Discussion:Intelegence bonus papers?

Intelegent bonus papers?

James 16:29, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi I wanted to make a house rule based off of intellegent bonus. A person gets paper equel to his intellegence bonus. for example: Ruth the wizard has a intellegence of 16 so her intellegence bonus is +3 so she gets 3 peices of paper to write notes on + her own memory. butch the fighter has an intellegence of 10 so he doesn't ge any paper.

Tell me what you think of my idea. and I allso need Ideas on what i should do if they have negative intellegence bonus.

Thank you!

Name Violation 20:41, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

what do the papers do? do they just have papers and say "look i got 3 papers". how does a character know what their int bonus is? so the fighter cant buy a book full of papers? is the wizards spell book only 3 pages long. that would suck. whats the point of the papers? whats stopping the fighter from buying a piece of paper and writing on it? only barbarians are illiterate so anyone else can read and write. I don't see the point personally

James 18:38, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

What I mean is the players get the paper to write notes on to act as their "memory" for example: Willion learns a kings name, so he writes it on one of his papers in order to remember.

Rogue The Demonchild 14:06, 4 March 2011 (MST)

So you're saying the PLAYERS get paper, not the characters. What if, however, Sorcerer has Int 10, does he not get to write down the spells he knows (since he can't remember them)?

Badger 14:30, 4 March 2011 (MST)

I'm guessing the papers are campaign notes, not character information. So, for example, the intelligent wizard gets a bunch of paper, so he takes a ton of notes about the history of the castle, and the kings, and local happenings. The unintelligent fighter gets no paper, so the person playing the fighter has to rely on their actual memory, rather than notes. Personally, I don't think this is a good system for a few reasons:

1. You should never actively try to limit the amount of things a player can "know".
2. In game time is very different from out of game time. While you might start a quest by talking to the king, and finish it by talking to a bishop in the span of a day in game, it might be as much as a month or more out of game. While you might have forgotten the bishop's name, it's unlikely even a dumb character did.
3. Players have a lot of stuff to remember, characters don't. Players have to learn combat maneuvers, spells, the entire system, plus they have to remember how to build their character. Not to mention all the real world things they have to remember (when trash day is, when that essay is due, etc).

This system can punish the infrequent gaming group, the casual gaming group, or the roleplayer who is playing a character with high wisdom, but low intelligence. In my mind, being able to attach a face to a name is often times as much, or more, wisdom (or even charisma) than it is intelligence. If this works for your gaming group, have at it, though. Anything is worth trying once, I suppose.

Persistent Memory... a cantrip of the wizard can do it... if the papers are wonderous ok. but if not, everyone can remember a thing seen.

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