The Dumb Fighter is a D&D cliché, a trope, we can even say it’s an unofficial term, like “meatshield”. So is it a justified cliché? Not in recent editions, but earlier yes, I think it was.
For starters, in early editions you didn’t choose your stats, you rolled them, in order, 3d6 for each. If you wanted to play a Fighter (or Fighting-Man, in OD&D) and rolled STR 4, you just didn’t play a fighter. If you rolled STR 15 and INT 4, you proceeded.
Second and VERY important, in OD&D and Basic you could fiddle with some of your rolled stats, and reduce one to increase another, but not on a 1:1 basis. Fighters could lose 2 points of INT to gain 1 point of STR, and having a higher STR affected almost everything for fighters including XP, so they had a strong incentive to do it.
It’s not just about the math though: Thieves could also lower their INT to raise their DEX, and yet “dumb Thief” has never been a trope or term in D&D. I think the reasons for that are obvious. People choose to play Fighters to be badass and hit things. People choose to play Thieves (or Rogues) to be smartass and steal things. It ain’t rocket science. 🙂
D&D tropes have a lot of inertia, they remain strong in the collective imagination long after the reason they came to be is gone. AD&D didn’t keep all these rules, people could also assign rolled scores to their stats, choosing which are high and which are low. With this arrangement, Fighters only dumped INT if they chose to. (And you know what? They often did.) AD&D also had minimum scores, and the Paladin (originally a Fighter subclass) had the strictest prerequisites: STR 12, INT 9, WIS 13, CHA 17. I theorise that Intelligence was included because otherwise Paladins would end up dumber than their horse. In any case, that left vanilla Fighters NOT required to be smarter than their Intelligent magic sword, and you know what? They often weren’t. Partly for optimisation reasons (you got more benefits from keeping your other stats high, CHA affected NPC reactions and henchmen, WIS affected saving throws, and all INT gave a non-caster was languages), and partly for roleplaying reasons (real-life fighting may be about tactics, but strategic players weren’t necessarily attracted to Fighters, not with these rules, which gave them ONE option and that option was to hit it again).
Then came 3rd Edition, which was complicated. There were 173 splatbooks and a million rules. There were tons of feats, and all the Fighter got was feats. There were hundreds of classes and prestige classes, many of them combat-oriented, and multiclassing was easy. Point-buy became a popular method of generating ability scores, which meant that once again people could reduce their INT to boost their STR if they do pleased. And optimisation became a science, peer-previewed in dedicated forums.
At that point, if all you wanted to do was hit it again, you played a Fighter, dumped Intelligence to boost your physical stats, and took Power Attack and similar feats. If you wanted tactical combat, you could do it, but then Fighter was a dip class. You’d take 2 or 4 levels tops for the extra feats, and then you had much better options, some of which were INT-based. You COULD build a strategic Fighter by choosing the right feats, a charger, or a tripper, or someone who focuses on attacks of opportunity, but there were few good combos, and some didn’t need INT at all, while others had Combat Expertise and required INT 13. That was basically the smartest “normal” Fighter.
So the dumb Fighter trope remained. Mind you, it wasn’t dumb warrior in general. People who wanted to fight smart had plenty of options, but playing a single-class Fighter was not the best or the most common, and even then a high INT was not required.
…At least in some circles. One very famous fighter is Roy Greenhilt, from The Order of The Stick, and he has “a very good Int” (number not stated, but fans have calculated it’s 14 to 17). This is noted to be unusual, considered suboptimal for Fighters, and whatchagonnado with it anyway?
Well I’ll tell you. I’ll figure out which columns are load-bearing, entice you to hit them using myself as bait, and bring the whole building down on your head, you oaf!
Basically, Roy was Rich Burlew’s vehicle to push back against the dumb Fighter trope, to remind us that they don’t have to be stupid and/or useless, and that copying an optimisation handbook is not the only way to build a character and play the game. 🙂
5th Edition is another animal altogether. If we only look at base classes, Fighters have no incentive at all to boost their intelligence, but neither does anyone else (except INT-based casters). All INT gets you now is a rarely rolled saving throw and some skills. It doesn’t affect how many skills or languages you get any more, so not even skillmonkeys are beholden to it, unless they focus on INT-based skills. Uncharitable but not entirely undeserved wording: in 5e, “dumb Fighter” isn’t much of a trope because everyone is dumb.
Once we look at subclasses though, the picture changes. There are actually more martial archetypes that have something to do with Intelligence than there are roguish archetypes! (For me this is an affront.) Eldtritch Knights are INT-based half-casters, Arcane Archers get INT-based trick shots, Psi Warriors get a bunch of stuff. For comparison, the roguish archetype named “Mastermind” gets zero mechanical benefits from a high INT, the Inquisitive is good with the Investigation skill, and the Arcane Trickster is the INT-based half caster.
As for tactical combat, Fighters are in the lead here. Battle Masters get manoeuvres, and (perversely, if you ask me) no one else does, not even Swashbucklers. Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything has an optional rule where all Fighters, regardless of archetype, also get a single manoeuvre, as a treat. Various martial archetypes come with various combat options.
Of course, it’s very easy, and not uncommon, to play a Fighter who does nothing but hit it again. Fighters excel in that, what with Action Surge and a million Extra Attacks. However, if that’s all you do and/or if you dumped Intelligence, then it’s clear you chose to be a dumb Fighter. The system didn’t push you. You had other options, and you didn’t take them.
So by now the “dumb Fighter” trope is a bit of a relic. It’s a lot more undeserved now than it was in the 1970s. It hasn’t died out, though. One reason is inertia, people hear an old cliché and repeat it and perpetuate it. But another reason, which I think is important, is that at the end of the day, despite all the available options, most people who play D&D just want to be badass and hit things: the most popular choice of species/class has always been and still remains “Human Fighter”.
Personally I prefer to be smartass and steal things, but to each their own.
Roguish 