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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 8155776" data-attributes="member: 694">I belong to a school of thought that would oppose this rather dramatically. Making plans and solving puzzles is the purview of the players; how clever the plan or how quickly the puzzle gets solved is up to the players' cleverness.In Classic D&D (other than Holmes or the white box post-Greyhawk), Intelligence has precisely two mechanical effects on the game: it impacts the number of languages a character speaks, and it adjusts earned experience points for magic-users. (And if you do count Greyhawk, Holmes, or AD&D, everything else that Intelligence does solely impacts how magic-users learn spells, nothing else.) So it's reasonable to interpret the Intelligence ability score not as describing the sum and total of the character's intellectual capacity, but rather, their linguistic and magical aptitude, nothing more or less than that. "Intelligence" just becomes an unfortunate shorthand for the character's "talky mageyness" stat.Likewise, Strength isn't the character's totalized muscle and athletic prowess, it's their "door-bashy fighteryness." Wisdom is the character's "magic-resisty clerickyness" and nothing else. Charisma is "leadership and first impressions," not license to walk around acting like a living, breathing incarnation of a charm person spell. Etc.This has the salubrious effect on gameplay of players not being able to use their stats to play a certain way—a low Int or Wis score isn't an excuse for the player to do something reckless or foolish, for example. That sort of thing is annoying anyhow and nothing but a detriment to a play-style that focuses on challenging the skill of the player, not the character.</blockquote>

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