Character ability v. player volition: INT, WIS, CHA

[Voadam]

A wizard smart enough to cast spells who is not clever at tactics or figuring out puzzle traps or remembering people's names.

A foolish cleric wise enough to cast spells.

A sorcerer who casts spells but is a quiet meek personality.

If roleplay is tied to mental stats these either cannot exist, are being played wrong, or mental stats are broad enough to encompass any roleplay activity.

 

[Ourph]

How do you play the Buddha if you are, in real life, a Bubba?

May you live to be a thousand years old, sir!

 

[billd91]

Characters with low strength have harder times making strength checks to kick in doors.

Characters with low cons are more susceptible to poisons.

Characters with low wisdom fail perception checks more often.

None of these are mechanics, not guides for roleplay.

Str and dex and con have no guides to roleplay.

Direct guide? No, but they'll have an effect. If my PC has a low strength, I'm not going to act like I've got a high one and offer to knock in doors or carry heavy stuff. I'll certainly use the understanding of being relatively weak when choosing how to get through encounters. If I have a low Con, I'll play it so it has some significance. Same with low Dex.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

Issues like this are why I hate mental stats (I hate stats scores period, so it's not a powergamer thing either). I'm terrible at answering the question "How is my character going to mentalize in an objective, score-based sense?" I see thought processes and how they play out as much more complex than three scores: a difficult logic problem can be solved by the slow person because they take the time to try every possible combination until the right one comes up, whereas the quicksilver mind needs to have a single quick flash or they won't have the patience to let their brain work; two geniuses can be different because one understands how her incredible creations work while the other doesn't the creations being the same. I just can't figure that out beforehand: frequently I need time to actually be that character with no restrictions before I understand anything about how they react in the mind.

 

[Celebrim]

Why do people care about 'dump stats'? I mean, at all.

Isn't a player actively participating in the game, contributing ideas, puzzle-solving, trying to influence NPC's through in-character speech, etc. more desirable than trying to nail that 8 INT or 10 CHR?

A 10 charisma may well exceed that of some of the players at the table, so its not that constraining.

Likewise, while I've yet to meet a player that I would rate as having 8 INT in real life, an 8 INT is only barely below average and reflects the ability of alot of people we've met in real life and quite a few famous people (many actors, professional football players, reporters, etc.). An 8 INT may not even be that obvious if the person has a decent charisma and you don't ask them to do alot of reasoning or knowledge retrieval. You might know someone for a while before it even occurs to you that they are below average intelligence. Nothing prevents a person with 8 INT from being a fully functional and successful person.

I would definately appreciate a person trying to play an 8 INT, but my experience with people RPing an 8 INT is that they tend to overplay the stupidity and make it a really defining trait rather than merely one aspect of the character to be occasionally refered to. I wouldn't have a big problem with a player with an 8 INT character participating to the extent of his own intelligence with only minimal RP cover for this, in part because IRL I've worked with actual mentally retarded people who have said clever things on occasion. So if you want to play a 'Forest Gump' character who is insightful without being aware or conscious of his insight, that's fine with me. What I might think as taking it to far would be playing a 8 INT character who consistantly takes the lead role in planning, solving problems, and investigation. That suggests that you didn't really want to play an 8 INT character at all, but were just power gaming.

 

[billd91]

Isn't a player actively participating in the game, contributing ideas, puzzle-solving, trying to influence NPC's through in-character speech, etc. more desirable than trying to nail that 8 INT or 10 CHR?

It's great to be actively participating, yes. But if stats don't matter, why have them? Granted, some differences are small - 8 to 10 isn't a huge gap - so trying to be overly concerned with getting it exactly right is time not well spent. But if you're building the character you want to build, particularly with point buy, I want to see you play it out to the best of your ability.

It becomes a bit like buying up a character's abilities by taking disadvantages. If you're not going to play the disadvantages that you've taken, then you shouldn't get the benefits they enabled you to take elsewhere.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

A wizard smart enough to cast spells who is not clever at tactics or figuring out puzzle traps or remembering people's names.

A foolish cleric wise enough to cast spells.

A sorcerer who casts spells but is a quiet meek personality.

If roleplay is tied to mental stats these either cannot exist, are being played wrong, or mental stats are broad enough to encompass any roleplay activity.

This also.

 

[Andor]

Conversely, if the player has little social grace to speak of, he shouldn't be automatically be banned from playing a dashing Bard, any more than the inability to cast spells should prevent him from playing a Wizard.

I sort of have to disagree a bit here. I've encountered more than one player whose own communication skills were so poor I've been unable to discern what they were trying to achieve in complex social situations. This usually leads to an upset player when things don't turn out the way they want. I've also seen people who were verbally adept but just gifted with negative negotition skills, there is no way to salvage a situation with a skill role when the player insists on RPing things out ... badly.

Actual conversation about a game I wasn't even in:

Player: "Sorry I missed a session, how do things stand?"
GM: "You're at war with the Tyrellians."
Player: "What!? But they were about to sign the treaty! What happened?"
GM: "Well..."
Player: "You let Paul negotiate didn't you."
GM: "Yeah."

 

[Mallus]

May you live to be a thousand years old, sir!

Wait... are you trying to sell me expensive luggage?

 

[Umbran]

I'd feel offended by a DM telling me I was playing my character wrong or poorly based on the stats on the sheet.

If you were playing in a game that had explicit advantages and disadvantages, and you took a major disadvantage, but then regularly intentionally ignored its existence, I think the GM would have grounds to be offended. You broke an agreement.

A particularly low stat is a disadvantage. If it was not worth the trouble for you, you should not have taken it. As a GM, I don't force a player to take a particular set of stats. It is either point buy, or accept a particular set of die rolls. So, you agreed to it, and should be expected to live up to that agreement.

Now, if it was not agreed to at the start of the game that there was an expectation that you'd play dumb, you might have an argument. Bot otherwise, I think you'd be on weak ground to be offended.