Crimson Longinus
Legend
I mean sure, it is up to interpretation, though ideally I feel that all people in the table should have at least somewhat similarish interpretation.And, again, an INT of 6 means you suffer a -10% penalty on tasks that require Intelligence. Do you think an ape, or a 4 year old, has about a 10% penalty for Intelligence tasks?
Conversely, a 14 is as far from average as a 6 is. Does a 14 mean that you are as much more intelligent than a commoner, than a commoner is compared to an ape? Because that would be super-genius level.
The mechanics of attribute scores make no sense logically, and simply cannot be used to say anything definitive about the fiction.
The only thing we know for certain is that a 6 imposes a -2 penalty. How you interpret that is entirely up to you.
In any case, D&D obviously does not attempt to accurately simulate real life, it tries to simulate some sort of fanciful action adventure story. As a result, probabilities are truncated. Worse scores make you less likely to succeed at things and better ones make you more likely to succeed, but to far lesser degree than would be realistic. This is common in action movies; untrained people manage to disarm bombs, fight off superior opponents etc. Still, I feel that the scores must tell us something about the fictional reality too, or there really is no point in having them.
Last edited: