Alternate Charisma Uses

[italianranma]

Of all the stats, I think that Charisma is the least powerful. With the exception of certain classes, there's not a compelling enough reason for my players to favor it over the other "personality" abilities. For fighters and rogues and other classes who don't have inherent class abilities that rely on Charisma, Intelligence or Wisdom carries the benefits of increased skill points and will saves respectively. Charisma is the modifier for certain key skills to be sure, and for the leadership feat, but the other abilities have their correspondings.

I understand that as the DM I could emphasis character interactions and thus raise the relative importance of those social skills, but I feel that it would be a hollow fix. I want the charisma modifier to affect something hard and tanglible in combat.

I'm toying with the idea of having Charisma affect the number of action points you recieve, and also as a modifier to the action die roll. This however doesn't add much to my NPCs as action points are reserved just for the PCs. That is intentional as Action Points tend to make fights longer, and if both sides had them I could increase my fights much longer than I'm comfortable with.

I want to know what solutions you've used or heard. I read one that gave bonus feats based on charisma, but I didn't like the idea, and the havoc that it could cause on game balance.

Any suggestions or links to prior threads of this nature are appriciated.

 

[Jdvn1]

I've always thought Diplomacy and Bluff were very useful skills. I also try to have NPCs react differently to people based on their Charisma modifiers. I don't have a system for it, but if you have a high Charisma, people will tend to like you. If you have a low Charisma, people won't treat you very well.

 

[Stalker0]

I think the problem with charisma is its the fluffiest stat. There are hard rules for all the other stats but when you get to social stuff it gets very vague.

I think your idea has merit....what happens to characters with really low charimas though...do they get no action points?

An idea I had but only got to test once was to tie in charisma with luck (paladin's get a bonus to their saves as kind of a blessing...so I decided to make charisma that way in general).

Whenever a player rolled a 10 on a 20....they added their charimsa modifier. I choose 10 because its the middle number....a good or bad modifier can really effect the result while adding to a 20 or subtracting from a 1 doesn't really have much effect.

 

[Cyberzombie]

Tying Charisma to action points is an increasingly popular choice. Many people are arriving at it independantly. I think it's a good idea.

One idea I've had is to have initiative based of Cha instead of Dex. It's not as insane as it might sound. One facet of Charisma is how outgoing you are. If you're an extrovert, you have a high Cha; if you're an introvert, you have a middling to low Cha. In most situations, an extrovert will act before an introvert. So having initiative reflect that instead of Dex gives Cha a reasonable boost -- in my mind, at least -- not to mention that it siphons off a bit of power from the 1st or 2nd most powerful stat in the game.

The last change is to make sure you have social interaction. If nothing else, the low-Cha dungeon crawlers should get screwed when they sell their equipment to the magic shop. They should get less than the "full" value, since they have no social graces. The big thing is to make sure that the 'face" of the party *can't* speak for the party all the time. In a city, the group simply can't stick together 24/7. Use that against them.

 

[italianranma]

Thanks for the replies so far:

Yes, tying Charisma to action points is a good thing I think, but it doesn't help for my NPCs who won't have action point.

I'm looking for anything else that represents you projecting your force of persoanlity: Some things I'd like to look at are opposed level checks. I don't have my books in front of me, but I think that things like Caster checks to overcome spell resistance, and spell resistance in general should be affected. That still doesn't give much incentive to the NPC fighter though. I'd like to make the stat affect luck, but that's kind of vague, and luck is already accounted for in the whole random number senario. I thought of toying with the Crit chance (because that's based on luck) but how would I go about doing that without making it overpowered? Would a Cha 8 fighter be incapable of critting? Would a 18 Cha fighter crit on a 15 or higher?

Giving bonus feats seems a little more reasonable now, just because it's the only thing that's not affected by any stat at all. But there's really no way to balance that without overhauling the system.

This is all going to be for my home-brew campaign anyway which is going to have a lot of other rule changes. It seems like there's no easy mechanic that could be readily implemented. I'm kind of thinking of a traits/disadvantages thing kind of like what you see in BESM...but that would take a lot of work...

I guess I could give action points to my NPCs and call it even.

FYI I'm doing action points differently too: they're renewed each day and you get 3 + 1/2 your level in them...That seems more right...

So here's what I think I'll do: everyone gets action points based on 3 + (Charisma Modifier) + 1/2 your level each day. Any final thoughts on that? It seems pretty straightforward to me.

 

[deltadave]

I changed the will save from Wisdom (couldn't say how that was related to will) to Charisma (often described as force of personality) for my Cyberpunk Modern game. Has worked pretty well and the characters tend to point buy much more balanced numbers rather than using Cha as a dump stat.

 

[italianranma]

I changed the will save from Wisdom (couldn't say how that was related to will) to Charisma (often described as force of personality) for my Cyberpunk Modern game. Has worked pretty well and the characters tend to point buy much more balanced numbers rather than using Cha as a dump stat.

I've heard that before too. What about Wisdom then? Granted it modifies Spot, Listen, Sense Motive, and the like, but wouldn't that make Wisdom the lame stat?

 

[Cyberzombie]

I've heard that before too. What about Wisdom then? Granted it modifies Spot, Listen, Sense Motive, and the like, but wouldn't that make Wisdom the lame stat?

I think there is a very real possiblity of that happening -- especially since a rogue will then dump that stat, and buy up Listen and Spot to compensate. While the change is logical, it really messes up Wisdom.

 

[kyberus]

Perhaps, in combination with above, will saving throws could be moved to charisma, and initiative could be somehow tied to wisdom (which is a measure of personal awareness of the environment, therefor, perhaps, reaction time?)

 

[Crothian]

Charisma also reprents hoew other character react to the person. Characters with low charisma I have NPC react worst with, they get fewer good deals and are more likely to get ripped off by merchants, they have troubles in most role playing conversations; I make it a point to have NPC react better to the character with the high charisma.