Intellect
Intellect refers to a character's overall mental faculties. It covers reasoning, calculation, and short and long term memory. Note that while intellect is improved by education, not all high intellect characters are well educated. A character with a high intellect score will be good at:
- Remembering facts quickly and accurately
- Knowing when certain information applies to a situation
- Finding inconsistencies or patterns in data
- Skimming information from a book or conversation
What Do The Scores Mean?
| Score | Rarity | General examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mentally challenged | Intelligent beasts or individuals with severe disabilities. |
| 2 | Below average. | Unreliable memory and slow to learn, may be the "village idiot". |
| 3 | Average, moderately intelligent person. | Average person. |
| 4 | Somewhat common, clever person. | Educated city dweller, merchant, land manager. |
| 5 | Uncommon, maybe one in a hundred. | Accountant, clerk, pursuviant. |
| 6 | Rare, maybe one in a thousand. | Mathematician, philosopher, herald of arms. |
| 7 | Very rare, maybe one in ten thousand. | Studied mage, respected lord. |
| 8 | Exceptional, maybe one in a city. | Royal advisor, paladin. |
*Keep in mind that intellect does not equal knowledge. Even a character with 8 intellect would be unable to solve a simple math problem without first knowing what numbers are.
If your intellect score is reduced to 0, you begin to display an animal level of intelligence. You cannot speak or perform any action that requires training. At the GM's discretion, you may lose control of your character.
If your intellect score reaches a negative number, this means that you are no longer able to process information about the world. You take damage equal to the negative number every round as your brain shuts down.
Using Intellect
Intellect is used heavily by the Academics skill, as well as by most "social" skills such as Negotiation. Crafting rolls and some rituals also use Intellect.
Additionally, nearly every skill can be rolled with Intellect to recall information related to that skill, such as rolling Intellect/Melee Weapons to recall the name of an exotic fighting technique.
Meta Note: Why No Wisdom?
Many RPG systems, pen and paper or not, have some kind of "Wisdom" stat. It is generally used as a measure of common sense, awareness, willpower, magic, and non-linear reasoning. Typically, it is used almost as a mental counterpart to whatever the system's equivalent to dexterity is. Where an intelligence score would let you brute force reason your way through problems, wisdom represents an ability to go around a problem or approach an issue more carefully and patiently.
Such a stat does not exist in this system - and it hasn't simply been rolled into Intellect, either. Some elements of it have been moved, of course. General awareness is covered by Precision, resistance to illusions is covered by Intellect, noticing detail and keeping a straight face are covered by skills, and magic as a whole is mostly tied to Soulpower. That leaves one glaring problem, though: where is common sense?
The simple answer is that common sense doesn't have a stat. Common sense comes from role playing. That's not to say you can't have wise or unwise characters, simply that it isn't quantified by a number on your character sheet.
Any veteran of pen and paper systems can tell you about the time that the party's high-wisdom priest walked straight into a painfully obvious trap. Or perhaps they can tell you how the party's foolhardy berserker kept giving better life advice than the druid with maxed-out wisdom. From a role playing perspective, these frequent occurrences make no sense. A character's level of common sense is more determined by the player's actions than by a number on a sheet.
In other words, how a character is role-played shouldn't be quantified into the system - hence the similar removal of a catch-all "Charisma", "Personality", or "Charm" stat. If you are able to make a convincing argument, the success of that argument should not be gated purely by a roll of the dice.