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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3032237" data-attributes="member: 7240">Seskis281,I would like to challenge some of your assumptions. You seem to believe that INT is the only attribute in D&D that measures brain function. The fact is that, if you look at what we now know about various types of intelligence, what our culture understands as mental capacity is spread quite evenly amongst the attributes INT, CHA, DEX and WIS. If you want to get a sense of how socially intelligent someone is, clearly you reference their CHA. If you want to understand how geometrically intelligent someone is (and I would suggest that this type of intelligence is of paramount importance in combat), you should be referencing their DEX and WIS. Of course, innate intelligence is not actually the main way that people develop skills to a professional level. The way you get your skills there is to practice practice practice. BAB progression does not reflect characters magically becoming physically stronger over time; BAB progression tracks how well-trained/practiced a character is at martial skills. I don't care how many IQ points you have on some guy in the Marines; in a ground-level fast reaction-time combat situation, his superior training and practice will flatten you. That's what BAB progression reflects. If you really want to reference a quantitative in-game measure of your character's short-term tactical capacity, BAB is far more likely to be an accurate reflection than a person's INT.If we were discussing long-term strategic decision-making, I might buy some of your arguments about INT. But we are talking about a series of 6-second segments during which a person must think, move and act. When you are in such a situation, you are not engaging the speculative aspects of your mind at all. You are reacting; the parts of your brain that are making decisions are largely subconscious. You don't have time to think "If he's twenty feet away and my ally is 45 degrees from his back I need to run to just this point to flank him" and carefully calculate all the steps. Rather, in a real combat situation, you just do. Think of all the great athletes in contemporary culture who exhibit great tactical acumen on a hockey rink or football field who are not traditionally intelligent. It is the combination of practice (~= BAB) and subconscious intelligence (~= WIS, DEX) that is getting them to the proficiency they have.The big problem in D&D is not the fact that too many people are playing low-INT Barbarians like competent tacticians. The problem is that most players, even given 50x as much time to decide what to do in melee as their character has are not going to be as tactically proficient as their characters. Why? Because your average player spends 4 hours a week being their character whereas the character spends 168 hours a week being herself. People who pore over the PHB and DMG and run a tape measure across the board to calculate everything just right are representing their character's expertise far more realistically and authentically than someone who sits back and makes stupid, elementary errors because their barbarian is somehow monolithically stupid.This problem is further compounded by the fact that we are not used to all of the physical laws of the world in which characters live whereas they know no others. While we have to make allowances for possible magical effects, the impossibility of disabling someone by severing a limb or the weird way people fall, our characters know these things intuitively. I pore over the battle map and rule books and make careful tactical calculations because I am trying to make a vague stab at representing just a fraction of my character's accumulated knowledge about combat. To me, this is authentic role playing; my character is so much more practiced and knowledgeable about the use of physical force than I am, I am unlikely to even come close making as smart a decision as he would given no time to think and the heat and chaos of combat around him.</blockquote>

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