all my exp from 1977ish, not exactly sure when I actually started)....

Coming up with creative ways to explain how your low mental ability isnt really low, is bending over backwards to not have to roleplay a low mental ability. If you don't want to play a low mental ability character don't give it a low mental ability.

Very sensible.

But, about 20 pages ago, the OP reported having rolled up an Int 5 character and invited ideas for how to play it. So Int 5 was the starting point and we fanned out from there.