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One gets a sense that the Biotics are all pretty low IQ from how they are described... but actually looking at the OCC notes, although slightly below average, they are still so close to average as to be disturbing just how many intelligent people are turned into Biotics against their will... this is not exactly scraping the bottom of the barrel for the most part. This makes me think that the contributing factor to Biotic selection is mostly mental illness (which can happen to high-IQ people just as often) or criminal behaviour (similarly, criminals can be high IQ) or even personal vendettas (framing enemies for crimes, gaslighting them into thinking they are insane). Cases of brain damage and mental disability do not appear to take up a huge portion or we would expect lower IQ stats.

Here are the odds for humans having an IQ of 14 or higher on 3d6 (ignoring OCC bonuses, classes like Geneticist and Gardener might slightly skew this up, but for the most part OCCs do not tend to give IQ bonuses so it is negligible)

15+10+6+3+1 or 35 ways to roll 14+ out of 216 possible 3d6 outcomes

or roughly 16.2 percent of humans roll 14 or higher

so 12% of Biotics being 14+ IQ is not that much lower than normals

I bet the Coalition States would be outraged by this. Aliens wiping the minds of innocent and INTELLIGENT humans... Archie could swoop in and make an argument to side with the machines.

...

the book goes out of it's way to point out that most biotics are mostly not voluntary, apart from the ones that "volunteer" to avoid the death penalty.

so yes, they are mostly suffering from mental illness or are criminals. that's exactly what the book says.

as to framing people or fooling someone into thinking they have a mental illness, i doubt that's done by the house. if they're going to persuade you to do something, they can just train you for one of the other classes (or various other classes that must be around - there's a militia OCC somewhere on these boards that makes a lot more sense for "regular soldier" than a roughneck, who is issued a top-of-the-line piece of biotech in the host armour which is considered to be reserved for the elite). but sure, i wouldn't be surprised if individuals do something like that for their own reasons (ie getting rid of people they dislike). it probably isn't *that* common though.