Roleplaying High Charisma?

[Aust Diamondew]

Personally, it depends on what type of character it is. I had a Sorcerer once with a Charisma of 18. I played her as acerbic, snarky, sarcastic and bitchy. Someone told me that wasn't Charisma 18, and I said "yes it is. Her Charisma is so high because she has an unshakeable, absolute conviction, total faith in herself. She has so much inner confidence that she natually considers most others to be inferior and is therefore a snob." The DM bought my argument and that was that. I think high charisma characters would naturally tend to have large egos - that's all part and parcel of the high score.

Any character can be a bitchy jerk. But for some reason if you're a bitchy jerk with a high charisma people will still like you where as a low charisma char people will hate.
This is true in real life too.

 

[cybertalus]

I always viewed Charisma score as being pegged to how introverted or extroverted a person is. Scores with negative modifiers are introverts, scores with positive modifiers are extroverts. The extroverts come off as more confident because their focus isn't about their own feelings, but about other people's.

Being strongly introverted, this means I hate playing high Charisma characters because it takes so much energy to even pretend to be an extrovert.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I am with Crothian on this, while you can do things to make CHR low, CHR is better in the hands of the DM. This can be done in a number of ways from the plan from the highest CHR being thought of the best plan, to even how bards sing of the the party, The mighty adventures of Bruno Simple's Mighty Band, the DM has a better control of the interactions of NPCs.

Something I have thought about is averaging party CHR to get a party CHR, to see how the world relates to them.

 

[Piratecat]

Right; like Crothian, I have NPCs respond much more favorably to high-charisma characters.