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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 6835207" data-attributes="member: 6683613">I don't think anyone here has expressed a concern with Intelligence being a dump stat.  That's not what this conversation is about.Make up a new and different London Underground?  Why?  And wouldn't that break verisimilitude, especially for the players who are familiar with London?Now you're just being melodramatic.This is in response to a situation I expressly described as being an auto-success for one player and a roll for another even though the difference is indiscernible in universe.  So no, clearly auto-successes and uncertainty can have a lot of overlap.[hr][/hr]Yes, exactly.  See again the example of Otto.  Tries lots of Intelligence tasks -- fails almost all of them.Flaws are supposed to be where you call out your character's weaknesses, right?  Pretend for a second 5th Edition hasn't happened yet and there's no "flaw system".  Ask a player what her character's "flaws" are, and a very low ability score is likely to be near the top of the list.  It's a soft constraint on action declaration, because, as you and I have both noted, it affects what actions a character is likely to succeed at.[hr][/hr]Tell me, O skilled player, the London train schedule for the first week of August in 1886.  And don't tell me "Sherlock looks it up", because Sherlock canonically has it memorized, so if your character has to look it up then you're modifying the concept in concession to your low ability score.  (And finding the information you want may be an Intelligence check anyway.)It's not my preference.  It's my recommendation based on the concrete fact that your character will be bad at the very thing your concept says he's supposed to be good at.  If for some reason you roll for class, and you get barbarian, I'm also going to recommend you pick a character concept other than "wizened old master of the arcane arts".Can a player can take the flaw "I am unintelligent" and play the character as intelligent?  The "I am unintelligent" imposes no restrictions, and unlike the Intelligence score doesn't even make the character mathematically less effective at anything.  Thus if you're okay with playing an Int 5 character as intelligent, surely you should be even more okay with playing an "I am unintelligent" character as intelligent.  Sure, the word "unintelligent" may directly contradict the word "intelligent", but so does quantifying "intelligence" with a number and giving the character a very low number.  Those are just the meanings of words -- they're not rules, right?The rules do actually say that "Intelligence measures mental acuity, accuracy of recall, and the ability to reason."  So I'm going to stand by that.  What I'll dispute is that this constitutes a demand that we play "a particular way".  There are lots of ways to play a character with a low ability to reason.If your character concept would have you kicking down doors, but instead of doing that you arrange for the door to be unlocked and then try the knob, then you are again modifying the concept in concession to your low ability score.</blockquote>

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