D&D 5E So 5 Intelligence Huh

[BoldItalic]

Statements of belief absent any evidence are difficult to accept. I provided my evidence. Sherlock is described as a genius. Everyone treats him as such. His notional identity across all popular understanding of the character has him as a genius. Ergo, under all available descriptions, Sherlock is a genius.

I have no difficulty in accepting that you believe that Sherlock Holmes was a genius.

Also, 5 INT is below average by definition. This is pretty inarguable.

Only if you take the average over all possible dice rolls of 3d6. If you take the average over all possible Int 5 Sherlock Holmses, 5 is exactly average. Despite your earlier assertion to the contrary, it is mathematically sound to take an average of one datum.

(Incidentally, the 3d6 distribution is not a normal distribution, although it approxmates one. To get a normal distribution by rolling dice you have to roll an infinite number. Three is not enough. I mention this in passing because in another post you asserted that 3d6 produces a normal distribution.)

Therefore, if Sherlock is a genius, which is definitionally above average, he cannot have a below average INT score.

Bang! A fallacy of the first water. You are asserting a belief that if a thing is above average in one aspect, it cannot be below average in some other aspect.

Exercise for the reader: which class of fallacy has been exposed?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Not necessarily.



"An Intelligence check comes into play when you need to draw on logic, education, memory, or deductive reasoning." The character is just turning a dial. Literacy and a useful hand is all that is required. (And a PC is literate, so far as I know, regardless of Intelligence score.)

Here's where I'm confused, though, as you seem very willing, in some cases, to look beyond the immediacy of the action declaration and determine the foundations that declarations is based on to determine outcome. The eye laser thing, for instance, you aren't just relying on the declaration and the fact that the player has eyes to shoot the lasers from, you're working on a deeper level to determine that eyes don't shoot lasers barring strangeness that isn't present, so, in this case, the eyes can't shoot lasers. This isn't very different from determining that the declaration of what the dial is turned to (not that it can be turned, no one's arguing that) has deeper foundational issues that can also be interrogated to determine the outcome. In the dial turning case, the fact that the character has a hand and the dial can be turned are not in question, it's the how the place to turn the dial was determined. Much like you figuring that eyes can't normally shoot lasers, it's fair to ask the question of if the low INT character can solve the puzzle.

Given that I wouldn't do anything other than let the action succeed unless I suspected that bad faith was involved, I'll often rule as you do. I just reserve the right to ask that question if I feel it warranted, and don't consider it a violation of the player's ability to declare his actions.

I fully expect for players to apply whatever skill they have to avoid making ability checks if they can regardless of how high or low their characters' ability scores are. Leaving your fate to a fickle d20 is not advisable if you can come up with an approach to a goal that removes the uncertainty of the outcome.

I've long suspected that we have a fundamental difference in approach that leads to our butting heads. I think this is it. I've no problem with a player bringing his/her knowledge to the table when appropriate, but I disagree that players can apply their knowledge at all times to their character's actions without acting in bad faith. If a character who happens to be a skilled tracker (I have one) builds an effete socialite that's never been out of the city and finds dirt icky, but when drug out into the wilderness begins declaring actions for their character that only a skilled tracker would know to do, I have an issue. I am giving him his character advantages in situations that he, as a player, is unskilled (social and political infighting at court), I expect him to accept his character's chosen limitations when those apply (complete lack of knowledge on how to survive/function in the wilderness and without a manservant). You do not seem to have this expectation. That seems to be the core of many of our disagreements.

 

[pemerton]

A 100 IQ is not twice a 50 IQ.

I didn't say that it is.

I said that the number 100 is twice the number 50. Which it is.

Similarly, 18 STR is not six times 3 STR, though 18 is six times 3.

if I roll a 3 and an 18 on 3d6, then those numbers are just numbers -- 18 is six times greater than 3, for instance. If I then use those numbers as INT scores, they change. 18 INT is no longer six times greater than 3 INT. It is greater, for sure, and I can (depending on edition) even state how many intervals greater it is, but I've lost the ability to say that it is six times greater.

Why are you stating my point back to me as if I need it explained?

the result of 3d6 roll is a number, it is not a measurement of any kind.

Once that number is assigned to an ability score, it is some kind of measure. For instance, p 7 of the 5e Basic PDF tells us that "The Ability Score Summary table provides a quick reference for what qualities are measured by each ability". I think it is obvious that this is not a measurement of a determinable property (ie it is not like a measure of length, mass, duration, etc) but it is a type of ranking measure where the steps in the ranking are demarcated by a rough notion of frequency in the population.

This is like saying there's .5% of people that finish first in a race, so if you roll an 18 on 3d6, you also finish first the race.

No. It's like saying that there's .5% of people capable of finishing first in a race, and that if you roll an 18 on 3d6 for you SPEED stat than your PC is one of those fast people.

And not only is that something that it makes sense to say, it's something that is actually done in at least some RPG stat generation systems.

The means that you can't map the distribution of 3d6 the roll to INT scores. The distribution of 3d6 requires you to take the mean of the rolls and the SD of the rolls, and that only has meaning if they are rational (you can do something similar on interval data, but INT isn't solely interval data). That math requires certain properties of the data to be meaningful. Those properties are missing with the ordinal data of INT.

I don't understand your repeated concern with means and SDs. No one else in this thread is talking about them, as best I can tell.

A roll of 3d6 will produce one of 16 possible natural number results. Those results can be put in a ranking (corresponding to the counting sequence of those numbers, from 3 to 18). Each of those numbers also has a likelihood of occurring.

Without getting too far into the philosophy of probability, I think it is acceptable to treat those likelihoods as corresponding, at least in rough terms, to frequencies within the population. That is to say: given that the result of 18 is the highest result in the ranking; and has a likelihood of occurrence of about 0.05%, it is quite reasonable to stipulate that a character with an 18 INT has the degree of intelligence that is found in the most intelligent 0.05% of the population.

And similarly for each other score, all the way down to 3 where (given that it is the lowest ranking) we stipulate that an intelligence of 3 corresponds to the degree of intelligence that is found in the least intelligent 0.05% of the population.

The above exercise has nothing to do with means and standard deviations. It is simply about probabilities, calculated using simple combinatorics.

This is the exercise that [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] is performing when equating a certain INT score to a certain IQ. The exercise is in no way based on any view about the mean or the SD of any sets of (actual or notional) data. And [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION]'s objection is quite simple: namely, that Maxperson is stipulating that the roll of 18 corresponds to a degree of intelligence found in far less than 0.05% of the population, and hence that Maxperson is carrying out the stipulation task in a manner that contradicts the parameters that he has set for himself. This criticism also is in no way based on any view about the mean or the SD of any sets of data.

 

[pemerton]

permerton is on record saying that character stats are completely divorced from action declarations.

I'm not sure who this permerton character is.

As for me, in fact I have repeatedly said that while I personally am not a big fan of a GM veto of action declaration based on PC INT, I nevertheless would find that preferable to a demand that the player police him-/herself in the name of "good roleplaying".

In D&D, being Sherlock Holmes is a consequence of action declaration and resolution. That is to say, the player can't just declare "I'm a genius who solves the mystery": rather, the GM frames the PC (and thereby the player) into some sort of challenging situation or other, the player declares action, adjudication takes place and we then learn what exactly has happened in the fiction.

If the player whose PC has 5 INT declares actions that turn upon intelligence, and the GM adjudicates them in such a way as the PC is revealed to be a genius, why is that the player's fault?

This argument completely discounts character generation as meaningful declaration by the player. My problem with any argument that holds that the only factors that are important are only made during gameplay is that it ignores that character creation is a factor that also occurred during gameplay.

I'm not discounting character generation as meaningful: it established parameters for future action resolution. Certain choices in character generation may also establish the constraints on viable action declaration (eg if I don't pay gp for a sword, I can't declare a sword attack; if I don't build a wizard I can't declare a casting of Magic Missile; etc).

But that all seems orthogonal to my point which is - at least in D&D as I play it and am familiar with it - it is impossible for a player to unilaterally roleplay his/her PC as Sherlock Holmes. All s/he can do is declare actions - his/her PC will be Holmes-like, in the fiction, only if the resolution of those action declarations results in the PC solving mysteries. If the PC has 5 INT, how is that going to occur? Only if the GM never calls for a INT check. That is why I say the issue falls on the GM, not the player. If the GM wants the INT stat to have an effect on whether or not a character, in play, emerges as a Holmes-like figure, then the onus is on the GM to frame the character into situations where INT will matter to resolution of the resulting action declarations.

(There may be other relevant aspects of PC build and scene/scenario design, too, like the various things that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] has mentioned, but I don't think their relevance undermines the point made in the previous paragraph.)

On the story side, you take certain elements (Sherlock is unique, no one is better than Sherlock) and discount others (Sherlock is a genius). On the game side you take certain elements (I can get the numbers to get an arbitrary high score with a 5 INT) and ignore others (others can do better). Then you admit that others in game can do better, but that's irrelevant because it's not the story

I realise that [MENTION=6777052]BoldItalic[/MENTION] is playing a 5 INT poster, and so I'm not clear exactly what moral I should or shouldn't be drawing from the "Sherlock Holmes with 5 INT posts".

But anyway, here is one of the things that I took away from them:

In D&D, you can't tell whether or not a PC is a Holmes-like mystery solving prodigy until you actually play the game and find out. On paper, it may seem that PC A is set to be Holmes (18 INT, trained in Perception etc) while PC B seems doomed not to be (low or average INT, say). But then, over the course of play, PC A is played by a player not interested in solving mysteries, who is poor at declaring Perception checks (or, for tables where only the GM calls for checks, poor at framing his/her PC into situation where such checks might be enlivened), etc. So PC A does little that is Holmes-like.

Meanwhile, the player of PC B declares actions very cleverly, multi-classes into (say) rogue to take Expertise in Perception, and despite the poor INT ends up solving many mysteries and - given the fiction of the campaign as it actually unfolds - is the closest to a Holmes-like figure over the course of the whole campaign.

The character sheet is not the character. The character sheet is a list of resources available to the player in playing the character, as well as a list of parameters to which the GM has regard in framing and adjudicating action declarations. The character exists only in the fiction, as a result of actions being declared by the player and then resolved by the GM. Stats factor into that resolution; hence, many players (perhaps most) will have regard to them (as well as other sorts of stuff, as [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] mentions) in declaring actions.

But it is in the shared fiction that the character emerges. That is how we find out whether or not a PC is comparable to Sherlock Holmes.

Which, again, underlines how odd I find the notion of a player unilaterally "roleplaying" his/her PC as a genius. I don't know what that would even look like.

 

[iserith]

Here's where I'm confused, though, as you seem very willing, in some cases, to look beyond the immediacy of the action declaration and determine the foundations that declarations is based on to determine outcome. The eye laser thing, for instance, you aren't just relying on the declaration and the fact that the player has eyes to shoot the lasers from, you're working on a deeper level to determine that eyes don't shoot lasers barring strangeness that isn't present, so, in this case, the eyes can't shoot lasers. This isn't very different from determining that the declaration of what the dial is turned to (not that it can be turned, no one's arguing that) has deeper foundational issues that can also be interrogated to determine the outcome. In the dial turning case, the fact that the character has a hand and the dial can be turned are not in question, it's the how the place to turn the dial was determined. Much like you figuring that eyes can't normally shoot lasers, it's fair to ask the question of if the low INT character can solve the puzzle.

Given that I wouldn't do anything other than let the action succeed unless I suspected that bad faith was involved, I'll often rule as you do. I just reserve the right to ask that question if I feel it warranted, and don't consider it a violation of the player's ability to declare his actions.

I'm big on the player stating a goal and approach when describing what he or she wants to do. If it's not clear, I ask rather than assume. (This also goes to the players ponying up their share of the conversation of the game, but that's a separate concern.) If a player said that he or she wants to have the character shoot lasers out of its eyes, then my response is likely, "Okay, how do you do propose to do that exactly?" (I mean, it's D&D, stranger things than laser eyes happen regularly.) But, of course, we're probably talking about a player acting in bad faith here or one that is not familiar with the game so the example is something of a distraction from the point.

When it comes to the goal and approach of the player's action declaration, we know the character's goal is to turn the dial to "S." Doing so with his or her hand is the likely approach we can infer, but the prevalence of contact poison being a thing, the DM should probably ask. Some DMs, it seems, would insert some kind of test to see if the character could come up with the right answer in the first place. But what if the player's action declaration was to turn the dial to "T," which is not the correct answer? Would there be a check then? Would it be an automatic success whereas trying to turn it to "S" might be an automatic failure because Int 5? This seems kind of messy to me and why, short of a physical impediment to turning the dial to "S," the character simply succeeds regardless of Intelligence score. Did the character come up with the right answer through deduction and reasoning? Was it a lucky guess? Did the character think the "S" stood for "silver" and expects a payday? Who knows. It's not really anything I feel I need to concern myself with as a DM adjudicating a simple action declaration of turning a dial.

I've long suspected that we have a fundamental difference in approach that leads to our butting heads. I think this is it. I've no problem with a player bringing his/her knowledge to the table when appropriate, but I disagree that players can apply their knowledge at all times to their character's actions without acting in bad faith. If a character who happens to be a skilled tracker (I have one) builds an effete socialite that's never been out of the city and finds dirt icky, but when drug out into the wilderness begins declaring actions for their character that only a skilled tracker would know to do, I have an issue. I am giving him his character advantages in situations that he, as a player, is unskilled (social and political infighting at court), I expect him to accept his character's chosen limitations when those apply (complete lack of knowledge on how to survive/function in the wilderness and without a manservant). You do not seem to have this expectation. That seems to be the core of many of our disagreements.

A player that is not playing his or her character to established traits, ideals, bonds, or flaws is probably not earning Inspiration. That's the player's choice not to go for that valuable resource in my view. It's not smart play as I see it, but that's not my problem as DM.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I have no difficulty in accepting that you believe that Sherlock Holmes was a genius.

I'm starting to have a serious issue with your shifting statements. Unless you're arguing that being a genius does not mean you have an above average intelligence, this statement does not at all square with your previous statements in argument to me. To whit, you previously made this set of arguments:

Nope. Because

1. Sherlock Holmes having an above average intelligence is not a fact
2. 5 Int is not below average for Sherlock Holmes. It is average, over a population of 1. Therefore that is not a fact either.
3. Your argument is not unbiassed. You are citing as facts things that aren't, to give it a spurious air of credibility.

I cannot rationalize your statement above with those arguments without postulating that you now believe that a genius does not have an above average IQ. Otherwise, you're vacillating in your arguments and arguing contradictory things to the same points.

Only if you take the average over all possible dice rolls of 3d6. If you take the average over all possible Int 5 Sherlock Holmses, 5 is exactly average. Despite your earlier assertion to the contrary, it is mathematically sound to take an average of one datum.

This is a nonsense argument. You cannot possible think that I intended the meaning of average to mean the average of the number 5. Arguing that you can substitute the meaning I provided in my argument with a different meaning you arbitrarily chose and then show that my argument fails using your meaning is a clear strawman fallacy.

Further, we're discussing 5 INT not in a situation of only one example, but in the definitions provided by the game system in question. That game system has consistently, across all editions, placed the average INT at between 10 and 12. With that definition, and the definition that lower scores are less than higher scores, it's trivial to arrive at the conclusion that a 5 INT is below the average of 10-12 INT. Your argument is absolute chicanery if you try to deny that the game itself declares 5 INT to be below average, and you border on outright dishonesty with trying to insinuate that the average of a single 5 INT person means that 5 INT cannot be below average.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

(Incidentally, the 3d6 distribution is not a normal distribution, although it approxmates one. To get a normal distribution by rolling dice you have to roll an infinite number. Three is not enough. I mention this in passing because in another post you asserted that 3d6 produces a normal distribution.)

This is a trivial point I'm well aware of. 3d6 is modeled as a normal distribution. Reality is different and doesn't have a normal distribution. I haven't introduced this concept because it's utterly irrelevant to the points I'm making to you (the definition of normal ability range isn't predicated on any real set of 3d6 rolls being a perfect normal distribution) and it was a unnecessary complication to my discussion of mapping IQ scores to 3d6. In short, you're trivially correct, but it's not very relevant.

Bang! A fallacy of the first water. You are asserting a belief that if a thing is above average in one aspect, it cannot be below average in some other aspect.

Really. You engage in fallacies left, right, and center and then declare that as fallacy of the highest order? Sad.

Also, wrong. While you're correct that a value that is above average in one context may be below average in another context, that's not what quite what's going on here. INT is an indirect measure of intelligence for the purposes of the game. For that purpose, it has an average, which is defined as between 10 and 12. Scores higher than 12 are above average, scores lower than 10 are below average. This is definitional. Further, I asserted that Sherlock is a genius, and has at least an above average intelligence. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative statement. The nature of Sherlock is that his intelligence is above average, regardless of the measurement of intelligence used. So, since a 5 INT is both a measure of intelligence, and below average, Sherlock cannot have a 5 INT because he's defined as having an above average intelligence.

Now, you could, perhaps, reach your argument if you asserted that intelligence, as measured by INT, is intentionally scaled so that 'average' means 'smarter than a genius' and a 5 INT is a solid score for a genius. This would be difficult, as the rules for 5e establish that 10 or 11 is the average human ability. That added qualifier of 'human' places INT on scale. A 10 or 11 represents the average human intelligence. A genius is someone with above average intelligence as related to the average human intelligence. Therefore, a genius cannot have an intelligence score below human average (10 or 11 in 5e) without violating the meanings of these terms. Therefore, a genius cannot have an intelligence score of 5. Since you (for now) admit Sherlock is a genius, he can't have a score of 5 on the INT scale because the average, while possibly different from other measures of intelligence, is defined in the same general terms as the usage of intelligence that genius uses. So, no fallacy.

Exercise for the reader: which class of fallacy has been exposed?

I'm curious myself, although I'll go ahead and proffer the answer of the 'not actually a fallacy' class of fallacies.

 

[ChrisCarlson]

Did the character think the "S" stood for "silver" and expects a payday? Who knows. It's not really anything I feel I need to concern myself with as a DM adjudicating a simple action declaration of turning a dial.

This is a great point.


Player 1: My barbarian steps up, grabs the dial, and turns it to 'S'.
DM: Okay, you hear a click as the door's lock releases, you have solved the puzzle.
Player 2: "Wow! That was amazing, Grog. How did you know the answer was the last day of the week?"
Player 1: "Huh? What day? I thought 'S' stood fer 'smart'. Figured you gotta be smart to solve puzzles. So..." <shrug>

 

[BoldItalic]

I have no difficulty in accepting that you believe that Sherlock Holmes was a genius.

I'm starting to have a serious issue with your shifting statements. Unless you're arguing that being a genius does not mean you have an above average intelligence, this statement does not at all square with your previous statements in argument to me.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Read what I said again, very carefully, twice.

I'll help you by representing it in a slightly more formal way:

BoldItalic believes ( Ovinomaner believes ( Sherlock Holmes was a genius ) )

That's all I said in the sentence you quoted. It's not an argument, it's just a statement of what I think you think.

Since you have objected so vociferously to my statement, I can only suppose that either you believe it is untrue, or you have not understood it. I'm guessing the latter. Hence this post.

If, however, you are telling me that

Ovinomancer does not believe ( BoldItalic believes ( Ovinomaner believes ( Sherlock Holmes was a genius ) ) )

then we do have a problem.

Would you care to clarify what it is you believe I said?

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

This is a great point.


Player 1: My barbarian steps up, grabs the dial, and turns it to 'S'.
DM: Okay, you hear a click as the door's lock releases, you have solved the puzzle.
Player 2: "Wow! That was amazing, Grog. How did you know the answer was the last day of the week?"
Player 1: "Huh? What day? I thought 'S' stood fer 'smart'. Figured you gotta be smart to solve puzzles. So..." <shrug>

I'm very glad to see more people starting to expose that the issue behind a DM preventing a player's declared action is usually the DM worrying what the player is thinking, rather than what the character could be thinking - thus forcing the situation to be meta-gamed in the claimed effort of avoiding meta-gaming (which I'm sure most of us around here remember that I don't believe is a thing outside of this exact behavior).

 

[Maxperson]

You're barking up the wrong tree with this. You're confusing fictional actions and action declarations. My argument is that any action declaration is valid, but as with all action declarations, the DM narrates the result of the adventurers' actions. "You're too dumb to make that action declaration" is not a thing where the rules are concerned.

No, but by that argument a response of, "You're too dumb to succeed is." I don't want to have to police the roleplaying of the players, so people who aren't interested in roleplaying a stupid PC as stupid don't get invited to my group or stay very long if the manage to sneak in.