5punk

What are you guys thoughts around the Charisma stat?

I find it an odd one, for a number of reasons.

People often treat Charisma as essentially nothing more than a representation of a characters physical appearance. When that is used in games, Charisma pretty much becomes a dump stat for nearly everyone, except for that one guy who decides to max out their Charisma and then insists they are so fucking hawt that they could turn the Pope faaabulous. I don't think any stat that people either ignore or min/max is a good thing. I would also argue that this approach is just fundamentally wrong, although in some systems the Charisma stat *might* have something to do with looks, I don't think anyone has ever designed a game with this as their intention.

But then what is it for? I think it is supposed to be a character interaction thing, but it seems to be simultaneously trying to fill two roles that are at the same time too similar to split apart into separate stats but also too different to comfortably fit together. For example, in most systems that have a Charisma stat that stat is used for diplomacy, trade, lying and intimidation. But that means the creepy, slimy, two faced torture expert has the same stat as the lovely, friendly, honest trader. That seems broken to me, how good you are at bullshit shouldn't be directly associated with how good a first impression you give.

I think my problem with Charisma as a stat is just that: being good at lying also tends to make you look amazing, be good at singing and be a skilled negotiator. To my mind those things should not all be lumped together. However, whilst deception, performing and negotiation could all be split out as skills, looks and first impressions don't make sense as skills. But if you strip out some of it and leave Charisma to just cover those couple of things it emphasises the dump stat problem. Not interested in your characters looks? 1 Charisma for you!

The other problem I find with Charisma, and by extension all the Charisma based skills, is there are multiple ways of handling them even if everyone agrees on what they fundamentally mean. For example, in my opinion a diplomacy skill should be used as a kind of modifier to what the player says in character. Rolling really well can make up for the fact you as a player were a little lacking in tact, roll really badly and you could be a truly cunning linguist and still muff it up. That doesn't seem to be a universal understanding though. I've played with people who don't even attempt to give their character a voice ("I rolled a 40, did I persuade him to let us past?") and other people who will do entire bits of game critical dialogue and never consult the dice in any way. I don't have too much of a problem with the first approach, as although it saps some of the drama out of proceedings some people are just not good at the words, or comfortable improvising in character speech on the spot in front of an audience. Plus sometimes it just slows down a game for no benefit. The other extreme does bug me though, and for much the same reasons that the first doesn't. I don't have to be a powerlifter in real life to play a barbarian in D&D, and I don't have to be a genius to play a xenogeneticist in Eclipse Phase, so why should I have to be a skilled orator to play someone with a high Charisma stat?

Long story short; I have a bunch of problems with Charisma as an RPG stat. What I don't have are any solutions to the problem. I'm tempted to just remove the damn thing entirely.

Ah, the age long charisma problem. First up, I'd take away the relation to looks for exactly the reason you stated. At least if the other stats are as granular as that. If you're lumping strength and agility into a physical stat then sure, but otherwise leave looks as a trait or something. One edition of D&D actually had a comeliness stat, but that just ended up as a second dumpstat and we ended up with parties of hideous dullards. Apart from the guy who always miraculously rolled 18 comeliness for his inevitably female character. He's the guy whose character sheet I amended the description box of with "massive hairy growler."

Other than that I think it's a matter of weighting the skills. Charisma isn't an obvious stat to pump up, but only because it isn't used in combat. It is, however, essential to frontmen, conmen, and information gatherers. As long as those skills play a part in the game then the stat is needed. Not by everyone, admittedly, but you can account for that. So the munchkins use it as a dumpstat, so what? Not all stats are equal, but if you like you could drop the starting stat points a little. That way the munchkins can munchkin their way into an above average but not super-hard fighter, while the talky types probably don't care that much that they're slightly shitter in combat because they probably aren't playing for the dice and maths anyway.

Incidentally in my homebrew on/off RPG system I not only took charisma but also empathy. I found it helped define the charisma stat:

high charisma, high empathy = champion of the people
High charisma, low empathy = charming psychopath
low charisma, high empathy = creepy scout leader type
low charisma, low empathy = reclusive serial-killer-to-be

I also used the empathy stat for healing and psychology skills, with charisma for the talky skills. Both are planned to be essential to priest-type characters who need to court divine intervention.

I approach it in two ways.

First is that I think it really should be called "People skills" if it's going to be an upwards increasing stat. Mostly because it divorces it from the connotations that come with it being called charisma, but also because it means under that name there's nothing wrong with someone with an arsehole for a face being born with a silver tongue.

Second is that I feel it should be a mostly fixed stat in most systems. Roll once at character creation and deal with it and make sure your system actually uses it fairly frequently outside of combat. Which takes it away from being just another skill and turns it more into an actual representation of a character's characterness.

Sadly though, it also isn't very fleshed out and comprises of lots of actual skills. I quite like the look of the WHFRP way of handling it, as it augments skills rather than being the skill itself (ie, you can have high charisma, but no trade skills, so you're gonna suck at those rolls).

I've seen it used with various names and systems in games and it's arguably often misnamed as Charisma. Charisma probably shouldn't affect your Initimidation powers more than someone with obviously excessive strength, but kinda refers again to the way the character look or comes across - ie: how good they naturally are at looking threatening, rather than perhaps a gentle giant. A more correct example of the name would be to determine how good a Bard is at Performing.

I've often seen it used as a companion stat for Rogues governing things like lockpicking and trap finding/disarming (sometimes as Cunning or Perception) and paired with Dexterity/Agility as their major, the same way as Stength-Constitution and Intelligence/Magic-Wisdom/Willpower work for Warriors and Mages - but in those systems each pair might as well be called Primary and Secondary as any points elsewhere seem a bit wasted.

A good use to popularise it might be to have it influence other things, perhaps a Sorcerer needs it to retain control of his summoned demons or a Ranger/Druid his animal chums, it could determine the size of reward one gets for completing quests, or affect how well characters interact with or use items or weapons that have a "personality" (either magically imbued or some sort of AI)

I always seem to take charisma to be a way of gauging how eloquent a person is mostly, and generally how well they get on socially, for example my character for D&D's lowest stat is charisma, he never really pays much attention to what people are saying and what he does take in gets warped to fit his own way of thinking, and he has little to no social etiquette either.

shot2bits wrote:I always seem to take charisma to be a way of gauging how eloquent a person is mostly, and generally how well they get on socially, for example my character for D&D's lowest stat is charisma, he never really pays much attention to what people are saying and what he does take in gets warped to fit his own way of thinking, and he has little to no social etiquette either.

I think Alice probably has the highest Fellowship skill of our WHRPG characters, but I can't remember if that was a conscious choice during character creation, just how the dice rolled or a byproduct of her race and career.

I've used it more as a roleplaying springboard to highlight effervescence than to actually pass many skill tests. As Joose argued you should not need yourself to be able to write actual convincing dialogue in order to pass skill tests as that's what the numbers are for. Of course it's fun to try and compose a convincing story if that's your thing, but it shouldn't be a substitute for the roll.

The reverse is a little more tricky - that of making no attempt to say what your character is doing and seems unique to Charisma. No-one would think it odd if you used a Strength check to "bash open the door", but if you wrote a paragraph on how you probed the door for weaknesses with your sword butt before applying a carefully-placed should you would seem a bit spoffish, as everyone would know it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference if you failed the roll (depending on the GM/house rules)

That's where roleplaying comes in. Charisma is a foggy example, but it's ultimately the same as your Intelligence 4 character coming up with a devious tactical solution to a tricky combat, or knowing how to make TNT.

I've found people typically fall into patterns of experience when playing tabletop RPG. Most new players will do little actual roleplaying and rely on rules and dice, typically playing combat characters. Then people get into it a bit more and branch out a little into moderate roleplaying and more advanced characters, often ditching their first character and re-rolling something more interesting. Then some people pass the rules bit alltogether and become a bit thespian. The problem of over-roleplaying is pretty common in the last type. You can spot them because they talk about their characters all the time. Incidentally I've been all of the above at various points.

I totally thought I had responded on this thread, but apparently I didnt. I shall do so now.

Dog Pants wrote:high charisma, high empathy = champion of the people
High charisma, low empathy = charming psychopath
low charisma, high empathy = creepy scout leader type
low charisma, low empathy = reclusive serial-killer-to-be

I really like this idea. Do you mind if I slightly steal it? And by slightly I of course mean completely?

Thinking about it, this kind of splits the traditional uses of Charisma into two camps: "Selfish" Charisma and charisma that helps other people. It would make sense, using this system, for Charisma to be the stat tied to things like bartering, lying, even (maybe along with Strength or something) intimidation: basically things that are attempting to horse people to your way of thinking against their will. Empathy on the other hand could be used for things like diplomacy, calming people down, understanding people, healing (because it helps to diagnose someone if you can understand what they are feeling), performance art and other things that are more about helping people out in some way. Its like Good Charisma and Bad Charisma. With that in mind, Empathy is an excellent name for the stat, but maybe Persuasion would be a better name for its other half? Its a bit more descriptive and leads players away from the idea that a high number in this means you have huge norks.

Steal away. I use it in my proto generic system that I'm not currently working on (and is way overcomplicated). Persuasion might be too easy to mix up with a skill. Maybe manipulation or a synonym?

Actually, yes, manipulation is much better. I'll go with that.