Homebrewed Solutions

The other day, while hanging out in the chat room of mydndgame.com, a discussion came up about homebrewed races that evolved into a homebrewed solution about animal intelligence.  Though I don’t really want to go into to much detail, I will point out the basic premise of the system: All animals have intelligence 10.  Why in the world would such a group want their animals to be as intelligent as they are?  Well I delved deeper into this discussion and found out why the DM had changed the rule.  He had felt that animals had been shafted because they can show more intelligence than the average human.  Now this made the chat room erupt into debate but ultimately he would not budge on his idea despite several good arguments for keeping the system “as is”.

Now my stance on the subject of homebrewed solutions is to not use them unless they are necessary.  Rules for drinking alcohol or using actions not covered in the rules fall into this territory, but to change something that is covered by the rules because you don’t like it?  I felt that this was a bad idea for a few reasons.

1) Dungeon and Dragons assumes that animals have intelligence of 1 or 2 while average humans have an intelligence of 10.  This is to separate man from animal as well as to place restrictions on what animals are affected by(i.e.. Spells) and can do(Less skill points, more natural ability).

2) Animals that have 10 Intelligence are no longer naturally driven, and are smarter than trolls.  Now I really shouldn’t have to explain this one in too much detail, but when a rat has more brain power than a troll, how are trolls surviving in such a world?

Now I could list other reasons, but these were just the main two.  The only thing I could hope was that the players were ok with this change.  I mean those characters that wanted to have an 8 Intelligence are no longer smarter than a rat.  I could see them now going around trying to role-play in such an environment.  But I guess that point didn’t cross any of their minds and the campaign seems to be doing ok.

This brings me into the point of a player having fun in such an environment.  I don’t think any of the players experienced any obstacles yet but that may be due to the fact that the DM and the players really hadn’t thought this solution through.  Maybe the DM didn’t that in a world where animals are as intelligent as humans, that anything below that level of intelligence is very feral and unable to think.

I could keep going on and on about the subject but then I wouldn’t have anything more in depth to go into about the subject, if it arises again.  Trust me, there is a little click on the site I mentioned above that is all about home brewing and I run into these people quite frequently, so it’s safe to say that it will come up again.