[oWoD] Upgrading intelligence

[fearmeforiampink]

Intelligence sucks.

Mechanically, at least.

This thought came to me when considering a character I'm making – a Ratkin Engineer. I'm going to be going with the Mad Scientist side of things quite heavily, and as such, I'll be taking an intelligence of 4 or 5. While I was thinking what to do with the rest of my points, I realised that I don't actually get very much for the 3-4 points I'm putting there.

Intelligence gets you some extra dice on a number of knowleges, and occasionally other rolls. And that's about it.

Comparing it to the other mental attributes

– Perception affects the ever-present 'Perception + Alertness, do you get ambushed' as well as the less than rare other rolls to notice things.

– Wits affects your initiative. And there are other rolls on it. Wits is perhaps underused (though the houserule of making most stealth rolls be wits + stealth, rather than dexterity does help), but its effect on initiative makes it useful and import.

And to the other attributes

– Strength affects hand-to-hand damage, and lifting/breaking things. It's weaker than dexterity, but it does have a usefulness based on the WoD cliche of "Don't bring a gun to a swordfight"

– Dexterity is king in combat. That's enough on it's own, but there's also a fair number of other rolls that work off it.

– Stamina keeps you alive. How important it is varies with what you can soak with it – it's less useful to Mages unless they're in a bashing damage heavy environment, due to their lack of abilitiy to soak anything more than that, but shifters and vampires find it very useful.

– Charisma and Manipulation do the same thing in different ways. And those things do come up a fair bit, because while you can do a reasonable amount of roleplaying out your social interactions, if you're wanting something, you'll probably be made to roll to see how persuasive you were at some point.

– Appearance doesn't get rolled much, but it is quite easy for an ST build into the game people's reactions to you from it.

Comparing intelligence to the social attributes, it's much easier to go "I roll some dice to persuade him" if you can't think of the right way to word it, than it is to go "I roll some dice to figure out that plot point which is eluding me"

So, the knowledge rolls don't come up much (and people have a tendency to use OC knowledge IC), and there aren't any other things that intelligence really adds to, whereas the rest all have frequent rolls based on them in some way or other.

Is this fixable? If so, how?

Discussing it with mapp, we've discussed various ways to make Intelligence more worth taking, like giving (Intelligence minus one/two) clues on demand a session, for when you get stuck and aren't sure what to do, or having hidden dice rolls and getting given advice based on those (which would be slightly bad advice if you got a failure, and very bad if you got a botch).

Anyone else got any other thoughts on how to fix it?

"Use this system instead" is a valid comment but not a particularly helpful one. Suggesting something from another system to adapt would be more useful.

Comments

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

What you need is to have key situations in the game require intelligence. Torg has quite a good system for this, in most sessions there is something vital to solve that has to happen alongside the action. E.g. Working out how to decouple the train car without setting off the explosives; it will result in multiple intelligence tests and until you solve it your team are going to continue to take fire from a superior foe.