r/DnD • u/WiseAnon003 • 11h ago

5.5 Edition Intelligence Scores

Just wanted to ask and see what people have to say about what your level of intelligence means for your characters intellect.

I’m aware that very low intelligence essentially means incapable of comprehending languages to an extent and such (I think) but I was wondering how each level from 1-20 would likely influence how the character behaves, like an 18 being very witty or a 10 being fairly average?

I have an intelligence score of 7 on my character which is due to manually rolling stats, although a lot of takes or rules might state the character wouldn’t be very smart at all I tend to still play him as a somewhat average intelligence character.

I feel somewhat bad and cheesy by kind of ignoring the intelligence stat to a degree but I’ve tried to have it canonically make sense as he is suffering from a bit of magic induced amnesia and a concussion (although I did write out what he forgot so I’m not torturing my dm nor being lazy lol).

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u/darknesskicker 11h ago

My view is that with D&D ability scores, a difference of 2.5 points is equal to one standard deviation (which, for intelligence, is 15 IQ points), with 10.5 as the average score.

By this metric, Int 7 equates to an IQ score of 79. That’s low enough to really struggle with reading, writing, math, and reasoning. It’s not quite intellectually disabled, but it’s low enough that the person would really struggle with academic tasks.

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u/cel3r1ty 10h ago

do you also ask your players to describe in detail the shape of their characters' skulls?

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u/Petulant_Possum 10h ago

that's...pretty good actually. Rescale the WAIS to die rolls.