Thread by @AlexandraErin

D&D should drop Intelligence and Wisdom as ability scores because they lead to racist places, they're inherently ableist, and their meanings aren't at all intuitive; there's no way to define "Intelligence" or "Wisdom" that everybody who agrees they're definable will agree on.

I mean, they're synonyms. It's like having two stats each representing 16.6666% of your character's basic abilities and they're called "Body" and "Physique".

And for all that people come out with "Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit and Wisdom is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad"... nah. Look at what they're actually used for in the game, aside from class features/magic.

You could replace Intelligence with Knowledge and it works for 99% of what they use the stat to do. Now it doesn't represent some inner quality of intellectual superiority but how likely your character is to have absorbed a useful fact, whether from habit or study or whatever.

A high Knowledge character could be one with a prodigious memory, or one who is great at making intuitive leaps in putting together disparate facts to arrive at a conclusion, or a lonely child who read every book in the mage tower's library, or a studious perfectionist.

And this is part of why the current names are a counterintuitive disaster... "Wisdom of the Ages" pretty much means knowledge. But all the knowledge skills are concentrated under Intelligence.

So what's Wisdom used for, if not knowledge?

Look at what calls for a Wisdom ability check under the rules.

You roll Intelligence to see if your character knows something.

You roll Wisdom to see if your character notices something.

The two most general-use skills for Wisdom are Perception, which is your physical senses and alertness, and Insight, which is your empathy/social awareness/psychology. Other Wisdom skill also have an "awareness" component...

Medicine is located under Wisdom rather than Intelligence (Knowledge) because of the diagnostic and triage element. Abstract knowledge of anatomy doesn't help you find and stop the bleeding.

Animal Handling under Wisdom because you must be able to read the animal's cues and body language, imagine how you appear from its point of view.

And Survival is under Wisdom even though it covers the same ground as Nature (Intelligence), because Nature is academic knowledge and Survival is about finding things and noticing things: weather cues, tracks, food and water, etc.

So rename Wisdom "Intuition" or "Awareness".

So, there's no class features that rely on Intelligence that really break down thematically if you rework it to Knowledge.

The Wisdom rename takes a little more thinking around.

Buuuuuuut really the only reason Wisdom is the Cleric casting attribute is because at the outset of the system, that was what Wisdom was: your potential for being a Cleric. That was really its mechanical justification for existence.

If being intuitive and good at noticing things makes sense as being the main deal for Clerics when you call it Wisdom, it makes sense when you call it Intuition or Awareness.

It certainly works fine for Druids and Rangers. Their magic comes from being in tune with the world!

My full systemic fix for this involves splitting Wisdom into two attributes: Awareness and Willpower, with Willpower taking over the defensive aspects (almost any spell with a Wisdom save) and becoming the casting attribute for Clerics, with Paladins rejoining them.

This, uh, helps cut down the crowding on Charisma as a casting attribute.

But you don't have to overhaul the whole system and change the balance of the attributes to improve them by reworking Intelligence and Wisdom into things that are more distinct, less prone to ableist/racist interpretations, and avoid "Wait, your character can't think that good.'

When I run a game, that's all they measure: your character's chance of knowing something and your character's chance of noticing something.

And that's. That's the rules as written. There's no other canonical application. A few "the DM might..." but nothing written down as such.

If you dump Int to 8 and you have a -1, that means you are 5% less likely to know some random fact about the fire ooze skellingtons you just encountered. That's. That's what that means. It doesn't mean your character isn't allowed to come up with plans.

If you rolled stats and got a 6 for Int, you'll fail a check to know the historical significance of the signet ring you wrestled away from the assassin in the dark 1 time in 10 times more often than average. That's it. Doesn't mean the DM can decide you walk right into a trap.

"So what's the stat that decides how good your ideas are?"

There isn't one. That's not how ideas work. That's not how anything works.

Rules as written, setting aside saving throws and class features, Intelligence and Wisdom are used for Know Checks and Notice Checks. That's what they do. That's what they mean. They really should be renamed to reflect that, and leave the baggage of the old labels in the past.

Very much so.

It just WORKS BETTER.

https://twitter.com/EvdorTheMighty/status/1254583523798745088

Anyway, I will be muting this thread because I should have said up front that it's not that I don't care if you disagree, I anti-care. We are past apathy and into antipathy. Nobody has anything new or interesting to say in defense of The Old Ways and it's terrible and I hate it.

This is for your protection - you probably don't actually deserve to be reamed out and blocked for trying to find a clever new way to say "street smarts and book smarts" or "Intelligence is knowing ____ but Wisdom is knowing ____".

But I don't deserve to hear it.

And for clarity, at my table when we're playing D&D I don't make everyone change their character sheets - that decreases clarity since it then doesn't match the source materials.

But I take what is already about 99% consistent subtext and make it text.