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Thread: Chaotic, High Wisdom
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2023-04-21, 11:54 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2014
- Location
- Ohio
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
Take Gandalf, and make his motivation less “must save world” and more “my life will suck if Sauron wins”. Gets a diverse group of individuals together to save the world, prefers advice and being in the background to leading armies, doesn’t always work well with the kings and regents he meets, humble. Very much does his own thing with no big organization around him.
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2023-04-21, 01:00 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2006
- Location
- Wandering in Harrekh
- Gender
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
My most recent character was like this; a Chaotic Neutral Cleric of Olidammara. I played her as basically a bartender confidante. Very perceptive, knows what makes people tick. Completely willing to involve herself in schemes that have a decent chance of working, but absolutely okay with saying "no" to a dumb plan that's not likely to work. Operated a tavern that had special "singles nights" involving Pipes of Frenzied Revelry. Recruited most of the staff of the tavern from miscreants the party had defeated (but not killed). Basically, she loved subverting the (Lawful Good) town's expectations and was savvy enough to get away with it; perceptive enough to know how far she could push things without getting the bar shut down.
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2023-04-21, 07:10 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
Last edited by Bohandas; 2023-04-21 at 07:11 PM.
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2023-04-24, 01:39 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2022
- Location
- the other Pacific coast
- Gender
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
example characters from fictional media:
Trafalgar Law
from One Piece.
arguably high WIS
wouldn't go out of his way to hurt or help people.
Shintaro Kazama
from the Yakuza games
mentor character, so high WIS.
"Yakuza with a heart of gold", i.e. CN
Riddick,
portrayed by Vin Diesel
insightful & perceptive = high WIS
ruthless, but not needlessly cruel = CN
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2023-04-24, 01:44 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2016
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2023-04-24, 06:19 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2015
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
This is a pretty good example, and its notable how Riddick does not fit in with society. He spends a very large portion of the movies he's in on the run, and when he does acquire a position of importance, loses it almost immediately because it both doesn't interest him and he doesn't know how to manage his subordinates. He even, to a very real extent, knows betrayal is coming, but it's simply not in his nature to take the steps to stop it. It's also notable that Riddick's universe is full of characters like him, but because they lack his level of personal bad***ery almost all of them are in prison or dead.
Chaotic neutral is, in many ways, the hardest alignment to survive as. Chaotic good individuals have friends, who will often go out of their way to say their butts when they commit some massive faux pas. Chaotic evil individuals are protected (at least for a time) by paranoia and intimidation. Chaotic neutral characters have none of this, and the alignment does more damage to itself than almost any other. D&D gets around this with the Slaadi by just having them spawn spontaneously, but that obviously doesn't work for humans.
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2023-04-27, 02:09 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2022
- Location
- the other Pacific coast
- Gender
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
Designating a character whose defining character traits are loyalty, duty, and responsibility, and who is driven entirely by his personal code of honor and need for redemption as CN is certainly...novel.
Seeing that Asian stereotypes as a whole (and Japanese especially so) already resemble 'lawful' alignment, I feel that it should be seen through a prism of sorts...
This is a pretty good example, and its notable how Riddick does not fit in with society.
My idea was to point out that "high WIS" doesn't necessarily mean the sage stereotype.
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2023-04-27, 04:10 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
Organized crime is generally Lawful Evil
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2023-04-27, 08:11 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2016
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
Anti-law =/= anti-Lawful. The quickest example to give is that many Paladins could be considered anti-law, if the laws are considered unjust. Are Paladins Chaotic? No.
The Yakuza, more than any other organized crime syndicate in human history was built on a rigid set of laws, and in many cases WERE the law for many settlements not long after the Meiji era began, acting as basically a suped up community watch and "get **** done" committee. They brought order to lawless regions and helped devastated communities get back on their feet...coincidentally (of course) allowing them to really get their claws in these communities and form cores of people who are very loyal to the idea of the Yakuza as the people who could help them when the government was too aloof or incompetent to do so.
This honor code and ruleset is actually the core of every conflict in the series: the protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu, an "old school Yakuza" (already considered a throwback to an earlier era in the late 80s, when he got started) who believes in honor, serving the community, and all that jazz clashes with more "Chaotic", self-serving, and profit-driven Yakuza. Shenanigans ensue.
Kazama, being his mentor and surrogate father, is the one who instilled these values in Kiryu. The man lives and dies by those values; working as a hitman for the Yakuza, but abiding by his personal code to never kill "civilians" if he can help it, and particularly not children...to the point he takes it upon himself to found an orphanage to care for all the children whose parents he murdered.
That is...like the actual, textbook definition of Lawful Evil. The Code above all. Honor above all.
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2023-04-27, 03:58 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
- Gender
Re: Chaotic, High Wisdom
Ability scores shouldn't really affect your ability to be any particular alignment. A high wisdom character who is chaotic could still be reckless or disrespect legitimate authority, because all his high wisdom means is that he has a wealth of real world experience and greater philosophical justification for behaving in that manner. People who disrespect authority aren't necessarily fools, and there are plenty of characters in fiction and people in the real world who are both described as wise and in constant conflict with orderly society.
"Whatever works" is going to be neutral. Just as a Lawful character might occasionally default to taking an ordered approach, a Chaotic character is going to occasionally default to a chaotic approach, even when something more measured might be more successful. In fact, it's literally in the alignment definitions that Neutral characters follow rules when they want, and break them when they want. The idea that "lawful slavishly follows the rules even when its stupid" and "chaotic doesn't do that" isn't supported by any version of the alignment system. Alignment on L v C is about your biases.
I agree, organized crime can definitely be Lawful. I don't know much if anything about the history of the Yakuza, but I do know that in other "organized" crime syndicates, the laws and oaths were really just tiny barriers for the foot soldiers to not behave in ways the upper crust disliked, and were frequently broken when they became inconvenient for folks at the top. So how "Lawful" your organized crime is will depend on whether or not folks follow those Laws even when they become an inconvenience. And of course, both Lawful and Chaotic characters can exist in an organization that's setup as Lawful.Last edited by Zanos; 2023-04-27 at 04:02 PM.
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2023-04-27, 04:10 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2016