MostlyHarmless42
Adventurer
This still doesn't address my core concern from earlier then: how to you propose you avoid punishing players who are not naturally charismatic? Why should an autistic or socially anxious player be effectively barred from playing a charisma character when we don't require the fighter to actually learn to sword fight or force the wizard to perform calculus every time they want to prepare a spell? Why should a DM's entire group suffer in every roleplaying/investigation encounter simply because their DM isn't a professional voice actor or an author in breadth of vocabulary? Or why should that same DM effectively be barred from having any deceptive villains simply because their poker face doesn't match that of a trained master spy?The problem is whatever you say as the DM tends to be taken as objective truth. Or you resort to "signalling" words like "seems" "appears" "probably" etc which will perk up the players' ears and cause them to dig in, much like failing a check to search for secret doors. "He's lying" is different than "he appears to be lying" which is different than "he's telling the truth" which is different than "he appears to be telling the truth". Lying and telling the truth are objective statements from the DM that the character simply cannot know short of telepathy or magic. Which only leaves "appears" or similar signalling words. So if that's the only reasonable or valid response you have as the DM, an NPC appears to be telling the truth or appears to be lying...why bother with a check or even a passive skill? Just give the player that info or let them decide for themselves, which they can still do regardless of the roll or what you tell them. So again, there's no purpose to the check. It doesn't actually reveal any solid info. It's a gut check, basically. The player has a gut, they can use it.
Or the opposite on the player side of things: why should the minmaxing player get the benefits of all their characters having an 18 charisma simply because the player themselves is a born liar/manipulator even if they've loudly declared at the table that "charisma is worthless and their dump stat"?
I'm not talking in hyperbole here. I want you to answer these questions because frankly your posts seem to indicate a frankly outrageous expectation for most players in terms of mental stats and it borders dangerously on ableism.