Does anyone have an idea of what D&D 5e intelligence modifiers would be as iq scores? Beholders are considered masterminds, but i once played a character who had a higher int mod than a beholder at lvl 1! So I kinda want to know what you guys think int mods to IQ scores would be

Simple, IQ isn't really a thing in D&D and a poor analog to the varieties of intelligences not reflected in IQ but can come to bare in INT.  IQ is a pretty fragile and fuzzy metric probing a few capacities that actually overlap WIS and iNT.  IQ is a bad assessment tool IRL, I wouldn't expect it to function any better in D&D.

Too many folks try to put INT on an IQ scale with claims that anything below 7 would be unable to function in society.  Not true at all, a low stat makes no such claim or control over how the character functions outside  of a penalty for situations calling for a check involving an ability score.  

Indeed, setting aside my distaste for IQ tests (or rather, people's attitudes towards them), the Intelligence Attribute Score really doesn't map well to IQ. Even if you compare the most intelligent of PCs (with a score of 20) to the least intelligent PCs (with score of 3), the only difference is that one is 45% (in raw terms) more likely to pass a given check to remember something or to understand how something works. That's not really how intelligence works or IQ (and they aren't the same thing). You will see that kind of variation within people who use similar IQs.

It doesn't really refer to what we think of as intelligence, and to be honest, it doesn't really map well to any real life attribute. You should see "Intelligence" as purely mechanical - it's the likelihood of passing a check or, if relevant, how powerful a spell is that it governs. It doesn't make sense as a measure of a characters mental ability.

Quote from Linklite >>

Indeed, setting aside my distaste for IQ tests (or rather, people's attitudes towards them), the Intelligence Attribute Score really doesn't map well to IQ. Even if you compare the most intelligent of PCs (with a score of 20) to the least intelligent PCs (with score of 3), the only difference is that one is 45% (in raw terms) more likely to pass a given check to remember something or to understand how something works. That's not really how intelligence works or IQ (and they aren't the same thing). You will see that kind of variation within people who use similar IQs.

It doesn't really refer to what we think of as intelligence, and to be honest, it doesn't really map well to any real life attribute. You should see "Intelligence" as purely mechanical - it's the likelihood of passing a check or, if relevant, how powerful a spell is that it governs. It doesn't make sense as a measure of a characters mental ability.

 I agreee with him

And it’s kind of true for all ability scores. In my mind, if you look at real life examples, the smartest, the fastest, the most intelligent, the most wise humans on earth top out around a 16 or 17 score. Pretty much 18+ is beyond real life human limits. 

Quote from ThriKreenWarrior >>

And it’s kind of true for all ability scores. In my mind, if you look at real life examples, the smartest, the fastest, the most intelligent, the most wise humans on earth top out around a 16 or 17 score. Pretty much 18+ is beyond real life human limits. 

 what do you base that on?

Strength is the only atribute where we have a solid, concrete data point that translates to the real world - carry weight. Per the rules, a character can carry 15 pounds for every point of strength they have. That means that your “weak” caster class who minimised their strength score with point buy is still able to comfortably carry 120 pounds of gear on their back. For comparison, men and women in the military, who generally tend to be rather physically fit, carry 60 to 100 pound packs into battle.

That is to say, with strength’s correlation to a real world equivalent being rather nonsensical, I think we can safely assume any mapping of the real world to attributes is a bit of a fruitless endeavour. I would be inclined just to act out the roleplay by matching my character’s intelligence score to other party members, and making sure I fall in the right place on the party’s spectrum, rather than try to map my character to the real world and reverse engineer how to act that way.

I definitely agree that not only does IQ not match up to int, and also IQ is inherently problematic.

That said, if one was going to go ahead with it anyway, I always thought of int score (not modifier) times 10 getting you a rough approximation. 

Quote from ShrimpFriedBryce >>

Does anyone have an idea of what D&D 5e intelligence modifiers would be as iq scores? Beholders are considered masterminds, but i once played a character who had a higher int mod than a beholder at lvl 1! So I kinda want to know what you guys think int mods to IQ scores would be

Loosely speaking, IQ is defined such that average IQ is 100 and standard deviations are plus or minus 15.  In order to correlate that with human intelligence in D&D you need to know how humans roll their intelligence, and that's inaccessible for NPCs.  You can be answered for PCs, but that will be IQ relative to other PCs, with by definition the average PC intelligence being IQ 100, which isn't what you're really asking.

If you want to assume based on nothing at all that human intelligence is 3d6 and IQ measures your modifier, then +0 is IQ 100 and every 1.5 of modifier is 15 points of IQ, which you can loosely fit to mean that +1 is 110, +2 is 120, and so on.

If you want to make the same baseless assumption for 3d6 but IQ measures score, 10.5 is IQ 100, and every 2.96 (rounding) points of score is 15 points of IQ, which very loosely can be interpreted as 11 is IQ 102.5, 12 is 107.5, 13 is 112.5, and so on.

Back in the 3.5 days we had an answer for this, but 5E explicitly doesn't.  For all we know, non-adventurer humans have intelligence based on rolling 4d4, or maybe they use exploding dice.  Who knows.

Quote from Merigold00Yahoo >>

Quote from ThriKreenWarrior >>

And it’s kind of true for all ability scores. In my mind, if you look at real life examples, the smartest, the fastest, the most intelligent, the most wise humans on earth top out around a 16 or 17 score. Pretty much 18+ is beyond real life human limits. 

 what do you base that on?

 Personal preference, tbh. And when I played AD&D in the early 80’s things like bend bars and lift gates, and some other stat related stuff (I’m sure even the numbers in 5E with STR based carry limits etc) was way beyond what people could do. 

Wisdom would also apply to any IQ rating, since it covers "perception and insight". I've definitely done IQ tests which involve matching patterns, which seems more like perception than "reasoning and memory" (which is Intelligence).

As someone who did score high on an iq test what I found is that it is fairly meaningless. Because we still have to experience failure to get the needed perspective.

Fine line between intelligence and IQ, but the most accurate portrayal in DND is to take the average commoner score of +0 and portray that as 105. For increased modifier above or below 0, add or subtract 20. If the modifier gets to +3, add an additional 20 on top of that. For example, a wizard has 16 intelligence. 16 intellegince is a 185 IQ, and that makes sense considering wizards are geniuses.

Int does not correlate to IQ at all because D&D uses a different definition of intelligence than real life. Neither Intelligence and Wisdom as D&D stats are not proper equivalents to their real life counterparts. 

Even in real life IQ is not a clear indicator of how smart somebody is. It provides a "rough guess" at best. IQ also changes constantly because brains are complicated.

IQ doesn't really measure anything beyond one's ability to take standardized tests.  If you gave a character with an intelligence score of 30 an IQ test, they'd fail it because they can't read or write English.  And also because they'd have no idea what many of the questions were talking about.