el-pinko-grande's page

Wolves flank and they have an int of 2

Yup, that's exactly the point my player made, right down to the same animal. My response was that wolves can also survive full-time in the wilderness with only a Survival skill of 1, and most animals seem to manage with no Survival skill at all. In other words, animals aren't a good analogy for the capabilities of sentient adventurer types.

I am this close to start insults for this sentence but because i fear the ban hammer i will simply say this:

This is a house rule, there is nothing in the rules preventing you from flanking based on your character's INT score.
Also there is a pretty bad house rule imo.

I never said there was such a rule, nor would I actually institute it as such. My point is to illustrate that having an Int, or indeed any stat, that low should have serious consequences for the character beyond the limited base of skill points you get from the rules. A character with a 7 Int is profoundly disabled and, yes, would be worse at combat than someone with a 10 Int, even if the rules make no provision for such. Given that the player involved would presumably be dumping Int to increase their combat efficiency, I wanted them to understand that there would be meanginful consequences for their choice.

It is bad DM'ing and DM metagaming(NPC's don't know your stats). The mature thing to do is handle it out of character. You can call it whatever you want, but if a GM can't man up and discuss things with me as a player he give my empty chair to the next guy.

Well obviously I would handle it out of character. I'm not going to look over a character, give it my approval, and then express my unhappiness passive-aggressively by making the low Can guy save against poison all the time. But if someone makes a highly min-maxed character, ignores me when I caution them against it (as I invariably will) I will definitely create situations where the balanced characters will thrive and the min-maxed guy will fare poorly. And why not? The min-maxed character gets to shine in combat, or whatever it is he/she was built for, while people who made reasonable, balanced characters lag a bit behind. I don't think there's anything wrong with holding people to account for such behavior.

That said, no one has ever made a character like that in one of my games. One person considered doing so after reading one of the class guides here, but stopped after I told them that their character would be too stupid to flank if they had an Int of 7.

If one of my players makes a character that has an organic reason to have a conspicuously dumped stat, that doesn't bother me. If I feel like a player is doing it just to min-max, I'm going to beat them over the head with their dump stat at every opportunity. Call it bad DMing if you like, but I think it's reasonable. If a character is running around with a stat of 7, they should probably be back at the monastery illuminating manuscripts, or working on daddy's farm. Certainly they shouldn't be adventuring. I'm not even sure how someone with a Con below 8 survives a few rounds of combat without collapsing into a wheezing mess.