How intelligent are Mimics? It states that they can speak common so just how intelligent are they?

Depends on your story i guess?

I've made mimics be highly clever assholes who mimicked damsels voices to trap asshole adventures.

and i've also had functionally retarded ones that made it a point to be so obvious it's dumb.

I've also had be a party member.... That was a strange one. Had a crown and everything.

Really it's up to you.

i suppose it depends what game system you're using. 2E mimics can communicate just fine using their own corrupted version of what their creator spoke, or they can also be taught common and other languages.

I saw one GM have a mimic set up shop in a dungeon that sold the magic items of adventurers that died there

I actually had that idea.

This was Storrie Longday the friendly storage container. It hoped around the pcs and acted as a talking bag of holding. Since I, in order to make magic items special, made them very rare except in this single dungeon specifically built for it. So Storrie was going to be their best friend.

Storrie was also a manipulative prick who was actually working for far darker powers that planned on using the ppcs loot against them.

I don't remember if I was actually original or ripped the idea off of Flowey.

Might have gotten it from Fable's Chesty. Shrug.

I mean, them being able to communicate, but not actually truly understand Common - that would be in line with what mimics are supposed to be - an animal that, well, mimics something more innocent than it actually is.

>what mimics are supposed to be - an animal

Killer mimics seem to fulfill that role, imo.

>Has been in a party made entirely of mimics
>mfw we spent large portions of our adventure fucking with our master dragon in intricate and hard to trace ways.
>mfw when i have no face

I make my mimics get dumber as they get bigger. house sized ones are mindless beasts, sometimes not even able to know there is something inside. small ones, the size of a makeup kit, are extremely intelligent and more than capable of carrying on a conversation.

they are a d&d monster, so they are what they're supposed to be. i believe the killer version of the mimic was made to fit the usage you are describing.

They could be like exceptionally gifted parrots, being able to repeat anything with perfect clarity and even copy someone's voice, without any kind of understanding or sentience involved.

"Ow! My arm, it's got my arm!"

"Ha ha ha, serves you right you greedy peck!"

"AAAAAAAGGGGHHHH!"

So legitimate dungeons?

Sorry your dick-ass theft got killed because trying to take every treasure they see is "in their character"

I don't know what the book says, but if intelligent, speaking mimics were in one of my games I would want them to be exceptionally rude, foul-mouthed pranksters. Like they just live to get one over on you, and after they do they laugh and laugh and call you a fucking idiot.

Except that parrots, by virtue of being social birds, understand meanings associated with various vocal sounds.

Can a parrot hold a human political opinion? No.
Can a parrot know what names are and which words to say to elicit particular responses and vice-versa? Yes.

that would make for some hilarious encounters. 10/10 would play in campaign.

I've always thought it was silly for a creature who's ecological niche was to mimic furniture in an attempt to lure and devour intelligent creatures to be itself any more intelligent than an octopus or perhaps a crow.

I mean, I dunno, I feel that kind of intelligence is unnecessary, but I'm a big advocate of, "intelligent monsters need to be few and far between so they can remain frightening and unpredictable."

Even more so I like the idea of Mimics being a little more circumstantial beyond just being a "chest", you know? Like, you've got:
-A natural mimic in the wild: disguising itself as a fallen log and basically eating anything that's unfortunate enough to crawl into it's mouth.. and clenching it's butthole tightly to prevent the opposite.

-Rumor spreads around about a Troll Bridge outside of town, well, no; the bridge IS a mimic. It's a BIG fucking mimic and it's been eating like a king.

-Another mimic has disguised itself as a water well. It has been getting mixed results.

they're also described as taking the shape of things like doorways and archways.

I try not to think too hard on monsters that way, as one of my favorite has always been myconids, the mushroom men, but in reality a mushroom is basically the sex organ of the greater fungus organism which usually goes unseen as a webwork of fuzzy strands in the dirt/log/compost pile and the mushroom generally only lasts long enough to grow to size, dump a pile of spores and then shrivel up. they themselves don't eat, but are fed by the mycelial network.

It could be interesting to play that part up, and make the walking, talking mushroom-men "appendages" of a mass of mycellium. Being a pile of fungal strands makes it hard to interact with anything, so the Myconid generates ambulatory bodies that can manipulate objects to defend itself, interact with other races, and just walk around spreading its spores. Each Myconid colony would seem like a hive mind, except really it would be the opposite (instead of single conciousness formed of multiple individual minds, it's a single mind controlling multiple bodies).

Personally I like Mimics being the literal manifestation of rampant greed and avarice. So they can trick people but they aren't smart, if that makes sense.

I agree, i've thought about the hive mind ascpect of a mycelial colony. You could have a massive myconid kingdom in an underdark setting consisting of concentrated nodes of myconids connected by strands reaching through the caverns, each of which is populated by villages of mushroom men who grow to adulhood in maybe five days, hanga round for a couple of weeks before shrivelling up and being replaced by a new one who shares all the same memories.

maybe they keep only a few in any village at any time, with the ability to raise an army in a few days if one of the scout colonies detect danger approaching.

and to get sources of food, which are best found on the surface, there could be the border colonies which exist near a surface entrance and periodically they will send a party of myconids out to go chop down a tree, or gather a whole bunch of grasses or something to bring back, then they shrivel up and the new growth myconids take over and haul the stuff back to one of the main nodes where the nutrients can be more evenly distributed from the compost chamber

>ripped off
>Flowey
No, user. You ripped off something much, much more Evil.

Big dumbly painted, houses, all congregating in a village, a lone cupboard hanging outside the city limits giving people warnings...

You don't listen, cupboards always lie...

The lamps all around start screaming, cheering, SOMETHING...

You run, but it's too late, the roads closed up and shifted deeper into the town....

You hear a cackling, the sound of coins being dropped on cold steel. You follow it closer to the city center. It's too late. They have you...

The houses themselves start shifting, like teeth, around you, closing in, cutting away the facade bit by bit. A tongue of cobble, wet with tar, wraps itself around you as darkness claims the sun...

All around you, the laughter... screaming... and silence.

These ideas are cute.

4E mimic is fucking smart.

damn, with that level of intelligence imagine if a mimic took out a wizard and decided to read his spellbook enough times to get a basic grasp of magic.

>Mimic now is a head of Merchants Guild.
>Nobody saw him.

I'm using this idea in my campaign somewhere.

I want to do unspeakable things to that chest.

Pathfinder mimics have Int 10 and a tragic racial impulse to become human. Attempting to become human only results in everything going Wrong in ways that shatter their minds and reduce them to blobs of pain, constantly shifting through shapes and textures in horrible combinations.

I included an alchemist mimic who used Alter Self rather than its own shapechanging. Loved to jump out and surprise people.

Can mimics fall in love?

I would rule yes. please describe this opportunity to build a magical realm.

Chinese Room asserts that a system of computation can't be intelligent because Mr. Searle doesn't understand how it could be, so all evidence of such intelligence should be discarded.

tl;dr Chinese Room is utter rubbish.

At what point does the combination of arbitrary rules become intelligence?

At what point do multiple grains of sand qualify as a pile of sand?

At what point does quantity turn into quality?

x is in the eye of the beholder.

Chinese Room setup assumes that the Room appears intelligent to an outside observer, based on having the ability to hold an intelligent conversation, so where ever the point is, it's been passed, thus its location is irrelevant.

The point where quantity turns into quality is the subject matter of the science of emergence. Google it for details.

Why do you think Chinese Room asserts that a system of computation can't be intelligent because Mr. Searle doesn't understand how it could be, so all evidence of such intelligence should be discarded?

>traveling merchant sells tiny mimics as self-cleaning mousetraps
>a creative adventurer could no doubt find other uses for them

>be dick ass thief
>dungeoneering alone because everyone got tired of my shit
>don't need them anyway, more loot for me
>run across a chest
>pretty sure it moved
>end up giving the mimic some meat to pass by without a fight
>about an hour later end up in the same hallway with the same mimic
>it mocks me for getting lost and offers to give directions for more meat
>back at the mimic and hour and a half later
>I'm bad with directions
>thankfully the mimic likes the meat from the monsters I was able to get the drop on farther in the dungeon
>agrees to be my guide in exchange for helping it get some of the "delicacies" it normally can't eat
>make a pretty good team and manage to leave the dungeon with several valuable magic rings, a trunk full of expensive silks, and a well-fed mimic sleeping in the back of my cart
>our adventure begins

...

Reminds me of skinwalker or goat man stories on /x/ - the creature mimics your friend, or is just a voice in the darkness, saying nonsensical things.

Yes, but only with inanimate objects.

>mimc in love with gold and treasure that's inside of him

I could imagine a mimic seeing a dungeon as it's 'home' and adventurers as robbers.
Imagine if your party was just wandering a dungeon and a fucking mimic ran at you full speed just screaming "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!"

How would it see the other monsters in the dungeon?

Lousy roommates

The Chinese Room understands Chinese even if no parts of it do. It's like saying chairs are impossible because you can't sit on a carbon atom.

>be me
>be wizard
>accidentally put my spelllbooks in the mimic instead of the storage chest
>now the dungeon is infected with wizard-mimics

>elisa speak
Are you really unable to tell chatbots apart from humans, user? Seriously?

But the system doesn't understand. Searle was right when you internalize the system you still don't understand chinese.

If mimics exist, why continue making treasure chests that look like mimics?

rustyandco.com/ is a webcomic about an adventuring party made up of a mimic, a gelatinous cube and a rust monster. It deserves a bit more popularity, imho

What? The argument was that the books don't understand Chinese because they're just inanimate objects, the man doesn't understand because he just has a list of context-free rules to apply to every possible input, so there's no place for understanding to be found.

What is this internalization nonsense?

Are you arguing that a cipher key would understand the cypher?

The criticism you're bringing up is that you're looking at the man, not the system.

Sorry, thumb slipped.

But if you internalize the system in your brain, where you are the system, you still don't understand chinese.

No, but a system composed of a reader who understood the deciphered text, the key, and rules for applying the key certainly would, and that's what the internalization argument seems to bring up. If you know how to carry on a conversation in Chinese, you know Chinese. The rules for deriving semantically correct replies, which you must have internalized to be indistinguishable from a native speaker, ARE semantics.

Mimics aren't just stuck to one image, just the general item. They are magical after all, they could easily copy any chest design.
Plus if someone can't tell if your chest is a mimic or not, people are less likely to try and steal from it.

Why do you think I am really unable to tell chatbots apart from humans, user?

>PCs join Adventurers Guild
>Get constant kill-quests with locations of Mimics
>Turns out that person who hired them is a Mimic and is eliminating the competition.

No John, you are the zombies. And John was a mimic.

The argument is based on that syntax is not semantics, even though you are giving out the "correct" answers, you don't know chinese.

Also, the AI is not the reader. The reader is not part of the system. A reader outside of the system can read and think that the system can speak chinese, but does that mean the system knows chinese?

What does a mimic look like when they're not mimicing anything? Or is there a specific breed of chesty mimics and potty mimics and what not?

Just started reading this from the beginning.

Dem jokes. Author's a punsmith.

They're fairly intelligent, at least from what I've played and heard. My uncle had a party with a pet mimic they coaxed into staying with them by letting him eat whatever they killed.

Tell your DM to stop stealing my ideas

I'm stealing both of your ideas and there's nothing you can do about it.

In 4E he can just be goo. Which we can assume what he is.

>mimics get dumber as they get bigger.
If only that were true.

>that would be in line with what mimics are supposed to be
>that would be in line with my personal head-canon which is the only acceptable version
ftfy
Almost as bad as those "beastmen should only ever be evil corruptions like in muh warhammer" posters.

Anyway, they've never been animals.
They're magical creatures created by magic with the purpose of guarding and able to understand orders.

>I've always thought it was silly
Magic/fantasy is silly.
If you really want to bring in realistic ecology and biology for monsters then mimic intelligence is the least of your problems.

There were also earlier edition references to mimics potentially being evolved from oozes/puddings.

it is true, though. killer mimics are the larger breed, and they're less intelligent.

I assure you I did not for one simple reason.

I did not play that came and do not recognize this pixie, from context i can tell she's a bitch.

He also does the "too many words" edits himself, truly ahead of his time

Not the only dig at that other more popular d&d comic

I feel like mimics are pretty intelligent, if they can mimic perfectly an object of interest like a chest and someone would fall into the trap. The mimics I heard about have also always been in such position that it doesn't create any suspicion.

Wasn't it written in some book somewhere that a mimic's ultimate goal is to eventually mimic a human being, but they can't and so they're tragic figures in that way?

>The Future Eve in a nutshell

If you want to keep your treasure safe, why NOT make it look like a mimic?

If you internalize the Chinese Room system, the Chinese Room's mind will be a virtual machine being emulated by you. The algorithms that understand Chinese are separated from you by the emulation layer, thus you can't directly interface with them, and thus won't know Chinese despite the virtual machine knowing it.

They can understand architecture and interior decorating, which implies some level of intelligence.

All I can imagine now is a room full of mimics that practice feng shui...

>to be any more intelligent than an octopus or perhaps a crow

>one of the smartest undersea creatures that rivals dolphins

>literally the smartest bird

Not making a good argument here.

...

And the argument contains a contradiction, because it argues that you can somehow come up with replies indistinguishable from those of a native speaker without semantic content, even though the native speaker's replies will inevitably have exactly that. If the room is also capable of generating the semantics necessary to create the replies it's supposed to, it must have exactly the understanding we're talking about.