Subhuman Mental Capacities and Behavior

One of my chief challenges as an actor was attempting to play characters less intelligent than myself. The possibilities that I see, the connections that I make are so instantaneous, so "obvious" that I can't imagine why someone doesn't see them as well. Graduate school has been good for me in that I've come face-to-face with people who are smart in very different ways, and I've been in the position of trying to see what they see so clearly.

The application to tabletop rpgs, as you might have guessed, is in trying to play "stupid" creatures. Playing creatures of average or above average intelligence is not particularly challenging, but trying to think as these creatures requires curtailing one's own cognitive abilities, trying to "unsee" options and connections.

I don't think that's the right way to go about it. Rather, I think a behavioral breakdown is in order, listing the kinds of behavior one might expect to see from creatures of a given intelligence.

The trick to this (and why these breakdowns usually fail to function) is that Intelligence is not the only attribute that needs to factor into this approach. Mindfulness (Wisdom) is also crucial. In my game, Mindfulness represents the character's ability to know themselves and others in a wordless way. This also corresponds to the character's situational awareness, but that's a fringe benefit of this self-attunement. High Mindfulness characters are more quickly aware of when their needs are unmet - they feel a muscle getting tired before it gets pulled, they are aware that they feel some degree of antipathy towards another before they act out, etc. Consequently, Mindfulness informs social interactions, which has a huge impact on behavior (since most critters are not encountered solo).

My scale for attributes works like this: nil, 0, 1, 2, 3,… Nil indicates an absence of that aptitude, an inability on the part of the creature to use the skills associated with it (programmed robots lack Cognition because they do not possess the ability to "think"). 0 indicates a subhuman (at least, below an adult human) level of functionality, and 3 is the human average. I don't really care about transhuman capacities - like I said, that's easier to manage than subhuman abilities, which produces the following matrix, with C for Cognition and M for Mindfulness:

Score	C: Nil	0	1	2	3
M: Nil	No behavior possible	Single-minded pursuit of food. If threatened will attack without hesitation. Can die from overeating, if enough food is available.	Same as left	Same as left	Same as left
0	Takes predetermined when appropriate stimuli occurs (think Venus flytrap, robot).	Fight-or-Flight response: able to perceive obvious threats and react to them. No group interaction.	Fight-or-Flight, minimal predictive powers (if-then, no nested clauses)	Fight-or-Flight, moderate predictive powers (1 nested clause)	Fight or Flight, full predictive powers
1	Same as above	Fight-or-Flight, group interaction: group decides upon actions/goals communally (think school of fish).	Fight-or-Flight, group interaction, social hierarchy: alpha and betas.	Fight-or-Flight, group interaction, social hierachy: alpha, betas, omegas	As left and above
2	Same as above	Same as above	Same as above	Fight-or-Flight, group interaction, social hierarchy, territory ownership, as above	As left and above
3	Same as above	Same as above	Same as above	As above	Human average

I am not fully happy with this list - I need to go through all of my animals and see where they fit on this matrix and if I am satisfied with this representation of their behavior. I like how this scales from the bottom up, but the top down might seem problematic. This is resolved when we add in considerations of language production. Language allows characters of lesser cognition/mindfulness understand ideas beyond their capability to generate - the 2 cognition bruiser does not understand the intricacies of court politics, but they do understand hierarchies of power and territory interactions, so as long as whoever is explaining stuff to the bruiser is able to translate it into terms the 2/2 bruiser understands, the bruiser can follow what's going on.

Of course, applying this to another game system will be a pain in the butt, as game designers really haven't considered this idea at all. The conventional wisdom is that animals tend to have subhuman Intelligence but human or transhuman Wisdom, which only makes sense when Wisdom is a mystical attribute covering all of the holes presented by the mental attributes themselves (as it governs faith, perception, lie-detection, and saving throws, among other things). My formulation, with Mindfulness, lacks this hodgepodge nature and also requires us as designers and DMs to question the "naturalness" of giving animals average or good Wisdom scores. Something to consider, as I work on the Bestiary.