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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FitzTheRuke" data-source="post: 8963696" data-attributes="member: 59816">As a tangential aside - almost everyone seems (to think) they know how to play a high or low Intelligence, but generally people have a harder time with a high or low Charisma.The D&D GAME ITSELF has troubles with what a low Charisma even means. This is evident in how (up until recently), Orcs (and to a lesser extent, Dwarves) often had very low (even penalized) Charisma scores - which somehow made it so they were less INTIMIDATING. The idea, as far as I can tell, was that they were grumpy jerks, which is why the low CHA. But what does that have to do with being intimidating? The problem lies in that Charisma mostly (as time went on - it often had more to do with being good-looking back in the day) became Force of Personality. Now, a lot of standoffish grumpy jerks have plenty of intimidatingly forceful personalities, just not diplomacy. It would be better, IMO, to penalize (if one were going to) their diplomacy skills (persuasion in 5e terms) rather than their Charisma score. To penalize the latter has the unfortunate side-effect of implying that a standoffish character is also somehow mousy, meek, or wishy-washy.All of this is a long way of saying - D&D abilities are in no way consistent with real life. Sometimes they represent more than one aspect of an actual person, and actual people can be (and often are) both really bad and really good at the same time on a single D&D ability score. If you want your characters to be at all like real people, they can't be too firmly attached to their ability scores. OTOH, their ability scores shouldn't mean nothing. They should inform some part of how you play the character, but not a straightjacket. As always, YMMV.</blockquote>

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