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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4984398" data-attributes="member: 4937">Woah. Woah there.  Do you literally mean that, or do you mean:"Social and mental stats are either tangential and not important mechanically to combat or they have significant mechanical impact on combat in 3e."Because I can agree that social and mental stats generally don't have a significant impact on combat expect for certain classes, but I certainly don't agree that they don't have a signficant mechanical impact.Yes, hense the temptation to 'dump stats' in order to maximize your combat ability.Ok, I see where you are going with this.Ok, fine.  This would appear to be an objection that all possible builds (charismatic fighter, weak barbarian, dumb wizard) should have equal combat ability, so that no matter how I concieve my character they should be balanced with all other possible builds.  But that's not an objection to what I've said directly.  To see why, let's imagine for a moment that I agreed with you that this was terribly unfair, and hense your 3 INT and 3 CHR fighter should be allowed to be role played as a smart charismatic leader.  What would the actual result of this concession be?  Well, to begin with, while a 3 INT and 3 CHR might have very little mechanical impact on your attack rolls and damage, they have a pretty huge mechanical impact on play outside of an attack roll.  At precisely the time that you are supposed to be showing off as the smart or charismatic character you claim you should be, the rules of play would say that you should consistantly fail on these occassions.  How then are you to actually appear to be a smart and charismatic leader?  The rules as you've already said demand otherwise.  And, if we are to ignore the rules and allow you to appear to be a smart and charismatic leader (or if you are finding/arguing for some way to get around those rules by virtue of your superior roleplay), then how are you doing anything but arguing that your characater should be strong, fast, hardy, clever, wise, and charismatic - that is to say without flaw?Therefore, my concession is of no value.  Whether I conceed to you the right to roleplay your INT 3 CHR 3 fighter as a clever and charismatic leader or not, it doesn't make it good role play.Moreover, if what you are really going for is bringing your character conception to life, why should it matter to you that your character isn't perfectly combat optimized?  Why should it matter to you that you are sacrificing a bit of strength or dexterity for more intelligence or charisma?I really only have two sympathies for the argument you make here.First, the D20 system doesn't do enough to make intelligence and charisma impact the game outside of combat (or even in it for that matter).  Intelligence should certainly not be a dump stat for as many classes as it is.Secondly, D&D in general historically has not encouraged DM's to make what happens outside of combat matter.But these objections have to do ultimately with the limitations of D20 as a rules set, not whether or not it is good role playing to play a character at the low end of the intelligence scale as if they were on the high end of the intelligance scale.  We can address the limitations of the ruleset.  It is quite beyond anyone's ability to make bad roleplaying into good roleplaying.</blockquote>

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