Gamers often discuss the idea of "player skill" vs "character skill" in games. That is: my wizard can speak Elvish--that's character skill--but my wizard knowing that a slow, tough monster with no distance attacks is best attacked with distance attacks is player skill. I know that so my wizard knows it.
In most games I like, what my wizard does is the result of both.
Some people don't understand how the Intelligence stat works in games where player skill is an element (since an intelligent player can add so much to the character's vocabulary of ideas) and I thought of this the other day:
A high-intelligence PC functions like a modern person who has a phone with internet and remembers to use it.
Do I know who Jonathan Livingston Seagal is? I do not, really. I remember the name, that's all. In fact I got his name wrong. But if I had a higher Int I might not have. But I have the internet so I can look him up and then know. A high Int PC would have a better chance of already knowing.
A high Int PC has facts at their disposal.
As we know: not everyone who has the internet and uses it is actually smart. For example, just because they can all google what a logical fallacy is doesn't mean that they'll avoid using them in their own thinking. The person "playing" these people isn't smart, even though they have the information.
A high-Int PC played by an average-Int player player is like most people on the internet: lots of access to facts, very little ability to use them to figure things out.
An average-Int character played by a high-Int player is like a clever person on an alien planet--they can figure stuff out, but only if they get help with what everything they're looking at is, does, or why they'd want to do it.
So there you go.
11 comments:
Nice analogies.
What about player/character wisdom?
In our homebrew system, Intelligence represents knowledge of the game universe (so, it’s different from being smart) and wisdom was replaced by faith. Concerning charisma, if the player has a good roleplay in his speech, he succeeds automatically. If not, he can still roll the dice (high charisma means second chance)
INT as in world knowledge is a good analogy, but it does require an active constant effort from players who roll low INT stats to seperate their knowledge from the PC's. That's where a new setting and/ or non standard monsters come in handy
this doesn't "resolve" player vs char skill gap but can at least somewhat reconcile the two. i too, in fact prefet to treat int as simple "availability of facts" or even cognitive capability as in "you can do math really fast".
Intelligence is such a problematic attribute for the reasons you describe. Your solution is interesting for a further reflections, I think. In LotFP (RAW), Intelligence is equal to knowledge at the start of play, but it never states what happen to the score if the character learn knew things across the campaign. Finally, I ignore the stat as a "roleplayable" trait, and just use it mechanically.
I always struggle with this. I know it, but does my character?
Yeah I couldn’t agree more. Access to the internet doesn’t make you smart if you have no idea of how to utilize the information in a cohesive manner. Although, some information can be questionable.
My online gaming group are high intelligence players who love to play dumb characters….or so they tell me. 😅
In the situation where a high-Int PC is played by an average-Int player and make sub-optimal decisions, is this a place where the DM should put their finger on the scale? E.g. You would know that this is a Ghoul and it can x?
@D&D bard life
Knowing what a ghoul is (in D&D) isn't critical thinking, it's knowledge from a specific niche source (the monster manual).
So if the PC would know about ghouls (for some reason?) but the player does not I would tell them.
I would refuse to do critical thinking for them--but if its world info then the whole point of Int is that PCs know it.
StoneDev said this, which I accidentally deleted:
"I think more people need to relax their concern about this. People worrying about it seem to always project some negative situation on how they have to pretend to be dumb or something silly."
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