u/Tharkun140

It's wild how much of Ultima's lore and mechanics is a direct consequence of its original 8-bit technology.

There's a joke in Fallout: New Vegas community regarding Caesar's intelligence score, which is said to be four. This lead to folks talking about how Caesar is "dumber than a mole rat" and how that's a brilliant easter egg meant to own stupid gamers who fell for Caesar's façade of intellect.

Except that's not how that works.

Caesar rose from a random punk taken captive by bandits to a supreme leader of one of the game's main factions by unifying and improving the Mojave tribes. He is written to be a smart dude that the Legion highly relies on, that's why saving him is a meaningful victory for evil. If his stats were accurate, the right choice would be to let Caesar do his thing (he has neutral karma after all) and then build a church for Ulysses, who is clearly a god with his 10-10-10-10-10-10 stats.

Except Ceasar is not dumb, and Ulysses is not a god. Their stats are just code variables that the player was never mean to see, let alone think about. Even when a game does let you see character attributes, they are rarely reflective of anything but game mechanics.

Take a look at Baldur's Gate 3 and its origin characters. Gale, a tall man with six-pack abs, has a Strength score of 8. Astarion is described a literal smooth brain, but has 13 in both Intelligence and Wisdom. Shadowheart has a Charisma score of 8, which is wrong in so many ways I don't even know where I'd begin roasting it. It's clear that DnD attributes are only there for gameplay purposes and have little to do with how these characters are written or designed.

It's not just video games either. The cast of D&D: Honor Among Thieves has official character sheets which clash heavily with the actual movie. Doric is supposed to be a high-level druid with 18 Wisdom and 16 Intelligence, making her a true genius and one of the most powerful beings in Faerûn. In the film, she runs from ordinary guards and is so dumb that intellect devourers can't notice her, which would pose another contradiction, but it doesn't because Stats Don't Matter.

One exception to that are works which actively make a point of integrating game mechanics into their world in a diegetic way. There may be some insights gained by guessing the stats of OotS characters, or reading enemy descriptions in Undertale. I don't recommend digging in the game files or anything, but if a work like that brings attention to attributes, those numbers might line up with how the characters act or how effective they end up being.

Other than that, stats are worthless. Don't try to make sense of them, and don't use them to defend your prefered character interpretation. Only pay attention to them when you're rolling skill checks, and even then, prepare for the dice to screw you over.