Is Holmes mostly abductive?
Is mastery of induction, deduction, or abduction most useful for noticing a case is particularly ripe for non-deductive reasoning?
In any case, it feels like his knowledge of chemistry, bloodstain identification, botany, geology, anatomy, law, cryptanalysis, fingerprinting, document examination, ballistics, psychological profiling and/or forensic medicine (to crib from Robert Ing), play a sizable roll in helping him along the way regardless of how he's getting there.
I'm having a hard time imagining him without both a pretty good Int and Wis.
I’m not arguing that Sherlock Holmes has INT 5.
The thread is about weird interpretations of high/low ability scores. The INT 5 Sherlock is a tongue-in-cheek example, and the story I cited (The Adventure of Silver Blaze) is an example of how one investigator uses Int (investigation) and deduces the wrong answer while the investigator that doesn’t use that way of thinking, who deliberately departs from it, solves it correctly.
If the solutions were straightforward, Scotland Yard wouldn’t need their consulting detective.
So, let’s say you rolled up an INT 5 character. And maybe you take the medicine skill, the alchemist kit, the nature skill, and perhaps you get expertise in perception and disguise or insight. Maybe your wisdom isn’t bad. In game, you make some connections with people on the street, a coroner, a medical doctor, maybe some people who know some things you can’t be bothered to memorize but are useful to have around. Some of those people come in real handy when it’s time to make Int checks. (“Id be most interested to hear your thoughts on these injuries, Dr. Watson.”) Maybe you or your contacts have access to one or two pretty decent divination spells that they learned to use really effectively. Maybe you disguise yourself really well and gain access to places other investigators don’t. (Holmes does all this, except the divination spells).
Maybe that adventurer can solve all kinds of mysteries without relying on Int (investigation). They see the same evidence everyone else sees, but they also think laterally, talk to people everyone else ignores, spend the money and time to chase down rumors, and ferret out feelings and motives that aren’t just surface; they imagine possibilities. And THAT is the INT 5 Sherlock Holmes.
It’s not that Sherlock Holmes has 5 Int. It’s that you could be an Int 5 detective by doing the things Holmes does. You could have, as the thread suggests, a weird interpretation of a low ability score.
Side note re Abduction vs Deduction: I think Will Graham (from Red Dragon) does the same kind of thing. He’s not making deductions, he’s empathizing with the murderers. Kind of mentally reconstructing the meaning of their actions to understand their behavior and thereby predict their next moves. And he asks Hannibal Lecter to help him understand Dolarhyde, in particular. The forensics and evidence go only so far before they need to get into the psyche, the meaning, of Dolarhyde’s actions. Anyway, that doesn’t strike me as an INT check in any way.
