Character intelligence quotient (IQ)


Homebrew and House Rules


I would like to def. the (N)PC intelligence quotient but use INT+CHA+WIS for it, because not only INT does count for the IQ.

Standard ability:
Low Fantasy 11
Standard Fantasy 11-12
High Fantasy 12
Epic Fantasy 12-13

|
|
-->"Standard-Fantasy"-Character-IQ:
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 19-20 => IQ 150
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 17-18 => IQ 137,5
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 15-16 => IQ 125
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 13-14 => IQ 112,5
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 11-12 => IQ 100
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 9-10 => IQ 87,5
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 7-8 => IQ 75
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 5-6 => IQ 62,5
(INT+CHA+WIS)/3 = 3-4 => IQ 50

What do you think, could that work?


Work for what purpose?

Liberty's Edge

I'd argue strongly as a Psych student with some experience in psychometrics that Charisma has no place whatsoever in IQ. Wisdom could be argued...but even then, I'd be strongly inclined not to include it.

If going purely on Int, I generally correspond each point of Int mod to one standard deviation of IQ score (which is, as that chart you link indicates, 15 IQ points).


Don't know why you need this, but, IMO curve for stats and curve for IQ are not corresponding well. I know quite a number of people with IQ 135+ and while they possibly would have INT 15+ in game terms, their CHA and WIS are in most cases lower, especially CHA :)

OTOH if we discard PCs who in general have much higher stats total then for NPCs, it may have sense.


Drachasor wrote:
Work for what purpose?

for example: (Role)playing a character with INT 8 and CHA 8.

I would like to know how to play such a character. Should I play him like a "animal" or is his mind only a little "slow".

Perhaps we should take a look on Spatial intelligence?

For example:

EDIT:

Deadmanwalking wrote:
(which is, as that chart you link indicates, 15 IQ points).

Like this:

Ability => IQ

23-24 => IQ 190
21-22 => IQ 175
19-20 => IQ 160
17-18 => IQ 145
15-16 => IQ 130
13-14 => IQ 115
11-12 => IQ 100
9-10 => IQ 85
7-8 => IQ 70
5-6 => IQ 55
3-4 => IQ 40
1-2 => IQ 25

Liberty's Edge

Okay, first off: Please, for the love of all the Gods, never ever reference anything by Gardner. The man's work is, to put it bluntly, complete bullshit. None of it is supported by any actual empirical evidence of any sort, and he's widely known in the field for being a snake oil salesman. Please, never base anything on his work.

If you want an actual intelligence researcher, look into Sternberg, his early work particularly is quite good.


Deadmanwalking wrote:
never ever reference anything by Gardner.

I only tried to give a wiki-quote about social intelligence (and co.) and don´t look for the reference. I you have a better reference on this, and/or a better idea please let me know

Also it´s only a try to put the abilities in the IQ-content as a guide how to play a character with (verry) high/low INT/CHA/WIS-abilites.

Grand Lodge

why is 10 int = 85 IQ? Average on 3d6, 10-11 is the average stat in a point buy etc.. Would not 8-9 be a better fit for 85 IQ and 12-13 for 115 IQ, ie working the comparison in line with the bonuses?


Bad idea. IQ has a very specific meaning that doesn't relate at all to Charisma and little to what D&D considers "Wisdom." If you think IQ measures anything at all -- I think it measures how well you do on IQ tests and nothing more -- then it measures the Intelligence stat.

If you do the actual statistics, using 3d6 stat generation, you will see that 1/216 of the Pathfinder population, about 0.5%, has a stat (of whatever type) of 18, and an equal number has a stat of 3. For comparison purposes, only 0.09% of the real-world population has an IQ above 150, and 0.5% of the population has an IQ above about 140. The actual standard deviation of 3d6 is 3 points (and for IQ scores, the standard deviation is 15 points), so each point of Intelligence score should by rights be about 5 IQ points if you match the bell curves.

This means that no one in D&D/Pathfinder has an IQ above 140 barring magic or leveling, and no one is dumber than a 60, which makes sense, as anyone with IQ below 60 probably isn't self-sufficient enough to adventure, possible not even to survive on his own in a pseudo-medieval world.


Der Origami Mann wrote:


Also it´s only a try to put the abilities in the IQ-content as a guide how to play a character with (verry) high/low INT/CHA/WIS-abilites.

Unfortunately, only about <very small number> percent of the population have any idea how behavior tracks IQ.

Let me just ask you, for instance -- can a person with IQ 50 typically do long division? Can such a person read a newspaper? Can such a person even count to twenty?

How about a person with IQ 70? IQ 30? At what point (numerically speaking) is someone's intellect such that they could not hold down a job?

Saying that Grogg the Barbarian has an IQ of 85 doesn't mean much if no one at the table knows how IQ 85 behaves. (Hint: just like everyone else; 85 isn't low enough that the lay person would even think there was something "wrong" with him.)


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Saying that Grogg the Barbarian has an IQ of 85 doesn't mean much if no one at the table knows how IQ 85 behaves. (Hint: just like everyone else; 85 isn't low enough that the lay person would even think there was something "wrong" with him.)

OK, that is a good point, but I think until now nobody can realy say what it does mean to have 9-10 INT or 3-4 INT ;-)

btw.: I found a test calculate your attribute scores in d&d
-->
A doctorate (PhD) IQ 131 or higher (=> INT = 17)
A Masters Degree IQ 121 to 130
An undergraduate or apprenticeship IQ 111 to 120
HighSchool IQ 101 to 110
Middle School(Grades 6-8) IQ 91 to 100
Grammar School(Grades 1-5) IQ 81 to 90
No Schooling IQ 80 or lower (=> INT = 6)

You can take other examples as the above but I think it´s a better way as to say IQ 131+ INT 17 / IQ 80- INT 6


Der Origami Mann wrote:
Orfamay Quest wrote:
Saying that Grogg the Barbarian has an IQ of 85 doesn't mean much if no one at the table knows how IQ 85 behaves. (Hint: just like everyone else; 85 isn't low enough that the lay person would even think there was something "wrong" with him.)
OK, that is a good point, but I think until now nobody can realy say what it does mean to have 9-10 INT or 3-4 INT ;-)

Well, a lot of people have tried to compare Int to IQ. Even Gygax himself said "just multiply Inteligence by 10," a scaling that doesn't work at all, but he was a game designer, not a psychometrician.

Quote:

I found a test calculate your attribute scores in d&d

-->
A doctorate (PhD) IQ 131 or higher (=> INT = 17)
A Masters Degree IQ 121 to 130
An undergraduate or apprenticeship IQ 111 to 120
HighSchool IQ 101 to 110
Middle School(Grades 6-8) IQ 91 to 100
Grammar School(Grades 1-5) IQ 81 to 90
No Schooling IQ 80 or lower (=> INT = 6)

You can take other examples as the above but I think it´s a better way as to say IQ 131+ INT 17 / IQ 80- INT 6

I think that's a lot more accessible. It still raises the problem of conflating intelligence with education, and it also raises the problem of what about people that didn't go on to do advanced degrees?

E.g. at least in the USA, a lawyer will not have a Ph.D.. The appropriate degree is a J.D., which is a degree that you take right after your undergraduate degree. I think in the UK, a law degree is an undergraduate degree. I'd hate to think that UK lawyers are ipso facto less intelligent than their American counterparts. My partner opted not to do a Ph.D. for financial reasons (and because the job market for Ph.D. historians makes such a degree essentially a $200,000 hobby). Therefore less intelligent? I don't believe so.

And, of course, a 17 year old has no idea how intelligent she is because she doesn't yet know whether she'll finish her Ph.D.?

But that said, I like this a lot better than trying to make WAGs about IQ.


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"IQ is what an IQ test tests for."

And that's basically the same things that the Intelligence score is meant to represent.


I typically represent IQ to Int as follows:

Int 10 or below: 10 IQ per point of Int
Int greater than 10: 100 + 5 per point of Int over 10.

For a quick Int to IQ reference...

  1.     10
  2.     20
  3.     30
  4.     40
  5.     50
  6.     60
  7.     70
  8.     80
  9.     90
  10. 100
  11. 105
  12. 110
  13. 115
  14. 120
  15. 125
  16. 130
  17. 135
  18. 140
  19. 145
  20. 150
  21. 155
  22. 160


The first reason that it is probably best to leave IQ out of it is that in the game world the Intelligence stat is already perfectly adequate for what it does. Why bring in a number from outside the game that correlates only to a stat within it that already does the job? And the Intelligence stat does do a perfectly decent job of measuring memory, reasoning ability, and all-around mental function, because that is what it is defined to be. It is very roughly similar to what IQ tests try to measure, although neither the game stat nor IQ actually is "intelligence" in the common usage of the word.

IQ tests do measure something, or rather they measure several somethings, average the scores, and call the result an Intelligence Quotient. There are excellent reasons to be suspicious of this in the real world. Is someone who is a literary genius and a mathematical dunce measured well by an average? There are many different types of intelligence. Ironically, because the game has three mental stats, it does a better job of capturing this complexity than any test that gives a single number (as opposed to aptitude battery tests, which often do a good job of measuring the various things they have been designed to measure).

There are many, many things that an IQ test will not test for that can often or at least sometimes be part of what we are thinking of when we think of intelligence in the real world. Drive, judgment, "social intelligence", perceptiveness, mechanical aptitude, and detailed knowledge of obscure fields can all be elements in a person's makeup that lead others to consider them "bright" and these elements aren't typically picked up by IQ tests.

In the Pathfinder/D&D/d20 game world, we have stats that capture some of these other things. High Wisdom indicates judgment and perceptiveness. High Charisma indicates social intelligence and force of personality, in some instances indicating drive and ambition (people who are go-getters typically are considered smarter than those who aren't, even if they test the same). Multiple ranks or skill focuses in Knowledge skills can compensate at least to some degree for average or low base Intelligence scores, just as in the real world there is no 100% guarantee that any given college graduate is particularly smart. The level of education a person has received does correlate better with IQ test scores than any other measure, but the correlation is not perfect, and there are plenty of uneducated people who would test quite poorly who are nonetheless very smart.

The other reason it probably isn't a very good idea to try to import IQ into the game is that our tests for it measure it on a human scale. There is no way to map that scale against the Pathfinder Intelligence scale, as in Pathfinder Intelligence can go so far beyond human norms that it becomes impossible to equate it to any IQ number. I myself have a 15th level character who has a 27 Int score now and will have a 28 at her next level (current total includes a +4 enhancement bonus from an item, a +2 inherent bonus from a Tome, +1 from a level bonus, and a +2 human racial bonus). I couldn't tell you her IQ. That is not even a meaningful question to ask. There are a few creatures in the Bestiaries with even higher natural Intelligence scores. Why, in such a world, would there be any reason to import IQ?


Zog of Deadwood wrote:
Why, in such a world, would there be any reason to import IQ?

For the same reason people living in our real world take D&D personality tests to determine what their in-game stats would be: it's fun.

Shadow Lodge

Orfamay Quest wrote:
My partner opted not to do a Ph.D. for financial reasons (and because the job market for Ph.D. historians makes such a degree essentially a $200,000 hobby). Therefore less intelligent? I don't believe so.

If anything, more intelligent due to actually considering the costs and rewards of the decision.


I have an IQ of 145, but I think my game score would be between 14-16. I always did int x 10. An 18 is considered the piñacle of an ability score with anything above being superhuman.


Byrdology wrote:
I have an IQ of 145, but I think my game score would be between 14-16. I always did int x 10. An 18 is considered the piñacle of an ability score with anything above being superhuman.

Well, at the risk of inflating your ego, 145 is pretty much the pinnacle of measurable human IQ. None of the standard tests have any consistency above that level, and none of the non-standard tests have been sufficiently validated above that level (partly because we have no ground truths to measure, partly because you can't get enough people together for a decent sample pool).

It's like if I asked you how fast your fingernails grow and handed you a ruler and a stopwatch. The measuring instruments that work just fine for things like falling coffee cups don't work for things on an entirely different scale.

Distributionally, IQ 145+ can all be lumped together into the category of 18 Int.


Weirdo wrote:
Orfamay Quest wrote:
My partner opted not to do a Ph.D. for financial reasons (and because the job market for Ph.D. historians makes such a degree essentially a $200,000 hobby). Therefore less intelligent? I don't believe so.
If anything, more intelligent due to actually considering the costs and rewards of the decision.

That would be my assessment, too. Of course, I'm biased 'cause we share a bank account.


Laithoron wrote:

I typically represent IQ to Int as follows:

Int 10 or below: 10 IQ per point of Int
Int greater than 10: 100 + 5 per point of Int over 10.

For a quick Int to IQ reference...

  1.   10
  2.   20
  3.   30
  4.   40
  5.   50
  6.   60
  7.   70
  8.   80
  9.   90
  10. 100
  11. 105
  12. 110
  13. 115
  14. 120
  15. 125
  16. 130
  17. 135
  18. 140
  19. 145
  20. 150
  21. 155
  22. 160

Why the asymmetry?


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Why the asymmetry?

Simplicity.

The approach I outlined above is a simple way to make the numbers approximate real world statistics. If Int 10 and IQ 100 can both be considered roughly average, then my system supposes them as equivalent. If Int 0 is mindless or altogether lacking intelligence, dividing the average by 10 meshes nicely with the Int scale.

On the opposite side, I recall from my own test scores that an IQ of about 145 places someone in roughly the upper 2% of the test population (essentially 17-18 on a 3d6). Considering that Pathfinder allows us to place a +2 bonus in the ability score of our choice, I'm supposing that Intelligence-focused individual would use their +2 on Int and that some of those with a 15 or 16 might as well.

Rather than getting overly fussy with trying to nail down an exact multiplier or dealing with 4d6 drop lowest, reroll 1s, etc, multiplying anything over Int 10 by 5 provides a neat and simple framework. Assuming that all people in the world (and not just PCs) use a 3d6×6, it reflects real-world IQ score distributions better than keeping the x10 multiplier all the way thru. Lastly, it makes Int scores greater than 20 impressive while not being totally beyond comprehension.


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Byrdology wrote:
I have an IQ of 145, but I think my game score would be between 14-16. I always did int x 10. An 18 is considered the piñacle of an ability score with anything above being superhuman.

Well, at the risk of inflating your ego, 145 is pretty much the pinnacle of measurable human IQ. None of the standard tests have any consistency above that level, and none of the non-standard tests have been sufficiently validated above that level (partly because we have no ground truths to measure, partly because you can't get enough people together for a decent sample pool).

It's like if I asked you how fast your fingernails grow and handed you a ruler and a stopwatch. The measuring instruments that work just fine for things like falling coffee cups don't work for things on an entirely different scale.

Distributionally, IQ 145+ can all be lumped together into the category of 18 Int.

I'm at least smart enough to know that I'm not THAT smart.


According to Wikipedia: The average IQ is 100. The average score on 3d6 is 10.5. One standard deviation in IQ occurs every 15 points. One standard deviation in 3d6 occurs roughly every 3 points. So with a bit of rounding:

An INT roll of 10 = An IQ of 100
Every point above or below is +/- 5 IQ points.

So
INT 3 = IQ 65
INT 20= IQ 150

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