D&D 5E How has your personal experience/expertise affected rulings?

[Ganymede81]

As an attorney that works in appellate law, I always make sure my rulings have citations to the text, to relevant previous rulings, and to on-point analyses elsewhere.

 

[Oofta]

On the other hand, the majority of the folks have been IT professionals for a couple decades. When we opt to handwave computers, there's nothing subtle about it. "Yeah, your character does something improbable and you crack the bank's security. We're going to skip any details."

What? No describing how you try simple sql injection attacks first only to fall back on phishing attempts or a malware attack?

C'mon! Obviously everyone should know how to do that!

But it is a good point. Do you want the TV/movie "type random keys" hack that always takes a few minutes or a real world hack that may take months of effort.

Same with a lot of skills, and things that PCs do. How realistic is the story you want to tell? Does it matter if you're unrealistic because of ignorance or play style?

 

[Celebrim]

Important topic, but I want to focus for now on a narrow assertion that has been repeated several times in the thread, and that is assertions of the form, "X skill is realistically more tied to Intelligence than Wisdom."

The problem with this assertion is that (in the game) all skills are tied to Intelligence because the intelligent person acquires more skills. So any task or profession that requires a depth of study, we'd expect (realistically) that the Intelligent person would be more skillful than the less intelligent person, simply because the less intelligent person won't have enough skills/skill points to achieve a depth of knowledge in the skill.

This is even true of things which are clearly not exercises of intelligence, like being a football player, playing ping pong, wrestling, or climbing a rock wall. The smarter person will develop a broader and greater depth of understanding, overcoming at least potentially or at least somewhat the limitations that they might otherwise face in natural ability. Everyone who wants to be great at something does need to be a student of their craft, and that's based on intelligence.

But though being skillful is an aspect of intelligence, is survival itself an exercise of the natural ability D&D treats as intelligence, or an exercise of what D&D treats as wisdom? That's much less clear. Would an equally unskilled smart but foolish person survive better in the wilderness than an unskilled perceptive but stupid person? Also unclear, and perhaps impossible to objectively answer. What is certainly clear is surviving in the wilderness is something animals can be very good at despite lacking intelligence as people understand the term. Plus, "survival skills" turns out realistically to be a very broad term that encompasses more than just what D&D explicitly calls out as survival. For example, it includes a lot of improvisational crafting skills to manufacture shelter, clothing, and tools. But crafting an object or knowing how to using a tool is typically in D&D a function of intelligence. There are a lot of things you can do with other skills that greatly improve your chances of 'survival'.

Fundamentally, intelligence and wisdom are both abstractions. Neither exists in the real world as they exist in D&D, it's not obvious what either means, they aren't easy to define, and IMO neither necessarily means what people commonly think that they mean (all intelligence is soft intelligence, IMO). I'm ok with the natural ability of surviving being intuition, perceptiveness, and self-control, even if as a practical matter no human is going to survive serious challenges without considerable knowledge.

 

[Oofta]

Fundamentally, intelligence and wisdom are both abstractions. Neither exists in the real world as they exist in D&D, it's not obvious what either means, they aren't easy to define, and IMO neither necessarily means what people commonly think that they mean (all intelligence is soft intelligence, IMO). I'm ok with the natural ability of surviving being intuition, perceptiveness, and self-control, even if as a practical matter no human is going to survive serious challenges without considerable knowledge.

Well considering that many people think there are 9 types of intelligence (which seem to encompass everything but strength and con) I think D&D was actually ahead of it's time.

But that's a whole separate thread. Suffice to say I've always liked the way D&D breaks down attributes. Considering how vast a simplification you have to have for describing attributes it holds up fairly well.

I like the idea of someone (like my brother-in-law) that is book-smart but the absent-minded professor type. I also know people who are pretty amazing when it comes to mechanical things that could never pass calculus.

So no ... it's not perfect. But IMHO it's good enough.

 

[Mercule]

But it is a good point. Do you want the TV/movie "type random keys" hack that always takes a few minutes or a real world hack that may take months of effort.

Same with a lot of skills, and things that PCs do. How realistic is the story you want to tell? Does it matter if you're unrealistic because of ignorance or play style?

There's a balance. Suspension of disbelief can bend quite a bit, but it eventually breaks.

There's also a middle ground where it gets bent to an extreme so many times that it's permanently deformed. Death by 1000 paper cuts, if you will. You can roll with it and play a somewhat surreal game. Nothing wrong with that and I can get behind it, sometimes. Other times, warped doesn't really fit the genre. Different folks have different points at which the bending happens, too. Someone who grew up in Portland would probably object to how I ran the Mage: the Ascension game I set there. Fortunately, I don't have anyone like that in my group. St. Louis and Boston are right out, though.

 

[Mercule]

Fundamentally, intelligence and wisdom are both abstractions. Neither exists in the real world as they exist in D&D, it's not obvious what either means, they aren't easy to define, and IMO neither necessarily means what people commonly think that they mean (all intelligence is soft intelligence, IMO). I'm ok with the natural ability of surviving being intuition, perceptiveness, and self-control, even if as a practical matter no human is going to survive serious challenges without considerable knowledge.

This. If we think too hard about it, it just doesn't make sense that anyone could have a 16 intelligence and an 8 wisdom (or 18 and 3, if rolling). There's too much interconnectedness, there. It makes no more sense than having a 16 dexterity and only an 8 strength -- to actually move your body that well, you need good muscles. It's only because of the abstract nature of the rules that it's even possible. Sure, you could build a system that required strength and dexterity to be within, say, 4 points of each other, but it'd potentially cause other issues and the complexity just isn't worth it unless you've got some real OCD about the topic.

 

[Celebrim]

So no ... it's not perfect. But IMHO it's good enough.

I absolutely agree. The six attribute system has held up very well over time, and attempts to tweak it into larger or smaller sets seldom work out well. I might consider a larger set of attributes for a complex video game that could handle the book keeping, but probably would never get much more than six for any game I designed.

Well considering that many people think there are 9 types of intelligence (which seem to encompass everything but strength and con) I think D&D was actually ahead of it's time.

Well, I personally have concluded that there are thousands, millions, or even and infinite number of types intelligences. The '9 types of intelligence' listed in the link you link to looks to me for the most part incredibly naive, and looks like it was compiled by someone who isn't remotely an expert in intelligence. "Naturalist" and "Existential" in particular strike me in particular as being not like the others, and should have hinted the creator that he was off on a wrong tangent. Still, at least he correctly realized that there was no such thing as "hard intelligence" as people in the 60's and 70's understood "intelligence" to mean by default. But for example, he seems to fail to realize that the even distinctions as small as ability to manipulate sounds as symbols (recognize words as standing for something else, for example) and the ability to manipulate pictures as symbols (recognize that a stick figure is representing a person) are separate forms of intelligence, and part of the general suite of (usually) innate intelligence that work together to give humans the illusion of hard intelligence. But even more so, he'd probably treat 'statistical inference' as a subcategory of 'math/logic' intelligence, but a being could have ability to enumerate objects (a form of intelligence) and plenty of ability to do term logic reasoning (another form of intelligence), but no intelligence regarding statistics. Indeed, I'd suggest that this is true of humanity, and that in order to do statistical reasoning we have to kludge together a variety of other things that we can to, in order to approximate statistical intelligence that we don't actually have as a species. So each of his categories breaks down into many subcategories, many of which we probably aren't aware even exists (think how long it took humanity to even discover statistics). His categories of 'Naturalist' and 'Existential' probably aren't even top level categories themselves, but skills that we recognize based on lots of sorts of intelligence that we don't necessarily.

While the absent minded professor type and the notion of "book-smart" is a comforting archetype, actual deep experience with people shows its far worse than that. A very clear cut example is the person who his highly literate but completely innumerate, and has despite their great literacy no power to change that. In some cases, I've met people so learning disabled with regard to math, that they have difficulty counting (no real conception of numbers at all, except as a sequence of sounds that occur one after the other), but capable of reading, evaluating and reasoning about any story I was capable of reading. That matches up with 'word smart' and 'math smart' in Gardner's diagram, but the reality is I think much much more granular than that.

One example I like is the counting ability of Chimpanzees. They can count well up to about 5, but not beyond it. And they can also reason well about numbers up to about 5, but only if the objects in question are not food, which they cannot reason about because food. I'm convinced humans are equally limited, we are just utterly blind to our limits. (Think for example of the circumstances leading to the discovery of statistics!)

 

[Celebrim]

This. If we think too hard about it, it just doesn't make sense that anyone could have a 16 intelligence and an 8 wisdom (or 18 and 3, if rolling).

Actually, no. I can actually was friends with an 18 intelligence 3 wisdom sort of person who was profoundly intelligent, but basically needed an adult caretaker to watch after him. I was just barely intelligent enough to understand him, and he found me just barely intelligent enough to not be threatening and mysterious.

And while I agree agility is interconnected with strength, dexterity is a far broader concept. It certainly not at all clear to me that anyone who is strong is necessarily agile or dexterous, and it's only slightly more convincing that high agility implies high strength to weight ratio. And in any event, since Mass is not an ability score (as it is in BRP/CoC) in D&D, it's not clear how we would accurately constrain the two anyway.

 

[Oofta]

This. If we think too hard about it, it just doesn't make sense that anyone could have a 16 intelligence and an 8 wisdom (or 18 and 3, if rolling). There's too much interconnectedness, there. It makes no more sense than having a 16 dexterity and only an 8 strength -- to actually move your body that well, you need good muscles. It's only because of the abstract nature of the rules that it's even possible. Sure, you could build a system that required strength and dexterity to be within, say, 4 points of each other, but it'd potentially cause other issues and the complexity just isn't worth it unless you've got some real OCD about the topic.

You've never met my brother in law. Near-photographic memory, brilliant guy. Amazingly good chess player. Totally clueless about so many things.

I like the guy well enough but he's a walking, talking absent-minded professor trope.

Now the implementation of some of the abilities as far as skills go? That I agree with. Acrobats need a decent amount of strength for example. But that kid that can stack like a thousand cups in a minute? High dex, based on his arm size, I'd say an 8 strength. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyyscuIq56I

 

[Soul Stigma]

Actually, no. I can actually was friends with an 18 intelligence 3 wisdom sort of person who was profoundly intelligent, but basically needed an adult caretaker to watch after him. I was just barely intelligent enough to understand him, and he found me just barely intelligent enough to not be threatening and mysterious.

And while I agree agility is interconnected with strength, dexterity is a far broader concept. It certainly not at all clear to me that anyone who is strong is necessarily agile or dexterous, and it's only slightly more convincing that high agility implies high strength to weight ratio. And in any event, since Mass is not an ability score (as it is in BRP/CoC) in D&D, it's not clear how we would accurately constrain the two anyway.

You can be very intelligent and lack "common sense". The difference between intelligence and wisdom is all around us on a daily basis, so I have no problem seeing the two as completely separate things either.