Roleplaying high INT and CHA with low WIS

[BigCat]

You are the absent minded professor beloved for your entertaining lectures and lively seminars, but you are constantly sitting on your glasses. You can recite the entire Illiad and make the audience cry for Achilles, but without your secretary you couldn't pick your own graduate students out of a crowd.

 

[Illirion]

I'd suggest reading OotS and taking a good look at Elan.

Oh wait no, forget about that. Belkar was the one with the low wisdom. Elan just has a low Int. But Belkar doens't have a particularly high charisma or intelligence stat either. So just forget about what I said and just read OotS

 

[Rystil Arden]

I'd suggest reading OotS and taking a good look at Elan.

Elan is not such a good example--his Int is not at all high either

 

[Wolfwood2]

Make fatal mistakes. Seriously, a character with a 4 wisdom probably should have gotten themselves killed when they were a child if not for someone really watching out for them.

Don't be afraid to offer to scout ahead or go off on your own. After all you will think you re being quiet.

Assume people who seem to like you have your best interests at heart.

No ranks in climb? Try it anyways and don’t bother taking 10.

Leave yourself open to monsters charging you so you can get your spells off.

Eat big juicy mushrooms you find while traveling without checking with the ranger or druid first. Better yet, add them to the dinner you are cooking for the party and…. Shhh… it is a surprise.

“Oops” Should be the first thing you say after “Fireball”.

Well, no, don't do any of those things because they will be annoying to the other players and not conductive to good gaming.

I would probably play up the low Will save and low perception angle myself, making this character someone who is easily talked into things. Mind you, he's obviously very intelligent and can see the right course of action when given some time to think things through. It's just that he often takes the easiest and most obvious way out when under pressure. Not necessarily the worst choice, because sometimes the best choice is the easiest choice.

 

[Balgus]

Eight Year old Genius.

If you have a son or someone you can get some advice from, ask them what they would do in certain situations and work on it from there.

I would also say Cocky bastard.

 

[orsal]

I take ivory-tower intellectuals as the prototype of high-int low-wis. High-cha fits that mold quite well. The character is extremely articulate, using his excellent language skills for rhetorical purposes. His influence is enhanced by the evident fact that he knows what he's talking about, and also can express it very clearly. But he's got a very theoretical mindset. Everything he understands well in theory, doesn't work out so well in practice. He can make well-informed decisions when he has a chance to deliberate, but his snap decisions are often poor, because he isn't good at assessing a situation when he doesn't have time to contemplate every aspect. Also, his verbal skills aren't matched by non-verbal communications -- terrible at picking up body language, unless the character takes enough Sense Motive ranks to compensate for the low wisdom.

Think back to the best teacher you ever had. That's someone who combined intelligence (deep multifaceted understanding and analysis of the subject matter) with charisma (engaging presentation in class). That person may or may not have been absent-minded; if not, you can well imagine that (s)he was without changing what made the person such a great teacher. Now suppose that, instead of going into the teaching or academic profession, the person had decided to make a career out of exploring subterranean caverns inhabited by strange monsters.

 

[Tarangil]

I remember some years ago, a DM of mine had an interesting analogy on describing the differences with a high/low Int/wis.

His example of a High Wisdom (18) and low Intelligence (3) was that the character upon chancing across a pile of crap, doesn't quite know what it is but instinctivly knows that it's best to avoid it.

Now put a character with a high intelligence (18) and a low wisdom (3) and when the guy chances upon the same pile of crap, he knows what it is. It looks like crap, it smells like crap...So he eats it.

 

[Kesh]

College professor.

Very smart, able to easily engage those he speaks to... but has no idea how to work his damn VCR.

Seriously, this would be a character with a lot of focus in one particular area of life (arcane magic, in this case) and zero idea how to deal with anything else. Not ignorance so much as inexperience and an inability to "wrap their head around" things outside their expertise.

 

[Zhaleskra]

I had a character with a low score in d20 Modern. The score was Charisma, and I went with the disfigured interpretation. Since it was really low 6 to start, and was later lowered even further to 4, rather than have the disfigurement by continuous, I chose to have it be three large scars, on his head and arms. The GM played with this when the event that lowered his Charisma further happened.

 

[davidschwartznz]

Malcom (in the Middle).

Smart and eloquent enough to get himself into a good situation, too short-sighted to keep himself there.