How do you roleplay as a character more intelligent than yourself?

Yeah, pretty much this. Being clever is tricky, but anyone can be academic.

Though it does come to mind that cleverness and humor are often associated. Studying principles of Improv and Comedy in order to be able to seize opportunities to roll out a quip or innovate when they present themself could in fact help you be more quick on your feet. Just don't overdo it and try too hard.

Keep in mind that the standard fantasy setting has a baseline education of like 3rd grade.

Even if you've finished High School and have a little bit of common sense, you're already rocking around an 18 Int. You just can't cast magic with it.

What if it's a character with 20 wisdom?

Just ROLLPLAY them, user!

Then say cryptic stuff, and pretend you knew the surprise twists all along.
>It comes to this
>As was fortold

Wisdom is a stupid stat and I have no idea who the hell made it was thinking.
What's it even supposed to represent? It can't be conventional wisdom and enlightenment because high wisdom characters still make dumb decisions, and can still be of evil enlightenment.

*evil alignment

Perception and awareness.

I guess Wisdom = courage, perception, awareness, willpower, self-control of emotions, not being neglectful with necessities involved in your goals.

Take a really long time to consider what your character is going to say before you speak. In character you character is rattling off facts, figures and calculations rapid fire. Also, enlist a friend at the table to feed you suggestions and ideas. THis makes the character seem as intelligent as 2 people.

Just keep your mouth shut until you are absolutely and completely 100% sure that you are right. Then, be a brief as possible while still being clear, and fall back into silence.

Ehh I wouldn't say that.

18 int is a little high. Maybe something more like a 14 for that.
18 int is really really high. That is damn smart. Maybe its just because I live in Arizona, but people who come off as 18 int smart usually paid for it in wisdom or charisma (not necessarily both) and are each remarkable people.

Plenty of geniuses fail to get rich, but i still wouldnt call 18 int common placer.

Then....why not just call it perception? Why wisdom of all things?
Also I'm not sure about courage, because I'm pretty sure I could find some NPC or monster with high wisdom who's also a big coward.

Courage =/= stupidity. Courage goes into fights in spite of fear, but they are not suicidal. They are well aware of the risks and will avoid fights with unfavorable odds and unsatisfying payoffs unless it's do or die.

"""Courage""" is the absence of fear and self-preservation behavior.

Be a collaborative storyteller. Occasionally ask other players out of character what they think your character might do.

Fact is, its unlikely anyone at your table has 18 in a stat IRL.
Roleplaying games are a group game though. Working together the party often can come up with ways for the smart guy to act smarter, the tough guy to act tougher, and the edgelord to being totally tolerable and sometimes fun. It won't always keep the tone even, but everyone (DM included) will have a great time.

I just make it clear that players are free to suggest actions to each other out of character. The character's player has final say though.

Sometimes though, their energy just hypes up each other in weird ways.
My 7th sea group accidentally all showed up to the table with three 195cm giants, then all spent the first game acting like various 195cm jojos.

This. Anyone with real fighting experience will tell you that it's best to avoid most fights in the first place. There's a reason we don't live in an eastern movie syle world.

Or in the words of Ip Man:
>"Master, what do you do when your enemies bring weapons?"
>"Run."

Courage is not the absence of fear or self-preservation.

Courage is moving forward despite your fear, doing something that must be done even if you don't want to die.

Which is exactly what he said. The sentence you quoted reffered to false courage, i.e. stupidity

>Courage goes into fights in spite of fear, but they are not suicidal. They are well aware of the risks and will avoid fights with unfavorable odds and unsatisfying payoffs unless it's do or die.
Yup.
>A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

Ah, only following thread loosely. Sorry.

>be playing rogue
>INT is 13
>both wizards in party have INT 20
>only character with lower INT than i is the fighter
>anytime we get faced with a puzzle or riddle i always solve them with the justification "well it's just a different kind of lock"

Yeah I know, but I mean I'm pretty sure I remember high wisdom characters who were straight up wussies. Like never did anything because they were to scared.

Apply a bonus to INT based skill checks.

Fake a posh British accent.

communicate in a foreign tongue only, leaving mistakes to translation errors from other party members.

alternatively, you only communicate through a series of highly intricate and fluid hand gestures that few people in the world can even follow properly.

Someone told me the difference between a character with high wis and low int, and low int and high wis, and I don't think I can maintain the distinction.

I can't (reallistically speaking) because I don't understand how the fuck you measure intelligence in a credible manner

Is intelligence IQ? That can't be roleplayed or transposed into a pc personality. Is it having a lot of knowledge? That sounds more like wisdom than intelligence. Is it being very logical and being good at thinking objetively? Then again so are autist and they can't be considered intelligent? It is well known that intelligent kids have a lot of imagination, but is it true of adults as well or is it the opposite?

However because it is just a game it doesn't need to be realistic, the two times I've played a character with super-human int were as a borderline asperger secretary that couldn't get jokes but knew entire libraries of occult knowledge and a techpriest that was superb at problem solving if not for his ADHD

>"My character says/does something smart."
>rolls
>"Yup, he did the smart thing."

Most of the stats don't make sense.

Dexterity is actually more important while using most swords. Strength is essential for bows.

Everything is all kinds of strange and backwards, and just underlies the reasons D&D is a bad system.

Fuck the English.

Play as one of those genius autistic dudes who can learn 5 different languages and solve complex math problems in his head, but it still autistic.

By being descriptive with your actions.
If you cannot think of a solution, but you're pretty sure your character can, you'd phrase it like
>[My character] analyzes the clues at hand to devise a clever solution
>rolls whatever is relevant
>GM says whether the roll is adequate to find an answer

Same as roleplaying a character more charismatic than yourself.
>[My character] uses their silver tongue to argue at length until their opponents are swayed
>roll
>GM says whether roll is adequate

Intelligence is being smart.
Wisdom is being perceptive.

High intelligence but low wisdom would be someone with a god complex who thinks they can never be wrong because they got all A's in school.

High wisdom but low intelligence is someone who is basically someone with a lot of experience but can't really put 2 and 2 together and doesn't really think things through, like a traveling hippie.

It's a difficult disctinction to pin down, but the way I think of it is:
Intelligence is essentially brain power or IQ, the ability to process information clearly and expediently. It deals more with explicit details and hard facts.
Wisdom is more vague. It's more like a holistic intuition. It deals with the bigger picture, and perhaps with less immediate but more profound problems, things like spirituality and ethics rather than hard logic or knowledge.
Forest Gump is often cited as a high wis, low int character. He's incredibly dim, but despite his apparent stupidity and ignorance he has cunning insight into the human condition and his place in the world.
Dr. Frankenstein is high int, low wis (book and movie versions). Genius scientist who doesn't really know what he wants (in the book) or has no idea how primitive villagers will likely react to his freaky science zombie (in the movie).

Intelligence is pure knowledge, but not applying that knowledge. Wisdom is applying what one knows to a situation with common sense.
Autism can be extremely high INT. Do you not know what autism is? It's a communications disorder, not directly related to one's capacity for information retention. (Indirectly related because it can interfere with one's ability to receive information at all, in severe cases.)
INT, primarily, is literally what you know and how much of it you know. Someone with high INT will flatly know a lot more than someone else. It is a metric of recorded data.
You'd think this means you should be able to raise your INT by visiting the library, but actually, that information will just slip from your mind if you don't have the INT to retain it to begin with.

Puzzles do not test pc cleverness, but player cleverness.
It's why I outright refuse to do puzzles in pnp games, or participate in them unless absolutely necessary.

>How do you roleplay as a character more intelligent than yourself?
You only need to be more intelligent than your group to achieve the illusion.

Have a reason for everything. It doesn't have to hold up to real world logic, it just needs to make sense long enough in universe. Take advantage of your OOC information to provide IC information, like if you're playing DnDPF family, take advantage of each knowledge check to roleplay your character's theory on why this is vulnerable to fire or why that lives in the wetlands. You don't have to actually be right, you just need to sell it confidently.

Avoid talking too much, let your group's CHA character handle negotiations and take that time to find an intelligent observation on a situation. Really smart people might be able to rattle off real talk endlessly, but you can pretend to be smart by working backwards through discussions if you don't have a quick wit. Try to give weight to your statements by reducing them to a point.

I play INT characters by mechanical preference but I don't learn shit. I've gotten extremely good at selling them smarter than me though.

Disagree completely

I'm tired of people pretending that autism or asperger means high intelligence when it is the opposite, mental stiffness and lack of mental theory (ability to know what others might be thinking) is counter productive not only for problem solving but also general functionality in a society, which, by definition, denotes very poor intelligence as a measure of adaptability and capability of survival

And that's what I was getting at, intelligence is shown as someone's capability to adapt to situations and to a medium

Plain knowledge is meaningless, that's why you can't say a database doesn't have intelligence while a robot who can play tic-tac toe has artificial intelligence.

Of course this doesn't apply to games, but you should get the idea

I mean, you're objectively incorrect based on actually professional studies of autism but you do you.

I never said it was "high intelligence", I said it could very well be high INT, as in what D&D refers to as Intelligence, the ability score, which itself has nothing to do with "adaptability" or "capability of survival" and only tangentially relates to "problem solving" at all (in some editions).

In short, you're not disagreeing, you just didn't really process my post at all. I am only talking about games.

Hyper specialized focus on a single subject, user, is the worst kind of intelligence, you are basically a trained monkey.
Sure, you can be useful, but your inability to act as a functional human being, as well as communicate that intelligence to others, counters it greatly.
Autism is having a lot of skill ranks in a single skill (and you may not even know what that skill is).

I assume the importance of dexterity vs strength in sword use varies between types of swords. But that is my largely uneducated opinion.

>You
Nice reading shit into places where it doesn't exist but no, I'm a complete normie.
You also seem to think I'm saying that autists are naturally smart which I'm not. I'm pointing out that when you say
>
I'm tired of people pretending that autism or asperger means high intelligence when it is the opposite, mental stiffness and lack of mental theory (ability to know what others might be thinking) is counter productive not only for problem solving but also general functionality in a society, which, by definition, denotes very poor intelligence as a measure of adaptability and capability of survival
You're objectively incorrect, because we know exactly what autism does, and it isn't that. There are multiple cases of people with autism with regular normal intelligence.

>he thinks there is only one person talking to him
Don't have the right add-ons, user?
>There are multiple cases of people with autism with regular normal intelligence.
For someone making accusations about reading things in, you do it yourself.
Autism comes with mental inflexibility by sheer rote. It comes with specialization in a single matter and a net detraction on all other intelligent pursuits. I am not saying all people with autism are stupid, but that autism interferes with intelligent discourse, the process of understanding new ideas and approaches, and dealing with society. The people who assume autism lends to scholastic achievement is what is being thrown down, not that autistic people are inherently dumb.

Autism is a spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders relating to problems with communication. It does not refer exclusively to Asperger syndrome, which is one specific (but particularly common) mild form of autism that enforces restricted and repetitive behavior.

As the GM it's your job to know your players. Some players love puzzles.

>soul purpose
>soul

Well, if you weren't so unintelligent, you'd know to simply avoid the issue by not trying to play a character more intelligent than yourself.

Just talk like you can read instead of the usual barbaric grunts.

I just learned something.
Thanks user. That's neat

abstract most of it

By being silent.

Take a little longer to think things through, take notes and reference them when needed.

You can come up with a solution IC in seconds, even though OOC it took you a few minutes.