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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4978575" data-attributes="member: 4937">One of two situations develop usually develop: either the player ignores what is written on his character sheet and plays as a full member of the party rather than as a fool member of the party, or else the rest of the party must deal with a member of the party whose play is fundamentally anti-social.For this reason, I tend to frown on players taking excessively low mental attributes for their characters.  It can be pulled off by a clever experienced role-player who is able to invent ways to excuse his characters insight and cleverness, but this is really rare.  It's is however really funny when pulled off correctly and you have a good straight man playing the smarter character in the party.  Absolutely.  I have no desire to game with people who don't play their character.  If they can't help but be themselves in the game, they should play a character whose personality is much like their own.In my opinion, you have to carefully balance these things.  You have to play what is written on the sheet and take a back seat in problem solving and NPC persuasion, but you also have to not keep yourself out of the game to the point that it becomes unfun for the other players.  So, if you see a way through the problem, you need to come up with some excuse for solving the problem by accident or foolishness, or providing some hint under the veneer of stupidity.  As a brick.  If you don't want to play a submoron with a 60 word vocabulary and limited ability to even dress themselves, then don't take a 5 as your INT.  I'm not saying that a really good roleplayer couldn't make a very memorable and even sympathetic character out of a PC that was dumber than Forest Gump, but in my experience actually playing such a character was seldom the motivation of the player or even considered by the character during character creation.If you do take a 5 as your INT (for whatever reason) and don't even try to play the character, expect to take an experience point penalty at my table.  I find such behavior as offensive as cheating.</blockquote>

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