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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 2220595" data-attributes="member: 3400">Bush pretty smart?  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/paranoid.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":uhoh:" title="Paranoid    :uhoh:" data-shortname=":uhoh:" />  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I think your example of low mental stats ruling a nation might come up more often than you think. There are a good many who think we do have smarter viziers running the show (Rove, Cheney) here in the US. The main qualifications for leadership is largely the ambition to try to get the job and the connections to succeed and that's why I'd say that even low mental stats can rule the day, for good or ill, even without hereditary leadership.Now, your use of their educational backgrounds as evidence of intelligence might suggest that intelligence isn't telling the full story. I suspect that's why I can think of at least two games that had an Education stat as well as intelligence (Traveller and Call of Cthulhu). In both cases, you could have someone who wasn't that smart being pretty knowledgeable based on their educational/real life experience.D&D currently has no real equivalent of that stat. Rather, D&D education tends to be reflected in skill purchases over successive levels, a major difference between games being Traveller and CoC aren't level-based while D&D is. D&D does, I think, reflect an interesting synergy between intelligence and education in the way it makes it harder for a dumb character to get a particularly broad education.As far as playing a dwarf who's not very bright, I think the Bull/Forrest Gump/Pooh mix could be pretty interesting. Just try to also keep him perceptive and confident as well to cover the high wisdom and charisma. That's going to be the challenge, though I have to say that Gump did have a tendency to be pretty affable, even magnetic, so it might not be that much of a stretch.</blockquote>

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