Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5402545" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not ignoring it.  It's in the second paragraph of my response.  However, leaving aside the fact that the player who is making the protest didn't get his opposed charisma check to resist (a clear violation of the rules), its worth noting that even though charm person 'let's you give orders' it is not the most correct interpretation of the spell to see it as allowing you to give the charmed person any order (provided you overmatch their charisma) or even that it allows you to make a resisted charima check to give unlimited 'suggestions' (as the 3rd level spell) to the target.  It is afterall only a 1st level spell, and that interpretation would make it significantly more powerful than the third level suggestion spell and nearly as powerful as the 6th level dominate person.Charm Person turns the attitude of the target to 'friendly'.  It makes the target regard you as a trusted friend.  It does nothing else to the person's mind, and everything else in the text follows from that beginning.  You may try to give that person commands, but they will obey only to the extent that they would obey similar requests from other trusted friends.  If you ask a friend to, "Pass you the salt.", he's probably going to do so.  If you ask a friend to kill his brother, cheat on his wife, or burn his D&D collection he's probably going to be outraged even if he does regard you as a friend.  That is the standard charm person is held to.Hense the restriction that the character will not obey 'obviously harmful orders' (and frankly, I consider, 'Abandon all your friends without explanation to be one.', but that's not really the point).   Charm Person gives you no magical ability to command what anyone does.   It doesn't let you issue commands which diametrically oppose the characters interests even if you win the charisma check.  The 'resisted charisma check' mechanic is merely an attempt to adjudicate the issue of using non-magical ordinary diplomatic persuasion to get your friend to so something.  Friends will take risks for other friends, but they won't act out of character.  Even if you successfully get a person to do what you want, it still doesn't ever render them an automaton.  This is the reason why I suggested that requests like, "Quick, run get help!" or "This is all a misunderstanding, protect me!" are much more likely to be obeyed IMO than a blunt command to 'Run away for an hour'.   The first sort of requests are of the sort that, if a friend made them of you under the circumstances, you might imagine yourself trying your best to fulfill.   But, you can't imagine any reason for simply abandoning your friends.  This is important because without close supervision, a charmed person is going to act in the most obviously helpful way.   A charmed person might well, "Run get help!", but you can't stop the character from coming back at the first sign of help actually turning up because the character is not rendered an automaton.   You can order a charmed person to, "Protect me!", but you can't order him to do anything other than what he would normally do to break up a fight 'between his friends' or to ignore your actions if you begin taking actions that don't conform to that standard.It's the fact that the DM didn't jump through the hoops he would probably expect the PC to jump through if the PC cast the spell that bothers me the most.   Frankly, the first thing I would do in this DM's campaign is gain the ability to cast 'Charm Person' because it would be so wonderfully broken if it worked like it works for the NPCs.  And the second thing I would do is leave the game if the spell didn't work for me like it worked for them and the DM failed to apologize for the bias.</blockquote>

Verification