D&D 5E So 5 Intelligence Huh

[pemerton]

luck and randomness are not only the same, but affect both equally

As I read [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION]'s posts on this, the whole point is that this is not true. Over the finite number of rolls in a D&D campaign, particularly in circumstances in which close recording and analysis of the dataset generated is not taking place (rather, participants are forming rough impressions where results that are particularly lucky, or particularly salient given the current concerns of play, are more likely to stand out), both will not be affected equally by luck/randomness. (Or, more precisely, will not be identically affected by luck and randomness such that it all cancels out leaving the contrasting bonuses emerging as salient differences between the two characters.)

Hence there is no very great likelihood that the +5 bonus will stand out in play from the +3 bonus.

That said, I'm not a statistician or mathematician, so Elfcrusher can correct me if I've misunderstood.

 

[pemerton]

Yes, and I ignored it because it was entirely irrelevant. Starting with a 16 at 1st level and raising it to max at 30th level isn't even remotely the same as having a 5 int at max level.

You are the one who has emphasised that 16 INT - 4 points short of the mechanical maximum - is not enough to be Sherlock Holmes. Yet I have provided an actual play example of a character who started with STR and CON both 4 points short of the mechanical maximum, and now at the end-game of the campaign has a STR still 4 points short and a CON 10 points short, who is nevertheless the toughest dwarf around.

And the reason for that is because actually playing D&D is not primarily about generating a set of numbers on a PC sheet that accurately model some fictional character. It is about generating events in play, in the shared fiction, that convey something. If the character with low or average INT nevertheless solves all the puzzles and performs all the deductions, then in that game s/he will play as Holmes-like.

(This conversation is doubly weird because it is the non-2nd ed AD&D players who generally get tarred with the brush of obsessed by mechanics, whereas in this thread we are the ones pointing out that mechanics are simply an input to play rather than an end in themselves as a measure of the fiction.)

If that's how you run your game, then that's how you run YOUR game. In the books, there is no such limitation on NPCs.

<snip>

it is possible that if you add in limitations to NPCs to keep them from being high level AND you start your PC with a 16 (more than 3x the 5 we are discussing) AND you raise that stat religiously, you can be maxed out and the toughest/smartest by max level.

<snip>

Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Spelljammer, Planescape, Dark Sun, pretty much all of campaign settings have high level NPCs. It's nonsensical for them not to. The PCs can't be everywhere at once and monsters would have wiped out every PC race a long time before the PCs were born if high level NPCs weren't around to stop them. One evil dragon could have wiped them all out.

Do you start your campaigns with no magic items in the world? After all, no high level NPCs means nobody of sufficient level to create them for the PCs to find. At least not anything powerful.

You are making all sorts of assumptions here about what is the "proper" or "default" way to run D&D.

In my 4e campaign, there are no powerful PCs of the sort you point to - it is a "points of light" game. (There are nemeses statted up as high level, in accordance with the game's conventions, but that doesn't mean they are, in the fiction, functionally equivalent to the PCs. They certainly don't hang around fighting "evil monsters" who would otherwise overrun the world.)

As for magic items - they are gifts of the gods, consequences of PC "charisma" (in the ordinary language sense, not the game stat sense), etc. There are artefacts which were forged in the distant past - The Sword of Kas, the dwarven thrower (Over)Whelm, etc. There are some items forged by NPCs, but given the relatively minor character of those items there is no implication generated that the (purely backstory) NPCs in question are of any great protagonistic potency.

I'm not saying that what I have just described is the only way to run a fantasy RPG, though it is one to which 4e is (in my view) particularly well suited. My Burning Wheel game, for instance, is quite a bit more gritty and doesn't centre the PCs quite as much in the mode of "cosmologically ordained" protagonists.

But even in my BW game, outcomes in the fiction, rather than numbers on paper, are the things that tell you about a character.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Sorry, Max, but no. The "degree of success" in D&D is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether you reach the DC or not. Therefore that's the only information you would get to determine intelligence. Anything else is metagaming.

Now, if this were a game were the amount you passed the DC by actually mattered, if each point above the DC gave a mechanical benefit, then yeah each point of Int (well, every two points) would be much more apparent. But that ain't how this game works.

The irony in your answer is that after dozens of pages of basically accusing the 5 Int player of metagaming if he does anything other than play dumb, you now admit you have to metagame (know the dice rolls) to figure out which character is smarter.

 

[Manbearcat]

Which is a completely different thing.

I'm not so sure. I think a topic of contention in this thread has been "how will so-and-so character (with so-and-so build) manifest in the fiction?"

The interesting thing about Inspector Gadget was that, to all but Penny and Brain, he was clearly the ace-est of ace detectives around. His boss, his cohorts, and his archenemy all considered him worthy of that esteem.

Meanwhile, looking under the hood, we know that his clumsy, dim-witted deployment of "logic" and gadgetry was supplemented (or outright replaced) by Penny's and Brain's efforts and sheer protagonist luck.

People can think you're the best and be wrong. Inspector Gadget didn't use brains and deduction. He stumbled on the solution by mistake. His int was very low and he had none of the bonuses being applied to PCs in this thread, but had some nebulous luck stat that was a 20.

Yup. I definitely agree here. I'm not certain how easy he would be to create in 5e. He would need to be a Rogue. He'd need Lucky. He'd need extra dice or outright 20s to augment his efforts. He'd need all of his Inspiration stuff to "hook into" his shtick. The gadgetry component would come in the way of magical items (eg a Flying Hat of some sort).

In D&D 4e, he would be trivially easy to recreate. There are various ways to account for luck in the scope of PC build architecture (feats, class/theme/path features, utility powers, exchanging magic items for boons). Further, the essential component of leveraging resources (and having that appear as something else in the fiction - eg intellect) is readily available with Streetwise and the Secretes of the City Skill Power (which lets you sub Streetwise for all relevant reason/knowledge/lore checks). With a good Charisma, you're basically there. As above, the gadgetry component could be magical item based (or Theme/Paragon Path powers). This could be built as a Rogue or as a "Princess Warlord".

Doing Gadget in Cortex+ would be similar to 4e. You'd need particular attributes and distinctions for your dice pool:

Intelligence: d4 (which would trigger complications in play but also earn the PC plot points which they could use to deploy Penny and Brain or Luck)
Luck: d10 (or 12)
Tech: d6 (which would work sometimes but give you plenty of complications/PPs)
Resources (this is Penny and Brain): d10 (or 12)

Distinctions:

* Now I'll prove to you that Martians are just an image of your figment.
* Don't worry, Chief, we'll make sure the found lost maps will remain unlost in it's found lostiness.
* Oh Penny, whenever I make a wrong decision, which is never, I like to just move on. You know the old saying: get right back on the horse and punch a bird in a bush.

Point being that in the mosaic of play (the fiction that emerges from our conversation and dice rolling and in the way that NPCs within perceive the action), we can have an ace detective who always cracks the case despite his character sheet deficiencies.

Very amusing post, though.

Thank you!

Amuse one person a day for all your days and a life-well-lived you will have. If someone never said that, they should have. Gadget would have said that, only in a much more awesome, Gadget-ey way.

 

[Maxperson]

As I read [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION]'s posts on this, the whole point is that this is not true. Over the finite number of rolls in a D&D campaign, particularly in circumstances in which close recording and analysis of the dataset generated is not taking place (rather, participants are forming rough impressions where results that are particularly lucky, or particularly salient given the current concerns of play, are more likely to stand out), both will not be affected equally by luck/randomness. (Or, more precisely, will not be identically affected by luck and randomness such that it all cancels out leaving the contrasting bonuses emerging as salient differences between the two characters.)

Okay fine, you got me. It won't be IDENTICAL, but over hundreds of rolls, it will be close enough that it won't really matter.

 

[Maxperson]

Sorry, Max, but no. The "degree of success" in D&D is irrelevant.

Tiered DCs are a thing, where the higher DC you meet, the more info you get. A DM not running DCs that was in a campaign geared for investigation is doing his players a great disservice.

Now, if this were a game were the amount you passed the DC by actually mattered, if each point above the DC gave a mechanical benefit, then yeah each point of Int (well, every two points) would be much more apparent. But that ain't how this game works.

Yes it does. It worked that way in 3e official product and 5e is no different. If you only each a medium DC, but Holmes hits hard, he can get more information. It just means the DM has to have tiered information set up.

The irony in your answer is that after dozens of pages of basically accusing the 5 Int player of metagaming if he does anything other than play dumb, you now admit you have to metagame (know the dice rolls) to figure out which character is smarter.

See, metagaming is when the CHARACTER uses knowledge that he does not have, but the player does. In this case the CHARACTER would see the higher tier DC being hit by Holmes much more often than by +3 int guy, so even though he can't see the numbers, he can see the result. Now, I can't see the information here like I would in game play, so the only way I can match the character's knowledge and keep things equal, is for you to give me the numbers. That's not metagaming, and I suspect you know that.

If you refuse to give me the numbers so that I can match the characters watching the two investigators, that will be very telling about how you view the strength of your position.

 

[Maxperson]

Point being that in the mosaic of play (the fiction that emerges from our conversation and dice rolling and in the way that NPCs within perceive the action), we can have an ace detective who always cracks the case despite his character sheet deficiencies.

I deleted most of the post because this was the only portion I really have a response for.

Yes, this is true, but it's not what is being argued here. What is being argued here is that a detective with those deficiencies can be Sherlock Holmes, a very different sort of detective than Inspector Gadget.

Thank you!

You're welcome!

 

[Maxperson]

You are the one who has emphasised that 16 INT - 4 points short of the mechanical maximum - is not enough to be Sherlock Holmes. Yet I have provided an actual play example of a character who started with STR and CON both 4 points short of the mechanical maximum, and now at the end-game of the campaign has a STR still 4 points short and a CON 10 points short, who is nevertheless the toughest dwarf around.

Right. You provided an example where a PC who was not the toughest, eventually became the toughest. When he became the toughest, his stats were not 16. His stats were capped and Holmes like.

And the reason for that is because actually playing D&D is not primarily about generating a set of numbers on a PC sheet that accurately model some fictional character. It is about generating events in play, in the shared fiction, that convey something. If the character with low or average INT nevertheless solves all the puzzles and performs all the deductions, then in that game s/he will play as Holmes-like.

No. That's just your style of play, not what the game says. The game gives numbers and DCs. The PCs and NPCs of the world use those numbers and DCs to determine who is best. The results are played out in the game world. Just because the focus is other than that at YOUR table, does not make that the way D&D is, or even "primarily" is.

You are making all sorts of assumptions here about what is the "proper" or "default" way to run D&D.

D&D only gives stats, bonuses and DCs. It gives numbers for population ranges (ie 3-18) and stat increases for level. It gives abilities to modify them. That's the default given by the rules. Change that and you are changing things for your game only.

In my 4e campaign, there are no powerful PCs of the sort you point to - it is a "points of light" game. (There are nemeses statted up as high level, in accordance with the game's conventions, but that doesn't mean they are, in the fiction, functionally equivalent to the PCs. They certainly don't hang around fighting "evil monsters" who would otherwise overrun the world.)

I didn't play 4e, but my understanding is that they generally didn't use PC rules, though the rules say you can do so if you want. The DM just assigned them bonuses and such that they needed, so if they needed to be Holmes, that bonus could be as high or higher than a 30th level PC.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Why don't you just ask to see their character sheets, so you can point out how obvious it is that one of them has a higher Int? "Look! This one has a 17 and this one has an 18!" Of course you can figure out who has a higher bonus by looking at the dice rolls, but that's irrelevant because we are talking about impact on game outcomes, and for that all that matters is pass or fail. Fact.

Tiered DCs are of course permissible, but a few posts ago you were dismissing pemerton's argument because his NPC's weren't RAW, so I shall do the same here. Likewise with your use of rules from previous editions: irrelevant.

I'll keep checking in. Let me know if you have any epiphanies.

 

[BoldItalic]

Suppose you are sitting next to a player who is role-playing Sherlock Holmes. He is playing in such a way as to focus all his actions on investigating a crime.

You can't see his character sheet but you can watch his dice rolls. You notice that when he rolls for an Intelligence(Investigation) check, the result he announces to the DM is +9 on the dice roll.

You don't know whether or not he has proficiency or expertise in Investigation and you don't know his character level so you don't know his proficiency bonus anyway. The contribution from proficiency could be anywhere between zero and +12 so the contribution from his Int modifier could be anywhere between -3 and +9.

What is his Int score? All you can say is that it must be somewhere between 4 and 29.