No. I'd force the player to play his character smarter than he is, by spoon-feeding him information and suggestions.
The flip side of that is that a Green Beret player shouldn't give Zandalf the Mauve the cloistered wizard the detailed knowledge of forest survival.
So you would try to simulate his higher Int by attempting to take control of his character? That sounds like trying to quench an oil fire by dumping water on it.
You even acknowledge where it's bad if a player does the same thing to his fellow player...
Eh...I'm pretty sure an 8 Int and an 8 Wis could get elected President of the United States.
I'm pretty sure one did. Oligarchy is fun.
Wrong Orfamay
Where one minority group shows lower scores, the differences could be real. This could indicate a poorer educational system (differences in educational opportunities, poverty, neighborhoods, home life…)In other words Education is DIRECTLY related to intelligence tests AND those who score poorer do so because of fewer educational opportunities.
Don't confuse "could be" with "is."
Wrong Orfamay
Where one minority group shows lower scores, the differences could be real. This could indicate a poorer educational system (differences in educational opportunities, poverty, neighborhoods, home life…)In other words Education is DIRECTLY related to intelligence tests AND those who score poorer do so because of fewer educational opportunities.
Don't confuse "could be" with "is."
This was said in defense of the tests. The alternative was that the way the tests are written is biased in favor of rich white males OR that rich white males are smarter somehow than the rest of the world.
So which is it Orfamay? Which is right? Are the racists right that they really are smarter? Are the tests flawed and don't actually prove IQ? Or is this a fault of poorer education as the experts currently favor?
This was said in defense of the tests. The alternative was that the way the tests are written is biased in favor of rich white males OR that rich white males are smarter somehow than the rest of the world.
You're confusing within-group and between-group variance, and also looking for a single cause where it is well-known that there are multiple.
For example, intelligence is partly genetic. Trisomy 21 -- actually, I think any non-fatal trisomy -- causes retardation, which shows up on IQ tests. Intelligence is also partly environmental, which is why you shouldn't feed your children lead paint smoothies. And intelligence is also hard to define, which is why IQ is a poor proxy, but unfortunately, the best we have.
Within a group, there is an extremely strong correlation between the performance of any two individuals on a typical "intelligence" task, whether that be reading speed, digit recall, or the ability to win at Trivial Pursuit. If you do the appropriate numbermancy, you can extract a single factor from a collection of such tests, and this single factor (as you might expect) correlates much better with any particular performance than any two performances do with each other.
E.g. your digit span (the number of random digits you can remember) correlates with your ability to complete pictures (e.g. a teapot with a missing handle) at about .23 -- substantial, but not overwhelming. Both of those correlate with this factor (formally factor g, informally IQ) at .68 and .56, respectively, which is an overwhelming correlation.
This factor also correlates very strongly with all sorts of educational performance measures as well as non-educational factors (like the ability to distinguish pitches -- is <this> note the same as <that> one?). And these factors correlate so strongly that they are able to pick out differences between siblings raised in the same family; it's not background that makes Lord Peter Wimsey so much smarter and more musical than his elder brother the Duke of Denver.
Between groups, the comparisons are more difficult. There are robust differences between the sexes and between racial groups that do not go away when we control for most things we can think of to control (which, by the way, includes education). We don't know why this is. There are also several other interesting group differences, such as the Flynn effect, which are similarly unexplained.
There are several hypotheses, none of them really tenable. The idea that IQ = Education is specifically untenable because it's testably false. (IQ differences between groups do not evaporate when you control for educational achievement.) The only really scientific statement that can be made is that we don't know why these differences persist. While it's tempting to put it down to instrument bias, it doesn't correspond to any sort of bias we can detect, which is why people have to make statements like "it could be."
One specific thing that does seem to have an effect is poverty. Controlling for poverty lessens IQ differences but does not make them go away. This also makes causal sense, since we know that poor nutrition can reduce cognitive performance.
I personally hold to the opinion that the methodology behind IQ testing itself is flawed. That's merely an opinion, but it holds a certain degree of professional weight. The factor analysis that led Spearman and his colleagues to postulate factor g is a fairly black-box statistical procedure that can be applied to any dataset and generates numbers-without-explanation. As a result, we really have no idea what cognitive (and non-cognitive) factors are actually causally linked to intelligence, and what other noise is captured in this system. Cultural factors are a good candidate for this sort of noise precisely because they can't be properly controlled for (as there's no way to turn "Hispanicness" into a number). The bathwater-to-baby ratio is unknown. But we do know there's some "baby" in the tub, and so I'm loathe to empty the entire tub until we have a better process in hand for distinguishing baby from bathwater.
Please return to the topic everyone. I don't care about IQ. I am interested in this thread, however.
I don't infringe on my players' RP. They can say and do whatever they like. Perceptions of them change based on their stats, however. 7 Charisma just seems to rub people the wrong way. 7 intelligence is a bit slow. 7 wisdom has their head in the clouds.
When specific skills are called into play, their ranks are more important than the stats.
Think Homer Simpson.
What About Peter Griffin?
Although he probably has an extremely Low Wisdom Score but High Charisma....
more fun to play...
My Barbarian has a 16 Charisma and I"m playing the Skulls and Shackles game... he shirks his duties all the time (I get beaten constantly) but I play him like a D-bag (not to the PCs... much)
Orfamay it isn't surprising to hear you are in the flawed testing camp after all your arguments. That is a lot of defensive text in support of such a simple answer. I guess we won't know which side is truly correct till they learn more.
However you completely misunderstand my position as well. I said IQ is directly related to education NOT that IQ = Education. There is a difference. Do you deny that better educated people do better on IQ tests? You obviously can't. You can claim IQ is what earned them this education all you want but that STILL makes them related doesn't it? And you yourself admit you can't know for sure. The fact that education can be proven not to be the only factor in IQ doesn't mean education isn't beneficial to IQ. I guess we will have to disagree on this...
Sorry TheRedArmy, I now return you to the regularly scheduled thread.