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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6868685" data-attributes="member: 6787650">At the risk of controversy, I'm going to claim that most upper-middle-class Americans have no conception of what an average IQ is actually like. If you're an average poster on these forums, you are quite likely to be college-educated with an IQ of around 115. The guy in your gaming group whom you think of as &quot;slow&quot;, the one who struggled to get Cs in high school... he's probably IQ 100, which we can call Int 8-10. The people who are actually less intelligent than average probably come across as almost incomprehensibly dumb to you--the gap is too wide for you to understand each other. (I was told once, long ago, that the Army prefers to have less than about 30 points of IQ separation between troops and commanders for a similar reason. I don't have a primary source on that; I think I heard it on Chaos Manor.)This is exactly why certain posters on this thread have said that they don't want to play PCs with Int below a certain threshold. If you can't relate to your own PC, you have a problem. I dislike playing PCs who both (1) have IQs under 13, and (2) do a lot of talking to other PCs. The only way I can roleplay an Int of 11 or below is to be the strong silent type.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6868685, member: 6787650"] At the risk of controversy, I'm going to claim that most upper-middle-class Americans have [I]no conception[/I] of what an average IQ is actually like. If you're an average poster on these forums, you are quite likely to be college-educated with an IQ of around 115. The guy in your gaming group whom you think of as "slow", the one who struggled to get Cs in high school... he's probably IQ 100, which we can call Int 8-10. The people who are actually less intelligent than average probably come across as almost incomprehensibly dumb to you--the gap is too wide for you to understand each other. (I was told once, long ago, that the Army prefers to have less than about 30 points of IQ separation between troops and commanders for a similar reason. I don't have a primary source on that; I think I heard it on Chaos Manor.) This is exactly why certain posters on this thread have said that they don't want to play PCs with Int below a certain threshold. If you can't relate to your own PC, you have a problem. I dislike playing PCs who both (1) have IQs under 13, and (2) do a lot of talking to other PCs. The only way I can roleplay an Int of 11 or below is to be the strong silent type. [/QUOTE]

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