Mindless Undead and Intelligence Boosting

[Spook205]

I've got an undead master cleric player in one of my games. Now he's got himself a little intelligence boosting item and his immediate response was to strap it onto an undead creature, specifically a mindless undead creature.

His intention is to give it a meager intelligence score (say 2) so he can train it.

Part of me is inclined to believe that mindless undead are just that, mindless, and no amount of intelligence boosting items is going to imbue them with an intellect (no matter how small) but I don't know if I have a rules basis.

Similarly, I don't think putting a +1 int item on a giant roach or a golem would make it animal intellect or trainable, but again, I don't have a rules citation to back me up.

What say you all?

[Paladin of Baha-who?]

Mindless creatures have no intelligence score, not a score of 0. Intelligence boosting effects have no result.

[dragonhunterq]

PRD wrote:

Mindless: Vermin companions have no Intelligence score and possess the mindless trait. In spite of this, vermin companions may learn one trick, plus additional bonus tricks. If a vermin animal companion gains an ability score increase (at 4 Hit Dice, 8 Hit Dice, and so on), the druid can apply this increase to the companion's Intelligence, changing it from — to 1, at which point the companion loses the mindless quality and is able to know up to 3 tricks per point of Intelligence, plus the additional bonus tricks. Vermin companions have no skill points or feats as long as they have the mindless quality.

this rule for vermin companions can be extrapolated to undead/constructs. essentially gain intelligence lose mindless.

[Tacticslion]

That seems exceptionally easy when compared to, say, the Awaken spell (and it's related variants in 3.5).

[boring7]

dragonhunterq wrote:

PRD wrote:

Mindless: Vermin companions have no Intelligence score and possess the mindless trait. In spite of this, vermin companions may learn one trick, plus additional bonus tricks. If a vermin animal companion gains an ability score increase (at 4 Hit Dice, 8 Hit Dice, and so on), the druid can apply this increase to the companion's Intelligence, changing it from — to 1, at which point the companion loses the mindless quality and is able to know up to 3 tricks per point of Intelligence, plus the additional bonus tricks. Vermin companions have no skill points or feats as long as they have the mindless quality.

this rule for vermin companions can be extrapolated to undead/constructs. essentially gain intelligence lose mindless.

To further expound, "can be" doesn't mean "needs to be." Ergo the DM who doesn't want undead getting an intelligence score can use either rule s/he wishes.

Further muddying the waters; mindless undead aren't mindless (their critter entry doesn't list the ability) and the general properties for undead imply that undead with an intelligence score actually heal naturally. The entry explaining the intelligene attribute talks a bit about mindless vermin but does not offer similar information for mindless undead.

Anyway, with that much creative license I think you can get away with any ruling you want. It would actually be really funny if suddenly getting an animalistic 2 intelligence caused the zombie to "forget" its programming and have to re-learn everything including how to walk. But that might be more interaction with zombie nonsense than anyone in the game really wants.