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

[Oni]

Signs you are roleplaying badly:

10) Your character description and mental image is essentially that of a anime character and includes any or all of the following words and phrases: "darkly handsome", "brooding", "moves with cat-like grace", "piercing intelligent eyes", "dangerous", "long black cloak". I'd almost throw "tall" on that list, but concievably tall might describe a non-twink mental conception.

What if you're playing BESM?

 

[Celebrim]

What if you're playing BESM?

I knew someone was going to ask me that.

If you are actually playing an anime inspired game, then hopefully you are conscious of the trope and have created your character concept with full awareness how overdone it is and an awareness that you'll either need to somehow make your character the definitive example of the archaetype or else explode the sterotype and create a character with hidden and preferably unexpected depths. Either way, I'd still personally be happier with something more original and looked less like ego gaming.

And while we are at it, you can 'play yourself' and 'be the same character' every time and be emmensely entertaining if you do everything else well and create the character to fit this concept.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

Things like what the OP is talking about is why I like the OVA RPG. You could create a character who is a Mage of some sort, but is only of average intelligence, and instead of giving him te "Smart" attribute, you could instead give him points in the "Passion (Magic)" attribute to show that he is not too smart, but that he has a passion for magic and use that to add to your dice pool instead of the "Smart" attribute.

 

[Celebrim]

Things like what the OP is talking about is why I like the OVA RPG. You could create a character who is a Mage of some sort, but is only of average intelligence, and instead of giving him te "Smart" attribute, you could instead give him points in the "Passion (Magic)" attribute to show that he is not too smart, but that he has a passion for magic and use that to add to your dice pool instead of the "Smart" attribute.

You can do that whenever you have a flexible skill system.

Even in D20, you wouldn't necessarily have to be really smart to be the world's most knowledgable historian. All you'd need was enough ranks in Know (History), and it really wouldn't matter if you were Int 10. If you want to play someone that knows far more about something than their intelligence suggests, you give them Skill Focus in the appropriate knowledge. It's fundamentally the same mechanic you describe, except in D&D magic isn't part of the skill subsystem. In D&D, if you want to have a person of average intelligence be a great Mage, you reskin the sorcerer to have the flavor you want and keep the underlying mechanics.

 

[pawsplay]

This is a very solid post. I am going to pick apart some of these items.

Signs you are roleplaying badly:
3) Rather than in engaging in dialogue with the other PC's or NPC's, your first instinct is always to describe what your character intends to accomplish. For example, you might say, "I go up to the Baron and introduce myself", as a proposition rather than something, "I go up to the Baron and extend my hand in greeting, "Good morrow, your Lairdship, I'm Sir Bannet of the Lantern Company". Or you might offer as a proposition, "I try to convince the chieftain that he should allow us safe passage through his tribes hunting grounds."

That's a stylistic difference. I think it's ok to narrate some or even most of the time, provided you speak in character at least some of the time. Similarly, although a player who speaks mostly in character is usually a blessing, sometimes the more extraverted types can drag the adventure for players who are looking for evens to move. Also, it can create hiccups if the player does not communicate at a meta level. For instance, the lovely speech to his Lairdship might get rewound if it turns out his Lairdship does not allow people to get physically close to him and uses an emissary.

9) You've spent literally hours outside of the game figuring out how to optimize your character up to level #20, but you don't know any of the following: the name of your character's mom, where the character was born, how the character spent his childhood, what your character was doing the day before the adventure began, what the character is afraid of, etc. (And if asked about any of that stuff, you'd probably say it was irrelevant.)

While I appreciate a well-developed character, there is nothing wrong with leaving some blank on the slate, even if you have a master plan for developing your character's abilities. For one thing, your numerics may be only tangentially related to your character's personality development. Devising such details as your character's hometown, mom's name and so forth can be a source of plot hooks, but it can also hem in future possibilities and can give the sense the character's most interesting experiences are behind them. I am far more concerned about the player being engaged, in the moment, "as if" the character, than the stylistic question of well developed background versus a few good hooks.

 

[IceFractal]

For all those claiming it's a balance issue - that people are getting something for nothing and cheating the system - consider this. In D&D, and many other systems, if Intelligence is enforced as a limitation to player volition, you have the following options:

1) Play a warrior with low Int, and never get to solve puzzles, use fancy tactics, or do anything "smart".
2) Play a warrior with high Int, have lower physical stats, and be mechanically less effective.
3) Play a wizard with high Int, be mechanically effective, and solve all the puzzles you want.

That isn't "balance", it's practically the opposite! If the physical stats don't control player volition, neither should the mental ones. You're not "stopping the evil powergamers", you're just saying "Hey everybody, go play a Wizard!"

And no, being poor at bending bars or balancing on a beam isn't the equivalent of not being able to use a plan because you're "too dumb". The equivalent of mechanical penalties is ... mechanical penalties. Which most systems already have. Things like less skill points, bad perception rolls, being worse at a number of skills. You don't need to "double charge" for low mental stats.

And also, 8 Int is not a fricken moron. Some people see "8 Int" and they think "Thog smash! Thog not use tactics! Thog not avoid obviously trapped door!" Give it a rest. Even wolves use flanking and they have Int 2!

 

[Nai_Calus]

That isn't "balance", it's practically the opposite! If the physical stats don't control player volition, neither should the mental ones. You're not "stopping the evil powergamers", you're just saying "Hey everybody, go play a Wizard!"

And no, being poor at bending bars or balancing on a beam isn't the equivalent of not being able to use a plan because you're "too dumb". The equivalent of mechanical penalties is ... mechanical penalties. Which most systems already have. Things like less skill points, bad perception rolls, being worse at a number of skills. You don't need to "double charge" for low mental stats.

And also, 8 Int is not a fricken moron. Some people see "8 Int" and they think "Thog smash! Thog not use tactics! Thog not avoid obviously trapped door!" Give it a rest. Even wolves use flanking and they have Int 2!

This, entirely this. The game has enough built-in punishment for having bad stats in x as it is. I've got a 3.5 cleric right now who's going to be in a world of hurt before long because the houserules in use give Elves -2 STR instead of CON and take heavy armor away from clerics, and the only viable place to put the 9 I rolled was in DEX, ensuring that my character will have terrible AC/Init forever unless I take a couple of feats to fix it/find some gloves of Dexterity.
So derp, there goes my DEX and praise Corellon that I'm an elf so I have a DEX bonus to get it out of the negatives. (Can't dump INT, need the skill points, don't have enough even with 14 INT; can't dump CHA, nobody else really has it; can't dump STR because lol 7 STR + armor + weapons + other crap = Enjoy being at a heavy load forever.) Yeah, there's a penalty to having bad physical stats.

Yeah you know what the penalty for having a character with 8 WIS because it was the only viable place to put it for him as well was? Failing every Will save ever, even with half his levels in a class with a good Will save. Not making spot checks.
Not 'Excuse my while I act permanently out to lunch and a complete moron'. He didn't have an exacting eye for detail and he was a bit impulsive. Wow yeah so mentally deficient and I was totally playing him wrong by not having him poke everything and run around like he was some kind of overgrown five year old with lots of weapons. (Oh wait, maybe it was because he still had 14 INT and 14 CHA.)

(This is why I like 4e's 'put your higher of two stats towards this NAD' system and houseruled it in for saves when I ran 3.5. Yeah my character with great force of personality and confidence who is very sure of himself falls apart at everything. Except wait, no, people like that don't. Yeah my intelligent character is too stupid to anticipate anything and thus get out of the way in time. Yeah my strong character is - OK that one breaks down because I've only ever seen one person dump CON ever because it's far too valuable in every version of D&D ever.)

If people actually *followed* some of the stats you end up with on characters to the degree half the people in this thread are insisting on, we'd all be playing a bunch of utterly psychotic mental patients with massive deficiencies. Now if you rolled like a 3 for INT, OK, sure. If you have an 8... Yeah, no not really. Frankly if you think slavishly playing someone with 8 INT as a complete idiot who never has a good idea, ever, and consequently can't function in the world is good roleplaying, I'm glad you're not in the games I'm in. >_>

(There's an easy way around this, incidentally, in which you use point buy, don't allow any stat below 8 before racial modifiers, and only allow one stat below 10. There, that wasn't so hard, was it? Oh wait, in before someone goes on about how point buy leads to munchkinism and bad roleplay.)

 

[drothgery]

For all those claiming it's a balance issue - that people are getting something for nothing and cheating the system - consider this. In D&D, and many other systems, if Intelligence is enforced as a limitation to player volition, you have the following options:

1) Play a warrior with low Int, and never get to solve puzzles, use fancy tactics, or do anything "smart".
2) Play a warrior with high Int, have lower physical stats, and be mechanically less effective.
3) Play a wizard with high Int, be mechanically effective, and solve all the puzzles you want.

In 4e, at least, you've got a ton of options for a high-int character that gets a lot out of his high int. Play a swordmage or tactical warlord with high int if you want to be a smart melee guy (or any other class with Int primary or secondary; warlock, avenger, bard, invoker, shaman, artificer, and psion all do).

And there were options for doing much the same in 3.x, even if some didn't work out as well as they could have.

 

[pawsplay]

Even Int 3 isn't bad... such a character might qualify as mentally retarded, but they could possibly still hold down a job (hence have a character class). "Thog smash!" level intelligence is not really consistent with having any skill ranks in anything, unless Thog simply speaks in an interesting dialect rather than lacking intelligence.

 

[delericho]

Even Int 3 isn't bad... such a character might qualify as mentally retarded, but they could possibly still hold down a job (hence have a character class). "Thog smash!" level intelligence is not really consistent with having any skill ranks in anything, unless Thog simply speaks in an interesting dialect rather than lacking intelligence.

Remember that Climb, Listen, Spot and Ride (or some version of the same) are all skills - there's no reason Thog couldn't have ranks in some or all of these.