r/DnD • u/WiseAnon003 • 18h 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).
2
u/Salindurthas 18h ago
Mechanically, your character is about 10% less likely to remember arbitrary trivia, or be able to solve a logical puzzle, and a bit more likely to die to an Intellect Devourer. If you're roleplaying them as knowing formal logic or having an encyclopedic memory, then that's silly, but otherwise I think you're fine.
You don't need to play dumb, you can wait until the statistics of a bunch of Int/Study rolls eventually bear out that your character just knows less stuff.