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?
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