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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 6856914" data-attributes="member: 16814">The real world is imminently material.  Sherlock Holmes is modeled against the real world in his source material.  D&D models against the real world in it's material.  Both are based on the common understandings of things, like intelligence, that we all have from the real world.  I fail to even grasp an argument about intelligence, or relative ability of intelligence, without a consideration of the real world to lend it meaning.As for the low mechanical impact of intelligence, you're correct that it is often minor.  However, the premise of my argument re: Sherlock had nothing to do with that mechanical impact, and my, and others', arguments have been that INT is more than just the mechanical impact.  Despite that, I was offered a purely mechanical rebuttal in the form of the 5 INT Sherlock.  However, even a cursory examination of that model shows it has glaring flaws in its ability to actually model the fiction of Sherlock Holmes as the superlative detective because others less experienced but with high INT can outmatch him and the number of those that can do so are non-trivial.  So the 5 INT Sherlock can't exist unless you add additional mechanical restrictions on other builds that prevent this disparity.  When pointed out that such additional restrictions are arbitrary and move the model even further from it's fictional bases, the argument because that perhaps, in that fiction, those restrictions do exist, and there are not high INT people or that the high INT people that exist are also extraordinarily unlucky while Sherlock is extraordinarily lucky.  The pile of of ridiculous caveats and premises continues in an attempt to save a bad construction.  And when all of these things are pointed out, the tack becomes to question either the very definitions of INT and/or to say that the real world and it's expectations aren't material, we're talking about a non-relatable construction wherein the absurd is standard and you should have never read Sherlock Holmes (or, for the majority, watched him) with the assumptions that you would make if he had any relation to the real world.  Instead, everyone around him you think is smart, isn't, and Sherlock's vast ability to deduce is really just extremely good luck in a world dominated by the worst kind of luck for everyone else who ever tries to deduce.It's ridiculous.Strawman.  Being disheartened by the level of discourse that the outlandish positions people will take to defend their poor constructs is neither an assertion that I expect someone will win nor is it a statement on they're ability to do so.  Of course they're allowed.  I'm registering my disappointment that they do. Nope, although Radiohead's referencing the same source material.  That whole album does.</blockquote>

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