How do you play low Intelligence and Wisdom?

[dicebro]

Sept 17, 2019 8:16:07 GMT -6 DungeonDevil said:

Rush into situations of extreme peril without thought.
Talk loudly when the party is trying to be stealthy.
Always argue with party-members needlessly.
Ignore traps.
Moon hungry dragons.

And then get “disappeared” by surviving party members?

[Punkrabbitt]

I once played a Droyne in Traveller, an intelligence of 3 (on a 2-12 scale.) I figured she was probably highly competent in the things she knew (skills, Droyne culture) but at an absolute loss for what was going on around her in human society. Things like "all humans look the same" and language problems... it was quite a roleplaying challenge trying to view everything through her eyes.

[Desparil]

Sept 17, 2019 7:10:34 GMT -6 dicebro said:

Sept 16, 2019 20:24:00 GMT -6 Desparil said:

You keep coming up with "moron" when I gave all kinds of reasons why a low score, even when equated to IQ, does not mean "moron"

I’m sorry, I meant to ask why someone would want to role play a dumb character.  It doesn’t make sense to me, honestly. 

In my experience, a fair amount of people find it fun to play a character with a juvenile or childlike personality. Or they'll want to play low wisdom and be a drunk or a stoner. Often it's as a break from their usual serious and professional character, but a few people prefer this as their usual type of character. I've had one player take a low intelligence because he was tired of being pigeon-holed as de facto party leader as the rest of the players invariably looked to him to be the rational and well-prepared one, so he took an in-character route to making himself a poor candidate.

[delta]

I recommend against the "match the curves" theory. Essay on my website (2005).

[strangebrew]

[Desparil]

Sept 17, 2019 18:26:05 GMT -6 delta said:

I recommend against the "match the curves" theory. Essay on my website (2005).

Oh see, you extrapolated that way further than I ever considered doing.

My interpretation was that anyone in the top half-percent (technically 0.46% on the 3d6 distribution, but close enough) has an 18, and 19 is only attainable through magical means or for inherently supernatural creatures. Most IQ scales have their highest category as either "130 and above" or "140 and above," and in general scores over 160 are great for the Guinness Book of World Records but aren't viewed as having much diagnostic value above and beyond any other score in the top category. Some scales don't even include numbers higher than 160 on the scale, and simply record a maximum of 160 IQ. In fact, the "140 or higher" lines up very closely with an 18, being the top 0.383% of the normal curve. If you wanted to get OCD about it you could have a percentile roll like what Greyhawk added for strength, but I don't see any need for such a thing - I think it's at the perfect level of granularity to "match the curves," but with no extrapolation beyond 3 or 18.

[hamurai]

INT for my group is closer to education than IQ (Traveller was my inspiration there). A 3 means you've never been educated (or failed to learn) in anything apart from what was absolutely necessary in the place you lived. Maybe you even tried to learn the basics of a trade. An 18 means you've spent years learning from teachers and/or books and/or you have a talent for remembering information like this. That said, some of my one-shot players still like to play a low-INT characters as loud-mouthed idiots, but I guess you get those with high-INT people too

Similarly, a low WIS doesn't mean you're a weak-willed, near-blind person. My elf character has a low WIS and I play him as being constantly either day-dreaming or distracted by something he sees, while - when asked - he claims to be distracted by whispers and images from the fairy realm to which he has special ties. Our low-WIS FM played him as near-sighted. Just some examples.

[Punkrabbitt]

hamurai, replacing IQ with EDU is a special kind of brilliant. Thank you for the suggestion!

[hamurai]

You're most welcome!

If you want to include a sort of intelligence (as far as learning ability goes) in the game, you might refer to the XP Bonus for that. There is a sort of body intelligence (learning moves and stuff like that) as well as cognitive intelligence (understanding, logic, etc.), which explains why FM with high STR get their XP Bonus (= body intelligence) as well as Clerics and MUs, who are mainly on the side of cognitive intelligence.

[dicebro]

Most of the people I play with aren’t into “acting” out the characters during a game. I tell them that the low numbers don’t mean much, other than what’s printed in the books. That way they can focus more on what their characters actually do in the game without worrying about their acting skills. I haven’t had the opportunity to play with Thespians and voice actors. Besides, it comes off as kind of weird when the player tries to act like a low intelligence dwarf with a horrible Scottish accent. The int score is just a number that indicates how many languages your pc can speak, in OD&D that is.

[Starbeard]

I can't say for certain with everyone here, but having chatted about play style enough, I'm sure most if not all of the people on this thread don't really 'act' as their characters either. The roleplaying their talking about is a self-imposed limit on what information you allow yourself to use when making decisions for that character. You may prefer staying outside the huge chamber with the blue dragon lounging in the back, but you declare that your shortsighted character steps in to investigate because, well, he can't see the dragon. Playing dumb doesn't mean speaking first-person with a bad Scottish accent, it simply means playing dumb in the same way you'd play dumb in a game of Monopoly or Clue. There's some banter back and forth between the players (as players), cracking jokes about obvious misinterpretations of the situation; then you direct your playing piece as normal and move on, possibly but not necessarily enforcing the humorous misinterpretation.

I also tend to explain Intelligence to my players as education rather than quickness of reasoning. It helps with the 'Would I know' questions. I sometimes go even further and rule that the education is within the purview of the character's class. A fighter can be expected to have greater learned knowledge as a naturalist than as a historian, for example. It doesn't always equate to education in play, but the fuzzy boundaries have never caused a problem, since it's just a mechanical device to determine success of actions that can't already be solved merely by a player-DM debate.

[Desparil]

See, I've never liked equating these things to education or skill, because that inevitably leads to the question "How come characters improve their scores?" I prefer ability scores to be your inborn characteristics, which squares much better with the fact that it takes a wish or equivalently powerful magic to raise them. I've come to dislike the Greyhawk strength percentiles for this reason; setting them based on weightlifting amounts as Gygax did carries a strong implication that the top-end scores are attained through training.

I rather view character level as a proxy for education and skill; a wizard's levels are his education and skill at leveraging his intelligence, a fighter's levels are his skill at utilizing his strength to its greatest effect, and so on and so forth.

[Starbeard]

Sept 18, 2019 11:47:30 GMT -6 Desparil said:

See, I've never liked equating these things to education or skill, because that inevitably leads to the question "How come characters improve their scores?" I prefer ability scores to be your inborn characteristics, which squares much better with the fact that it takes a wish or equivalently powerful magic to raise them. I've come to dislike the Greyhawk strength percentiles for this reason; setting them based on weightlifting amounts as Gygax did carries a strong implication that the top-end scores are attained through training.

I rather view character level as a proxy for education and skill; a wizard's levels are his education and skill at leveraging his intelligence, a fighter's levels are his skill at utilizing his strength to its greatest effect, and so on and so forth.

Those are some good points. I guess my response is that I see the scores as being static only because of the time scale of most games. I'm happy to negotiate the chances of a score increase for a character who, for example, puts away adventuring for an entire year or two to attend the university (and pays out of pocket to do so), but then that character is also not adventuring for a very long time. I figure without fast-tracking through magical means, one's scores are assumed static because they have stopped devoting their time to stat increase and are now adventuring. "If you really want to bump your Strength from 12 to 13, you could do so but you'll effectively be taking a year out of the game to do it—by the way, how are you providing for yourself in that time?"

However, in reality very few of my players want to take that long term approach, so it rarely happens and we're back to the same problems you address. In the end, I just don't give it much thought and encourage my players not to give it much thought either. We test Intelligence if it seems like an adequate idea at the time, and that's about it.

[eotb]

Like some others have said, it's how the player wants to handle it. I don't mandate playing dumb, or even encourage it. However, if a player wants to roleplay that they they must realize that the game world doesn't have a soft spot for imbeciles, so taking on that role gets no DM leniency.  Just like shields will be splintered, idiots will be darwined.

[Scott Anderson]

Currently: don’t worry about it. If it’s a wizard or cleric assign the XP penalty. Of course checking for success against them will be harder. I do 1d6 checks with +-1 or even 2 for circumstance and stats. So a 3 WIS and 6 WIS are functionally the same.

[Fearghus]

I learned to not view the scores in the original version of the game as the spread of the entire population. A 3 strength is not an enfeebled old man or a small child. A 3 strength can shoulder 1500 coins of encumbrance just like an 18: its just that the 18 is given consideration over the 3 in matters of strength.

So taking the same view of intelligence and wisdom, it does not mean the character is simple. The simple are not even scored with intelligence and wisdom, the same as an enfeebled old man or a child is not scored with strength. Because they are not suitable for adventure and their scores do not matter. Now with regard to experience, the low intelligence and wisdom character might level a little slower. So in RP terms they need to make mistakes on their own, or make mistakes twice, but they can still do everything the higher scores can do.

And then of course we roll into AD&D and later editions where the 3-18 is meant to represent the entirety of the population.

[Scott Anderson]

Fearghus is on to it: a 3 is not the minimum human ability but rather the minimum requirement to be an adventurous type. Wisdom of 3 is not foolish. An int of 3 is not a complete idiot. They’re just not as polished and clever as the int 13 and wis 13 guys.

[hamurai]

If we indeed need a physical stat (STR, DEX, CON) for NPCs I usually just roll a d6 or a d4. So a score of 3 in these would be about equal to an average of the population.

[Starbeard]

That's where BX makes a huge change with the standardized modifiers. AD&D's spread already represents the whole of human potential, but at least the modifiers are uneven, and PCs get to roll better than average dice and pick where they go because they're assumed to be of gentle stock and primed for adventuring.

In BX you still roll 3d6 down the line just like OD&D, but getting a 3 in any physical ability basically bars you from surviving combat. A -3 in Wisdom basically guarantees failure against spell saves. I don't think anywhere in the books is it said that all characters have 6 abilities rated 3-18 regardless of whether they're actually adventurers, but
the modifiers range makes it seem so. That means that adventurers are quite literally Average Joes, indistinguishable from non-adventuring NPCs in terms of ability scores. I rather like the BX standard modifiers, but it gives a very different feel of what the scores mean.

[Desparil]

Sept 19, 2019 22:28:29 GMT -6 Starbeard said:

AD&D's spread already represents the whole of human potential, but at least the modifiers are uneven, and PCs get to roll better than average dice and pick where they go because they're assumed to be of gentle stock and primed for adventuring.

This is where my head's always been at since AD&D is what I started with. Normal people roll 3d6, adventurers roll 4d6 drop lowest. As I mentioned before, the lowest I've ever seen was a 5, and that character had all other scores at 9 or higher. I enjoy the prospect of the odds favoring PCs who are notably above-average in a couple of areas, and mostly average in the rest - but leaving the possibility for real deficiencies.

Part of what makes so many Dying Earth characters so amusing is their appalling lack of wisdom and foresight, and Elric's frailty when not being bolstered by Stormbringer is major part of his character. Wolverine is an extremely uncharismatic character in-universe, being grumpy and disagreeable and not much interested in leadership, but is quite possibly the most popular X-Man of them all. And frankly, one or two bad scores doesn't doom a character even if you apply some penalties like AD&D does - as long as the character is played skillfully and has decent scores in the areas that are important to the chosen character class. In the end, it's only the very highest-level spells that are locked behind extremely high ability scores, and meanwhile the fighters and thieves adapt and overcome, starting to score hits on a 2 or succeed at lockpicking 90% of the time simply by dint of level. And in extremis, they can "fake it 'til they make it" since the standard, by-the-book random treasure tables include gauntlets of ogre power or dexterity.

[dicebro]

In the 3 little books, I have noticed that very little text is devoted to “intelligence”. Other than character creation, “intelligence” only seems to be relevant to magical swords and helms of telepathy. It wasn’t until much later that Gary Gygax came up with the proposition that the Intelligence score was equal to “IQ”. And so what, even if he did it doesn’t matter because referees will run their games however bloody well they see fit. Heh.

I rather enjoy the original definition on page 10 of Men & Magic: “Intelligence is the prime requisite for magical types. Both fighters and Clerics can use it in their prime requisite areas (strength and wisdom respectively) on a 2 for 1 basis. Intelligence will also affect referees’ decisions as to whether or not certain action would be taken, and it allows additional languages to be spoken.”

So the score “will affect referee’s decisions about whether or not certain action would be taken.” No need to worry about IQ equivalency. If a player with a character that has a 3 intelligence tells the referee that his character attempts to take a certain action, then the referee can choose to prohibit the action after considering the Intelligence score. That’s it. Easy. The referee decides.

[Porphyre]

Speech patterns is the whole extent of my "role-playing stupid": a 3 INT character is illiterate, and utters in "hulk'speak."
A low Wisdom character would speak like someone with ADD (the medical condition, not the advanced edition , of course!) I also once played a low Wisdom-cleric like a mouth-foaming fanatic, always cursing and invoking over the most trivial subjects.

I however never indulged in deliberately acting "chaotic stupid" for the sake of role-playing. It's counter-productive and impairs everyone's fun after a while.
I like to think that the stupid/foolish character has some sort of "guardian angel" (i-e: I the player) who acts as his luck and prevents him from making the worst decisions

[scalydemon]

A certain Buck Owens song comes to mind

[countingwizard]

I look at OD&D as more of an adventure game with some roleplay thrown in for entertainment. If a player wants to roleplay, that's fine as long as it doesn't annoy the group or punish the group. A low int score would imply inability to read or write as a hard-rule mechanic, and a low wisdom would mean the same thing if the player was a cleric, but otherwise have no mechanical effect unless there was a specific ability check (which is possible during play, but not frequent).

Mostly, negative stats are just a way for players to riff and make jokes; as they should be. Players shouldn't feel so punished that they want to discard the character.

[talysman]

Odd, I wasn't involved with this thread on its first run...

Players can "play dumb" or "play foolish" if they want, but I don't see Int or Wis as absolute measurements of mental capacity. I see them as relative comparisons within a given range. Int 3 humans are going to be a little slow on the uptake compared to Int 10, and much slower than Int 18, but none of them are forbidden to be literate (I mean, they can be M-Us with spellbooks, so how could they be illiterate?) And it's not the same as being a "moron", which is more in keeping with Confusion and Feeblemind spells. Lower primates are measured on a different scale, so an Int 18 monkey is almost but not quite as smart as an Int 3 human. And non-primate animals are on still another scale.

(I do the same thing with Strength. A Strength 18 human is not quite as strong as a Strength 3 giant. Not without a Gauntlet of Giant Strength, at least.)

I mostly treat Int/Wis scores as speed ratings. If two characters are trying to figure something out, the Int 18 character will figure it out quicker than the Int 3 character unless the second character is very unlucky... but both can figure it out.

I feel justified in treating the scores this way because the bonus/penalty for abilities that have them is barely anything. +/-1. If a Dex 3 archer only misses an extra 5% of the time and even a Charisma 3 character can still have 1 special follower and infinite men-at-arms in their employ, any penalty for Int 3 or Wis 3 should be equally minor.

I also don't use the language bonus as "max languages" but as "starting languages". There are/were real life people who know/knew way more than the number of languages you'd get with Int 18. So, I have no cap on number of languages learnable. I just adjust the speed of learning.

[Vile Traveller]

I mostly treat ability scores as character flavour (other than the modifiers stated in the rules, that is). If a player can bring them into the role-play in a fun way it's a bonus, but they primarily make it easy for players and the referee to visualise a character. This really clicked for me when I was designing a percentile skill-based system with no ability-based modifiers, and started wondering about the need for ability scores at all. After a bit of play testing I concluded that even with no obvious* mechanical effect, ability scores made it much easier for players to relate to their characters.

* Ability scores do have a purpose in determining beginning characters' pools of points to spend on different skills, but in actual play there are no modifiers for combat, etc.

[howandwhy99]

I agree with countingwizard. These are Ability Scores for playing an adventure game, not attributes meant to be to expressed. As long as it doesn't interfere with other players who are gaming it is a player prerogative.

[Deleted]

This post over at The Disoriented Ranger is on topic at hand.

[Algolei]

I play "dumb" characters. It's fun! It's like all those comic strips out there where "the dumb guy" keeps getting the wrong end of the stick, misunderstanding things and screwing up in ways most people wouldn't predict. Not only can it be challenging to be "dumb", it's also usually good for a laugh.

For instance, in one game from long ago, another player whose character had a low Charisma gave money to my high-Charisma (but dumb as a rock) character to go into town and buy some horses. His plan was to take the horses to another city and sell them at a profit. He expected that my character could get a good deal, since I was knowledgable about horses and very good at talking to people. But instead, I played the character in such a way that I didn't bother to barter for them -- he just gave the horse dealer all the money and said, "Give me some horses!" My character knew enough not to accept old nags and broken-down crowbait, so he did come back with nice mounts, but he didn't get a good deal.

[dicebro]

It’s probably useful for everyone to know up front if players will be expected to act out Character Attributes or not. Also whether a low roll equates to some kind of weakness in the game. In Od&d a low strength only gives fighters a deduction on XP. So I don’t treat the so called “Strength” number as anything other than that.  Same goes for Int and Wis.  The problem I have is when players assume they must act dumber than they actually are. They certainly can’t act smarter or wiser than they actually are, so why require the opposites?