I was thinking about this Oscar Wilde quote the other day:
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." *
At the risk of being tedious myself, I'd like to propose the following as an RPG thought experiment. It's not particularly profound, but it might be amusing. Strip out the "Good" and "Evil" from the standard AD&D alignment chart and replace it with "Charming" and "Tedious" -- so you end up with Lawful Charming, Chaotic Tedious, and so forth. I can't remember the number of "fictional character alignment charts" I've seen, sifting everyone from different iterations of Batman to the cast of Family Guy into the classic 3x3 grid, and I'm curious to see what such a chart would look like with that substitution. Take a character from real life, comics, books, TV, etc,, and drop them in. Take a character you're currently playing, and see where they fall on the grid. Just off the top of my head, Special Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks would occupy one end of the spectrum at Lawful Charming, while the late Muammar Gadaffi and, say, internet trolls typify Chaotic Tedious.
*Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
You did it. You cut the goddamn Gordian knot.
ReplyDeleteAnother nice thing about this system is it's Moorcock + Wilde. Proving once and for all that homosexuals have always had a better grasp on morality than the rest of us.
ReplyDelete@Zak: I may have misunderstood, but you're just talking about Wilde, right? I understand Moorcock's (all jokes about his name aside) as straight as the arrow of Law.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I was thinking of Samuel Delaney...
ReplyDeleteI don't know. There are lots of charming people whom I think would leave the world a better place with their demise. And tedious people are often tedious, but, fuck, when you need someone to put all the whatevers in alphabetical order the tedious person will sit down and do it while the charming person will not only offer you a dozen reasons why they shouldn't do it but will even manage to make you feel guilty for having asked.
ReplyDeleteI admire people like Oscar Wilde. I just suspect that it is easier to do so having never directly dealt with the man.
@Limpey: I'm not in any way attempting to make any insight into morality or ethics as they apply in our world in this post. Even the hard-nosed practical concerns of everyday life (person x is interesting, stylish, and delightful company, but completely undependable) for the purposes of this post, just occupy another space on a conceptual grid (Chaotic Charming).
ReplyDeleteDoes that make sense at all?
Love it. What would neutral be? "Meh"?
ReplyDeleteOh, it makes complete sense... I was just musing on my love/hate for the charming Oscar Wilde types in a stream of consciousness way. Nothing beyond the inside of my own skull is implied.
ReplyDeleteHaving dated several catty, witty, and a tad evil graduate students in my time, it's a distinction I readily grok.
ReplyDeleteI can't help but think that the charming-tedious axis is really more about the player than the character, right?
Have you ever, once even, seen someone who is a charmless bore or jack ass in real life (fortunately a rarity these days) play something other than a Tedious character--no matter how much they characterize their PCs and NPCs in terms glowingly Charming? (And this is only multiplied exponentially when playing Chaotics).
On the flip-side I have seen tedious-described characters that are extremely Charming in creative players or GMs hands.
Have you ever, once even, seen someone who is a charmless bore or jack ass in real life (fortunately a rarity these days) play something other than a Tedious character...
ReplyDeleteShit. I want to sneak into your social circles... I know altogether too many jack asses and bores. Maybe it's a case of like-attracting-like... maybe I am a boring jackass and just sink to common social level of my type.
While the Charming-Tedious alignment axis certainly is amusing, it's really just the Chaotic-Lawful alignment axis renamed from the Chaotic point of view.
ReplyDeleteJust as Evil people think of themselves as things like "intelligent" and "pragmatic" rather than "evil", Chaotic people think of themselves as things like "charming" and "sassy" rather than "chaotic".
You did see the part at the end where I give an example of Lawful Charming, right?
DeleteYes. But it didn't persuade me because I don't agree that Dale Cooper is Lawful. I think he's Neutral on the Lawful-Chaotic axis. And I think his "charming" personality is due to both high Charisma and slightly Chaotic tendencies.
DeleteTo persuade me that being Charming is separate from both having high Charisma and being Chaotic, I'll need to see an example of somebody who has neither high Charisma nor Chaotic tendencies, but is still Charming.
I'm not really interested in persuading anyone of anything as far as this post is concerned. I proposed it as an amusing thought-experiment, and that's all I really intended. To split hairs over the nitty-gritty of such a slight thing seems counter to the spirit in which it was intended. Granted, that might be an inevitable consequence of putting something out into the gaming blogosphere -- as a species, we tend to quantify the hell out of the abstract, but a detailed, exhaustive explication seems to me to be a frankly tedious exercise. For me, Charm works the same way as the old chestnut about "obscenity"-- "I know it when I see it" -- and subject to the same level of subjectivity, prejudice, and whim.
DeleteIt is amusing. And, if regarded as nothing more than a mere amusement, then you're right that the most amusing way for most people to enjoy it is for them to just enjoy it, not analyze it.
DeleteBut I don't think it really is nothing more than a mere amusement. I think it's also an insight into how some Chaotic people see the world. And, when regarded as that, I think it's also interesting to analyze. That's why I did so.
Just one question, which I hope isn't tedious:
What is it about Charm that you see as different from Charisma?
It just occurred to me that your example of Chaotic Tedious -- Muammar Gaddafi -- might, ironically, actually be an example of Lawful Charming. It's hard to get into a position of leading a nation and stay there for a long time without having at least Lawful tendencies. So he probably wasn't Chaotic. And it's hard to get into a position of leading a nation and stay there for a long time without also "charming" lots of people. But...oops...that's probably just high Charisma at work again. Never mind.
ReplyDeleteDictators and despots are admittedly problematic as far as this metric is concerned, as they tend to be all over the map in terms of Law/Chaos Charm/Tedium. Looking back on it, Gaddafi was probably not the best example.
Deletei tend to find everybody charming. maybe that's my fault though
ReplyDelete