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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6844358" data-attributes="member: 42582">The game of D&D involves sitting around with friends, pretending some imaginary stuff is going on, and thinking up interesting, fun, effective, etc ways for your PC to engage with that stuff. In that sense, it's an intellectual pastime. (Contrast, say, running or cycling, which are also things that can be fun and interesting to do with friends, but are primarily physical pastimes.)Telling a player that s/he can't engage with the intellectual elements of the game is tantamount to telling him/her that s/he can't play the game.If a PC has a 5 STR, the player of that PC is in no way precluded from playing the game. S/he can still sit around with his/her friends and come up with the action declarations that s/he thinks make sense for his/her character, given the ingame situation, the goals of the character, the preferences of the player, etc.But some posters in this thread are saying that, if a PC has 5 INT, then the player of that PC has to refrain from fully engaging with the game in this fashion: for instance, that s/he is not allowed to engage in solving puzzles. Think about classic modules like Tomb of Horrors, or Ghost Tower of Inverness, or Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, or the Caves of Chaos in Keep on the Borderlands: these modules are almost entirely puzzle-solving, in the sense that playing these modules is all about reasoning through solutions to the various improbable but challenging situations they throw up in front of the PCs.Or think about a more contemporary module, like the first Freeport module, or Speaker in Dreams, or Heathen, or Bastion of Broken Souls, or Demon Queen's Enclave (or even the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, which is an old module that is rather contemporary in feel). These modules also have a very big puzzle-solving dimension, as the players have to identify various factions, work out who is related to whom in what sort of way (allied, opposed, potential friend, certain foe, etc) and then make choices about how to inject their own PCs in to the situation and push it to some sort of resolution.One characteristic of real people who aren't all that clever is that they can't do this sort of stuff very well. They can't make effective tactical or logistical choices. They aren't all that good at working out the dynamics of complex political or social situations. They make poor choices, relative to their own interests, because they are incapable of identifying and then reasoning through the relevant (though perhaps not immediately salient) consequences.To require a player of a low-INT PC to play his/her PC in such a way is, in effect, to require him/her to not fully engage with these aspects of RPGing, which to many RPGers are at the core of the activity.To me, it's fairly clear that this is why Moldvay relates INT to linguistic ability: it gives INT a clear mechanical role, as STR has in relation to opening doors (but, in Moldvay Basic, not to encumbrance). But there is no suggestion that the player of the low-INT fighter isn't nevertheless fully able to engage in the play of the game.In the context of 3E, 4e or 5e, a low INT penalises certain skills and limits access to certain feats. That's the "handicap" that is imposed. Especially in 5e, the GM is also free to frame ingame possibilities, including the need for a check to find out what happens, by reference to a PC's INT.But none of that implies that the player him-/herself has to take responsibility for limiting his/her PC in certain ways, any more than if the PC had a 5 STR.(If all fiendishly difficult puzzles are resolved by INT checks there might be other issues with the campaign, but the low INT PC will be suitably penalised, just as is the low STR PC when it comes to weightlifting competitions.)Most D&D players don't take this approach to physical stats. That is, they don't expect the player of the PC with 5 STR to decide what is or isn't appropriate for that PC to declare as a feat of strength. Rather, they let the rules of the game - encumbrance rules, STR check rules, etc - answer these questions. In AD&D, even a person of below-average strength can bend steel bars on a lucky roll (STR 8-9 has a 1% chance to bend bars/lift gates), and so the player of a character with 8 STR is allowed to declare, as an action, "I try and bend the bars" - and then roll to see what happens.I don't see why having a low stat in INT should be a greater burden than this. And I don't see why the onus shifts from the GM to enforce the relationship between mechanics and fiction, to the player having to police him-/herself. If the player wants to play a certain way, that's his/her prerogative (I have a player who sometimes won't declare physical checks for his PC because he thinks his PC is too feeble to do it), but I don't see that s/he is obliged to.The bit about in-character/out-of-character is something that I don't fully follow. I can imagine some ingame situations where the question of who, in the fiction, solves a riddle matters - perhaps the PCs are engaged in a riddle contest with some NPCs, and there is prestige or money or whatever at stake on an individual basis.But in more typical D&D party play, puzzling out who the villain is, or what the strange sigils on the door mean, or whether it would be better to tackle Orcus first or Demogorgon first, is a party thing; and in these contexts, the distinction between in-character and out-of-character is often rather relaxed. So I don't really feel the force of saying to a player "You can participate in the game by helping work out what the party should do, but we all have to pretend that it wasn't your character doing that."I assure you that I am being sincere, not disingenuous (= "lacking in candor, insincere, hypocritical, etc").When it comes to 5 STR, the character sheet is nothing more than a "bag of mechanics": the GM is the one who has the job of translating that mechanical fact into appropriate fiction, eg by enforcing the encumbrance rules and calling for STR checks when appropriate.Why should INT be any different in this respect?Upthread someone (maybe  [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]) said that s/he wasn't worried about dump stat issues. It seems that you are, though. That the reason the player is responsible for roleplaying his/her PC's INT a certain way is because otherwise s/he is getting an unfair advantage.More generally, why would you ask "Are you SURE you want to put it there?" If the player has rolled a 5, it has to go somewhere. Why should putting it in INT be any bigger a deal than putting it in STR, or some other stat? A 5 INT means you'll be poor at knowledge skills; a 5 STR means you'll be poor at carrying things and bashing things; etc. And if the game is one in which it's well-known that INT saves and INT checks aren't very common, then why not build a low-INT character? I mean, if the game was one in which it was well-known that allof the action happened in the city, you wouldn't expect people to build as many rangers and druids as thieves and bards, would you?Presumably it can be done, and is done.But that doesn't tell us what counts as good RPing.In my current 4e game, two PCs started with 8 INT (the fighter/cleric and the cleric/ranger). Two started with a 10 INT (the paladin and the sorcerer). And one started with an 18 INT (the wizard, now and invoker/wizard).In the game it is crystal-clear who is the learned one in the party: the invoker/wizard casts all the rituals; by 30th level has bonuses to knowledge skills in the neighbourhood of +40 (whereas the other PCs tend to max out around +20 at best); whenever any bit of lore needs to be known (in the sort of way that  [MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION] talks about not too far upthread) it is this PC who knows it; etc.Furthermore, the other PCs, having other domains of expertise, tend to excel in non-intellectual ways: the fighter is strong and tough; the sorcerer and ranger are quick and acrobatic and a little bit flamboyant; the sorcerer is also a joker and a liar; the paladin is steadfast and unrelenting in argument.The difference in ability scores, including INT, manifests itself in all these ways. My players are not bad roleplayers because, in addition, the players of the 8 INT characters don't take a back seat when (say) it comes to trying to work out whether Vecna or the Raven Queen is the party's true enemy; or on those odd occasions (two that I can think of) when I throw a riddle the party's way.EDIT: Here we have a poster saying that a PC with 5 INT can't make choices (and pointing to Winnie the Pooh's making of choices as a reason to judge his INT as greater than 5).A character who can't make choices is not a viable vehicle for RPGing, at least as many players undertake that activity. Hence any INT score that is permissible for a PC (which, at least in some versions of D&D, includes an INT of 5) can't be a marker of a person being unable to make choices.And in reply to [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] and others: this is exactly why I say that some posters in this thread are treating INT in a fashion that makes low INT disproportionately disadvantageous to the player when compared to, say, low STR. (In case it's not clear, this is all from a real world, playing-the-game-at-the-table perspective. In the imagined world of the fiction, it may be no more serious a handicap to be unable to make a choice than to be unable to lift a boulder. But for the players of the game, those two things are not equal in degree of burden.</blockquote>

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