Intelligence = Clever?
I've never thought so. There are plenty of geniuses that aren't clever in the slightest.
Ability to reason... ability to retain knowledge... but ability to think on your feet? Nah.
That's Wisdom (perception, worldliness, intuition, common sense).
Once you start arguing about what the stats "mean," you've conceded the battle about how relevant it is, more or less.
This isn't really about what Int and Wis and Cha "mean." We all have a pretty decent notion of that, I'd assume, even if we might bicker on specific examples.
This is about Int still being useful as a stat. Specifically, to rogues. It would seem that rogues should be able to make great use of Intelligence. It helped them out in 3e, and the "rogue with a high Intelligence score," however you defined that in terms of role-playing, was a valid and worthy and useful character build. Mechanically, Intelligence would seem likely to help with puzzle-solving, challenges of knowledge, and memory and pattern recognition. A rogue's archetype is fairly broad, but I can't think of a better "information broker," or "Knows a little bit of everything" kind of class. Appraising your finds, knowing how much you can fence this item for, evaluating 'worth' in the middle of a hectic situation are all typically Intelligence. Heck, the Sneak Attack/backstab feature has been fluffed in previous editions as a matter of
knowledge, that the theif/rogue has a brain that can learn where to hit people better than other classes. This would all suggest that a rogue should benefit from a high Int.
So clever could be high Int, or high Wis, or high Cha, or high Dex, or even high Con or Str with the right color and angle on it. The point remains that for many people, me included, it seems decidedly bizarre to have a rogue who is a bit slow on the uptake.
So if a character whose archetype revolves at least somewhat around things that can decidedly be linked to a high Intelligence score, and yet has no encouragement to take a high Intelligence score (or even to avoid a low one), it's not altogether out-of-the-blue to suggest that Intelligence might not be useful for nearly as many characters as it was in 3e.
The quality of this change, whether it's good or bad, is going to be open to debate.
A rogue with a high Intelligence as a good character build has been established. Now, it's existence is perhaps not so secure.
And I'll also say that conflating Wisdom with "worldliness" and "common sense" is a little problematic. Wisdom is often described more as an instinctive kind of perception, whereas Intelligence is a learned, acquired, and developed kind of perception, the ability to recognize patterns and recall information.
Knowing how to find food might be Wisdom, because it's instinctive. Knowing which streets to avoid in a twisty city is more likely to be Intelligence, because it's learned. Knowing which berries are poisonous is likely an Intelligence thing, because it's acquired knowledge. Knowing how to avoid a sword in a fight might be Wisdom -- it's self-preservation. Knowing where to strike an enemy for the most damage would probably be Intelligence -- it's acquired, learned knowledge. Being able to decieve and fool an enemy in the middle of combat is probably Charisma. That's part of the rogue model that seems very interesting, very "trickster," very "clever."
What is a little more dissonant for me is the idea of an "athletic" rogue with a good Strength score. Sure, Strength probably shouldn't be a dump stat, but it won't be for any class who is concerned with making melee attacks of having a good Athletics score (as the rogue is). The "thug" is a good archetype, but thugs aren't usually drawn as very brilliant combatants, just very powerful, so another class (perhaps fighter, perhaps some sort of 'gladiator,' barbarian if it still existed, a pure unarmed-strike monk) would be good for them, and, indeed, could make good use of a high Wisdom score as a sort of instinctive battle awareness. The fact that Wizards catered directly to this rather than the Intelligent rogue strikes me as an odd choice, but I could see a few meta-reasons for it (such as wanting each class to have one "physical" and one "mental" build).
In fact, it would strike me that the most likely dump stats for a rogue would be Wisdom (the archetypal naive rogue who can't help but steal and doesn't know when he's getting in over his head lacks that sort of instinctive self-preservation) or Constitution (the fragile little buddy who can dish it out but can't take it, so he needs the typical big tough thug as backup).
I'd
love for the game to support the well-treaded archetype of a rogue who is easily lead by his greed, who knows the ins and outs of the labyrinthine city, who is intelligent enough to know how to strike a victim where it hurts, and who thwart the sphinx in a puzzle contest, but who still can't resist the thrill of the next big catch, the lure of the legendary gem, or the challenge of the world's most deadly tomb. This would seem to be best supported by a high-Intelligence rogue with a lousy Wisdom. He'd still be agile and tricky (with a good Dexterity, a good Charisma), but he wouldn't get his way with muscle (middling Strength, middling Constitution). His achilles heel would be his low willpower (low Wisdom), his best asset would be his brilliant deductive mind (high Intelligence).
You also have other concepts of Intelligent rogues. The Sherlock Holmes type. The Indiana Jones type. Heck, even the Bilbo Baggins type. The brilliant con man who uses a combination of bravado (Charisma) and intricate language (Intelligence) to trap you in a perfectly legal and binding contract that you nonetheless want out of. Rogues often get called upon to play the "adventuring sage" archetype. But without much of a mechanical incentive to be an Intelligent Rogue...it could throw a wrench in those being valid builds for the game at launch.
So this long post is my way of trying to drive home the fact that, Mourn, the question of what stat represents "clever" is entirely moot. Intelligent rogues were a supported archetype, and it doesn't look like there will be support for such a character at launch. As such, questioning the nature of Intelligence in 4e is important, if one of the historically iconic Int-based classes doesn't have much use for it.
For an example of your iconic intelligent rogue, look no farther than Thief of 8-Bit Theater, or even at the whole motif of the Devils in 4e. In 4e, a player seeking to play a Thief-like character (and the archetype is much older than Clevinger's take on it) would have no reason to choose the most theif-like class (the rogue). That seems kind of counter-intuitive.
