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Jon Peterson posts Mordenkainen in 1974
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<blockquote data-quote="AmerginLiath" data-source="post: 7749319" data-attributes="member: 777"><p>Vymair’s take is also what I’ve read from every early Original Campaign player, as well as my own experience talking to older players as a guy introduced to late-1st edition as a child in the 80s. Both mechanically and stemming from its wargaming roots, the original game was very heavily built around henchmen and hirelings (look at the Monster Manual’s retention of mass numbers of enemies, such as running into a hundred goblins), even if only to carry out all the treasure needed to gain levels in a GP-to-XP system. Charisma was the stat used to manage these bands (which were themselves a sort of preparation for managing large bands in domain play at Name Level).</p><p></p><p>As years went by, and a combination of the proliferation of convention modules (which focused on a small band of adventurers acting in a limited time scale) and the proliferation of D&D novels (which focused on tight knit parties of characters) taught the second generation of tables what the game looked like, Charisma became less useful as a party-management tool and was on its way to becoming a “dump stat” among min-max gamers, especially as D&D later began to experiment with more then-modern point-based systems in 2nd edition.</p><p></p><p>If anything, when one looks at old edition PHBs and sees what attributes give what bonuses when, Charisma was almost always one worth pumping up if a player didn’t have particularly high rolls or had an extra good roll, because it was the rare attribute than gave incremental advances (it’s bonuses to dealing with henchmen and hirelings) from a low number on instead of not giving any bonuses until 15. So, no, Charisma only became a plausible “dump stat” around 1995 or so, if not 2000 (depending if one is considering it’s change of use in 3.0 vs the rebalancing of options in Skills & Powers), although it’s use in game culture was declining after about 1986.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AmerginLiath, post: 7749319, member: 777"] Vymair’s take is also what I’ve read from every early Original Campaign player, as well as my own experience talking to older players as a guy introduced to late-1st edition as a child in the 80s. Both mechanically and stemming from its wargaming roots, the original game was very heavily built around henchmen and hirelings (look at the Monster Manual’s retention of mass numbers of enemies, such as running into a hundred goblins), even if only to carry out all the treasure needed to gain levels in a GP-to-XP system. Charisma was the stat used to manage these bands (which were themselves a sort of preparation for managing large bands in domain play at Name Level). As years went by, and a combination of the proliferation of convention modules (which focused on a small band of adventurers acting in a limited time scale) and the proliferation of D&D novels (which focused on tight knit parties of characters) taught the second generation of tables what the game looked like, Charisma became less useful as a party-management tool and was on its way to becoming a “dump stat” among min-max gamers, especially as D&D later began to experiment with more then-modern point-based systems in 2nd edition. If anything, when one looks at old edition PHBs and sees what attributes give what bonuses when, Charisma was almost always one worth pumping up if a player didn’t have particularly high rolls or had an extra good roll, because it was the rare attribute than gave incremental advances (it’s bonuses to dealing with henchmen and hirelings) from a low number on instead of not giving any bonuses until 15. So, no, Charisma only became a plausible “dump stat” around 1995 or so, if not 2000 (depending if one is considering it’s change of use in 3.0 vs the rebalancing of options in Skills & Powers), although it’s use in game culture was declining after about 1986. [/QUOTE]
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