D&D 5E Weird Interpretations for High/Low Ability Scores

[TwoSix]

If the clues are hidden objects, it's likely a Wisdom (Perception) check anyway.

My personal feeling is that Perception is a little overused, so I try to only use it for quick reaction situations. Anytime the characters have more time to look around, I default to Investigation or Insight.

That's just a personal ruling, of course, I make no claim that it's RAW.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Not in the approach @iserith uses. The player could just state what the player knows as PC knowledge without a check. There's no "roll a check to see what your PC knows" in this approach (note: I use this approach as well). It would be using that knowledge that might be tricky, if the GM determines the application is uncertain or outright incorrect. The INT -5 Sherlock could spout knowledge all day long, if the player decides to and provides it, but it might be wrong.

What you're describing is at odds with the situation, though.

If a PC is trying to identify some tracks, or a particular kind of dust, or a deeply obscure religious symbol (the sort of thing Holmes does), if the player decides to say that their PC says X, well, sure. Anyone can do that. It doesn't interact with INT or with knowledge skills or whatever, but equally, it's almost certainly total bollocks. And if it consistently isn't, that's a metagaming problem.

If they want their PC to make an actual honest attempt to identify the thing in question, though, rather than spouting bollocks, they're going to need to make a check, or ask the DM if their character knows (which you might reasonably determine they do/do not based on their actual character background, area of expertise, stats and so on). It's deeply inconsistent to do otherwise, unless you allow people to do things like narrate leaping chasms and so on (fine if you do).

I mean, the "Stupid detective who talks bollocks" is a trope almost as old as Holmes. They walk in to the scene, and start making proclaimations, but because they're thick as two short planks, however confident and detailed the proclaimations are, they're complete nonsense, and just leading you down the garden path (there are shades of this with the detective in Knives Out! recently).

 

[Bawylie]

Nope. All the stuff he knows about animals, poisons, behaviour and so on is knowledge which in 5E would come from INT-based skills, and he'd have to make checks to know that stuff, and constantly would fail the checks. Thus he'd either being coming up blanks about things he needed to know, or even giving out wrong/misleading information.

All that people have succeeded in doing in this thread is proving that Sherlock Holmes isn't a case of "High INT, low WIS" as people often suggest, but rather a case of "High INT, above-average WIS, and dump-stat CHA".

If I have Int 5 and training in Medicine, and you have Int 10 but do not have training in medicine, which of us knows more about medicine?

Follow-up, how often do you require an ability check to know something? All circumstances? Are there situations where an adventurer can auto-succeed? Auto-fail?

At my table, taking a knowledge skill confers knowledge AND grants a bonus when checks are made. I do not require checks in every case.

Could our handling of checks explain some of the difference in our positions?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

My personal feeling is that Perception is a little overused, so I try to only use it for quick reaction situations. Anytime the characters have more time to look around, I default to Investigation or Insight.

That's just a personal ruling, of course, I make no claim that it's RAW.

This brings up an interesting side-effect of essentially making the same activity different skills which use different attributes...

I might have a character with an outstanding Perception score (and high WIS) but conversely have an abysmal Investigation score (very low INT). This brings up the odd situation where my character is really really good at noticing things as long as they aren't trying too hard to notice them. I suppose this might make for a funny quirk, but it doesn't stand up much to the "test of reason".

A house rule in my campaign is that anytime you take an action to actively do something which you have a passive score in (most commonly using your action in combat to make a Perception roll to notice a hidden foe) you can't do any worse than your passive score +1 regardless of your roll.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If I have Int 5 and training in Medicine, and you have Int 10 but do not have training in medicine, which of us knows more about medicine?

Accidental trick question - it depends what level you are. Once your proficiency bonus gets high enough, you might be a thick encyclopedia of specific facts, albeit with no real way to put those facts together, except in that you might have rote-memorized procedures. You still won't be anywhere near as good at them as a normal person who'd done the same, let alone a smart person. Even a normal person could probably give better advice than you though, initially because you'd be spewing piles of irrelevant medical facts.

INT 5 is basically "talking animal and not the bright kind" INT so RPing it differently is pretty crappy. You're literally dumber than a gorilla (INT 6), just with a working voice-box. It's like taking CHA 5 and then assuming your character is totally charming and likeable and memorable and so on, and that just because you can give a speech, your PC can, or STR 5 and testing the DM's patience by carrying around 300lbs of stuff just because this DM doesn't use the encumbrance rules.

Follow-up, how often do you require an ability check to know something? All circumstances? Are there situations where an adventurer can auto-succeed? Auto-fail?

At my table, taking a knowledge skill confers knowledge AND grants a bonus when checks are made. I do not require checks in every case.

Could our handling of checks explain some of the difference in our positions?

The suggestion was that you can 100% avoid making INT-skill checks to know things. Not that you can't know some stuff due to your training and background - but that you can 100% (or very close) avoid INT-skill checks, and didn't even have to check with the DM whether your PC knew stuff, you could just come out with stuff and it would somehow be accurate.

Identifying unusual stuff is a situation where I'd almost always call for a roll, unless the character had a very specific background that meant they just knew (which does happen, but not routinely). If someone had Expertise in a skill, I'd probably give them a bit more leeway in what I considered them to "auto-know".

But we're talking about what Sherlock Holmes does, which is to merrily prance into a room, look around it basically once, and start making actual declamations/proclamations about stuff. That's definitely going to need a check or three.

If someone wants to take INT 5 and somehow contrive to get Expertise in a bunch of knowledge skills, and has a consistent and sufficiently plausible background for the character, they could avoid more rolls than most, but you don't get to be Sherlock Holmes if you don't make any checks, especially not whilst being demonstrably worse at logic, math and so on than a gorilla. You get to be Lestrade, maybe, on a good day.

I mean, that's the big issue here - to be truly imaginative about real-world (to your PC) situations, you need to be intelligent. You need to understand how things work. Intuition alone isn't good enough. Intuition is what gets you thinking "Hmmm this scene doesn't seem right, it seems staged" and maybe that's WIS (arguable), but INT is what lets you actually understand what happens in an A-B-C way, and most of the skill needed to identify unusual things found at a scene are likely to be INT skills.

To use a media example, think of the Robert Downey Junior Sherlock Holmes movies, where he can basically replay what happened at a scene because they understand how everything works. Someone with INT 5 could never do that. They don't understand the world well enough. If they have WIS 20 and Insight they might well take a look at a fleeting expression on the face of someone there and know that person knew more than they were say, or even that they did it, but they could never formulate the hypothesis needed to prove that person did it, or even scare that person into a confession, unless just pointing to them and screaming "YOU DID IT!" was good enough.

 

[Bawylie]

Accidental trick question - it depends what level you are. Once your proficiency bonus gets high enough, you might be a thick encyclopedia of specific facts, albeit with no real way to put those facts together, except in that you might have rote-memorized procedures. You still won't be anywhere near as good at them as a normal person who'd done the same, let alone a smart person. Even a normal person could probably give better advice than you though, initially because you'd be spewing piles of irrelevant medical facts.

INT 5 is basically "talking animal and not the bright kind" INT so RPing it differently is pretty crappy. You're literally dumber than a gorilla (INT 6), just with a working voice-box. It's like taking CHA 5 and then assuming your character is totally charming and likeable and memorable and so on, and that just because you can give a speech, your PC can, or STR 5 and testing the DM's patience by carrying around 300lbs of stuff just because this DM doesn't use the encumbrance rules.



The suggestion was that you can 100% avoid making INT-skill checks to know things. Not that you can't know some stuff due to your training and background - but that you can 100% (or very close) avoid INT-skill checks, and didn't even have to check with the DM whether your PC knew stuff, you could just come out with stuff and it would somehow be accurate.

Identifying unusual stuff is a situation where I'd almost always call for a roll, unless the character had a very specific background that meant they just knew (which does happen, but not routinely). If someone had Expertise in a skill, I'd probably give them a bit more leeway in what I considered them to "auto-know".

But we're talking about what Sherlock Holmes does, which is to merrily prance into a room, look around it basically once, and start making actual declamations/proclamations about stuff. That's definitely going to need a check or three.

If someone wants to take INT 5 and somehow contrive to get Expertise in a bunch of knowledge skills, and has a consistent and sufficiently plausible background for the character, they could avoid more rolls than most, but you don't get to be Sherlock Holmes if you don't make any checks, especially not whilst being demonstrably worse at logic, math and so on than a gorilla. You get to be Lestrade, maybe, on a good day.

I didn’t intend a trick question. I was asking in good faith.

I understand where you’re coming from. Thanks for the response.

 

[iserith]

A lot of people have opinions on how Int 5 should be played or that this or that action definitely should have an ability check every time, but not a lot of support for those ideas in the rules. Those are rulings and they will vary from table to table.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

A lot of people have opinions on how Int 5 should be played or that this or that action definitely should have an ability check every time, but not a lot of support for those ideas in the rules. Those are rulings and they will vary from table to table.

I think it's pretty clear that when you are routinely being outsmarted by a gorilla (which is the case in the rules), there is absolutely no chance you could reasonably engage in Sherlock Holmes-type behaviour that wasn't buffoonery.

I am aware that by typing this I have caused someone out there to make their new PC "Gorilla Sherlock Holmes", but I accept that as an inevitable side-effect.

 

[iserith]

I think it's pretty clear that when you are routinely being outsmarted by a gorilla (which is the case in the rules), there is absolutely no chance you could reasonably engage in Sherlock Holmes-type behaviour that wasn't buffoonery.

You have some work to do to show that the gorilla will "routinely" outsmart the PC in a way that affects play meaningfully, particularly as it's unlikely (but not impossible) that a gorilla will feature quite often in this character's adventures. It's just not a worthwhile consideration and doesn't have anything to do with the rules. It's instead to do with your apparent preference as to how a player should portray a particular ability score. You're welcome to your preferences and your table rules, of course. I just don't share them.

 

[iserith]

My personal feeling is that Perception is a little overused, so I try to only use it for quick reaction situations. Anytime the characters have more time to look around, I default to Investigation or Insight.

That's just a personal ruling, of course, I make no claim that it's RAW.

The way I handle it is Intelligence (Investigation) is for resolving tasks with an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence for failure related to making deductions based on clues you already have. After all, if they're not hidden, the clues will be in the description of the environment which the DM should have already provided. If they are hidden, then they aren't in the description of the environment (though they may be telegraphed) in which case we're dealing with hidden objects and finding those clues may call for Wisdom (Perception).

As it relates to the thread, Int-5 Sherlock Holmes could therefore be good at finding the hidden clues, but not as good at succeeding at ability checks related to deducing what those clues mean. But a player needn't ever make an ability check to do that if they can put together the clues and make deductions on their own since a player establishes what a character thinks anyway. The character might be wrong, of course, if the player reached an erroneous conclusion, and might not be able to confirm it prior to acting on it due to a subpar Intelligence. Notably, the high-Int character has this same problem. It's just more likely they will succeed on average without needing to spend additional resources.

Where Int-5 Sherlock Holmes might struggle is in figuring out how traps and secret doors work before disarming or opening them. But as far as recalling lore or making deductions in a way that might call for an ability check? That's something the player doesn't need to engage with if they don't want to. All they have to do is not declare actions that entail making deductions or recalling lore.