Intelligence

## Summary

**Intelligence** is a word that is incredibly difficult to define, as it has been used to refer to many things, such as one's ability to process information, or their capacity for logic, self-awareness, creativity, reasoning, and/or problem solving, or their knowledge and memory. In its fullest definition, intelligence can be said to encompass all these things, which makes it incredibly difficult to quantify in persons debating terms, as many individuals may have plentiful ability in one area, such as knowledge, and also be lacking entirely in another, such as planning, emotional intelligence, or creativity.

As opposed to attempting to reliably quantify intelligence, pages should reflect that intelligence has many facets and, when describing the intelligence of people, specifically detail their areas of strength while acknowledging any intellectual shortcomings they may have. People can be listed as having average knowledge overall while being geniuses in certain topics

## Suggested Rankings

There is no way to reliably quantify intelligence, and even these rankings are just suggestions and guidelines for pages. It is more important that a page discusses a character's intelligence and gives feats for their varying skills than have a solid ranking, though it may help with quickly summarizing their overall intellects and how they measure up to others.

**Below Average:** People of below average intellects and unremarkable skills.

**Average:** People of average intelligence. While they have more developed intelligence in certain subjects, in many cases, their overall intelligence remains average.

**Above Average:** People that show greater cognitive ability than the norm, but do not particularly stand out in any intellectual or academic fields.

**Gifted:** People who demonstrate high reasoning ability, can master difficult concepts with few repetitions, and display high performance capability or notable mastery in intellectual or specific academic fields, which makes them equivalent to real-world experts in these areas.

**Genius:** Individuals with an exceptional capacity for knowledge and intelligence, usually in one area of varying depth. This level of intellect is the level of real-world geniuses, polymaths, and genuinely extremely prominent intellectuals, and, in the absence of better feats, should be the default intelligence category for fictional characters with exceptional or superhuman intelligence.

**Extraordinary Genius:** Individuals whose knowledge spreads over multiple fields of science and who vastly surpass the real world's upper human limits. At this level, many are capable of creating extremely advanced futuristic technology, executing complex strategies even under high pressure, outperforming supercomputers, and even accurately predicting the future through sheer mental calculations.

**Supergenius:** The highest level of intellect, possessed by individuals with unfathomably superhuman intelligence who are capable of creating impossibly advanced physics-defying and reality-warping fantasy technology for extremely diverse purposes.

### Note

A person may have more than one intelligence rank if the statistic varies depending on the area. This means that they can reach exceptional levels in some respects, but be unimpressive in others.

Here are some examples:

* "Below Average normally. Extraordinary Genius in scientific disciplines" may be appropriate for people who behave in a silly matter, have klutzy mishaps even when trying to do simple tasks, or often make unrealistically dimwitted tactical decisions, but have displayed exceptional feats in fields of science and technology.
* "Below Average normally. Genius in Martial Arts, combat & strategic thinking" may be appropriate for people who behave in an immature, naive, uneducated, or unintelligent manner most of the time, but are absolute savants when it comes to hand-to-hand combat and associated strategic thinking.

As mentioned above, it is a good idea to list feats and/or other explanations for their respective rankings. In cases where this results in considerable amounts of text, it may also be beneficial to Standard Format for Person Profiles for each of the person's intelligence statistics, as it can make the structure more organised and easy for readers to understand.