A new look at how intelligence can create and develop characters
I was reading this article, and it seemed rather insightful to me (in an over-use of dropping F bombs kinda way; try to ignore that part, sorry).
Thought I'd try to design a character building/progression system around it.
Intelligence - Basically, you're stupid until you're smart. This means rolling against the chaos and eliminating the ability to make mistakes. Intelligence gives you some defense against mistakes. Basically, roll what you know initially and then go from there.
In an adventure, you might get an intelligence pool and spending it to 0 means you're spent for the day - each time you learn something (or maybe try if it's something difficult or plot related), roll 1d6, and this drains your intelligence pool by the rolled value. You must analyze to learn more about something in order to know the answer to it. Resting restores your intelligence pool.
Questions and answers include anything - Ie. How to cast a new spell or fighting move. Based on how the world might work, the GM can impose a variety of rules. In a certain scenario, you might not be able to employ a fighting move, and casting a spell multiple times in a single day might require extra pre-preparation incantations that you simply do not know, because you're stupid! So yeah, everyone is stupid and you're only as intelligent as you are lucky or willing to learn something new (however you might want to explain the intelligence pool system).
Becoming a factotum under this system, or being able to recall a wide variety of facts on a single subject would be more of a perk or a feat or class feature.
If you need other stats...
Perseverance - Resist frustration and avoid the emotional reaction that occurs with causality (it's in page 2 of the article). Could be a character feature that lets you try again.
Attention - How to heed your gut responses and know that something is a bad idea before you try it out. I dunno how this'd work - drunk driving with a bus is too obvious an example of bad idea... Another thing Attention can do is you might be able to assess that something is particularly difficult, or how skilled you are, relative to other characters.
Ego - Maybe, everytime you accomplish something new and that seemed difficult, you're ego will inflate itself. This is, outlined in the article, a stupidity response, so it might make other things that are difficult seem less difficult, and then upon failure, you become more easily frustrated ("I thought I was awesome! Darn it."). In social encounters, you might have to voluntarily inflate your ego in order to have the gall to intimidate or pursuade or annoy an NPC.
Another idea could be that ego is what regenerates your intelligence pool, however it could also be happiness. Whatever restores confidence in your ability to handle a challenge. In order to reduce ego, you need to humble yourself in some way, and hope that it doesn't totally depress you. Sometimes, the GM might control characters by making them get confident about only handling certain challenges (the ones they are fed up with not having handled).
Thought I'd try to design a character building/progression system around it.
Intelligence - Basically, you're stupid until you're smart. This means rolling against the chaos and eliminating the ability to make mistakes. Intelligence gives you some defense against mistakes. Basically, roll what you know initially and then go from there.
In an adventure, you might get an intelligence pool and spending it to 0 means you're spent for the day - each time you learn something (or maybe try if it's something difficult or plot related), roll 1d6, and this drains your intelligence pool by the rolled value. You must analyze to learn more about something in order to know the answer to it. Resting restores your intelligence pool.
Questions and answers include anything - Ie. How to cast a new spell or fighting move. Based on how the world might work, the GM can impose a variety of rules. In a certain scenario, you might not be able to employ a fighting move, and casting a spell multiple times in a single day might require extra pre-preparation incantations that you simply do not know, because you're stupid! So yeah, everyone is stupid and you're only as intelligent as you are lucky or willing to learn something new (however you might want to explain the intelligence pool system).
Becoming a factotum under this system, or being able to recall a wide variety of facts on a single subject would be more of a perk or a feat or class feature.
If you need other stats...
Perseverance - Resist frustration and avoid the emotional reaction that occurs with causality (it's in page 2 of the article). Could be a character feature that lets you try again.
Attention - How to heed your gut responses and know that something is a bad idea before you try it out. I dunno how this'd work - drunk driving with a bus is too obvious an example of bad idea... Another thing Attention can do is you might be able to assess that something is particularly difficult, or how skilled you are, relative to other characters.
Ego - Maybe, everytime you accomplish something new and that seemed difficult, you're ego will inflate itself. This is, outlined in the article, a stupidity response, so it might make other things that are difficult seem less difficult, and then upon failure, you become more easily frustrated ("I thought I was awesome! Darn it."). In social encounters, you might have to voluntarily inflate your ego in order to have the gall to intimidate or pursuade or annoy an NPC.
Another idea could be that ego is what regenerates your intelligence pool, however it could also be happiness. Whatever restores confidence in your ability to handle a challenge. In order to reduce ego, you need to humble yourself in some way, and hope that it doesn't totally depress you. Sometimes, the GM might control characters by making them get confident about only handling certain challenges (the ones they are fed up with not having handled).