Mental Ability and Alignment

[Godskook]

Actually, understanding one's views very well is what often causes one to be a zealot. A more moderate position could be seen as contradictory and the intelligent person may end up at an extreme.

I was using this definition of zealot:

A fanatically committed person.

With this definition of fanatical:

Possessed with or motivated by excessive, irrational zeal.

Admittedly, there are other definitions of a zealot, but that's the one I'm using. By that definition, a moderate person and a zealot are mutually exclusive.

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To further my point, I see an intelligent person who isn't wise as someone who chooses which cause he pursues when contradictions appear between ideals. A wiser person would keep both ideals and find the necessary balance between them. For instance, I see Shojo as being very intelligent, but not very wise. I'd place his alignment firmly in NG. He isn't lawful, but he still prefers it to chaos.

Essentially:
High int characters see that ethics and morality will conflict, but how they deal with this is dependent on their wis score. A high wis will allow for compromise, but a low score will lead the character to choose which he follows, and the other is merely the way his neutrality leans.

Low int characters won't notice the conflict.

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All that said, I wasn't being restrictive. I didn't say, nor did I mean, that an intelligent person would never be an extremist, just that I felt it less likely than the half-neutral views.

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One more in the pile-on Godskook!

LN, NG, CN, and NE characters can be just as zealous as LG, CG, LE, and CE characters. So can True Neutral characters, for that matter.

Anyone can be a zealot.

Druids, clerics and paladin variants are the only 'zealot' classes in the SRD. Notice that an int score isn't very useful in any of them, relative to other classes.