Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe Intelligence influences higher brain functions and the ability to speak at least to some degree?
Feeblemind drops the target's Intelligence and Charisma scores to 1, and the result is a character who is essentially a beast: they can't understand language or communicate in an intelligible way, but can tell friend from foe and act accordingly. Unless we want to attribute understanding of language to Charisma somehow, it does seem to indicate that Intelligence plays a role in a character's ability to express themselves (as without a proper understanding of language it will be hard or impossible to communicate complex ideas).
There are also some spells which require their target to have a certain Intelligence score to work. Tasha's Hideous Laughter makes the target "perceive everything as hilariously funny", but doesn't work on creatures with Intelligence scores of 4 and below. Why is that? Perhaps because at this level of Intelligence the brain function is so simplistic it doesn't have a concept of humor?
In the real world, intelligence has many facets and means many things. But this is a game we're talking about, and it has to abstract some ideas in order to make a system. A character with an Intelligence score of 7 is on the level of a great ape or a monkey. And while both apes and monkeys often surprise us with how smart they can be (the gorilla who was taught simple sign language comes to mind), I think we can agree they're not quite as "smart", in the stereotypical sense, as we are. This should apply to characters as well.
Last edited by MrToucan; 18/01/22 09:36 AM.
