Oofta
Legend
Average intelligence is 10.5, not 9. It lines up with IQ fairly well (INT * 10 = IQ). Therefore an intelligence below 8 (or an IQ less than 80) is considered mentally handicapped.
D&D 5E Rolled character stats higher than point buy?
Average intelligence is 10.5, not 9. It lines up with IQ fairly well (INT * 10 = IQ). Therefore an intelligence below 8 (or an IQ less than 80) is considered mentally handicapped.
Oofta
Legend
A baboon (according to the MM) has an IQ of 4. There is no way Mongo is a 5. He speaks full sentences, dresses himself, functions reasonably well in society.
Anyway, didn't mean to derail the post. Suffice to say that ya'll just ignore low scores in my opinion.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
There are degrees of mentally handicapped, though. Mongo was well below an 8.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
How does, "I'll play any low stat but int" equate to "Ya'll just ignore low scores..."? Clearly I don't ignore low scores.
It's not a derail, it's a discussion.
But... If 8 is Mongo... What's 10? Give me another example from fiction, please. And for fun, what's 9 and 11?
I suspect your example of 10 will mean you're leaving little room for nuance.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Exactly. Mongo is well below Gump or those who work at supermarkets as baggers and door checkers. Mongo couldn't learn and hold a job.
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Okay, I'm fine with that. I enjoy discussion for the sake of discussion and edification. Here's a quick rundown of what's happened the past three weeks. Hopefully I've got all of these details right. (Disclaimer: there is at least one of the details of the first encounter that I know I have wrong, but I'm not sure which one, since my memories of that one conflict with each other.)
Week 1:
S. brings a new friend MJ to the session. After some discussion about what archetypes she finds most "cool", she decides to be a blind Shadow Monk named Cersei. In compensation for her blindness I give her +2 to Dex and let her start at level 3, and the advice that she should take the Alert feat as a variant human and make liberal use of Darkness to cancel out her own blindness. I warn her that this is likely to be a challenging PC but a potentially awesome one when the blind girl rocks the house.
J. is absent, but C. also creates a new PC, rolling 1d3 for level, and winds up with a Warlock 1/Barbarian 1 (Str ???, Cha 13) named Kharson.
DM's background to this session: I'm experimenting with breaking the adventuring day up into multiple conflicts, without turning into one giant conflict, and in order to do that I'm relying on an old AD&D item called the Quill of Law, which has the property that the last three laws written by the legal ruler of a place with the quill MUST be obeyed by whoever reads them. In this orc village there is an ongoing power struggle between the headman, Doroga (big shoulders, Stallone accent), and his gangly, lank-haired medicine man, Whumpf (New Yorker accent, spreads his hands for emphasis when speaking). The culture of the orcs is roughly based on the Mundugumor tribe of Papua New Guinea: women do all the domestic work, men do war and trade, and the headwives (the wives of the headman) rule the village and have the power to make and break appointments of all offices including the headman. (And if they depose the headman in favor of a new one, he becomes their husband.) Whumpf is trying to get the headwives to depose Doroga in favor of Whumpf. He's doing this by keeping them captive in their homes until they come around to his point of view. He can do this because of the three laws of the village:
(1) No startin' fights.
(2) No interferin' with somebody doin' their job.
(3) No eatin' Doroga's pigs.
Whumpf has suborned the headwives' bodyguards. Each of them gets two bodyguards, and the bodyguards are "doing their job" by keeping the headwives "safe" from catching any diseases by going outside. Whumpf by the way has promised to "clean up the streets" when he is headman, which would let the headwives outside again. Because the bodyguards are "doing their jobs", Doroga cannot interfere with them nor with Whumpf. Hence his need for the PCs.
At the start of the session, Kharson and Cersei are hanging in cages like Mad Martigan from Willow when S.'s 2nd level human fighter Nox enters the orc village. An orc thug and a couple of cronies intercept Nox and start calling him names. "Hey, Dykini, what'cha doin' here? You think you're so great! Get lost, Dykini!" etc. He attempts to defuse the situation by locating a pigeon and shooting it out of the air, but the orc puts a hand on his longbow and takes it out of his hand. Nox remains nonconfrontational, and an Insight check is rolled which tells him that the orc is trying rather obviously to start a fight. He lets the orc walk off with the bow, and goes to talk to Kharson and Cersei about where to find weapons and supplies in this village. They've been hanging there long enough to learn some things, and they point him to the weaponmaster downtown.
Nox has bought his new weapons and is exiting the building when suddenly a couple of orcs grab him (he fails his Athletics contest to avoid being grappled) and hustle him into an alleyway. There Doroga is waiting, unusual accent and all. Nox hears him out and makes a deal: he'll sign the Contract of Nepthas to free at least five of the six headwives within twenty-four hours, and if he succeeds Doroga will give him the legal right to his King's Tears gems (ruby and sapphire, 1000 gp each). [Whumpf has stolen these gems from Doroga but Nox does not know this.] A Contract of Nepthas must be obeyed. Nox asks Doroga if he can have some help--specifically, the giant purple-pants guy and blind girl hanging in cages outside. Doroga agrees and Nox goes to get them. He's able to extract them from the cages using smith's tools, but then is challenged by the orc man who "owns" the slaves. Nox is able (after a few Persuasion/Intimidation rolls, I forget what exactly) to persuade him that he's allowed to have these slaves and that the owner can take it up with Doroga if he wants to get paid. Now the adventure begins in earnest.
After locating the hut where the first headwife is, they spent some time reconnoitering. They talked to Doroga's lieutenant Karl and got hooked up with an orc lady Liesel who had a place to hide the headwives once they were freed, but she had a hidden objection: she's afraid of Whumpf. They uncovered the hidden objection and promised to deal with Whumpf permanently afterwards so he would not be able to retaliate against her, and she agreed to help them. Then they went back to the headwife's hut and planned some more about how to split the two orcs up. Eventually--I don't remember exactly how--Kharson decided to knock on the door, and when the guards opened the door, he dropped his pants and urinated on them then took off running. (I don't condone everything that happens at my table, I just adjudicate the results.) One guard took off running after him, and he were faster than Kharson expected thanks to orcish Aggression or whatever it's called. But Kharson did make it to the corner where Cersei was lurking in ambush inside of her Darkness, and then there was a fight, with the orc's attacks against Cersei at disadvantage. I'm a little bit fuzzy now on some of the details such as why the orc was attacking Cersei instead of Kharson but it was logical at the time, and after Kharson hit him hard (in the dark) the orc switched his attacks to Kharson just in time to get knocked unconscious by Cersei, who promptly cut his throat. Then they dragged the orc's body inside of a barn and tried to look casual. There was some amount of drama and concern from Kharson over the possibility that someone might be watching this fight and the giant ball of blackness, and in fact there was a neighbor gawping at the whole thing from where he was feeding his goats, but ultimately nothing came of it and they just hid the body. They were just heading back to the headwives' hut when they ran into Nox running the other direction from the other orc guard--I can't remember why--but ultimately they murdered that guard as well and hid his body with the first one. Then they took the headwife to the hut. One down, four to go!
(BTW I made a point of the fact that the orc guards were really excited to be in combat. It was obviously their first time, and they hoped that if they did well they might even win the right to have wives. Too bad they got their throats cut instead.)
After resting long enough for Cersei to get her ki back, and at the second hut, after a lot of planning, they decided they were going to sneak the super-sneaky blind girl in through the window after Nox distracted the guards by urinating on them at the door (again). Kharson was busy pushing a wheelbarrow down the street toward the house at the time, and he deliberately crashed into one of the orc guards while they were chasing Nox, which bought Nox enough time to get away. Meanwhile the blind girl Cersei had snuck in the back window and, thanks to Pass Without Trace, noiselessly managed to get the headwife out the back window too. When the guards got back from their little adventure, there was no headwife! I rolled a DC 12 Wisdom save to see if they would fess up to their superiors, and they failed miserably, so I ruled that the guards made a little shape under a blanket and tried to pretend they still had a headwife.
Two headwives down, three to go! At this point about three hours of their twenty-four time budget was gone and they were feeling pretty good but we were out of time, so we cut the session there.
And that was the end of one session.
The next session didn't go quite so well for the players, in part because C and MJ couldn't make it (it was an emergency-scheduled Saturday session because I had a date on Wednesday to see /Assassins/), and JD's brand-new hill dwarf cleric ended up getting rescued by Nox, who acquired a dark secret in the process--while he was looking for bags to make sandbags that he could use to prevent water from leaking through the crack into which he had found the strange dwarfed wedged, so the hay in the barn would not get wet after taking the dwarf out--while he was searching, he ran across an orc lady in the barn where he found bags. Since Nox does not speak orcish, he communicated entirely through gestures, and due to a miscommunication she thought that by pointing to the sack in his hand, he was propositioning her. Since orcs lust after humans and elves, she was very open to this, and she embraced him. One failed Athletics contest later he was prone on the ground and aggressively being kissed. He chose to just wait it out and eventually she had her fill of smooching and rolled off him with a sigh of contentment. (Again, I do not condone anything that goes on at my table--I only adjudicate.) He went back to the dwarf with his hard-won sack of sand and resolved never to tell anyone about this adventure.
After all of this effort, then, it's a bit of a shame that the dwarf decided to just eschew stealth. Since MJ and C weren't there, I ruled that the party was split, so Nox and the hill dwarf were on their own when the hill dwarf peeked through the open window and threw a Molotov cocktail right in the face of the orc guard looking out. 10 points of damage didn't manage to kill the guard but it sure did enrage him and he and his buddy rushed out to beat this dwarf to a bloody pulp. (BTW, "no startin' fights" didn't apply because the dwarf had already started the fight.) I don't remember what action the dwarf declared on that round, but it sure wasn't Dodge, and he didn't cast Sanctuary or Shield of Faith either, so when the orc critted him into instant unconsciousness I can attribute that to the player's choices and not to stats. Nox couldn't do anything to save the crazy dwarf, but while the furious guards were mutilating the dwarf's corpse he did manage to sneak the headwife out.
I rolled a Wisdom save for these guards and they too, failed, so they were resolved to likewise cover up the lack of the headwife once they discovered it. But various villagers had seen the fight and the ensuing mutilation, and Nox went back to see whether the guards were going to try to report the escape. Unfortunately, the guards rolled natural 19 and 20 on their Perception checks when scanning the villagers, and Nox's attempt to blend in with the crowd via Int (Stealth) did not beat that score (which meant they recognized him as an associate of the dwarf who had just thrown the Molotov at them a few minutes ago), so to make a long story short, he ended up getting caught, threatened, and almost precipitating open warfare between Doroga and Whumpf. And that's where we ended that plot arc, because I needed to know what Cersei and Kharson had been doing in the meantime. (It turned out, next week, that they had managed to free the other headwives in the meantime, so there was a happy ending involving a messenger running in to Doroga while he was planning and Doroga's sudden change of expression from tense to ecstatic. And there was much rejoicing, and then an attack of 4 Shadow Demons. But that's a different story.)
Since we were at a dead-end on that one, but still had some time left, we just switched to a one-shot dungeon crawl, in which I told them to roll up 5th level PCs in a dungeon which, I told them, I estimated they would have a 50% chance of surviving if they were 7th level. So they called it the "suicide mission", and as it turned out, one of the two PCs eventually survived.
Whew! That's a lot of writing from me, hope it wasn't too boring to read. It was pretty fun to play though.
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Oofta
Legend
I always assumed that Mongo had 8 in both int and wisdom. He talked slowly but he did talk. His comprehension wasn't great but he did understand people. I always assumed he clothed and fed himself, and was a functioning member of the town.
Forest on the other hand had low int, but a reasonable (if not high) wisdom.
Since average intelligence is 10.5, 9 would be a little slow while an 11 would be barely above average. When you get to the 14-16 range you're starting to talk Mensa, and really, really smart. Anyone above a 16 is a certifiable genius.
The scale isn't perfect of course - while the highest IQs are around or close to 200, the lowest IQs fall below 30. But straight rolls of 3d6 do give you a decent curve that approximate the intelligence bell curve. In addition IQ tests aren't perfect because they don't measure wisdom.
Or maybe Oofta just have soft spot for Mongo (and it has been years since I've seen the movie).
Fun story!
I forget what it was supposed to prove.
That stats aren't terribly important, especially compared to player choices? Sure, I'm already convinced of that of course, but this satisfies my confirmation bias nicely at the very least.
Sounds like an entertaining couple of sessions. A little zanier than I tend to prefer playing things, but that's personal preference... And probably makes the story even more entertaining.
I forget what it was supposed to prove.
That stats aren't terribly important, especially compared to player choices? Sure, I'm already convinced of that of course, but this satisfies my confirmation bias nicely at the very least.
Sounds like an entertaining couple of sessions. A little zanier than I tend to prefer playing things, but that's personal preference... And probably makes the story even more entertaining.
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