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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6851676" data-attributes="member: 42582">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".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.)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.</blockquote>

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