Can charisma be something more than just dump stat?

[NichG]

There's two sides to something like a stat: penalties for having it low, and rewards for having it not-low. They'll lead to different behaviors with respect to dump-statting. I would say that low Con is penalized (everyone needs resilience against attack to be functional), but low Str is not except in the case of carrying capacity, since if you're a wizard, having low melee damage is basically ignorable.

For example, take Charisma.

RP penalty: NPCs tend to harass low-charisma characters regardless of what they do.

Mechanical penalty: Charisma is used as a defense against some forms of attack that are relatively common, and so low Charisma means you get knocked out/killed/etc more often.

RP reward: NPCs spontaneously tend to show up and do things for any high Charisma characters in the party. High Charisma means you start as nobility and gain various contacts and priveleges from it.

Mechanical reward: You can use Charisma checks to shape morphic planes. You can use Charisma as a bonus to hit/damage/what-have-you. You gain bonus spells based on Charisma.

Rewards will tend to encourage bipolar stat distributions in the party - the people who synergize well with the rewards will have high or at least above average values, while the people who don't care about those rewards will have low values. Penalties will tend to encourage across-the-board average stats to avoid weak points.

 

[cattoy]

But why should one player be penalized for not having a high Charisma?

And so on.

Typically, we don't rate our players. Too many bruised egos.

 

[Jack Colby]

Charisma is not a dump stat in older editions if you have followers and want their morale to be good. They can help a lot in combat, so any fighter type would absolutely want Charisma as high as possible for the sake of survivability and not having your fellow combatants run away on you.

I can't understand why modern games have made Charisma more of a dump stat by removing hirelings and henchmen from the game. And I think the luxury of assigning your ability scores where you want them only exacerbates the situation, because if you rolled high Charisma you'd darn well try to make use of it in play.

Restore these two things to your game and watch Charisma be important again. Just a suggestion...

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Charisma is not a dump stat in older editions if you have followers and want their morale to be good. They can help a lot in combat

They also make things much more complicated. I don't know, maybe in 2e, with its simpler yet more complex (yeah, that made sense ) rules, you could have multiple characters per person, but that doesn't work well in 3.x or 4e.

so any fighter type would absolutely want Charisma as high as possible for the sake of survivability and not having your fellow combatants run away on you.

I don't know about 4e, but in 3.x there was this feat called Leadership. It was Charisma-dependent. But a lot of players (myself included) did not want followers. This is especially true in post 2e games, where characters could be unique without needing to use kits.

In 4e, they have a charismatic fighter-type, the warlord, which I think is the best of the new core classes. Instead of wasting time using his abilities on wimps though, he buffs his allies. Let the villainous charismatic warlord-type use his special abilities on minions.

I can't understand why modern games have made Charisma more of a dump stat by removing hirelings and henchmen from the game.

Because some people don't want hirelings and henchmen. In fact, a lot don't. I hardly ever saw them even in high-level 2e games I've been in, and it wasn't because the DM didn't want them either.

And I think the luxury of assigning your ability scores where you want them only exacerbates the situation, because if you rolled high Charisma you'd darn well try to make use of it in play.

Restore these two things to your game and watch Charisma be important again. Just a suggestion...

I don't want six dice rolls made at character creation to control every aspect of my character from now on. Options, not restrictions, okay?