Highly Intelligent Characters.

[Anastasia]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume most everyone has played a high intelligence character before. In fact, it's possible you've played one who's well above the human norm and your own intellectual level. How do you handle playing a character that you know is smarter than you are? Alternately, how do you DM for a character with super human intelligence?

[Merc]

I honestly don't see a need to play high Int/Wis characters differently from average ones. Just because you're more intelligent or wiser doesn't mean you have to use big words or somehow 'sound' smarter, not unless that's a character quirk like with Josa, or just ego, or the like.

This makes it admittedly harder to show that you're more intelligent, but I tend to think high int/wis should be shown more through insight on problems that arise or the like, and that tends to go more towards the DM side of things or OOC discussion/cooperation, or your background/skills.

RPing is supposed to be a cooperative thing, does it really matter where the ideas come from? If you're not playing a high intelligence character and you have an idea, you don't want to always be the one coming up ideas while the one with high int is struggling to think something. Give him the ideas in the ooc channel! Sure, from time to time, it's nice to be the character with a flash of inspiration, particularly if that's actually your dump stat, but if you're showing up the genius in his specialty all the time, there's something weird there!

On the DM side of things, when I have a puzzle or problem, I tend to have a small list of hints/thoughts, most right, some wrong, and roll on that and feed it to the smartest PC if they're struggling. I've considered rolling on that list for every PC, just with different probabilities depending on their intelligence,but I've honestly not had enough puzzles/problems where I've felt a need to roll on those lists, and it's usually more fun to see PCs come up with something. But if some time has gone by and it looks like its starting to get frustrating, well, why not give the player with a high intelligence character something to show off with?

Sorta related, I've commented on it with Dune before, but I tend to think it's easier to play someone with average or low mental stats than a high mental stat, just because of expectations on the side of roleplaying. A high charisma character is expected to be charismatic and social, a high intelligence character has to show off his brains, a high wisdom character has to show off insight. Nevermind that you're playing something -beyond- your usual range. You HAVE to roleplay it! ...Somehow?

Things get expected out of you, but if you're playing something because you want to play that rather than because you're good at it, and even though you have all these high skills and the background and such to show you're capable at it, but then you're expected to roleplay it and you freeze...well that's hardly fun. It's actually pretty frustrating. While yes, the roleplaying aspect is more important than the rollplay part, sometimes there seems to be too much emphasis on the roleplay part, to the point that the mechanical part doesn't matter, and if that's the case, then why not just freeform it? or why even bother playing something you can't roleplay that well (yeah, pfft, who likes to play something different anyway)?

Conversely, if you're playing something with low to average mental stats, those expectations just aren't quite there, but you're still free to show that charming side, those brains or that insight. And it's not quite as weird or commented on... except when there's that other character that's supposed to excel in those fields but is getting shown up  by your constant bouts of inspiration... Well, whoops?

[Corwin]

I think I'll start with a popular quote:
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool/145479.html

Do they need to always come up with the 'smart' idea? I don't see why, they can just support it in the end. Must they be all-knowledgeable? Arguably yes, but in D&D that translates to a Knowledge skill check which they should mechanically ace on average.

I think the only real 'problem', as such, with roleplaying 'high int' characters is when people try too hard and fail. This is roleplaying, so you don't actually have to BE a smart person. You just need to PRETEND to be one or, barring that, avoid looking foolish too often. That's all it is (and see? my quote was relevant!) So how do you RP someone smarter than humanly possible? By not giving anyone the impression through your RP that this character actually belongs on the short bus. And not by retconning/pretending that they knew things all along, that tends to be kinda lame and feel fake. Needless to say that acting all superior over others intellectually is also often fail precisely because that tends to push your 'credentials' to the front, and then you actually have to back them up. Since Merc listed Josa as his example, I might as well use him here for mine too.

[Dracos]

RPing is supposed to be a cooperative thing, does it really matter where the ideas come from? If you're not playing a high intelligence character and you have an idea, you don't want to always be the one coming up ideas while the one with high int is struggling to think something. Give him the ideas in the ooc channel! Sure, from time to time, it's nice to be the character with a flash of inspiration, particularly if that's actually your dump stat, but if you're showing up the genius in his specialty all the time, there's something weird there!

Unrelated, but even absent of Intelligence as a stat, I tend to be a fan of this and think it's one of the better uses of an OOC room.  Practically speaking, it's very common for other players to see ways to solve a given problem using information that is appropriately known or the hallmark of another character.  While it is convenient for momentum to just answer, giving the idea to another player can help considerably to keep their character concept coming through.  Or asking them about it, for the 'don't use ooc' folks.

"Well, I might know more about cable network systems than anyone else here, DM included, I am not the robot, and if I talk about it I'm diminishing the believability of both our characters.  But if I hand her an idea, she can take it and run with it, looking more awesome for doing so, while giving me a chance to play off my character's ignorance in that area."

"I got a great idea that comes from knowing the tiefling's background story on how we can solve this problem!  See in the splatbook on devils, there's this prince of lies ...wait, wouldn't it be more neat to have the Tiefling be able to talk about this?"

"Man, I'm glad I took knowledge Religion so that I could compete with the set of expert priests that make up our uneducated mercenary group." :P </for the snark>


On topic, Cor's quite right.  Also, a lot of very intelligent folks don't necessarily wear it like a badge either.  It can be cutting to the heart of the matter after a long silence where others toss out ideas, it can be speaking clearly to repeat a good idea in small words, it could simply be being methodical about how you approach things.

[Anastasia]

RPing is supposed to be a cooperative thing, does it really matter where the ideas come from? If you're not playing a high intelligence character and you have an idea, you don't want to always be the one coming up ideas while the one with high int is struggling to think something. Give him the ideas in the ooc channel! Sure, from time to time, it's nice to be the character with a flash of inspiration, particularly if that's actually your dump stat, but if you're showing up the genius in his specialty all the time, there's something weird there!

On one hand, yeah, a good and talkative OOC room is a good thing. On the other, eh. There's a fine line to walk there and that can get into metagaming.

On the DM side of things, when I have a puzzle or problem, I tend to have a small list of hints/thoughts, most right, some wrong, and roll on that and feed it to the smartest PC if they're struggling. I've considered rolling on that list for every PC, just with different probabilities depending on their intelligence,but I've honestly not had enough puzzles/problems where I've felt a need to roll on those lists, and it's usually more fun to see PCs come up with something. But if some time has gone by and it looks like its starting to get frustrating, well, why not give the player with a high intelligence character something to show off with?

I've never tried that. Personally, I'd rather give you guys a clue or two IC and let you work on it. Honestly, solving a puzzle or situation with an intelligence check leaves me cold. Really cold, I mean, what's the point of making you guys RP and work things out if I hand you the answers to difficult situations? It's not the DM's place to do that.

Sorta related, I've commented on it with Dune before, but I tend to think it's easier to play someone with average or low mental stats than a high mental stat, just because of expectations on the side of roleplaying. A high charisma character is expected to be charismatic and social, a high intelligence character has to show off his brains, a high wisdom character has to show off insight. Nevermind that you're playing something -beyond- your usual range. You HAVE to roleplay it! ...Somehow?

Yes. The best idea is to do the best you can and remember that your character is still human. Well, probably still human. The point is that you're gonna make mistakes sometimes even with a high intelligence score. It's important not to conflate a 29 int with perfect judgment and freedom from making mistakes.

Conversely, if you're playing something with low to average mental stats, those expectations just aren't quite there, but you're still free to show that charming side, those brains or that insight. And it's not quite as weird or commented on... except when there's that other character that's supposed to excel in those fields but is getting shown up  by your constant bouts of inspiration... Well, whoops?

Yeah, that. I run into that with Aaeru on occasion. It's easier to be dumb than smart, but it's still easy to play dumb too smart. It's tricky.

[VySaika]

I've handled it in a rather interesting way before, from both the GM and Player perspectives.

As a player, I had a character with much higher intelligence then I had...and while talking out an idea about the villian's motives and effectively trying to psychologically profile him to figure out where he was hiding, the GM was listening. It turns out that I was mostly right about things...due largely to the GM deciding that what my character had come up with was entirely reasonable(and in fact he admitted it was more stylish then what he originally planned) so he just seamlessly changed the plan so that I was mostly right. It was pretty cool.

I've since taken that approach to GMing and used it myself a time or two. Not every time of course, but it is generally pretty fun when it happens.

Ignoring all that, though...I play high Int characters largely by abusing my knowlegde checks and pestering the GM for what I know about x thing I just rolled for. Then I take the information given, assume that at least half of it will be relevent to the situation as GMs tend not to throw out excessive amounts of red herring on good rolls(you could call that metagaming if you really wanted, I suppose.) and try to piece together something useful. Usually infodumping on the other players either IC or OOC so I'm not the only one informed.

What it basically boils down to is a whole lot of working with the GM. Since...well, I'm not a wizard/bard/whatever who was trained in all these various subjects, so it's entirely reasonable from my POV to ask the GM to provide the information my character should know. It's sort of like playing on Easy mode for puzzles. High Int gets me more pieces. i still have to put them together on my own(or with the other players) but hey, having those extra pieces really helps.

[Carthrat]

What kind of intelligence are we talking about here? We're talking about the kind of intelligence that comes up with good ideas, good plans, quickly assimilates data about some crazy situation and comes to reasonable conclusions. That's the key. These are the decisions PCs make that are important and require players to be clever.

It's not really one's ability to do book-learning or actually memorize facts or study well, which is what the Int stat tends to actually represent in most D&D games. In many cases, this translates to have more skills or more/better spells or mastery of some discipline the player can't reasonably be expected to be good at. In short, it's all mechanics.

I don't see why the two actually need to be correlated in one stat. Having a high intelligence can simply mean to me that you're awesome at various disciplines but not necessarily a quick thinker or planner. I've played many characters with high intelligence, or high alleged intelligence, and then made really dumb decisions in a completely IC fashion, so I see no inherent problem. That said, I think truly extreme scores, high or low, should be avoided. We really have no good way to play characters that are so radically different from ourselves, and I would rather focus on what is plausible and believable than what is completely outlandish and relies on fiat to work.

As for when you're compared to the less statistically gifted members of your party, keep in mind that there's countless works of fiction where there's some blue-collar hero who is kinda clever but no genius, and some egghead scientist guy/wizard/whatever who has an IQ of 500 but can't think his way out a cardboard box. So I think there's plenty of room for a high-intelligence player to have his high intelligence but not play through the various situations that crop up in RPG-land in an... intelligent fashion, and equally for the less brainy dude to be the one who figures out how to escape the deathtrap, or whatever.

I'm kinda mean about this topic, and unapologetically so. If you want to play a smart character who comes up with cool plans instead of just a guy who's read a lot of books, you have to be smart and come up with cool plans yourself. Similarily if you want to be taken seriously as a charismatic speech-giving character, then you should really be able to string a few words together instead of someone with some vauge 'force of personality'. People's standards here are going to vary, and I do think that GMs should be lenient- we don't need to be Martin Luther King to give a good speech- but you should at least try to hit some acceptable standard for the sake of plausibility.

I think this attitude is justified because the alternatives tend to lead to suspension of disbelief being broken, and thus any desire to be involved in the game, at least on my part. I'm talking from a general roleplaying perspective; there are certainly games where mechanics for just about everything are hashed out in great detail, and if you want to use them to model brainpower, more power to you.

RPing is supposed to be a cooperative thing, does it really matter where the ideas come from? If you're not playing a high intelligence character and you have an idea, you don't want to always be the one coming up ideas while the one with high int is struggling to think something. Give him the ideas in the ooc channel! Sure, from time to time, it's nice to be the character with a flash of inspiration, particularly if that's actually your dump stat, but if you're showing up the genius in his specialty all the time, there's something weird there!

I will cheerfully talk about ideas in the OOC channel, but if I have a great idea on my own I'm going to say it, and I'll think it is lame if someone else takes the credit for it. I would also like this far more if it is an actual discussion and not spoonfeeding ideas to people. Collaboration good, plagarism bad.

[Carthrat]

Incidentally, Drac brought up an interesting point; what happens when you, a player, are in fact a specialist in whatever is being covered in the game, but your character isn't? I'd agree that it's pretty bullshit convert your real-life expertise in a field like compsci or, I dunno, poisonmaking into stuff your character can do, and that in this case it really is the best to tell the other players/GM how things work, presuming it helps things flow. Games are about lots of things none of us are experts in, or more importantly the GM isn't an expert in, after all.

That said, if it's a game set in the modern day and you have a net connection, you pretty much know everything anyway... >_>

[Ebiris]

That said, if it's a game set in the modern day and you have a net connection, you pretty much know everything anyway... >_>

When I was playing a superhuman intelligence scientist character in Cid's 1930s era pulp game I basically had Wikipedia open constantly for every session.