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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steinhauser" data-source="post: 5032755" data-attributes="member: 86705">This is actually a very interesting thought. Personally, I wouldn't grant more than 3-4 Intelligence, and then only for dolphins and higher primates, if I was motivated by realism alone. (The animals capable of learning human language.)I do agree - what's best for campaign-specific storytelling should overrule both the written rules and any real-world consistency.You're absolutely right, and higher-thinking animals were already on my list of rules to question. Though I never played editions older than 3E, I believe I heard that it used to be the case in 1 or 2ed.On the contrary, I have never seen it referred to representing anything other than a completely autonomous, robotic lack of decision-making intelligence - whether predicated on absolute obedience (zombies) or instinct so base as not to require a brain (oozes, plants).I guess this is another thing that rankles me. Spiders, scorpions, bees, worms, none of them actually have Darkvision in the real world, as such a thing does not exist. Now while it's concieveable that such a thing might be a banal reality in a world that includes an underdark, I still think Darkvision should be the exception and not the rule. Of course not all animals have low-light vision either.I only used the phrase because I didn't know the name of the real-world species that qualified as such.Say you were implementing a "snailopus" and it was an octopus-snail hybrid (for lack of a better way to explain it in D&D terms). Such things once existed in the real world and were on the cusp of what D&D might call either "animal" or "vermin". What, then, would the person who converted the creature from real world to D&D statistics call it?I think the common D&D denizen would immediately jump to their most obvious shared trait - the fact that each and every one lives in or around water. That's also what someone creating or converting a creature would do - which is why I mentioned it. Deciding between animal and vermin isn't as cut and dry as deciding if your creature is aquatic.</blockquote>

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