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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5376710" data-attributes="member: 58197">I think the biggest problem with Charisma is that people think it requires "enforcement."If you have Strength 8, there's no talk about whether you're roleplaying it correctly. Your carrying capacity is lower, your basic melee attacks suck, and you'll botch a lot of Strength-based checks. Same goes for Dexterity and Constitution. Nobody calls in the roleplaying police over physical stats.Mental stats, on the other hand, lead to all kinds of crap. Wisdom mostly gets a pass because nobody has a clue what it's supposed to signify, so no one can figure out how to police it. But Intelligence and Charisma are nearly as bad as alignment-restricted classes for spawning stupid arguments between players and DMs who disagree on exactly what "Charisma 8" signifies, since the rules give virtually no guidance.(Intelligence is at least as bad as Charisma, if not worse. A lot of folks take the attitude that if you don't have an actual Int penalty, you don't have to "dumb down" your character--completely ignoring the fact that Int 10 is average human intelligence, even slightly below average, and the typical gamer is a lot smarter than average. If we assume Int follows the usual 3d6 bell curve, then most gamers should be "dumbing down" any character with an Int score less than 15 or so.)These days, my attitude is: Intelligence describes your character's "book learning," as evidenced by its effect on her knowledge skills. Wisdom describes your character's alertness and perceptiveness, as evidenced by its effect on her perception-type skills. And Charisma describes your character's innate charm and persuasiveness, as evidenced by its effect on her social skills. Beyond that, I don't bloody care. I'm not interested in being the roleplaying police, and I'm not interested in having anyone else police me.And if a lot of folks dump Charisma as a result? Well, I agree that Charisma tends to be underpowered in early editions, though to some extent that reflects DMing habit more than the rules--if DMs were more rigorous about using the monster reaction rules, Charisma would see a lot more interest. In 3E, it's still weak, but not intolerably so; social skills and the Leadership feat count for enough that I don't have a problem with using it as is. (And if you want to dump Cha and make up for it by pouring your scarce skill points into Diplomacy/Bluff/Intimidate, that's fine.) In 4E, it's not really an issue.</blockquote>

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