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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8306254" data-attributes="member: 42582">I thought INT in 5e D&D was your ability to recall the lore of Arcana, History, Nature and Religion, and to recognise and draw inferences from clues?That's a slightly arbitrary grouping - I watched an episode of Lewis last night, and the lead character had noticed a clue but needed someone else to tell him the bit of Hamlet that would let him make sense of it; conversely, what distinguishes Lewis's predecessor Morse is that he is not only a good detective but know art, music, poetry and literature. I also remember in a Holmes story that Watson remarks on Holmes's ignorance of general knowledge that is not relevant to solving crimes.It gets even more arbitrary if we put maths in there: it's possible to be very good at the humanities and terrible at maths, and vice versa.4e doesn't really address mathematical ability as best I recall - it's not really part of the game. When engineering has come up we've used Dungeoneering skill (which is based on Wisdom). The fact that INT covers both knowledge of lore (Arcana, History and Religion in 4e) and anticipation of attacks  never caused any issues (and in some ways harked back to the AD&D Wu Jen's ability to get +3 to initiative 1x/day - "a burst of sudden action" that is made possible by "a strict regimen of mental training": OA p 25).</blockquote>