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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NichG" data-source="post: 5340550" data-attributes="member: 44666">In mid to high level 3.5ed D&D, Charisma is actually overpowered as a stat. No other stat can be used as a modifier for as many things as Charisma can with the right feat and class choices:Divine Grace, Oriental Adventures Shaman class ability, Ruin Delver's Fortune: Charisma to all savesVarious spells (Sirine's Grace, etc) and templates (anything incorporeal, various undead), as well as the Battledancer base class (Dragon Compendium) and the Ascetic Mage Monk/Sorceror path: Charisma to ACMarshal: Charisma to skills or a particular save (stacks with Divine Grace)Slippers of Battledancing (DMG2): Charisma to attack and damageSnowflake Wardance: Charisma to attackDry Lich (okay, this is very situational): Cha mod added to Con mod for determining hitpointsVarious Feats: Cha replaces the normal stat for the various savesSo Cha can substitute for Str, Con, Dex, and Wis in many cases with the right things. Sometimes it can even do so in multiple simultaneous stacking ways: with the proper things, it's possible to get 3x Cha mod to Will saves, for example. A lot of these would be limited in most games, either because they require some strange character choices or because the sources aren't allowed, but it just goes to show how ingrained the perception of Cha as a dumpstat is, since so many game designers went out of their way to allow it to do mechanical things. In a game where some of these options are available, a character designed to exploit Charisma can easily end up being overpowered due to the ability to collapse all of their stat dependencies into a single stat. Doing so doesn't even really require going out of a character concept - a Paladin could use Divine Grace for the save bonus and the Slippers for the attack/damage modification, and could also go into Marshal to emphasize their role as a leader; a Bard could use Snowflake Wardance, the Slippers, Ruin Delver's Fortune, and Sirine's Grace all in theme, and Marshal again wouldn't be too far a jump. A rogue could go the battledancer route, which has some overlap already, and UMD scrolls or wands of the various spells.</blockquote>

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