We seem to be on a roll with this “what bad things can you do with very high and very low non-physical abilities (Int, Wis, Cha)” thing, which we all recognize as a timeless piece of flame bait and thus speaks to very reasons why we just love playing this crazy D&D game in the first place.

So I should tell you a bit more about Killington Mann, the ultra-lawful-good fighter-not-a-paladin-thank-you-very-much (in my defense – this was before Order of the Stick’s Roy Greenhilt came along to become the epitome of the very same role) that I ran in our first 3rd-edition campaign:

He had a Wisdom of 5. I played him as if we had a Wisdom of 9. This was a tragic mistake on my part. Mea culpas from now until the end of time.

I’ve learned a lot since then (possibly), but how we do love to bring up the past, eh? Killington was cut from the cloth of Sheriff Bud B. Boomer (John Candy) in Canadian Bacon: “There’s a time to think, and a time to act. And this, gentlemen, is no time to think.” First one into combat, using absurdly high movement bonuses to outrun his party’s cover on a regular basis. I’m pretty sure he had the record for most deaths in the campaign. (That the party kept raising him is a testament to the tantalizing power of dysfunction.)

I always thought that this was a pretty foolish (but fun!) thing to do, and I thought it did a good job embodying what someone with a 5 Wisdom might do. So I thought I was playing him well. The problem was that it annoyed most of the other players (and probably their characters, too), and they tended to hold me responsible for the grief that ensued, instead of Killington, despite the fact that it was clearly his fault.

Why is that? Probably because it’s my natural intent to play a little recklessly and do some big-bashing dice-rolling combat when I play, so my fellow players weren’t likely to credit me for good roleplaying, as much as fault me for being so naturally weak to this non-roleplaying hack-and-smash tendencies.

Here’s the thing: when you consider a really low stat and its prospect for an “unplayable character”, it’s not so much that you can’t find a way to play it, individually, so much as, if it’s done right, any mental stat down as low as 5 should represent a chronic, perpetual hazard to the well-being of the entire party. This will lose its novelty really fast and instead become an ongoing distraction to the campaign. Either you’re playing it wrong, or else you’re playing it right but everyone is sick of you because of it.

I submit that I wasn’t playing Killington’s 5 Wisdom “poorly” enough as evidenced by the fact that the party continued to function and succeed with him on board.

The best on-screen portrayal of the way I envisioned Killington’s low wisdom was Jack, Thomas Haden Church’s character in Sideways. It was basically just a party-of-two, Miles and Jack, and yet Jack’s extraordinary, nay epic, tendency to lead them astray and get them in almost unimaginably bad situations was, well, it was a tour-de-force of foolishness.

From that perspective, I clearly didn’t play Killington foolishly enough. How can you be a loose cannon in combat, but aspire to oratory leadership in the city? You can’t. Most trips to the city should have been a spin-the-bottle game of who he’ll end up in a fight with first. Or he’d have to be kept on a short leash by the party wizard. “It’s just a charm spell, it won’t hurt a bit…”

Our DM, unwittingly, didn’t help the situation in that he kind of overlooked the Wisdom thing and saw Killington as this walking Wheel of Destruction, and tended to try and counter him by raising the stakes of physical damage: more fire, more lightning, more ice, more big red teeth and claws. The truth was that even at 12th-level he could be neutralized in any given combat by a 1st-level sorcerer with a couple charm spells. Every time. Never really happened. Our sorcerer kept counters handy, just in case, but I don’t recall the need ever arising. Heck, in truth, Killington could have been neutralized by a 0th-level sorcerer, armed only with a bag of candy and shiny marbles to scatter about on the floor.

Anyway, if I had it to do all over again, I think I would have to trash this set of abilities and re-roll. It is, more or less, unfair (and maybe even unethical) to bring a character into a party with such a cripplingly low stat, because if played correctly, it has to end up as a perpetual Achilles Heel that the DM should rightfully exploit over and over and over again. It makes sense, but it sure doesn’t sound like fun for anybody involved!