Ever heard of Krusk, your typical D&D barbarian? He's got 8 Int (Enemies and Allies, page 57). Half-orcs have 8 Int as a race average. So as a race they're generally clinical idiots.Shardthepious wrote:i consider Forest Gump to be a INT 8 person
Your typical Human Soldier Sergeant (Heroes of Battle, page 142) has 8 Int. So human troops have Forest Gumps for Sergeants.
It gets better. A few pages later we see the sergeant gained a few levels and became a Human Soldier Colonel (HB, page 144), who has 8 Int too. So human troops have idiot senior officers as well. I've been in the army, but I didn't know *that*.
Have you EVER played PnP D&D? You know, the one where you roll dice to find out what your character statistics will be? With D&D's standard method for ability score generation (4d6, discard lowest die) there's 48.5% probability to have at least one score of 8 or lower, and 16.5% probability to have at least 2 scores of 8 or lower. Generally lowest stats end up in Cha and Int, because rulewise those are the least damaging abilities for a character to have at low values. So, let' see... D&D's default character generation will produce clinical idiots around 25% of the time. Do you think this was it's authors' intent - to have pathological morons for a quarter of the hero population? You can bet your Ring of Three Wishes it wasn't, and if you're interpreting the rules in a way that makes it appear so, you're interpreting them wrong.
What if I want to make a character that's only slightly stupid? From what you seem to think, I'd have to make him with like 9.63 Int, because that's where I want him to stand between Forest Gump (8 Int) and your random passer-by with average Int. You're robbing me of possibilities here.
And what if I get unlucky and roll 3 or 4? This happened to two of my friends in our last PnP campaign. In the D&D FAQ there's a pretty specific explanation what Int 3 means.
So, we have the just described retard at 3 int, a normal human being at 10 and Forest Gump at 8 Int... Do you notice anything wrong with that? Why's the scale exponential and not linear? Why shouldn't 6 Int, as the halfway point between 3 and 10, not describe a character with a vocabulary of at least 1000 everyday words, with passable grammar (sorry if I'm disappointing, but "My crush yoo" is reserved to 3-4 Int), who can add and subtract numbers up to at least 100, *not* drool or piss in his pants, and even understand what the word "complimentary" actually means? Now if you take that 6 Int person and compare it to your typical 8 Int army sergeant, I'd say that the mental abilities I just described are a bit of an understatement really.Q: I’d like to know just how intelligent a human character
with an Intelligence score of 3 is. What is the character’s
approximate IQ? Is the character considered mentally
handicapped or just slow? Can he carry a normal
conversation or does he have problems speaking?
A: A character with an Intelligence score of 3 is smarter that
most animals, but only barely. Any creature with an
Intelligence score of 3 or higher can understand at least one
language (see page 7 in the Monster Manual). A human with an
Intelligence score of 3 can speak Common but doesn’t have a
good vocabulary (perhaps a few hundred one- and two-syllable
words), and the character doesn’t have a good grasp of syntax
and grammar. The character speaks and understands only
simple subject-verb sentences and probably has problems with
things such as past and future tense.
Intelligence also affects memory and reasoning, so the
example character doesn’t have much of a head for facts, and
the character is not very good at arithmetic.
Ten points of IQ per point of Intelligence is a good rule of
thumb, so your example character has an IQ of about 30. How
others perceive and treat the example character depends on
social conditions in the campaign. Most cultures in a D&D
world are pretty tolerant—they have to be just so they can get
along in a place that contains the wide variety of creatures that
inhabit most D&D worlds. In such cultures, terms such as
“dull” and “slow” probably don’t get much use, at least in
respect to a person’s mental capacity. When your own
Intelligence is about average (10) you’re “slow” compared to a
dragon, beholder, mind flayer, or other creature that might live
right next door or lurk beyond the next valley. Still, elitism and
a sense of superiority can exist just about anywhere.
It is a good bet, however, that the example characters’
associates, relatives, and neighbors know the character’s mental
limitations, and that they adjust their expectations for that
character accordingly.
Please stop looking at things from the narrow field of view of NWN, where the all-time lowest stat of a char can be 6 and where you use point buy to generate abilities. If you had to roll dice and didn't really have a *choice* on the exact numbers, your attitude would be a lot different. You're overreacting on your min-maxing concerns. However, the meaning of the statistic Int is defined in the context of D&D, not point buy, cookie-cutter-char-producing NWN.
Get a grip, people.
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