Mixture

[Adam Wiggins]

> Intelligence attribute:  someone (J.C. I think) made a statement to the
> affect that there was no real reason for an intelligence attribute.  I have 
> to dissagree.  For a system where the character is just a different 
> "physical" body for the player, ok, yeah, there should be no intelligence
> attribute.  But for systems where the character is another being that
> the player just pulls the strings on, intelligence is quite important.
> For example, in my system, room descriptions are layered by levels of
> detail (essentially).  The more astute a character is, the fuller a 
> room description/graphical image of the room they will receive, the less
> astute, the more "blury" the description will be (requiring explicit
> commands to investigate something further).  How much the player has to
> work with is based, to some extent, on the character's intelligence.
> (some level of detail will always be presented, to make it playable.)

Actualy, we use this quite a lot, but it's a seperate stat called
perception.  I know plenty of people who are very perceptive but not
all that smart, and especially vice-versa, ie geniuses who don't notice
when their shoes are untied or other sorts of common things that
most people take for immediately obvious.
Intelligence we find very, very useful as a way to regulate the rate
of learning.  Being intelligent will help you out with anything you do
(although, some things more than other).  This is a nice way to balance
physically strong races like trolls, ogres, etc.  After all, why is it
that humanity is the dominant race on earth, despite the fact that
we are medium-sized, weak, unarmored and unarmed (no tough hide or claws),
our young take *forver* to reach maturity, etc etc?
Anyways, I thought he said that you didn't need to *see* an indicator
of it, not that you didn't have it, based on (I assume) the concept that
physical attributes are more easily gaugable than mental ones.