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It really depends on your DM, and how good you are at persuading him that the fluff and crunch should be separate.  You could argue that your social and mental stats don't represent blanket deficiency across all items that fall within the purview of the stat. 

Consider that CHA is subject to expression as compelling presence, affability, charm, good looks, and other qualities that allow you to influence the reactions people have to you.  Some of those aren't reliant upon one another, and can even be mutually exclusive.  Consider a character whose CHA manifests itself as an imposing presence.  He draws attention wherever he goes, and his words are terribly compelling because people are fascinated by (and a little afraid of) him.  He'll have trouble making friends.  Consider Tyrion Lannister from A Game of Thrones.  Is he personable?  Is he pretty?  Is he well liked?  Does he talk his way out of certain death over and over and over again?  One could convincingly argue that a low CHA doesn't mean you're ugly, oafish, abrasive or any other specific trait we'd associate with a lack of charisma, but that there's something about the character that prevents them from being very compelling.  You could be likeable, but nobody takes you seriously because you're short and unassuming.  You could be fascinatingly beautiful, but callous and arrogant.  You could be capable of making very compelling arguments, but you can't hold peoples' attention because of your stuttering, monotone delivery.


Same goes for your INT, as far as I'm concerned.  You could be cunning, but completely uneducated.  You could just be misguided, having grown up in a theocracy that raised you on a mixture of propaganda and revisionist history that you now take for absolute, incontrovertible fact (to the point that you deny matters of common knowledge and historical fact as heathen slander).  You could have a retentive memory, but for trivia that's not useful for things that require check rolls in the game.  You could have a great mechanical aptitude and spatial understanding, but a rotten memory.  All that a low INT necessarily represents in game is doing poorly on knowledge checks and not being able to use specific class abilities to great effect.  Express that however you like.


If you played a high CHA, high WIS character, I think it would be totally valid to make your character a shrewd student of human nature who's clever and cunning, but uneducated.  You don't need to know sums and figures to lead a gang or work a crowd, or know when it's time to leg it the other way.       

Nov 3, 2011 -- 1:05AM, ThaneRhogar wrote:

My character comes from another continent and a vastly different culture in the game world (set in a magical version of 16th century Earth, he's a Congolese pygmy hunter, and the campaign takes place in North America).  He isn't dumb, although he certainly isn't educated in any sense that the natives would recognize.  But more importantly, he's had no prior access to knowledge about any religion, magical technique, or history that would apply to the immediate campaign setting, and this is expressed as a -1 to all of these skills (as well as none of them being trained, of course).  When it comes down to a raw Int check (which it never has, in fact), his small penalty can be rationalized that he just doesn't think and construct logic in the same way others around him do, so he'll come off as simple and be bad at solving certain kinds of problems.

Just want to say I think this is a very good way of looking at it. Cultural differences could definitely explain a low (effective) intelligence. It's important to always remember that the ability scores are all about what advantage your character gleans from a particular ability, not some objective measure of his worth.

In the last edition, races often took a penalty to CHA based on how different their culture was to human culture (the baseline), to indicate that humans would likely find them alien and difficult to interact with.

All an 8 Int tells you is that your character is slightly worse than average at knowledge-based skills.  That's it.  No, really.  That is the only thing you would need to include, avert, subvert, or ignore (yes, ignore) in your roleplaying.  If and how that penalty manifest in the roleplaying of your character is completely 100% up to you. 

So if you want to make it a big deal and roleplay your character as dumb as bricks, he is.  If you want your low int to manifest as a minor personalty or background quirk, such as a poor education or avoiding big words, then it is so.  And if its to small of a point to bother it, so be it.

And really, a -1 is not even that much worse than average.  A drop in the bucket.  Put an 8 Int Fighter and 10 Int Fighter side-by-side in a int-based skill challenge and, all other things being equal, you could probably never figure out which one was the smater one without looking at their character sheets.  Training, Skill Focus, racial bonuses, and items all have a much larger effect on your ability to perform on intellgence-based tasks.  So my 8 Int char still has an good chance of being the smartest character in the party.  So, yeah.  Not a big deal.  YMMV though.