professorDM
First Post
It seems to me like intelligence is severely undervalued in the game. There are precious few calls for intelligence checks. Unless you're a wizard, there's little reason to use it as anything other than a dump stat, save for a few for the most part meaningless skills.
This disparity doesn't seem at all in line with the real-life applicability of having a high intelligence.
I'm thinking of offering, in the campaigns I run, intelligence as an alternative to dexterity for initiative rolls, such that players can choose which modifier they'd like to use. It seems obvious that being extraordinarily brilliant would give one a leg up in terms of one's reaction time, and I don't really see any drawbacks to allowing it as an alternative to players. Can you?
The only possible caveat I can imagine would be the objection that this would make wizards even more powerful, but I doubt the added benefit would be much of a game-breaker, and mechanically, it just seems to make too much sense: a player with a 12 dexterity and an 19 intelligence is far more likely to respond before a player with a 15 dexterity and a 6 intelligence.
But many of you have more experience with wizards at higher levels than I do---what do you think? Would this add too much to their already (at higher levels) stacked abilities? With many of the added benefits for higher level non-casters in this (and recent) edition(s), I can't imagine this being too much of a problem.
Of course, maybe the best way to add a benefit to having a highly intelligent character (and fixing what seems to me a disparity in the way I'd imagine initiative to work) is to average one's intelligence and dexterity modifiers together to determine reaction time. (So that a character with a 20 intelligence and a 20 dexterity clearly has a leg up on dunce with a 5 intelligence and a 20 dexterity, unless the latter has the luck of the roll on his side.)
I also think many wisdom checks in the game should at least have intelligence-based alternatives (i.e., perceptiveness, etc.), but maybe that's for another time....
This disparity doesn't seem at all in line with the real-life applicability of having a high intelligence.
I'm thinking of offering, in the campaigns I run, intelligence as an alternative to dexterity for initiative rolls, such that players can choose which modifier they'd like to use. It seems obvious that being extraordinarily brilliant would give one a leg up in terms of one's reaction time, and I don't really see any drawbacks to allowing it as an alternative to players. Can you?
The only possible caveat I can imagine would be the objection that this would make wizards even more powerful, but I doubt the added benefit would be much of a game-breaker, and mechanically, it just seems to make too much sense: a player with a 12 dexterity and an 19 intelligence is far more likely to respond before a player with a 15 dexterity and a 6 intelligence.
But many of you have more experience with wizards at higher levels than I do---what do you think? Would this add too much to their already (at higher levels) stacked abilities? With many of the added benefits for higher level non-casters in this (and recent) edition(s), I can't imagine this being too much of a problem.
Of course, maybe the best way to add a benefit to having a highly intelligent character (and fixing what seems to me a disparity in the way I'd imagine initiative to work) is to average one's intelligence and dexterity modifiers together to determine reaction time. (So that a character with a 20 intelligence and a 20 dexterity clearly has a leg up on dunce with a 5 intelligence and a 20 dexterity, unless the latter has the luck of the roll on his side.)
I also think many wisdom checks in the game should at least have intelligence-based alternatives (i.e., perceptiveness, etc.), but maybe that's for another time....
