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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7180795" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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