One of our players held a poll recently, checking to see what characteristics players preferred when developing a character's personality. Leading the race: Cunning.

It probably shouldn't be too surprising that many people in roleplaying environments want to play a character who's clever. But, the sad truth is, some people behind these characters aren't quite as intelligent as the characters themselves.

How does one balance the desire to have one's character seen as intelligent against the embarrassment of looking stupid from time to time? And how do you balance the repercussions of stupid player choices with the need to maintain a flow of IC actions and consequences?

I don't really see a way to make a character intelligent when the player isn't unless you move up one level of abstraction. In other words, instead of: Bob says, "It's my considered opinion that the world is flat, and I can prove it." (which would mark him as stupid presuming your world isn't flat) you'd need to abstract to: Bob says something remarkably intelligent about the fundamental nature of the world.

You can rp someone dumber than you at the common level of abstraction (ie having to actually speak the words) but I don't see how you can play somone more intelligent. It's just you, the player, communicating, after all, and you can't be more than you are.

--matt

Generally, I agree with this sentiment. However, the devil's advocate in me has to consider something: People who play "beautiful" characters may not be beautiful in real life. Roleplaying games are a means of exploring what you aren't - and it's a lot to ask players, I think, to "play to their RL intelligence level." Wouldn't that require a remarkable amount of intellectual honesty on their part?

It's done that way because players usually expect it and often to try and inject a relative intelligence in races (like, orcs are dumb and Grook are smart). It's still fairly stupid given its meaningless though, I agree.

--matt

(The Logos)

(Brody)

The two are related.  The latter (Brody's point) requires a suspension of belief from those who literally know the person - they instead accept the virtual description of the character, rather than their physical knowledge of the player - when interaction occurs.

For the former, rather than a suspension of belief, one must provide benevolant acceptance - that is, those who are interacting with the virtual character must increase the statement to meet what would actually have been said, were the player behind the character of the minimal intelligence requisite for that character.

In truly immersive worlds, this is done as a matter of course - it is a point of courtesy among players, to ignore or minimalize faux pas on the part of the player behind the character.

Of course, those who truly are incapable of meeting the requirements of their character for a sustained period of time usually prove Darwin's theory in the virtual reality, by working towards their own elimination.  One could likely extrapolate a method of determining the relative intelligence of the player behind the character by determining the length of time between creation, decline, and demise.

Beauty is a physical attribute that is easily faked in muds, both graphical and text.

As to playing to their RL intelligence level, it's not a matter of asking them to do it. It's not really possible for them to play beyond their own intelligence level so it's not even an issue. The solution is probably just to remove intelligence and all other intangibles as a character stats.
--matt

I don't want us to be hung up on "intelligence" as a stat. I'm not talking about stats. I'm talking about roleplaying. I'm talking about people who want to play, say, a shrewd smuggler whose bio suggests they're a really clever individual, but then they do some incredibly dumb-as-dirt things because the player behind the character isn't all that clever.

The question, really, is how you deal out the Darwin Award while also trying to maximize enjoyment of your game for everyone. I've been a big proponent of IC consequences on my games - and eventually came up with ideas like luck cards and +cricketfactor (named after Jiminey Cricket, a tool that actually rolls the character's intelligence stat so that, if they pass, a staffer can drop a major hint that the player is about to get themselves killed by doing something stupid). These measures have helped *some*, but we still get people who ignore +cricketfactor rolls and insist on doing stupid things. And then they still get mad at staffers when bad things happen.

In a perfect world of roleplaying, players would be forced to stick with a character that fits their RL IQ - or less, since it's probably easier to play dumb than it is to play smart. But how do we balance that ideal and keep a playerbase relatively happy?

That's a problem with intangibles. Characters can have tangible aspects but all intangibles come from the player himself. You get this kind of disconnect anytime you try to express an intangible (intelligence, alignment, etc) in tangible form.

I think the solution is just to keep intangibles on the player where they belong and where they emanate from. (I should take my own advice too since we stupidly have both intelligence and alignment.)

--matt

I'm pretty certain people can play way above their intelligence level under certain conditions.  In fact I've read hundreds of university theses written by complete morons which appear to bear that out.  That is they certainly sound intelligent at first glance on the surface merely because of wordsmanship.  Sustaining it during role-play in real time consistently would take more skill, but certainly doable.   ;-)

Wordsmanship is not intelligence though.

A dumb person can't make his character solve a problem he can't himself solve without some sort of outside help and without free-form AI or a nearly 1-1 staff to player ratio we lack a way to consistently provide that help.
--matt

Other people's opinion of you is irrelevant to your intelligence level.

--matt

I agree with you logos that your intelligence level is not dependent on other people. But the fact is that it is about appearing intelligent not necessarily being it. After all when you rp, you pretend to be things you're not. Therefore in this case, the intelligence level is determined by how you appear to be intelligent.
I've seen a lot of times when some people think that another person is really intelligent, while some other people think that same person is the dumbest ever. It's all about perception.

I've found that it's usually all about relative intelligence and knowledge of the subject matter at hand. People can BS other people into thinking that they are extremely intelligent if a) they are more knowledgeable with respect to the subject at hand, b) are substantially more intelligent* than the aforementioned other people, or c) the other people lack confidence, and it is therefore easy to convince them that they are wrong when in fact they are correct.

a and c are especially effective in combination when the subject matter at hand is relatively esoteric.

*note that more intelligent != very intelligent.

*edit*

That isn't necessarily a problem for the said dumb person trying maintain the illusion that he or she is a genius. All he or she has to do is convince all onlookers that the problem is much more difficult than it actually is. Using lots of often-heard-but-poorly-understood technobabble is one of the most common examples of this.

I agree with the people who say: it's not quite possible to be a clever character when you aren't a clever character yourself. There are ways you could get around it, all of which I've already seen posted, but the ideas I've seen don't worry make for good roleplay in my opinion.

Mostly I think some people's character resemble themselves, another party of themselves, or something they could be. Not something you want to be (on some cases, of course we aren't all masters of a sword, but I'm speaking personality wise).

Intelligence/cleverness/expertise in the MU* World is one which is a fine line. To a limit, however, I think it is possible to play someone smarter than the player, but it should be done within limits. Realistically, there are some races on MU*s out there that would be unplayable if we were purely focused on playing 'at or below player's intelligence levels.'

Same thing could be said for several occupations. Should a player be allowed to be a fencer if they aren't one IRL? Should we limit occupations and skills to what a player knows?

This is where I think that players should at least put minimal research into occupations or skills. This doesn't mean write a thesis statement, but it means, 'If you want to play a pianist, know how many keys there are on the board.' or just having a little bit of understanding of your skills so you can RP them properly, and this can transfer to inteligence somewhat.

I have played characters from a bit below my intelligence to characters with intelligence that would make most humans feel inadequate speaking to it. The higher level intelligence often requires knowing a few things... but I'm sure there are smart people out there that spend years with 'brilliant' research ideas including ones that last for years on if water melts.

You can't learn cunning and raw intelligence. You can enlighten yourself on your character and a little bit of what they know.

As one of the people that voted for cunning as one trait, I feel like I have to speak up in my defense some. I wasn't interpreting cunning as intelligence; I was interpreting it either as the ability to quickly think out plausable and workable solutions in a pinch, or the ability to out-talk or out-smart a person... thinking of it more in the sense of a con artist rather than a rocket scientist.

With that said, though, I like playing intelligent characters since I like to stretch my mind after that. Like how I created an astrophysicist on OtherSpace after reading a couple books theoretical astrophysics (time travel, dimensions, etc). In that case, my vague knowledge from reading those books let me out-talk just about everyone so that I didn't have to venture into details I didn't know, or have some ability to fudge in a realistic, yet sci-fi, way.

Anyway... I've entirely forgotten my point. ####.

I think you may be confusing slow with deliberate.

Synonyms to slow (adj.), as a description of mental capacity, include dense, dim, dull, dumb, feeble-minded, retarded, stupid, imbecile, and moronic.

I just wanted to say that I believe that text mudders are God's chosen people and that we are destined to inherit the earth, dwell in a land of milk and honey, and generally groove out to the smoove smoove sounds of Isaac Hayes.

--matt

*makes his point on the matter, then runs away* Intelligence is not cumulative. It can't be measured as a number. Take an astrophysicist off the street, ask him to calculate the amount of trace silicon you need in a steel alloy for a heavy-duty spring, and you'll get nothing. The astrophysicist is not a metallurgist. He doesn't know, but does that make him stupid? No.

The same thing can be applied to a warrior, a druid, and a mage. The druid and mage is probably obvious. The druid would have knowledge of herbs, while the mage has knowledge of the arcane. But what about the warrior? Well, a good fighter thinks. He has to make split-second decisions, or his head is split. He is aware of his environment when fighting, and can use it to his advantage. In learning his weapon, any cleverness and intuition is good for learning it faster. But is he smart? He doesn't know how to create a fireball. But he could have just as easily learned herb lore or studied runic texts, and gotten quite far at it.

See what I mean? If a player who happens to be a psychologist wants to play someone smart, he's not going to be a very realistic astrologist unless he does something like it as a side job or hobby. I agree with earlier posts that you should read up on who you want to become. It's fun to do that anyway. But if you can, play characters that compliment your own expertise. You'll find that a lot of players who would be labeled idiots become respected roleplayers with this in mind.

I agree with what others have said that it is possible to act more intelligent than you are. However there are limits to it, and it is difficult. Someone may think you are intelligent from a single conversation, but if they get to know you well it's going to be much harder to convince them.

Also to act intelligent you do need to be at least reasonably intelligent in real life, but I think to roleplay anything well you need to be reasonably intelligent in real life.

The way I would act an intelligent character is as mentioned above, taking the slow and deliberating aproach. Another thing I would do is try and show my character as knowing a lot (especially about academic related subjects). This isn't too hard, just use google to find a few web pages about whatever topic you need to pretend to be clever at.

Perhaps the hardest thing about appearing intelligent (or rather knowlegable) is when faced with someone who really does know about it. Say for example I am pretending to be an expert in medicine, I do a bit of research (which I think is important for any roleplay), to the average person I appear to know about medicine, and if there is something I don't know I can always make it up. However if someone is a doctor they're going to be able to tell I'm not an expert. This is a problem I can't really see a way around.

Personally my main character is a mercenary fighter, he is illiterate and has never had any kind of education. He isn't intelligent, but he isn't totally brainless, he is smart in some respects. He is a pretty good public speaker and a decent leader. Sometimes roleplaying a character who isn't very intelligent is actually not that easy. It is quite difficult not to roleplay him a sterotyped fool, and at the same time show that he isn't all that smart.

Roleplaying something you are not can be hard, and with intelligence it is especially hard. A sign of a good roleplayer is someone who can create a character who is convincing. Research can help with this, and roleplaying something you know about can be easier, but in my opinion a truely great roleplayer can be anything.

Maraz

Intelligent people do not have to be smart.  Thus common sense and "book learning" are often seen as different things.  Being clever is not being intelligent.  If I can slip out of a situation before I get my virtual butt kicked, I was clever.  If I can create a swift comeback when insulted, I was clever.  If I figure out that player X and player Y are dating in-game without being told, then I was clever.

But, why is it an issue of having to live up to intelligence in the first place?  That would be like having a character name Monty and claiming he was the funniest man in the game.  Of course, when in an RP session, old Monty is rather bland.  Thus his PR guy is better than his RP guy.  Claiming intelligence is not the same as having.  This is why I am opposed to player-viewable, player-written bios, because then you have "the bravest hero", "the funniest bard", "the craftiest mage", and "the best looking troll in the land".  This goes back to the first rule of story-telling, "Don't say the lady screams, bring her out and let me hear her" or simply "show don't tell."