You are right. That's what I mean by wording the original post poorly.
I thought people would generally agree that a 22 int is extremely rare and obviously a huge deal. I didn't really seek validation for that, but I did kind of think of it as self-evident.
This I was already fixed on, so I didn't really look for a take on that. I had already decided that the character is a super genius as is anyone with an intelligence or wisdom score of 22. Even 20 is a genius in my book. But there are many ways for one to be a genius. Like I think a high wisdom score could be interpreted as genius level instinctive deduction, like Sherlock Holmes accurately reading a murder scene in two seconds.
What I was looking for, was concrete ways to make these differences more visible throughout the setting - pretty much the opposite of having an extra +1 on skill checks. Like what kind of things could set apart the highest intelligence score individuals from others. Just brainstorming and spitballing.
But the thread took a quick turn, which is entirely my own fault. I should have been more clear with the purpose of this thread.
You are right. That's what I mean by wording the original post poorly.
I thought people would generally agree that a 22 int is extremely rare and obviously a huge deal.
We do, but we also think that a 20 int is also extremely rare and obviously a huge deal. It's considerably more common among player characters, but the character with 20 intelligence is already a genius. From the perspective of an average NPC with a 10 int, telling the difference between two wizards with 20 and 22 int would be difficult because the 20 int character is already talking about stuff they can't comprehend. That's where the disagreement seems to be.
The problem here, SerLoxy, is that you are asking on a public forum of average INT geeks for an answer to a question that is beyond how average INT geeks think. If you want higher than 20 INT to have a significant impact on your game lore, I suggest reading the biographies of unusually bright people as written by people in their respective fields. For instance, try to find a book about Richard Feynman by a fellow physicist. Or a book about Rosalind Franklin by a fellow molecular biologist. If that is too difficult to find, consider journalists who have written books about such people.
Also, it would be worthwhile to consider the fact that Intelligence in and of itself is only as useful as the resources of the person with said high Intelligence. So what other stats does this person have? High Charisma? High Wisdom? High Dexterity? Is this a character born in riches or poverty? Is this person inclined to be part of the establishment or to rebel against it? Answering all of these questions will help you shape the direction that you want to take for the lore since they all have a big impact on How such a person would choose to use their unusual capacity for thinking about their life and their goals.
The "mind stats" are always a minefield in D&D. I usually treat INT as other game systems may refer it to as KNOW. If you look at how INT functions in the game, they're all about maintaining information they've been exposed to, even investigation implies not so much creativity as an application of methodologies. Because "intelligence" IRL is hard to pin down and means different things depending on what field or even ideology you're operating in, I wouldn't really do more with INT beyond profess it as a measure of "book smarts". For a Feynman, or an Einstein or what have you, to have the intuition paired with the book learning, you'd also need a beyond 18 WIS, and I'd throw in a a high CHR (the "WILL" CHR not the "charming" CHR) to account for the perseverance to realize and see one's work through. So a "genius" would need a trifecta of high stats.
All that said, how to RP a super INT? It's easier to do when you realize you don't have any pressure to "play smarter" any more than you'd have to play more dexterously (you never cock a die) or with more strength (you use one of those jumbo d20s made of iron) if you had high physical stats. The game gives you opportunities to mechanically demonstrate how high INT the character is. You just need to wrap a personality around that mechanic.
Let's take Professor X from the X men and his varied portrayals. Yes, in the comics, his mind has become so vast that he's definitely in the deep end of weird. But look at Patrick Stewart's portrayal. All he has learned from his studies, both books and the minds of others, has made him an incredibly generous and empathetic soul. He's kind. Dial that back to a younger iteration of him played by James McEvoy and you got the same stat more or less, but tempered with a lot more arrogance, and a bit of skepticism in himself. Magneto of course would be an antithesis example of Professor X, and consistently so ... everything he's learned through experience and study leaves him disgusted with the bulk of humanity, and that feeling is exacerbated by the arguably not wrong conviction that they're stupider than him. So key take away here is decide how this great intellect effects the characters outlook toward other sentients in their civilization. Is he generous, arrogant, demanding/entitled, afraid?
With that general demeanor developed, the next step would be to figure out how the character puts their intelligence into practice. Do they demand center stage and command attention when faced with a situation governed by their areas of expertise (or technically, proficiency unless you're doing the super INT Bard or Rogue thing at the expense of your default core stat)? Do they instead observe from the sidelines, witnessing whether their hypothesis as to how things should unfold hold true or whether there is something new to learn here? Do they know when to stop talking or do they over talk?
Personalities are too diverse, even among the highly or super intelligence, for a stat number dictate a character be played a certain way. That said, it's clear a 22 INT is a key feature of this character, so it's probably smart, so to speak, to figure out how that stat plays out in role play. Hope these pointers help.
I think "how to play high INT or high WIS or high CHR" characters trended among D&D YouTube a few months back, I remember Ginny Di did a few, and I'm pretty sure others in that space were aboard the trend as well. So there's guidance out there beyond this forum.
One last thing: since INT is so tied to information retention and management, it's common for players of 3d6 games to claim something like eidetic/photographic memory if you're beyond the high end of the curve. That's fair, but that also treads on the Keen Mind feat. As a DM I don't think I'd simply grant a feat to a character just for excelling in the stat (that's like a reward for a reward and by rules guidelines effectively a double ASI), but I'd welcome the character to use their INT to check for a sense of direction if they were lost or what not, or trying to recall info/clues laid out in the game.
Yeah, this is the age old dilemma on DnD. I usually allow my players to play these mental stats very liberally and I do the same too. I had a monk/ranger with 8 int and 18 wisdom paired with all sorts of perception and deduction features. The character was really smart and quick to figure things out on the fly. He was a reborn who died 60-something years ago and ever since spent 90% of his time in the wilderness. He had very little memory of his previous life. He didn't like towns, because his undead nature and smell of death always drew unwanted problems even with a hood on. So he only went there if needed. Because of that, he never managed to gather much knowledge. He couldn't read, he didn't know etiquette. He was a wicked smart wildling. His Insight was amazing, he had expertise on Investigation. He had the Alert feat and as a Ranger he never got lost etc.
So it was more than alright to portray him as smart despite that low int. :) And if a player has low mental stats, I still allow them to play at their own intellectual capacity if they want to. Dumbing down often results in metagaming that only slows things down. So I generally suggest that their low mental score must affect the character visibly, but they don't have to be stupid. They can figure out the puzzles in the game with the rest of the group without having to withhold information.
Another example. I played a barbarian with very low int and quite low wis too. We had a picture puzzle that I figured out. I played the reason for figuring it out quickly as "hey these look like the pictures on our totems..."
Like you said, the mental stats intertwine quite a bit. I think they are almost arbitrary as Attributes. BTW this is why I enjoy the variant rule of using different stats for skill checks. Like a Wisdom Investigation check. As long as you can describe how you use Wisdom for Investigation.
A Da Vinci, or Machiavelli, Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty, in General, People that are far ahead of their time.
Yup. I don't personally think that it's difficult to play a genius. You just pick some features that you can easily describe in action. Like Sherlock's deduction skills aren't very difficult to describe.
The "mind stats" are always a minefield in D&D. I usually treat INT as other game systems may refer it to as KNOW. If you look at how INT functions in the game, they're all about maintaining information they've been exposed to, even investigation implies not so much creativity as an application of methodologies. Because "intelligence" IRL is hard to pin down and means different things depending on what field or even ideology you're operating in, I wouldn't really do more with INT beyond profess it as a measure of "book smarts". For a Feynman, or an Einstein or what have you, to have the intuition paired with the book learning, you'd also need a beyond 18 WIS, and I'd throw in a a high CHR (the "WILL" CHR not the "charming" CHR) to account for the perseverance to realize and see one's work through. So a "genius" would need a trifecta of high stats.
All that said, how to RP a super INT? It's easier to do when you realize you don't have any pressure to "play smarter" any more than you'd have to play more dexterously (you never cock a die) or with more strength (you use one of those jumbo d20s made of iron) if you had high physical stats. The game gives you opportunities to mechanically demonstrate how high INT the character is. You just need to wrap a personality around that mechanic.
Let's take Professor X from the X men and his varied portrayals. Yes, in the comics, his mind has become so vast that he's definitely in the deep end of weird. But look at Patrick Stewart's portrayal. All he has learned from his studies, both books and the minds of others, has made him an incredibly generous and empathetic soul. He's kind. Dial that back to a younger iteration of him played by James McEvoy and you got the same stat more or less, but tempered with a lot more arrogance, and a bit of skepticism in himself. Magneto of course would be an antithesis example of Professor X, and consistently so ... everything he's learned through experience and study leaves him disgusted with the bulk of humanity, and that feeling is exacerbated by the arguably not wrong conviction that they're stupider than him. So key take away here is decide how this great intellect effects the characters outlook toward other sentients in their civilization. Is he generous, arrogant, demanding/entitled, afraid?
Personalities are too diverse, even among the highly or super intelligence, for a stat number dictate a character be played a certain way. That said, it's clear a 22 INT is a key feature of this character, so it's probably smart, so to speak, to figure out how that stat plays out in role play. Hope these pointers help.
There is a substantial issue if you decide to go with fictional character from genre fiction like detective fiction or superhero comics that has bearing on how they use their Intelligence. It's a potential problem or not a problem at all, depending on the kind of story you are telling.
Back when one of the Chris Nolan Batman movies were coming out, an anthropologist by the name of David Graeber made an astute observation*: The heroes almost always react to problems. They have no larger vision of improving the world other than through the invention of more ever-more advanced weaponry and occasional charity contributions. Despite being the altruistic representatives of Good, superheroes keep the world in the same cognitive-emotional state by reseting it back to the status quo of what came before The Threat, almost always by a supervillain. Superheroes, including the "genius" ones, keep puttering around the world doing very little good for the world at large Unless that threat is from a supervillain.
Why does crime never really go down in Gotham City despite the Bruce Wayne’s charity and the crime fighting efforts of Batman? Why is Charles Xavier, despite being a telepath and a supposed genius, so ineffective at decreasing the stigma about being a mutant, not only in the United States, but in any area of the world?
This is in part because genre fiction like detective stories and superhero narratives are generally of an episodic nature. You often don't need to know WTF happened in the previous mystery or story arc of the comic book series to understand what is happening in this one. As such, after solving this particular mystery or beating up that particular villain, the world gets pretty much rebooted back to the default. This is even more true in movies than TV shows due to the desire for mass appeal and accessibility. Wash, rinse, repeat, IOW, is good for viewership numbers. But, as Graeber states, supervillains generally have far more potential to alter the world, for better or worse, than the heroes do: “in fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination…The villains, in contrast, are relentlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas.”
Another part of the problem is that the genre known as superhero fiction generally cannot tolerate asking the question of “What are the world’s problems that exist and would continue to exist once all the supervillains have been stopped?” Therefore, in the case of Batman, the problem of crime and corruption in Gotham City is always centered on the supervillains, mobsters, and petty thieves; not on the systemic problems in Gotham’s electoral system or why so many supervillains show up in Gotham City in the first place (hint: part of it is because Batman exists). In the case of X-Men, the only “solution” that the mutants have found is to segregate themselves from larger society, whether that means living in the sewers - as the Morlocks did - or to settle on a separate island. So despite Charles Xavier being supposedly super smart and having one of the most powerful computers in the world at his hands/head, he is mostly powerless to do anything effective about the threat posed by the normal humans. There are no meaningful appeals to the U.N., no attempts at changing mass paranoia through the film, fashion, or journalism, no alliances with alien civilizations to influence the fate of mutantkind on Earth. (Like, didn't Charles sleep with the Queen of the Shi'ar Empire multiple times? Why did he never parley that relationship into something substantively helpful for mutants?)
If superheroes are about “justice," then their ineffectiveness about the actual problems in their spheres of concern is, well, concerning. It is concerning in that supervillains, at least those who profess reasonably good ideas and arguably good intentions (like Magneto and Killmonger) before starting on the murder sprees, are so much better at using their INT score than their "Good" counterparts are. It says something about the psychological limitations of superhero and mystery stories that the world in such fiction never actually improves for the vast majority of people living in them. The implication here for the reader is that "Well, if these super smart people in this story I like can't do anything about problems that don't involve supervillains (i.e. all the world's Real problems), then I can't either." It's little wonder that we live in an age of mass cynicism and mental health problems. It is also concerning that supervillains' initiative to try to solve problems on a global or inter-galactic scale are always somehow shut down by superheroes who demonstrably have no better ideas 99% of the time, even when said superheroes are canonically supposed to be Genius levels of intelligent.
*"Super Position" by David Graeber is found in the book The Utopia of Rules.
The "mind stats" are always a minefield in D&D. I usually treat INT as other game systems may refer it to as KNOW. If you look at how INT functions in the game, they're all about maintaining information they've been exposed to, even investigation implies not so much creativity as an application of methodologies. Because "intelligence" IRL is hard to pin down and means different things depending on what field or even ideology you're operating in, I wouldn't really do more with INT beyond profess it as a measure of "book smarts". For a Feynman, or an Einstein or what have you, to have the intuition paired with the book learning, you'd also need a beyond 18 WIS, and I'd throw in a a high CHR (the "WILL" CHR not the "charming" CHR) to account for the perseverance to realize and see one's work through. So a "genius" would need a trifecta of high stats.
All that said, how to RP a super INT? It's easier to do when you realize you don't have any pressure to "play smarter" any more than you'd have to play more dexterously (you never cock a die) or with more strength (you use one of those jumbo d20s made of iron) if you had high physical stats. The game gives you opportunities to mechanically demonstrate how high INT the character is. You just need to wrap a personality around that mechanic.
Let's take Professor X from the X men and his varied portrayals. Yes, in the comics, his mind has become so vast that he's definitely in the deep end of weird. But look at Patrick Stewart's portrayal. All he has learned from his studies, both books and the minds of others, has made him an incredibly generous and empathetic soul. He's kind. Dial that back to a younger iteration of him played by James McEvoy and you got the same stat more or less, but tempered with a lot more arrogance, and a bit of skepticism in himself. Magneto of course would be an antithesis example of Professor X, and consistently so ... everything he's learned through experience and study leaves him disgusted with the bulk of humanity, and that feeling is exacerbated by the arguably not wrong conviction that they're stupider than him. So key take away here is decide how this great intellect effects the characters outlook toward other sentients in their civilization. Is he generous, arrogant, demanding/entitled, afraid?
Personalities are too diverse, even among the highly or super intelligence, for a stat number dictate a character be played a certain way. That said, it's clear a 22 INT is a key feature of this character, so it's probably smart, so to speak, to figure out how that stat plays out in role play. Hope these pointers help.
There is a substantial issue if you decide to go with fictional character from genre fiction like detective fiction or superhero comics that has bearing on how they use their Intelligence. It's a potential problem or not a problem at all, depending on the kind of story you are telling.
Back when one of the Chris Nolan Batman movies were coming out, an anthropologist by the name of David Graeber made an astute observation*: The heroes almost always react to problems. They have no larger vision of improving the world other than through the invention of more ever-more advanced weaponry and occasional charity contributions. Despite being the altruistic representatives of Good, superheroes keep the world in the same cognitive-emotional state by reseting it back to the status quo of what came before The Threat, almost always by a supervillain. Superheroes, including the "genius" ones, keep puttering around the world doing very little good for the world at large Unless that threat is from a supervillain.
Why does crime never really go down in Gotham City despite the Bruce Wayne’s charity and the crime fighting efforts of Batman? Why is Charles Xavier, despite being a telepath and a supposed genius, so ineffective at decreasing the stigma about being a mutant, not only in the United States, but in any area of the world?
This is in part because genre fiction like detective stories and superhero narratives are generally of an episodic nature. You often don't need to know WTF happened in the previous mystery or story arc of the comic book series to understand what is happening in this one. As such, after solving this particular mystery or beating up that particular villain, the world gets pretty much rebooted back to the default. This is even more true in movies than TV shows due to the desire for mass appeal and accessibility. Wash, rinse, repeat, IOW, is good for viewership numbers. But, as Graeber states, supervillains generally have far more potential to alter the world, for better or worse, than the heroes do: “in fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination…The villains, in contrast, are relentlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas.”
Another part of the problem is that the genre known as superhero fiction generally cannot tolerate asking the question of “What are the world’s problems that exist and would continue to exist once all the supervillains have been stopped?” Therefore, in the case of Batman, the problem of crime and corruption in Gotham City is always centered on the supervillains, mobsters, and petty thieves; not on the systemic problems in Gotham’s electoral system or why so many supervillains show up in Gotham City in the first place (hint: part of it is because Batman exists). In the case of X-Men, the only “solution” that the mutants have found is to segregate themselves from larger society, whether that means living in the sewers - as the Morlocks did - or to settle on a separate island. So despite Charles Xavier being supposedly super smart and having one of the most powerful computers in the world at his hands/head, he is mostly powerless to do anything effective about the threat posed by the normal humans. There are no meaningful appeals to the U.N., no attempts at changing mass paranoia through the film, fashion, or journalism, no alliances with alien civilizations to influence the fate of mutantkind on Earth. (Like, didn't Charles sleep with the Queen of the Shi'ar Empire multiple times? Why did he never parley that relationship into something substantively helpful for mutants?)
If superheroes are about “justice," then their ineffectiveness about the actual problems in their spheres of concern is, well, concerning. It is concerning in that supervillains, at least those who profess reasonably good ideas and arguably good intentions (like Magneto and Killmonger) before starting on the murder sprees, are so much better at using their INT score than their "Good" counterparts are. It says something about the psychological limitations of superhero and mystery stories that the world in such fiction never actually improves for the vast majority of people living in them. The implication here for the reader is that "Well, if these super smart people in this story I like can't do anything about problems that don't involve supervillains (i.e. all the world's Real problems), then I can't either." It's little wonder that we live in an age of mass cynicism and mental health problems. It is also concerning that supervillains' initiative to try to solve problems on a global or inter-galactic scale are always somehow shut down by superheroes who demonstrably have no better ideas 99% of the time, even when said superheroes are canonically supposed to be Genius levels of intelligent.
*"Super Position" by David Graeber is found in the book The Utopia of Rules.
You are right. That's what I mean by wording the original post poorly.
I thought people would generally agree that a 22 int is extremely rare and obviously a huge deal. I didn't really seek validation for that, but I did kind of think of it as self-evident.
This I was already fixed on, so I didn't really look for a take on that. I had already decided that the character is a super genius as is anyone with an intelligence or wisdom score of 22. Even 20 is a genius in my book. But there are many ways for one to be a genius. Like I think a high wisdom score could be interpreted as genius level instinctive deduction, like Sherlock Holmes accurately reading a murder scene in two seconds.
What I was looking for, was concrete ways to make these differences more visible throughout the setting - pretty much the opposite of having an extra +1 on skill checks. Like what kind of things could set apart the highest intelligence score individuals from others. Just brainstorming and spitballing.
But the thread took a quick turn, which is entirely my own fault. I should have been more clear with the purpose of this thread.
Finland GMT/UTC +2
We do, but we also think that a 20 int is also extremely rare and obviously a huge deal. It's considerably more common among player characters, but the character with 20 intelligence is already a genius. From the perspective of an average NPC with a 10 int, telling the difference between two wizards with 20 and 22 int would be difficult because the 20 int character is already talking about stuff they can't comprehend. That's where the disagreement seems to be.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
The problem here, SerLoxy, is that you are asking on a public forum of average INT geeks for an answer to a question that is beyond how average INT geeks think. If you want higher than 20 INT to have a significant impact on your game lore, I suggest reading the biographies of unusually bright people as written by people in their respective fields. For instance, try to find a book about Richard Feynman by a fellow physicist. Or a book about Rosalind Franklin by a fellow molecular biologist. If that is too difficult to find, consider journalists who have written books about such people.
Also, it would be worthwhile to consider the fact that Intelligence in and of itself is only as useful as the resources of the person with said high Intelligence. So what other stats does this person have? High Charisma? High Wisdom? High Dexterity? Is this a character born in riches or poverty? Is this person inclined to be part of the establishment or to rebel against it? Answering all of these questions will help you shape the direction that you want to take for the lore since they all have a big impact on How such a person would choose to use their unusual capacity for thinking about their life and their goals.
The "mind stats" are always a minefield in D&D. I usually treat INT as other game systems may refer it to as KNOW. If you look at how INT functions in the game, they're all about maintaining information they've been exposed to, even investigation implies not so much creativity as an application of methodologies. Because "intelligence" IRL is hard to pin down and means different things depending on what field or even ideology you're operating in, I wouldn't really do more with INT beyond profess it as a measure of "book smarts". For a Feynman, or an Einstein or what have you, to have the intuition paired with the book learning, you'd also need a beyond 18 WIS, and I'd throw in a a high CHR (the "WILL" CHR not the "charming" CHR) to account for the perseverance to realize and see one's work through. So a "genius" would need a trifecta of high stats.
All that said, how to RP a super INT? It's easier to do when you realize you don't have any pressure to "play smarter" any more than you'd have to play more dexterously (you never cock a die) or with more strength (you use one of those jumbo d20s made of iron) if you had high physical stats. The game gives you opportunities to mechanically demonstrate how high INT the character is. You just need to wrap a personality around that mechanic.
Let's take Professor X from the X men and his varied portrayals. Yes, in the comics, his mind has become so vast that he's definitely in the deep end of weird. But look at Patrick Stewart's portrayal. All he has learned from his studies, both books and the minds of others, has made him an incredibly generous and empathetic soul. He's kind. Dial that back to a younger iteration of him played by James McEvoy and you got the same stat more or less, but tempered with a lot more arrogance, and a bit of skepticism in himself. Magneto of course would be an antithesis example of Professor X, and consistently so ... everything he's learned through experience and study leaves him disgusted with the bulk of humanity, and that feeling is exacerbated by the arguably not wrong conviction that they're stupider than him. So key take away here is decide how this great intellect effects the characters outlook toward other sentients in their civilization. Is he generous, arrogant, demanding/entitled, afraid?
With that general demeanor developed, the next step would be to figure out how the character puts their intelligence into practice. Do they demand center stage and command attention when faced with a situation governed by their areas of expertise (or technically, proficiency unless you're doing the super INT Bard or Rogue thing at the expense of your default core stat)? Do they instead observe from the sidelines, witnessing whether their hypothesis as to how things should unfold hold true or whether there is something new to learn here? Do they know when to stop talking or do they over talk?
Personalities are too diverse, even among the highly or super intelligence, for a stat number dictate a character be played a certain way. That said, it's clear a 22 INT is a key feature of this character, so it's probably smart, so to speak, to figure out how that stat plays out in role play. Hope these pointers help.
I think "how to play high INT or high WIS or high CHR" characters trended among D&D YouTube a few months back, I remember Ginny Di did a few, and I'm pretty sure others in that space were aboard the trend as well. So there's guidance out there beyond this forum.
One last thing: since INT is so tied to information retention and management, it's common for players of 3d6 games to claim something like eidetic/photographic memory if you're beyond the high end of the curve. That's fair, but that also treads on the Keen Mind feat. As a DM I don't think I'd simply grant a feat to a character just for excelling in the stat (that's like a reward for a reward and by rules guidelines effectively a double ASI), but I'd welcome the character to use their INT to check for a sense of direction if they were lost or what not, or trying to recall info/clues laid out in the game.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
A Da Vinci, or Machiavelli, Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty, in General, People that are far ahead of their time.
Cheers mate!
Yeah, this is the age old dilemma on DnD. I usually allow my players to play these mental stats very liberally and I do the same too. I had a monk/ranger with 8 int and 18 wisdom paired with all sorts of perception and deduction features. The character was really smart and quick to figure things out on the fly. He was a reborn who died 60-something years ago and ever since spent 90% of his time in the wilderness. He had very little memory of his previous life. He didn't like towns, because his undead nature and smell of death always drew unwanted problems even with a hood on. So he only went there if needed. Because of that, he never managed to gather much knowledge. He couldn't read, he didn't know etiquette. He was a wicked smart wildling. His Insight was amazing, he had expertise on Investigation. He had the Alert feat and as a Ranger he never got lost etc.
So it was more than alright to portray him as smart despite that low int. :) And if a player has low mental stats, I still allow them to play at their own intellectual capacity if they want to. Dumbing down often results in metagaming that only slows things down. So I generally suggest that their low mental score must affect the character visibly, but they don't have to be stupid. They can figure out the puzzles in the game with the rest of the group without having to withhold information.
Another example. I played a barbarian with very low int and quite low wis too. We had a picture puzzle that I figured out. I played the reason for figuring it out quickly as "hey these look like the pictures on our totems..."
Like you said, the mental stats intertwine quite a bit. I think they are almost arbitrary as Attributes. BTW this is why I enjoy the variant rule of using different stats for skill checks. Like a Wisdom Investigation check. As long as you can describe how you use Wisdom for Investigation.
Finland GMT/UTC +2
Yup. I don't personally think that it's difficult to play a genius. You just pick some features that you can easily describe in action. Like Sherlock's deduction skills aren't very difficult to describe.
Finland GMT/UTC +2
There is a substantial issue if you decide to go with fictional character from genre fiction like detective fiction or superhero comics that has bearing on how they use their Intelligence. It's a potential problem or not a problem at all, depending on the kind of story you are telling.
Back when one of the Chris Nolan Batman movies were coming out, an anthropologist by the name of David Graeber made an astute observation*: The heroes almost always react to problems. They have no larger vision of improving the world other than through the invention of more ever-more advanced weaponry and occasional charity contributions. Despite being the altruistic representatives of Good, superheroes keep the world in the same cognitive-emotional state by reseting it back to the status quo of what came before The Threat, almost always by a supervillain. Superheroes, including the "genius" ones, keep puttering around the world doing very little good for the world at large Unless that threat is from a supervillain.
Why does crime never really go down in Gotham City despite the Bruce Wayne’s charity and the crime fighting efforts of Batman? Why is Charles Xavier, despite being a telepath and a supposed genius, so ineffective at decreasing the stigma about being a mutant, not only in the United States, but in any area of the world?
This is in part because genre fiction like detective stories and superhero narratives are generally of an episodic nature. You often don't need to know WTF happened in the previous mystery or story arc of the comic book series to understand what is happening in this one. As such, after solving this particular mystery or beating up that particular villain, the world gets pretty much rebooted back to the default. This is even more true in movies than TV shows due to the desire for mass appeal and accessibility. Wash, rinse, repeat, IOW, is good for viewership numbers. But, as Graeber states, supervillains generally have far more potential to alter the world, for better or worse, than the heroes do: “in fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination…The villains, in contrast, are relentlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas.”
Another part of the problem is that the genre known as superhero fiction generally cannot tolerate asking the question of “What are the world’s problems that exist and would continue to exist once all the supervillains have been stopped?” Therefore, in the case of Batman, the problem of crime and corruption in Gotham City is always centered on the supervillains, mobsters, and petty thieves; not on the systemic problems in Gotham’s electoral system or why so many supervillains show up in Gotham City in the first place (hint: part of it is because Batman exists). In the case of X-Men, the only “solution” that the mutants have found is to segregate themselves from larger society, whether that means living in the sewers - as the Morlocks did - or to settle on a separate island. So despite Charles Xavier being supposedly super smart and having one of the most powerful computers in the world at his hands/head, he is mostly powerless to do anything effective about the threat posed by the normal humans. There are no meaningful appeals to the U.N., no attempts at changing mass paranoia through the film, fashion, or journalism, no alliances with alien civilizations to influence the fate of mutantkind on Earth. (Like, didn't Charles sleep with the Queen of the Shi'ar Empire multiple times? Why did he never parley that relationship into something substantively helpful for mutants?)
If superheroes are about “justice," then their ineffectiveness about the actual problems in their spheres of concern is, well, concerning. It is concerning in that supervillains, at least those who profess reasonably good ideas and arguably good intentions (like Magneto and Killmonger) before starting on the murder sprees, are so much better at using their INT score than their "Good" counterparts are. It says something about the psychological limitations of superhero and mystery stories that the world in such fiction never actually improves for the vast majority of people living in them. The implication here for the reader is that "Well, if these super smart people in this story I like can't do anything about problems that don't involve supervillains (i.e. all the world's Real problems), then I can't either." It's little wonder that we live in an age of mass cynicism and mental health problems. It is also concerning that supervillains' initiative to try to solve problems on a global or inter-galactic scale are always somehow shut down by superheroes who demonstrably have no better ideas 99% of the time, even when said superheroes are canonically supposed to be Genius levels of intelligent.
*"Super Position" by David Graeber is found in the book The Utopia of Rules.
For a more audio-visual version of this argument, see "Marvel Defenders of the Status Quo" on YTube.
Or watch comedian Roy Wood's version of this: "The Avenging Ones."
This is very interesting!
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