D&D 5E So 5 Intelligence Huh

[Maxperson]

I don't think that is necessarily so.

And that's a corner case view in what a 5 int represents. The norm is that people think it's stupid.

 

[Guest 6801328]

That's back to goals. If roleplay is not one of the goals of the group, then not roleplaying is just par for the course. However, if roleplaying is part of the group's goals, then things should be roleplayed out, including solutions.

Then we're back to absolutism. Roleplaying can be one of the goals, but that doesn't mean every opportunity to roleplay needs to be taken up. And skipping some of those opportunities is only "bad roleplaying" if your expectation is that you always stay in character. Most tables don't have that expectation.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

No. It's not even remotely exact because how does a 50 IQ act? There are many ways. Characterizing it as exact is a mischaracterization.

Max, No. I don't believe you.

I do not believe that you do not see the many ways to act like you have a 50 IQ as not being exact IN COMPARISON (ultra emphasis added because you have repeated ignored this phrase and the context it creates, and have mischaracterized my statements in doing so) to the many ways to act stupid by comparison to however you would act with some higher intelligence score and no related measure of intelligence, such as IQ score, factoring into however it is you are acting.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I firmly believe that some posters just cannot respond to my arguments and have to twist them in order to "be right."

And I firmly believe that it is you twisting their arguments, and sometimes even your own, so that whoever is engaged in a discussion with you has to make responses trying to straighten out what you've twisted the argument into just so that you can resort to accusations of "strawman" and the like.

Other people I know do the same thing, and some have even admitted it is a thing they do because if they aren't "right" they don't care one bit - they still want to "win" the argument, even if only by frustrating the other participants to the point of simply abandoning the argument because of the perception that no one continuing to say "you're wrong" is the same as everyone saying "you're right."

 

[Satyrn]

Are any of my fellow WotC refugees reminded of the Tarrasque?

(I just looked up his stats, hoping his Int matched up)

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Are any of my fellow WotC refugees reminded of the Tarrasque?

(I just looked up his stats, hoping his Int matched up)

You are right. There certainly are some similarities between this conversation and that conversation.

 

[pemerton]

It seems there is a particular (and even peculiar) version of roleplaying out there, one in which the players around the table attempt to "act like their character" as consistently as possible, and the game for those players consists of trying to not break character. To me it sounds uninteresting, and an arbitrary game goal. Sort of like saying, "Ok, the goal is to say everything in pig-latin. If you forget to use pig-latin, or use it improperly, we'll all give you the stink eye for breaking immersion."

<snip>

The part I find rather astonishing is the insistence that this *is* roleplaying, and everything else isn't. I'll agree that it is a *kind* of roleplaying, but certainly not the only one, and one that honestly takes mere discipline more than actual narrative skill.

<snip>

It reminds me of how really good dialog writers (e.g. Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard) can be very sparse with description, and they don't embellish actions with adverbs, preferring to use dialog. They don't describe *everything*, just the bits that convey the most information. A woman will have nothing described but her scarf, and yet somehow you have the whole picture. Most times when a character does something it's simply done with a naked, simple verb, sans embellishment, but by then you already have a good sense of the character so you imagine the details yourself.

This resonates with me very much.

I don't read as much fiction as I would in principle like to, but I know what you mean about sparse versus overdone writing. I see this in my students, also: although they are writing non-fiction, they over-embellish and use far too many adjectives and adverbs. I call it "Sunday supplement" style, and in the case of my students it is a result of high school teachers encouraging floridness as a substitute for dynamism and structure in their writing.

And I like your application of this point to roleplaying. I've got nothing against a player adding colour via description and characterisation, and done well it enhances the RPG experience. But for me it's not at the core - what's at the core is the making of choices by the players which express their characters by orienting them in some way or another within and/or towards the fiction, and letting the participants at the table see how - in virtue of this - PC A is different from PC B because A cares about and does this thing, whereas B cares about and does this other thing.

To put the point really bluntly, I should be able to tell that one PC is a fighter and another a wizard from their action declarations. And if the fighter has high INT rather than the stereotypical low-to-modest INT, that should be coming through too (eg the fighter is making meangingful INT checks, either because a scholar as well as a warrior - Siegfried Sassoon or TE Lawrence - or because a great tactician, using INT to (say) help gain the party a buff on the first round of combat, as Tactics skill can do in classic Traveller).

 

[pemerton]

On the question of how many ways to play 5 INT.

Upthread I, and I believe [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION], asserted that there were infinitely many such ways. By "infinite" in this context I intended to convey indefinitely many - that is, however many ways one enumerates to play 5 INT, there are other ways that have not yet been enumerated. I think iserith meant the same thing.
[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] denied this. So now, when [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] says there are many ways to play 5 INT, I wonder if he could tell us what the value of "many" is. And if that value is in the thousands, or even in the hundreds, then I think that for practical purposes it may as well be infinite - no gamer or gaming table is likely to hit the crunch point of limitation in the ways of playing 5 INT, if there are hundreds or thousands of such ways.

Now another variation on this debate seems to have arisen: does playing a 5 INT mean playing as if the PC had a 50 IQ? or does it just mean playing as if one's INT is lower than some (roughly understood) average? I am reading [MENTION=6701872]AaronOfBarbaria[/MENTION] as claiming the latter.

I agree with AoB on this, if only because I think there is no rule of the game correlating 5 INT to 50 IQ. (And I am still waiting for [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] to point to the relevant rule for any edition other than 3.5, where there apparently is an FAQ entry.)

Now, unless one thinks that the number of ways to play 50 IQ is (literally) infinite - and, upthread, Maxperson has denied this - it must follow that if AoB and I are correct then there are more ways to play a 5 INT than Maxperson is allowing for.

And if AoB and I are correct, it also follows that those ways are free from a constraint that Maxperson would impose (namely, free from the constraint of playing one's PC as if s/he had 50 IQ).

I think this is why AoB is saying that Maxperson would impose a type of unwarranted exactitude on the playing of a 5 INT character.

For my part, I think I'm even more liberal than AoB because I don't think that a low INT score obliges the player to play any particular way - but as per the conversation that [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION] and I are having on different approaches to roleplaying, I think that, in the sort of game I enjoy, the difference will emerge through the dynamics of action declaration and action resolution.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

You are correct in your reading of my claims.

For my part, I think I'm even more liberal than AoB because I don't think that a low INT score obliges the player to play any particular way

There is no functional distinction between my expectations and yours, though I did phrase things as if there could be - I really do mean "whatever completely vague measure of 'lower' you personally wish to use" as exactly that, and as such include "no noticeable measure" as a valid option within the set.

The character, even if played no differently by the player, will appear suitably less intelligent by not having as high of chances at passing any rolls relying upon Intelligence score which come up through the course of playing the game (not because I am using the check as a means to say "I don't think your character can have that idea/try that action"), and that fully satisfies my expectation that the character will be played as less intelligent than if it had a higher intelligence score.

edited to correct and clarify a bit.

 

[iserith]

And that's a corner case view in what a 5 int represents. The norm is that people think it's stupid.

At best, we can say Int 5 represents below average because that is what the rules say. There is no way to honestly say what "the norm" is outside subjective experience. It's on the player to decide whether the character is actually stupid and what that means for the character's personality and decisions. If a player says he or she has a character with Int 5, that only tells me a -3 penalty to Intelligence-related checks applies. How the player actually plays the character (both in portrayal and in roleplaying, that is, the decisions the player makes for the character) and to some extent the character's listed personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws are what inform me whether the character is stupid or not.