Acting Dumb
At long last we have arrived at the opposite-world sequel to “Behaving Intelligently.” And in a weird way, I think it can be more difficult RPing the dummy. I mean sure, playing a character smarter than you is tough to fake. But acting like an idiot can inflict more psychic damage. Is it time for another tale from a table? Do rangers carry poo bags for their companions?
So no shit, there I was: a freshly minted barbarian in a low level party. We were up against our first incorporeal opponents, and we were getting our asses handed to us.
“This is bullshit!” said the druid.
“Are we about to TPK?” said the rogue.
“Why the crap are shadows CR 3?” said the bard.
Happily, I am more intelligent than my barbarian.
As we all know, magic weapons in Pathfinder 1e are able to deal half damage to incorporeal creatures. Mundane weapons, meanwhile, can’t do diddly. So there I am swinging away with a magic bastard sword and doing my job while the poor rogue, who hadn’t picked up any magic weapons yet, can’t contribute.
“Wait!” says I. “I’ve got a couple of magic arrows in my quiver. You can use them as improvised daggers.”
I felt clever for thinking of that solution, but the rest of the table shouted down the idea, saying that my barbarian wouldn’t think of it.
And that, ladies and germs, is the pain of playing the dummy. I had the solution in the palm of my hand, but it didn’t sit right with the rest of the table.
To be fair to them, having a barbarian shout, “Use my magic arrows as improvised daggers to deal half damage to the ghost,” does feel a bit off. My guy doesn’t have any ranks in Knowledge (religion), after all. And according the rules, a Knowledge (religion) check is how you find out about undead creatures’ strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, I’ve seen that my magic sword worked while the rogue’s daggers didn’t, so it’s a reasonable conclusion to make. On the other other hand, I’m also in the middle of a rage and probably not thinking tactically.
This was a complex metagaming issue with lots of factors. But at the end of the day, even though it’s been years since the incident in question, it still leaves me wondering whether piloting a dumb character necessarily means playing dumb too.
So what do you say, friends? When it’s your turn to play dumb, do you find sneaky ways to justify smart play? Do you lean into the derp and like our old pal Magus? Or is there some clever middle-way? Give us all your smartest thoughts on being stupid down in the comments!
JOIN THE HANDBOOK OF HEROES DISCORD! Do you want a place to game with your fellow Heroes? How about a magical land where you can post your dankest nerd memes, behold the finest in gamer dog and geek cats, or speculate baselessly on Handbook of Heroes plot developments? Then have I got a Discord Invite for you!
I found out that other players are more inclined to accept clever ideas from dumb characters if they are worded dumb.
For example, in your example: “AGH! Punny rogue pointy blade don’t stab good! Rogue’s pointy blade useless! Trow it away! Even my magically arrow be better, here use it!”
I was going to say the same thing. Low intelligence doesn’t mean the character can’t have good ideas, you just need to present them right. You’re probably not going to come up with a complex plan of action, but “magic sword works, try these magic arrows” isn’t unreasonable even from an INT8 orc barbarian.
That said, the Rage is a bigger problem. There are many ways to portray barbarian rage, but they all involve a mental state — whether red misted anger or cold focus — that’s not really conducive to that kind of problem solving. They can still work as a team while raging, but helping other people solve problems with ineffectual weapons is something that would require breaking the rage…
This may be a me thing as well. I played orcs in Warhammer Fantasy some years ago. I absolutely hated played a tactical game where my dudes wouldn’t do the tactical thing in defiance of my wishes. Wound up trading them out for other factions.
my take on the debate is this: low int doesn’t mean stupid
being bad at tactics and book study doesn’t mean they can’t come up with good ideas
if anything they’re more likely to come up with stuff like “use magic arrows if daggers don’t work” or “use create or destroy water to remove fog” because they don’t overthink things and aren’t as limited by how things “should” work, making solutions smarter characters would never try incredibly obvious to them
there’s a reason WIS and INT are separate stats after all
Cool justification. I might just adopt that in future. It’s easier to think outside the box when you’ve never bothered to learn what a box is!
Am barbarian! Prepositional phrase bad!
While I know the situation, it has never really been a problem at my tables. Its normal to discuss our options and infos out of character . You do not need to restrict yourself to your characters knowledge there, you are players planning (limitations to avoid to much backseat gaming apply).
Obviously this does not allow the group to use information that the group have no way of knowing, but the players know. So in your example, if nobody made their monster lore check and there would be no context clues, you could not recommend the magic arrows, because nobody knows. But this applies to the 20 int wizard as well. But you could totally, as a player, go ‘hey Wizard, do a monster lore check’ even if your char has 8 int or go ‘well, my magic weapon does damage, someone should be able to figure things out’.
As to how to explain that in-universe the usual is to just agree that the guy best suited came up with it in-universe. This can be a bit strange, when, say, after a long explanation to a puzzle or that the Wizard has the perfect spell here the Rogue Player has to say ‘at least thats what I assume the Wizard would say.’ but nobody minds, often its funny.
For the most part we dont treat character knowledge/behaviour = player behaviour (I know your example was more specific) and if we follow this to the logical endpoint it becomes very restrictive: The 8 Wis Fighter player could figure out a riddle, but would just have to sit there. And in turn, the 20 Int Wizard player would be appointed note keeper and buyer of emergency scrolls and items even if they just wanna throw fireballs.
I always liked the “assume the smart guy came up with it” strategy for this. Or at least, I have since I heard about it in forums. Wish my barbarian’s group had known about it at the time.
You can be stupid, but wise/cunning (wisdom stat), which is how Ogres operate, being able to make cruel, sadistic traps and ambushes despite being idiots (the traps/ambushes might be poorly made, of course…).
In your Barb’s case, he could possibly put two and two together by realizing ‘shiny glowy sparkly things hurt ghosty’ and since their arrows are sparkly glowy, he might say ‘Borrow sparkly glowy hurty ghosty!’ or such.
I don’t recall RPing the interaction in any particular way. I think I just told the rogue to grab the arrows out of my quiver and explained the interaction.
In that sense, I guess a spoon full of RP helps the metagame go down.
I’ve always felt that “not RPing appropriate to the character” = “not speaking in character”. Sounds to me that maybe the other players could have pulled the RP stick out of their collective bum for a moment and translated this to “maybe someone without an Int penalty could puzzle out what makes the barbarian’s attacks different”.
It’s tough. I stumbled upon the solution and explained it out-of-character. I guess saying something like, “Sword magic! Magic hurts it! Use arrows!” and then hurling them at the rogues feet could have worked.
“You’re right. Me should RP Intelligence 7. Me could also RP Strength 20 on your face.”
The key for having clever ideas while playing a dumb character is to have dumb justification for your good ideas.
For example here: “Duh, why not pretty elf girl use her magic mumbo jumbo to fix this? Like explodey fireballs? Or something less explodey.”
One could argue metagaming, but you could argue could roleplaying.
A line worthy of Handbook-World. 😀
High praise.
I’ve found it incredibly hard to roleplay someone who is significantly dumber than me without being an active detriment to the party, which I suppose is part of playing a very stupid character.
I tend to make it so the dumb character is lacking in impulse control, doesn’t seem to pay attention (so they will remember things slightly off), and insults NPCs seemingly by accident.
If I come up with something that’s too clever for my character to have come up with, I’ll try to get another PC to suggest it instead. It’s occasionally fine to have the dumb character think up something clever too, but it has to be presented well. A raging barbarian isn’t likely to think of a clever solution, but maybe the ditzy catfolk monk who has a higher movement speed than IQ will accidentally have an idea somehow.
One of Laurel’s old groups had a learned idiot. Crap for Intelligence, but max dots in Lore.
“I wonder who built these ruins?”
Cue the human encyclopedia rattling off a full lore dump.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Ma learnin’s.”
For stuff like that, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to speak out-of-character, for two reasons: one, I think this problem and the one presented in behaving intelligently go hand in hand – Most folk at a table are probably 10-12 Int irl, so combining their heads to think of what the 16-18 int characters would do/say works wonders. Plus, it allows the players playing 7-9 int characters to contribute.
Secondly, this is a game, with weird mechanics that if you think too hard about them. “Use my magic arrows as improvised daggers to deal half damage to the ghost,” makes you sound like a crazy person. There is also no other way to express those concepts. Ultimately, these games are design such that if players *don’t* use out of character terms and phrases, their characters will almost certainly die. Sure you can try to come up with some way of describing it in character that suits the in-game universe, but ultimately that only works with experienced players who have read the rulebook, and thus are translating in their head your RP talk into the actual phrase, which is “Use my magic arrows as improvised daggers to deal half damage to the ghost.” New players wouldn’t stand a chance against those enemies, and will only stand a chance when either A) they read the rulebook after dying and learn to translate RP speak, or B) someone says something out of character and prevents them from dying. Only the second option is fun.
(I do feel the need to get ahead of anyone getting mad at this comment, out of character discussion about mechanics should only be allowed *after* succeeding the appropriate knowledge check.)
It’s absolutely mad to me how player forget all about lore check the moment the dice come out. That info is critical, but folks are more interested in casting the next flashy (but possibly ineffectual) spell.
Character/player separation can help with that. What I would do would be to give the solution out-of-character, and someone with a higher int character can propose/do it in character. You can get the credit for a smart move, and the in-game story is consistent.
I understand this might not work for everyone though. You could argue that it’s like playing someone else’s character for them. Or you don’t like out-of-character discussions of what to do.
I want there to be SOME way for the info to come out, you know? There’s something in me that rebels against the idea of “your class choice determines how tactically you’re allowed to play in this tactical skirmish.”
When DMing, I was doing that. Someone proposes something the PCs may not know, or is about to do something the PCs may know it is a bad idea –> “please someone roll me a wisdom/intelligence/something (Lore) check”.
LARPing in college, there was a situation where the event was full of riddles to be solved. I *love* puzzles and riddles, but my dual-weapon duelist was functionally illiterate and thick as a brick. It was killing me to be obligated (based on my PC’s job) to be standing *right there* and not be able to meaningfully contribute to the puzzle-solving without breaking character and/or metagaming all to hell and back.
Finally, I hit upon a solution. About four hours into the event, I very publicly approached my friend (who played the local lord) and said “Sir? I’ve been thinking on this.”
“Yes, sergeant?” he replied.
“That first puzzle,” I said (picking the one that everyone had solved immediately without discussing it first), ‘When is a door not a door’, I think the answer is ‘A JAR.””
My friend looked me dead in the eye for a minute, then deadpanned, “Thank you sergeant, very good. You are relieved from puzzle-solving detail, by the way. See if the rest of the villagers require any assistance.”
And with that I was free to go find goblins to beat up or some other combat-related task.
My next character was the local sage.
Can’t imagine why. XD
This is why Perception is my dump stat of choice. A) it’s subjectively funnier to be sitting there oblivious while the prisoners escape behind you than to sit there with the perfect solution that you can’t express IC, and B) it’s a much more solvable problem (the above problem was solved with “hey, if someone clues Lapis in, she has Sleep prepared”).
Nose stuck in a book, eh? Best kind of caster.
My solution would be to just let one of the smart characters ‘think of the idea,’ but that only works if your players lean into the group storytelling mentality over the players in a game mentality.
Yeah… I think that particular group was more into the idea of “I am my character.” In general I agree that. That tends to be a go-to solution for me these days.
If someone in my game is running a low Int character and their wisdom is at least average, then I’ll usually give them a wisdom check if it’s something that they have a decent chance of knowing. The arrow thing would have probably been a no though. If the barbarian was truly dumb, then they would never have made the connection between them being able to hit with their “special” sword and the rogue being able to use their “special” arrows. The chances of them making that connection would, of course, go up with their intelligence.
One of my favorite characters started out dumb as a rock (Int 5). He fought with an axe, because it was simpler than a sword. His favorite line, which he started most conversations with (and this was YEARS before Forrest Gump) was, “my mama told me”. The parties gnome fighter had promised my characters mother that he would watch out for my fighter and keep him out of trouble. He was pretty much clueless of anything that he wouldn’t have encountered in a large village or during his training.
Gnome finally got tired of babysitting a 7’2″ human and set it up with the DM to make him “smart”. DM already had potions that would randomly affect stat’s and worked it to get the fighter to drink one. It would either make him smart enough to take care of himself, or so dumb he could dump him on a temple to care for without guilt. Couple double 00’s later and fighter was maxed out in intel. DM didn’t think it through though. Up until that time he couldn’t learn because it took him a long time to understand something. Now he could understand things, BUT HE STILL DIDN’T KNOW THEM. The DM expected him to immediately be a fount of knowledge, but I reminded him that he had to learn things just like everyone else. We went around and around about that for a couple weeks. Character ended up being the one I played for the longest.
The secret missing detail? My barbarian was Int 12. Didn’t throw that into the OP since it kind of went against the theme of today’s comic. Still, I think the general principle of ‘your character is not smart enough to think of that’ still applies.
Yeah, I’d definitely give the player a Perception or Wisdom check at that high of INT.
there is a difference between book smarts and street wisdom, and it is easy to just always say “I wouldn’t think of that as this character”, it is actually more of an exercise in critical thinking to try and think up ways that you WOULD think of a thing, but in a “dumb brain” way.
I think one of the more perfect examples of this is in the barbarian Grog that Travis Willingham played in the first campaign of Critical Role. He played a character with an int score of 6, but a decent wisdom, and while he couldn’t read (canonically, altho he was learning enar the end), he was still able to think tactically in many situations, and even in a rage, there is no reason that someone built for battle can’t think about how to fight.
You can always figure out reasons or ways that you can come up with the solution as the dummy, without “breaking character” and at the end of the day, if the entire table wants to hinder their own group by saying “You can’t do that!” firstly, let the bodies hit the floor, and when the group in game is TPK’d over the parties IRL stupidity, you can enjoy the moment as you were literally the smartest one in the room.
And also, maybe find another group…
I was very much thinking of Grog in today’s comic. 🙂
Yeahhhh I can’t play dumb characters for this reason.
A gamer after my own heart!
So what? It’s you who got the idea not your character. The rogue player could be the one RP having the idea. That said if they prefer to be useless to RP in a RPG that is their deal 😛
PCs are on their own reality, players are eldritch being from otherworldly dimensions and knowing things that no mortal was meant to know, like the contents and rules of the players handbook. What the PC know and the players know, the ideas they have and what they knowledge are separate things. The vessel is dumb, the player is clever 😀
Yeah. But the trick is getting the other eldritch entities to accept that the smart thing came out of the dumb vessel’s mouth.
I mean there’s dumb and dumb. Sure, the barbarian isn’t aware of the nuances of ancient elven society’s delicate customs, but it does fighting for a literal living, so he surely would know, if steel dagger goes the gold see-through person harmlessly, sparkly point arrows might still make it hurt.
Or there was the barbarian I’ve heard of second hand, whose first question was, when the party entered a large gothic chamber with intricately decorated rugs on the walls: “what happens to a vampire if you break their teeth off?”, and when the others looked at him dumbfounded, he just punched the wall carpet, and knocked out the vampire hiding behind. The question was totally reasonable- five year olds with less life experience come up eith more complicated questions all the time…
Low intelligence does not mean you are not street smart, it usually means you have trouble connecting the intricate dots – but you can still hit a nail with a hammer.
I wonder if there’s a market for vampire grillz? Immortality must bring some major tooth decay problems after all!
Just be smart out of character, and let the smart characters have your ideas in-character. Similarly, smart characters have the collective intelligence of the table.
I do like that this allows everyone to participate in tactical play without disrupting the fiction.
Of course, if your wizard is a sorcerer, it does raise the question of whether parties without an Int-based class are allowed to play smart.
My table has a player who knows the system better than most of the other players and is generally a strategist. In our longest-running campaign, he also plays an innocent, low-INT plant kid. He’s prone to suggesting something and then saying something like “I don’t know if I can know this in-character, but…”. I always say that he can share it. In my view, if a player has an idea that their character wouldn’t think of, it is perfectly reasonable for them to tell the other players out-of-character and those players to act on it. You’re on the same team for the gods’ sake! Forcing players to not share and use their cool ideas hardly seems like promoting fun. This is particularly true for combat encounters, which are already very gamified.
Agreed. I thought we wanted to encourage creative play, you know?
“Creativity is an ability score that is entirely separate from both wisdom and intelligence”
Intelligence: “The fog is particularly dense because of the water being warmed by general decomposition causing it to evaporate into the cool night air”
Wisdom: “If the fog is obscuring our vision, then any foe may be similarly hampered”
Creativity: “Guh, hard to see through wet air! Wizard, use magic to get rid of wet!”
You don’t necessarily have to understand the full nature of the problem, or all the ramifications of addressing it, to be able to solve/bypass/remove it.
Of course, it can be tough when you’re a GM trying to help a player. You KNOW they have an answer on their spell list, but figuring out how Grug the Boatman can zero in on it is rough.
I ran into this at an Adventure League table that had expanded beyond the first adventure with a little group of newbies en-route to becoming regulars. I was playing a cockney-accented Orc Barbarian, and had to explain the idea of action economy and focusing targets down to the gang in character, while sticking to my big dumb goober schtick I’d been having fun with so far. It went along the lines of:
“Roight, y’know how when deys lots o fings wantin to give ya a good stabbin, and y’gotta pick which ov em t’smash first? Whots better, splittin up and tryin to spread out and hurt em all, or groupin up an KICKIN DA CRAP OUTTA ONE OF EM to show the rest who’s really in charge, eh? Then, even if they dun get the message, there’s still one less of em puttin the stab on us, and we can move to the next un nice and orderly like, yeh?”
The rest of the session went a bit better, and when we talked out of character afterwards, it went down a lot easier for the group in general!
Me and my awakened cockney-accented cane corse barbarian salute you!
A webcomic over at Webtoon, “Surviving the Game as a Barbarian”, is regularly invoking this situation. The protagonist is a veteran gamer who has been “incarnated” (I guess?) into the game as a Barbarian, where in-universe Barbarians have all the usual stereotypes. The game is pure ironman hard difficulty, and the player has to use his knowledge and metagame all the time just to survive.
Very often, he is in the position of knowing what to do, but has to act dumb to avoid attracting undue attention. Today’s episode 41 has an example.
Link to toon for those interested:
https://www.webtoons.com/en/fantasy/surviving-the-game-as-a-barbarian/list?title_no=5515
Depends how dumb we are talking. I don’t think I would expect anyone not to think “magic weapons are better than non-magic ones”. On the other hand, when the barbarian can suggest the use of an obscure spell from a supplement book to solve a problem the party is facing with magical rather than mundane means (real experience), I am far less satisfied. For other tactical strategies such as kiting or distracting the enemies, it’s kinda a case-by-case basis.
But generally if the players are using out-of-game knowledge to bypass Knowledge checks, that’s a no-no, regardless of the character’s supposed intelligence.
A resounding “it depends?” Forget 42. Methinks that might be the real answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Sometimes it’s the dumb person that finds the solution because the smart ones are overthinking it.
https://i.makeagif.com/media/12-17-2016/GiiMpS.gif
So, while I didn’t get to play a lot of dumb characters as a player. As a Gm I never miss the chance to RP it around, and while some of the npc (or monsters) are dumb i never let it be a reason for them to loose an argument. It’s more fun that way.
Take for example the following between a pc (‘Buri’) and the pseudo-wyvern he befriended (‘Sigoy’), just to make it clear pseudo-wyverns are as big as cats, have a very low score of both int and str. this one specify was lured to join the party by Buri after he bribed him and carried his hoard for him (Sigoy has a punk gangster mentality and treat him as an underling).
the discussion started after the party shared the loot they got and Siogy called dibs on all the copper coins (which were a lot more numerically then the other coins. :
Buri: “Yo Sigoy, how many copper coins do you think this gold coin is worth”;
Sigoy: ” Ha, let me teach you so you won’t be fooled by tricksters.
See, a scratched and dinged up gold coin like this one should be something like 10 rusty old copper coins, or 3 shiny new ones.
now, you might think the shiny ones are better, right? -Wrong! you can scrap the rust off of the old coins with enough scrubbing to make it shine almost as new. then you got way more shiny coins for the same price!”
Buri: “Dude… any normal market will give you 100 copper for a single one of this, shiny or not. And they’ll give you 1,000 for those bigger shinier platinum pieces”
“If people have only given you 3-10 for one of these… you’ve been scammed”;
Sigoy: “No no, this is how they get you..ahhh you poor fool.
Sure they say it’s worth a ton of coins. even might give them to you. But once you try and carry them all, you can’t -see? you go pick up as many as you can. even 8 or 9 then once you go with that and turn your back they go back and sweep all the rest. don’t let them trick you”
Buri: ‘I think carrying coins might be a you problem, Im carrying both of our hordes which is roughly 1500 coins and i don’t really feel any encumbrance yet… Though you might want to invest in some extradimensional storage if you want to carry lots of coin by yourself”
Sigoy: “Right, that whole bag trick, sure you CAN carry a lot of coins in the bag. It just so happen it cost 2 gold coins to buy one.. I’m not a dummy – I looked around. As if I’ll stoop down to PAY to be able to get my coins ‘worth’. i’d be left with nothing but useless empty bags that way !”
(GM: reminder. he’s hoard had less then 2 gp total net worth when met)
Buri: Sigh… You know you are much richer than you were back then, you could use one of your shiny platinum coins to buy a bag and they’ll even give you 8 gold pieces as change;
Sigoy: “Why would I need a bag? I got you for carrying my hoard.
Don’t you try pawning this on me now.”
Buri: ״Fine, just make sure you get the full value when you exchange coins”
Sigoy: “Yes yes, fool value, I hear you…”
As gamers we so often believe that you “win” the argument if you make the skill check. Nothing more fun than sticking to your guns, even though you meta-know you’re wrong.
for me my character being a dumbass manifests more as “I know I really shouldn’t but [character] isn’t that bright”. As for the kinds of situations outlined in the commentary, I like coming up with dumb reasons for the same conclusions, having it be like a “hey I just remembered this fun fact”, or follow what other people have said about assuming that the smart guy is the one to come up with it in character
See also https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/areyousure
That is why I take a page of wisdom from Thief and take all the 20s 😀
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/take-all
Ignore that because reasons 🙂
With regard to your specific scenario: I think it would be funnier for the rogue to steal the barbarian’s magic arrows to use as improvised weapons.
I know I’m kinda late to the table here, but for what it’s worth (and this part has been mentioned above) it doesn’t feel to me like you’d have to be Einstein to realize that hurting something supernatural could require something supernatural. Particularly if normal weapons literally pass right through it. “Fight fire with fire” isn’t a saying reserved for post-graduate-level physics classes…
My REAL thought though is that the treatment of low-INT characters in RPGs says a lot more about the players than the game. Mechanically the difference between INT 6 (dumb-like-rock) and INT 12 (smarter than your average bear) is a miserable +3 out of 20. That barbarian is going to outsmart the clever rogue A LOT if we’re using the rules. Similarly, if we’re using 3d6 as our odds-generator, then logically INT 6- should represent a fair-sized portion of the population… But have you ever (honestly) met a Grog? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really like Grog! He’s a lot of fun. But he is a characature, and if we’re being totally honest kind of a mean-spirited one. Which is okay, comedy should be allowed to be mean-spirited. But we shouldn’t then mistake it for reality. And being a low-INT toon shouldn’t mean you’re incapable of doing smart things, it just means that, on balance, you often don’t.
Just like, in the real world, every utterance of even the smartest of us isn’t pure philosophical gold. And that’s not even getting into the fact that having a single, monolithic, INT score is an incredible abstraction. It’s kind of perverse, then, to turn around and say that because the mechanics (necessarily) lack a certain subtlety, so must the players!