D&D 5E So 5 Intelligence Huh

[Ovinomancer]

The relevance of all this to the present discussion is lost on me.

I've been clear all along: you cannot compare IQ distributions to 3d6 distributions. Despite both claiming to have normal distributions, 3d6 is the only one of the two that has a legitimate normal distribution; IQ has an artificial, forced normal distribution. The two are just fundamentally different things.

Yes, natural numbers have various properties and relationships to one another. But that is equally true of the numbers used to label IQ score eg if my IQ is 50, and yours 100, we can both note that 100 is twice 50, that 75 is as much greater than 50 as it is less than 100, etc.

No, you can't. A 100 IQ is not twice a 50 IQ. That's like saying 100th place in a marathon is twice 50th place in the same marathon -- it's nonsensical. This is because the numbers used for IQ are rankings, not values. 50 IQ is less than 100 IQ, and that's all that can be noted. You can expand that and compare to each step between, but that's it. You can't even say how much 50 IQ is less than 100 IQ because the distance between the rankings isn't uniform, like the distance between race finishes isn't uniform.

Those observations about the properties of numbers tell us little or nothing about the relationship between my intelligence and yours. Similarly, the various observations you are making about the relationships between numbers generated by rolling 3d6 tell us little or nothing about ability scores in D&D, and the personal attributes that they notionally measure. That is why I am puzzled by your calling the association of mechanical stats with ability scores arbitrary. It's not arbitrary, as far as I can tell - the point of rolling scores is to establish those mechanical stats!

YES! FINALLY! IQ tells us a bit about the difference between our intelligences, 3d6 tells us nothing, and INT (if real) would also tell us something. None of them measure intelligence, though. So you can't go from a ranking of intelligence (IQ) to a pure chance distribution of real numbers (3d6) and then to another ranking/sometimes interval of intelligence (INT). The transitions make no sense -- you can't do it.

Bottom line: the likelihood of rolling an 18 on 3d6 is a bit less than .5%. There are IQ scores whose incidence in the population is, by definition, a bit less than .5%. If a player of D&D wants to say that rolling 18 for INT is a marker of having that degree of IQ, and puts forward as his/her reason for that that the likelihood of the dice roll result correlates to the incidence of the IQ score, that seems fine to me. If done accurately, this technique can be expected to yield a distribution of IQ scores among randomly generated D&D characters that at least approximates to the distribution of such scores in the general population.

Bottom line -- this is false. This is like saying there's .5% of people that finish first in a race, so if you roll an 18 on 3d6, you also finish first the race. It makes no sense to say this, yet this is what you're trying to say when you try to equate the two. That they have similar percentages doesn't mean that they're actually the same thing, or can or should be compared.

THIS is the trap of statistics. You've heard the old saw 'there's lies, damned lies, and statistics.' There's a reason for this other than the general feeling that stats you don't like are suspect. It's because statistics lies to you by transforming data into a common language and letting your forget that the data aren't the stats -- that what you've done with your mathemagic isn't the reality. In this case, you're allowing the fact that someone abused reality to do math that doesn't mean what it appears to say -- the IQ distribution is false and arbitrary. The functions performed to create it should not be done with that data. While you can plug the numbers into a calculator and perform the process of determining the mean of IQ scores, the fact that IQ scores are ranks, not values, and lack any defined interval means that the result is meaningless. It's like taking all of the place finishes in a race, averaging them, and declaring that this has meaning -- it clearly doesn't because the average of 1st place through nth place isn't meaningful. IQ data, similarly, doesn't have a meaningful mean.

So, why then do researchers do it? Again, an old saw "all models are wrong, but some are useful." The IQ distribution is wrong, but it's useful in some ways. It's useful to compare points within the IQ distribution. It has no use outside of that (because it's too wrong to be useful outside of that). This is agreed with in many studies on IQ.

So, because of this, comparing the IQ set to 3d6, despite the fact that they have similar words and apparently similar values, is meaningless because the IQ data is of a completely different nature than 3d6 rolls. There's no transferable meaning.

The point that [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] was making to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] and others, though, is that in their attempt to make a move along these lines they have failed to achieve a correlation of likelihoods. The reply was that they are aware of this, but are prepared to tolerate errors in approximation. Hriston then pointed out that the errors are so significant that they cast the whole project (of treating INT as corresponding to IQ/10) into doubt.

Maxperson's method is exactly as valid as Hriston's method. Both are making arbitrary claims that are not backed by anything valid.

The result of the 3d6 roll is a number, which is intended to be a type of measure - not a measure of the quantity of some determinable property that is present (as I posted already, that makes no sense) but a type of ranking measure where position in the rank also corresponds, roughly at least, to population frequency of that degree of ability/aptitude.

No, the result of 3d6 roll is a number, it is not a measurement of any kind. That we then take it to use as a measure means it transforms from just a number into a new kind of data and loses some of it's properties along the way. For instance, if I roll a 3 and an 18 on 3d6, then those numbers are just numbers -- 18 is six times greater than 3, for instance. If I then use those numbers as INT scores, they change. 18 INT is no longer six times greater than 3 INT. It is greater, for sure, and I can (depending on edition) even state how many intervals greater it is, but I've lost the ability to say that it is six times greater.

The means that you can't map the distribution of 3d6 the roll to INT scores. The distribution of 3d6 requires you to take the mean of the rolls and the SD of the rolls, and that only has meaning if they are rational (you can do something similar on interval data, but INT isn't solely interval data). That math requires certain properties of the data to be meaningful. Those properties are missing with the ordinal data of INT.

We use the roll of 3d6 (sometimes) to generate a random number to assign to a measurement of an ability. This is a fine use for a random generator if we wish to have a random measurement within the range. What we should be careful of it mistaking the properties of the random generator for the properties of the measurement we wish to randomize. They are not the same thing.

I don't follow this either.

In D&D, being Sherlock Holmes is a consequence of action declaration and resolution. That is to say, the player can't just declare "I'm a genius who solves the mystery": rather, the GM frames the PC (and thereby the player) into some sort of challenging situation or other, the player declares action, adjudication takes place and we then learn what exactly has happened in the fiction.

If the player whose PC has 5 INT declares actions that turn upon intelligence, and the GM adjudicates them in such a way as the PC is revealed to be a genius, why is that the player's fault?

This argument completely discounts character generation as meaningful declaration by the player. My problem with any argument that holds that the only factors that are important are only made during gameplay is that it ignores that character creation is a factor that also occurred during gameplay. It's special pleading that the ability scores and other factors chosen by the player have only a limited meaning while action declarations are superior to all other choices. I can't agree with this.

 

[iserith]

I tell him he fails and then after the game I let him know in a one-on-one that disruptive game play will not be tolerated. If he continues to disrupt the game like that he will be asked to leave.

Lacking any sort of means by which to produce eye-lasers, that seems reasonable, provided I felt that the player was acting in bad faith.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yes, in the context of the stories.


Yes, in D&D there can. Just, not in the stories.

This is special pleading. You ignore facts inconvenient to your narrative and favor facts that support you on both side. On the story side, you take certain elements (Sherlock is unique, no one is better than Sherlock) and discount others (Sherlock is a genius). On the game side you take certain elements (I can get the numbers to get an arbitrary high score with a 5 INT) and ignore others (others can do better). Then you admit that others in game can do better, but that's irrelevant because it's not the story, but the whole point of the argument is that you cannot do a good job of modelling Sherlock Holmes in D&D with a 5 INT so you cannot handwave away the reality that it's trivial to do better than your construct (and, in fact, a player in my game will shortly be better than your Sherlock and he's not even trying to model Sherlock, he's just a rogue that chose investigation as one of this expertise skills and had an INT boosting item). Your Sherlock construct rapidly fails to model Sherlock as one of the greatest detectives when a level 8 rogue can almost rival his 20th level feats of investigation.

You're cherrypicked so hard that the tree broke.

I haven't (see above) so it isn't.

You modified so you didn't, and by doing so introduced even more cognitive dissonance to your example. This is a losing road. You should stop travelling down it.

I concede freely that you can make a character with a 5 INT that, at 20th level and with investigation as an expertise skill, can do very impressive feats of investigation. However, that's easily surpassed by a much lower level character with an above average INT, and even earlier surpassed by characters with high INTs. Since high INT versions of your build result is significantly better performance, it actually shows I was correct -- even a narrowly focused build to recreate Sherlock Holmes is objectively worse than a high INT version.

I disagree, but it's a matter of opinion, so we needn't debate the point.

You say this, but then that would mean that I must...
Some would say that it's not a failing but a virtue.[/QUOTE]
... deny the very virtue you assign me. I shan't disappoint you.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Lacking any sort of means by which to produce eye-lasers, that seems reasonable, provided I felt that the player was acting in bad faith.

How did you determine the character lacks means to produce eye lasers? I doesn't say in the rules they can't.

 

[iserith]

How did you determine the character lacks means to produce eye lasers? I doesn't say in the rules they can't.

You're barking up the wrong tree with this. You're confusing fictional actions and action declarations. My argument is that any action declaration is valid, but as with all action declarations, the DM narrates the result of the adventurers' actions. "You're too dumb to make that action declaration" is not a thing where the rules are concerned.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I tried that. People argued. That brought us here. To reach this point, we had to discover that you and I use the word "objective" differently and then, in trying to clear that up, we discovered that you and I use the the word "fact" differently. I'm not sure who first introduced Sherlock Holmes as an example in this thread, but it wasn't me^*. It was useful, though, in uncovering the roots of our disagreement.

I would prefer it if you would you accept, as an objective fact, that Sherlock Holmes had an Int of 5. I don't imagine for a moment that you will, but nevertheless that is my preference. It would save me so much typing.

---

^* Actually, I've done a search and I think it was me, in post #137. Well, well. My memory isn't what it was.

Statements of belief absent any evidence are difficult to accept. I provided my evidence. Sherlock is described as a genius. Everyone treats him as such. His notional identity across all popular understanding of the character has him as a genius. Ergo, under all available descriptions, Sherlock is a genius.

Also, 5 INT is below average by definition. This is pretty inarguable.

Therefore, if Sherlock is a genius, which is definitionally above average, he cannot have a below average INT score. That you cobbled together a bunch of stats to create something that can get a high Investigation check if they roll perfectly doesn't actually address my points, and it's flawed by quickly showing that even an average intelligence beats your construct if similarly built, meaning it fails the other definitions of Sherlock as being one of the best and without peer. Meeting a narrowly defined aspect of capability doesn't mean you're successful at being the thing, else a flip phone would be the same as a brand new Galaxy or iPhone because it can make calls. Having one trait doesn't mean you have all necessary traits. That even ignores that fact that your argument doesn't address mine.

So, yes, you're correct that I'm not going to convert to your faith about Sherlock having a 5 INT. It's logically unsound.

Just glancing at a few of the posts here convinces me that the INT score of the most active posters is well below average.

Aw, come on, there's clearly very intelligent people arguing here. 5 WIS, though....

 

[ChrisCarlson]

Aw, come on, there's clearly very intelligent people arguing here. 5 WIS, though....

Self-awareness is, after all, the first step towards self-improvement.

Anyways, again, I think it is important to remember that one should hopefully be assuming the players at the table are all acting in good faith. Continuing to argue about "bad faith declarations" is a pointless exercise, AFAIC. At the point where you are dealing with such things, at the table, you have bigger issues than how one should presumably adjudicate.

 

[Manbearcat]

This argument completely discounts character generation as meaningful declaration by the player. My problem with any argument that holds that the only factors that are important are only made during gameplay is that it ignores that character creation is a factor that also occurred during gameplay. It's special pleading that the ability scores and other factors chosen by the player have only a limited meaning while action declarations are superior to all other choices. I can't agree with this.

This doesn't represent the argument of your opposition in this thread. The argument actually being made neither completely nor even partially discounts character generation as meaningful declaration by the player.

With respect to what you've written above, the argument being made states:

1) Ability score (modifier...which is what is relevant unless we're talking AD&D NWPs and rolling under score) is only one input to the player's process of determining action declarations at the table.

2) Ability score (modifier...which is what is relevant unless we're talking AD&D NWPs and rolling under score) is only one input to action resolution.

3) In systems that have a multitude of PC build components, PC flags, reward cycles (which may incentivize action declarations which end in complications or player intent unrealized...such as Inspiration for a Flaw in 5e or xp in Burning Wheel and Powered By the Apocalypse systems), specific play agendas (push play toward conflict, test your beliefs, play to find out what happens), and GMing techniques (such as Fail Forward), there will be several other inputs that can serve as the primary signal for how play outcomes are realized at the table (the totality of which generate archetype, genre coherence, and story).

4) The fickleness of Social Contract (not intra-table, but across the spectrum of TTRPG tables) is not insignificant. This is on display in every thread ever posted in the history of RPG forums.

 

[TwoSix]

We're all role-playing Int 5.

At least, I am. Isn't everyone else?

I'll be honest, I'm pretty much fully immersed.

At least, I think I am...good ideas tend to break my verisimilitude.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You're barking up the wrong tree with this. You're confusing fictional actions and action declarations. My argument is that any action declaration is valid, but as with all action declarations, the DM narrates the result of the adventurers' actions. "You're too dumb to make that action declaration" is not a thing where the rules are concerned.

So it's a matter of semantics? I could just say, 'You attempt the action, but your character's lack of wit means you turn the dial to something else," and this would be fine by you? I mean, you're fine narrating that a player can't shoot beams out of their eyes, but you won't stop them from trying. How is that functionally different from saying 'you try to turn the dial to 'S', but your slow wit means you forget your goal halfway through and you end up on 'T'.' Is this really just a semantics argument?