AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

I know we have talked exhaustively of honoring the charactersheets 4 int and 2 charisma - and we all have the ability to put on that mask.

What about high stats, 20 charisma, wisdom, intelligence. These are arguably impossible for players to properly emulate. And we don't have a dm overseeing us to smooth the bumps all the time. How do you handle this dilemma?

If you have 20 charisma, your breasts expand two cup sizes.

The problem I've seen with high stats and playability of those stats is as was stated, no person alive would ever have the equivalent of a 40 INT, or, at the least, quite few. That in itself makes them hard to portray.

The other effect that makes it difficult is the social aspect. Many believe CHA is just beauty, but, in reality, we've all met highly charismatic people and they're not always the beautiful ones. They are the person that makes every head turn when they enter the room, not for their beauty, but for the energy they give off, be it positive or negative. This is hard to play out on a server such as ours. It requires that other players and characters know something of your stats and play them too.

For instance, let's say my char with 28 CHA walks into the Merchant halls and says hello to some people there, women, men, what have you. His cha score should allow a positive reaction if he is being genuine and courteous. Which, given who I am speaking of, he is. Now, I have actually had people react negatively to this, though they've never met him. Sure, they may have had a bad experience that would make them on the defensive, but.... my point is: It's hard to play a cha that high without the support of those around you.

I'd say the say goes for Intelligence, as most of us aren't 300 IQ geniuses.....

High Wisdom is the hardest I'd say. You almost need to have a precognitive sense of people if you have say a 40 WIS. I've seen some people with WIS scores that high, and, well, not one plays that way. Not picking, just reinforcing how hard this is to do.

How to do it? Tough question, but, I'd say have something in your bio and do the best you can to roleplay out your CHA or WIS or INT. If you do it well enough, or get other players that "get it", you will find yourself surrounded by people you can rp with and you can do the same for them. It takes time, trust, and patience, but, it can happen.

Not sure if my babbling did any good, but.... thanks for listening.

That Guy wrote:

High Wisdom is the hardest I'd say. You almost need to have a precognitive sense of people if you have say a 40 WIS. I've seen some people with WIS scores that high, and, well, not one plays that way. Not picking, just reinforcing how hard this is to do.
.

As one who falls into that category yes it is hard. Which is why Grim is usually slow to reply or gives very crypitical answers or extremely shorts ones to questions. I have to sit and think a lot on how he would reply to things but I hope I have played him as rather insightful

Personally I don't like it when someone tells me what my character would think of other characters in terms of beauty. If I see such RP I just ignore it. I do however appreciate it when people RP what kind of signals their character would send out. It is however up to me as a player how my character reacts to it.

As for intelligence and wisdom, I don't think it is realistic to expect people to be able to portray them in extremely high values. I look past it, mostly. The only thing I can react negatively to is if someone with -8 Wisdom acts as if they don't have that. I classify that as a sort of 'godmoding'.

Sorry if I come across as a bit negative in the post

So we understand that we cant expect people to play these stats because it is something they cant wrap their head around. Now taking that to the low stat direction what makes it so important to portray these stats properly? It seems a bit negatively skewed.

If we expect adamantly that people play their low stats where is the dissonance in giving a pass on those with too high stats?

OpenTheRift wrote:

So we understand that we cant expect people to play these stats because it is something they cant wrap their head around. Now taking that to the low stat direction what makes it so important to portray these stats properly? It seems a bit negatively skewed.

If we expect adamantly that people play their low stats where is the dissonance in giving a pass on those with too high stats?

I think that everyone can play stats negatively to some extent if they wanted to since it's about "being less" rather than "being more" which may surpass your own limits OOC.

With that said, I personally stay away from high intelligence / wisdom characters because I don't think I could portray them in a convincing way. Lyraesel is basically "average or lower" in terms of everything other than dexterity.

For those of you who play them, I'm happy with the "try your best" scenario. I don't judge if I see a 40 Intelligence character who, for example cannot speak properly. That falls partially into the personality aspect, but majority of the intelligence / wisdom RP as I imagine it can be done "off screen" and thus isn't much of an issue!

OpenTheRift wrote:

So we understand that we cant expect people to play these stats because it is something they cant wrap their head around. Now taking that to the low stat direction what makes it so important to portray these stats properly? It seems a bit negatively skewed.

If we expect adamantly that people play their low stats where is the dissonance in giving a pass on those with too high stats?

This.

It is a thing that has bothered me to no end. Why is it that I get a RP penalty flag for having a stat only 20% lower than average, but a free pass on one that is 100% higher or more? By the numbers, a 16 Intelligence is 60% higher than average or 4 times the difference of an intelligence of 8.

A character can have as much as 44 in a particular stat on Amia, not including certain shapes like dragon shape which can have strength of up to 55. If a player can conceivably RP a stat so high, how can there be any sort of penalty when one stat is within 20% of normal compared to the other which is within 440% of normal? The double standard is so out of whack it comes down to a judgement call on the part of other players and no bearing whatsoever on the stat itself. Add in the complication of the other double standard of allowing min-max and general power builds tweeked for PvP walking side by side with RP builds. It would really help if there were a chart to show how to RP a certain stat number, that way all the people that RP so easily will just shut up about it.

This isn't really a lore oriented subject so much as a general mechanics and role playing discussion so I've gone ahead and moved it to general discussion and left a little shadow in place that I'll remove later so that the people interested in it know it was moved.

To heck with impossible. I play my abilities exactly as they are.

Role playing stats is a bit of a challenge, I'll admit. That's why I usually get a feel for who the character is before I serially play them. Gerald is acc ambitious leader and I've been lowering his charisma score, but I might be reading it again in a future rebuild because of where he's going and who he is.

Plus the whole weapon master idea I had for him simply does not fit him as a character.

For the mental stats at least, imagination plays a big part of it. As much as I love people thoroughly considering their RP, I do think the "argh, how can I properly RP a 40 INT wiz" is a bit overkill. The same way you imagine what it's like to have 50 STR and be able to throw wagon carts like baseballs, think of the trope-ish-ness and the idea of playing a character with those stats. How would an uber-genius act, in your mind? (I would consider anyone with 18+ in a mental stat easily a genius in some way, be it logical faculty, empathy, knowledge, or creativity). Basically bullshit it and stop worrying so damn much if you're playing it "right."

So your PC has 26 natural INT. They have a staggering amount of intellect, super-humanoid. Cool. Plan out their day. What are they doing while they're waiting on the boat? Calculations? Running scenarios through in their head? Mimic what you think someone like that would do. Keep a calculator tabbed open or a wiki page. No one, even DMs I'd say, are expecting you to create theorems on the fly. Just give the illusion of it in your character. That's all any of us are doing while we're roleplaying, you know? Pretending. I'm no more a super-humanly creative person than I am a drow, but I think I do a fair job at pretending to be both.

As far as anyone getting a "pass" on RPing high stats, I'm not exactly sure if that's a thing. Like someone said before I think, you can always have "less" than what you show. To go back to the example of a natural 26 INT PC, they can pretend to be as dumb as they wish. They may not always be in-tune with that super-genius part of their intellect and only break it out when deriving the mechanics of the world to make magic. While I say we have to get in touch with the "idea" of these uber characters to properly RP the illusion, I don't think we should completely buy into the standard tropes. I'd bet most geniuses don't sit around constantly prattling out equations and formulas, though their work may come up as in their idle thoughts now and then. Likewise when our Archmagi are having a casual conversation with friends, there's no reason for them to constantly make a deal of their intellect, or for a high CHA character to constantly turn prose into poetry, or for a high WIS PC to speak ominously like Yoda.

TL;DR: A 40 STR PC isn't walking around constantly ripping doors off of the hinges and putting footprints in concrete, so there is little reason to expect a 40 INT/WIS/CHA character to constantly exercise their huge abilities, unless they wish to.

Pretending to be a smart person comes naturally if you entertain the notion that you're an utter dunce.

I never had problems playing the 20 base charisma for my bard. He gets enough attention, so I suppose it works. As for intelligence and wisdom, I have seen great examples for both.

Asya's supernatural intellect is usually played by me insisting something fantastical is accurate until everyone else agrees with me, since this is all made up anyway. After a while people just assume you're right because you were right a whole bunch of other times, thus acknowledge false intelligence.

Ability scores and explanation, along with alignment, are terribly vague, and honestly poorly thought out in D&D. This is unfortunately just something we have to work with.

The actual numbers, and their range, is a mechanical stipulation NWN forces on us. They choice the worst possible stat creation method for online roleplaying games, to make their single player game more accessible to non-paper-rpgers. It's fair to expect people to ham up what by the numbers (and their explanations) would be only slightly below average, because it's almost the lowest -possible- to us. The other side of that, what would be superhuman powers of cognition or personality or strength, etc, are totally open to us though. If we were actually looking at what the average ability score in the game was, it would be 13-14 (without including magic bonuses, or even the extra point the 7 level stat bonuses would raise the average)... but that doesn't jive with the fluff. So it's a compromise. Saying anything more specific than 'if it's below 8, make it part of your character', would only lead to RP policing anyways.

I don't think people should get passes for not playing up their high scores, but overlooking positives is easier to forgive than ignoring weaknesses. Is that really a discussion that needs to happen? Everyone knows when they are ignoring, or playing opposite, their dump stat... but I certainly wouldn't want to call someone out for trying, and failing, to play an extremely high stat convincingly (not to mention they simply could be using a different understanding of the rather vague abilities, it's not like a high wisdom cleric of Bane is going to have the same acting/apparance of wisdom as a high wisdom druid or cleric of Lathander). I think it's the 'try' that should be looked at, rather then the 'convincing'.

On a more positive note, embracing a weakness or two is a step towards better roleplay and characterization. So the slightly lopsided encouragement a rule on playing low stats helps develop better characters and roleplayers than a focus on the high stats would. And since the stats o our sheets ARE supposed to mean something, even if they mechanically do nothing (looking at you charisma), it also help defend to server balance from rampant min-maxing. It really isn't fair if one person sacrifices points into charisma and intelligence, while another puts them all towards more 'effective' stats then plays the beautiful genius anyways.

To quote from the most excellent “Mirror, Mirror” episode of Star Trek:

"Spock: It was far easier for you as civilized men to act as barbarians, than for them as barbarians to act like civilized men."

It's naturally easier to play a low stat than a high one, it's within our grasp. To play a high stat requires far more imagination and cleverness than some of us can pull off, and specialized knowledge or lore that I for one simply don’t have; faking it can only take me so far.

I think we all need to take extraordinarily high stats with a grain of salt and accept that we play them as best we can, exercising forbearance with others and hope they do the same with us.

I find the most interesting aspect of this topic is that so many of us have low charisma. That a Cha of 8 is the real average, not 13 as it would be for “average” starting stats across the board.This of course is due to the necessity of ‘min/maxing’ in order to have viable characters, Charisma being the one stat that's easily dumped. The game 'forces' the most successful adventurers to be less-than-pretty. A lovely bunch of coconuts we are.

Vortex wrote:

I find the most interesting aspect of this topic is that so many of us have low charisma. That a Cha of 8 is the real average, not 13 as it would be for “average” starting stats across the board.This of course is due to the necessity of ‘min/maxing’ in order to have viable characters, Charisma being the one stat that's easily dumped. The game 'forces' the most successful adventurers to be less-than-pretty. A lovely bunch of coconuts we are.

I've personally always focused on Charisma as being mostly about force of personality and sense of self. Under that logic, it just means that most adventurers are simply very easily manipulated or cowed into oppositional interests, which makes perfect sense. No other group will charge into certain death so easily because a complete stranger told them 'I'll give you something shiny'. If you expand that into a personality type that is quick to follow orders from someone who looks like they know what they're doing, they're also the perfect cannon fodder. I bet those sexy Cordorian Guards and their 11-15 Charisma scores keep wondering why these heavily-armed adventurers keep throwing themselves on flaming demon swords just because someone holding a flag tells them to.

Almost all my characters have at least 10 charisma. The few expectations are due to them being exactly that, easy to lead and lacking in social circumstances. While cha 8 might be PC's average, it ain't the real average I believe.

My Sorc has charisma of 44 - 46.. Can't recall right now. At her prime it was great but nowadays, I simply can't demonstrate it like I did before. It is to do with other players too, how they are willing to interact with you. One character became permanently charmed by her and because of that was under quite strong manipulations of my char's whims and desires. It only took place because the other player, without me asking, allowed it and allowed his lower cha character to be manipulated by my higher cha character. Luckily, we both enjoyed the interaction between them and thus it was interesting how it played out in the end.

Not many players are willing to demonstrate weakness or place their characters in the weaker positions. In my opinion, of course.

every time I do this I feel like people get huffy ooc about it.

If I'm playing one of my lower stats people don't like th effect or if Im playing one of my higher stats people essentially tell me I should dumb things down.

A lot of different people tell me a lot of different things. It's always in the for of 'You should X' and I think this comes across poorly.

A better way of offering or sharing ideas with some one else is posing questions like 'Have you tried to do X yet?' or advice. ' You know I find it better to achieve x by doing Y .'

I found this thing, which is rather helpful towards this.
http://linuxdigital.net/img/DnD-3.5/Sup ... debook.pdf

As for my view on this, it's not that hard to roleplay it if you go by the assumption that 10 or 13 would be average. 6 or 7 Cha? Maybe your character is completely lacking in social intelligence? After all there are people out there with an insane IQ, but that can't get master's degrees because of their complete lack of social skills and understanding. The reverse could be true for very high charisma. Maybe you're not the sharpest or most clever knife, but you just might be good enough at emulating it trough social interractions and getting others to THINK you are.

I think Krin is an excellent example of how RPing a high cha character can be done. He's got a force of personality behind him, which eventually means that while not everyone may like him.. almost everyone know him or know of him. Like the Kardashians maybe.

As for wisdom, it's the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. Having high or extremely high wisdom might mean that your character picks up on things extremely quickly and apply them into past situations to gain new insight. A lack there of might mean that your character is more driven by impulse of passion, and prone to act without thinking or even using common sense or experience in situations. As I see it, normal wis characters tend to be more the type "The Iron is hot, be very careful near it" after having burned themselves once, high wis chars might know it because they've seen how temperature reacts to metal. Low wis chars might be more the "why not?" type and check if it's hot with a finger anyway, just to know for themselves. A low wisdom score might also leave your character open to more manipulations, as wisdom is the governing stat for will saves. Maybe a high wis character has a much easier way of seeing other's manipulations or agendas compared to a low wis char?

Also I've always seen it as the base BASE stats that govern such things, the raising of them is the character getting better or more experienced (more wiser trough experience, better at social interaction, stronger trough training etc). While the level 1 stats, I see as more the genetic type, inborn ability, natural instinct, call it what you will. Some people are just born stronger, smarter, prettier, healthier, faster to learn etc. And that lvl 2-30 stats gained is the character training and honing those stats. This makes it much easier for me at least, when trying to determine how good/bad aspects of my character's stats/personality traits are compared to the standard 10 or 13, and can give a good backstory as to what your character focused on improving about themselves, and why.

Very provocative explaination, must say you have shed some light for me. At one point a wise person said to me that true neutral isn't necessarily meaning that they always take the neutral option but that when all of their decisions are weighed out, the good, bad, lawful, and chaotic it strikes balance at tn. What do you feel of a range of decisions above and below their quantifiable value that sets them at the given stat
stat. For instance you have 10 int, sometimes you make 6 int choices and other times you make 14 int choices

That is certainly a valid method, as that is basically a more player controlled version of what dice rolling does, which is adding in variance of how "good" you are at something at any given time. Even the smartest or wisest of people make mistakes and alternatively even a down dunce can be stuck by genius.

Stat allocation certainly has meaning, just like their alignment. However those aren't really hard boundaries, they are a give a good general baseline but shouldn't feel restrictive in how you RP your character, in that smart characters can make dumb choices, evil characters will sometimes do good. If anything I actually think it helps really flesh out aspects of characters to sometimes explore the sides of them that (due to their stats/alignment) don't as often get much attention.

Gravemaskin wrote:

I found this thing, which is rather helpful towards this.
http://linuxdigital.net/img/DnD-3.5/Sup ... debook.pdf

As for my view on this, it's not that hard to roleplay it if you go by the assumption that 10 or 13 would be average. 6 or 7 Cha? Maybe your character is completely lacking in social intelligence? After all there are people out there with an insane IQ, but that can't get master's degrees because of their complete lack of social skills and understanding. The reverse could be true for very high charisma. Maybe you're not the sharpest or most clever knife, but you just might be good enough at emulating it trough social interractions and getting others to THINK you are.

I think Krin is an excellent example of how RPing a high cha character can be done. He's got a force of personality behind him, which eventually means that while not everyone may like him.. almost everyone know him or know of him. Like the Kardashians maybe.

As for wisdom, it's the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. Having high or extremely high wisdom might mean that your character picks up on things extremely quickly and apply them into past situations to gain new insight. A lack there of might mean that your character is more driven by impulse of passion, and prone to act without thinking or even using common sense or experience in situations. As I see it, normal wis characters tend to be more the type "The Iron is hot, be very careful near it" after having burned themselves once, high wis chars might know it because they've seen how temperature reacts to metal. Low wis chars might be more the "why not?" type and check if it's hot with a finger anyway, just to know for themselves. A low wisdom score might also leave your character open to more manipulations, as wisdom is the governing stat for will saves. Maybe a high wis character has a much easier way of seeing other's manipulations or agendas compared to a low wis char?

Also I've always seen it as the base BASE stats that govern such things, the raising of them is the character getting better or more experienced (more wiser trough experience, better at social interaction, stronger trough training etc). While the level 1 stats, I see as more the genetic type, inborn ability, natural instinct, call it what you will. Some people are just born stronger, smarter, prettier, healthier, faster to learn etc. And that lvl 2-30 stats gained is the character training and honing those stats. This makes it much easier for me at least, when trying to determine how good/bad aspects of my character's stats/personality traits are compared to the standard 10 or 13, and can give a good backstory as to what your character focused on improving about themselves, and why.

I really like the sentiment grave, but I dont think this could ever be enforced, just take charisma, it also denotes how pretty people are according to the phb, and you try to explain all the charisma 6 people out there that they are butt ugly..cause according to the phb, you cant be pretty without charisma (I know you can be ugly and have high charisma, the stat covers a wide array of things, but it also covers physical attractiveness, according to the phb)

I think an issue might be confusing "physical attractiveness" with being "pretty." For instance, are Illithids, Beholders, and dragons "pretty?". Only if you're into weird Japanese stuff. Yet, these beings all have huge Charisma scores as compared to average people. However, no one's nursing a semi over watching a mindflayer suck out their friend's brain, unless there is something terribly off about them.

There are different interpretations and "does low Charisma mean you're ugly" has gone back and forth since someone first rolled a d20. But this is how I look at it. You can be what people would call "pretty" with low Charisma. You might even be beautiful in some or many people's eyes. But the moment you step out the door, the moment you open your mouth, the very second someone scratches the thin veneer of physical beauty, all of your other traits cast you in such a poor light that it outweighs whatever Golden Rectangle of a face genetics had blessed you with.

You slouch. You might stutter. You don't really think about yourself much, so maybe you forget to wipe the crust from your eye on a daily basis. You hair's a mess because again, you don't really think about yourself so much as you think about how people react to you. You're just plain shallow and the moment you speak people know you're not about nothin'. Your presence is no more commanding than a discarded rose, beautiful, but brilliantly useless and of little concern to anyone else. You're "pretty" but god help the vapid fool that finds you "attractive," physically or mentally on your own. Maybe you can fool people a lot of the time. Maybe you can pay people to do your make up or dress you like a celebrity might, or maybe you have someone train you in words and phrases to say to smooth over your own rough edges like a politician. But on your own, when it comes down to what makes you a being and not a sort of wind-up maniquin, there ain't that much, and most people with a nose for it can smell it on you.

In contrast, goddamn is that Mindflayer Lich ugly, but when he enters a room, all the attention immediately goes to him because he commands it in ways unspoken, but salient. It's like the most beautiful train wreck you've seen and you can't look away because the carnage of it all just boggles description. It's like a work of art. A horrible, surrealistic, Vladislav Provotorov-inspired work of art, but art nontheless.

The thing is with charisma, is that a lack of it doesn't even have to mean you're ugly or bad with words or anything obvious, you could even have a character who is refined and attractive, and be court trained to always say the right thing. And they could still have low CHA by just innately being painfully dull or unmemorable.

I always loved the complete switch of high CHA to play really obnoxious or visibly odd characters since even if not a good sort of charisma, you are NOT forgetting some characters easily.

The Great Equalizer wrote:

The thing is with charisma, is that a lack of it doesn't even have to mean you're ugly or bad with words or anything obvious, you could even have a character who is refined and attractive, and be court trained to always say the right thing. And they could still have low CHA by just innately being painfully dull or unmemorable.

I always loved the complete switch of high CHA to play really obnoxious or visibly odd characters since even if not a good sort of charisma, you are NOT forgetting some characters easily.

It iss just not what PHb 3.5 says, its clearly says.

"Charisma measures a character's force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead and physical attractiveness"

I do not believe this can be misunderstood, to say that you can be pretty with low charisma is abit like saying you can cast level 4 spells with 6 in intelligence, beauty is clearly stated as being part of the stat, and this isnt the case of ad&d with ..I think it was one of the rule expansions, where you could split charisma up in leadership and beauty.
If we are to encourage rping your stats, then we must accept all of them or change the rules for what the stat represent.

You must have a high strength to be strong, you must have a high charisma to be beautiful, its part of the stats of 3.5, and until this is changed by dm's then we must assume that 3.5 is still in effect as I belive this is a 3.5 server..or atleast 3.0 both have the same oppion on charisma.

personally I think its too much to ask, let stats be ooc and pretty much ignore then ic'ly within reason.
PEople wont rp thier stats unless it fits thier idea of what thier char should be.

What about the gorgeous person that has a shit personality and no one likes them? Does that mean they have an 18 CHA just because they are gorgeous? Or should they have a lower CHA to accommodate the fact that their personality (the biggest portion of CHA given it's one of them non-physical stats) is in the crapper? On the flipside what about the persuasive person that is butt ugly? Should they have an 8 CHA because they are ugly? It's not cut and dry, and yes you have to account for beauty as well but CHA is recognized as a non-physical stat and you have to balance it correctly.

Kraniumbrud wrote:

personally I think its too much to ask, let stats be ooc and pretty much ignore then ic'ly within reason.
PEople wont rp thier stats unless it fits thier idea of what thier char should be.

It's... too much to ask that people play the numbers that represent what their characters are? I'm sorry, but I simply cannot agree there. It's fairly well integral to the game we are playing. If your character has no skill points in something they aren't good at it, if they have a low AC they get hit a lot, if they have low strength they are weak. The point is that we are playing a character that is not ourself, and the numbers exactly represent what that character is. Personally, I think having different rules for how we interact with PCs and NPCs is where the issue starts to come up that makes it weird. But simply disregarding the numbers entirely would result in further weirdness.

I do think there is room for different justification of low or high scores though. You don't *have* to be gorgeous for high charisma (if it represents those 5 things, beauty is only 20%), but your character should display high scores in everything else it represents (which however are all much harder to show, especially in a PW environment). High strength could be a variety of types of muscular power, exceptional dexterity could be explained by either, or both, high precision and grace, etc. The ability system is rather poorly implemented (and that attempt in 2e to split the abilities into their subgroups was even more of a min-maxed mess), and it falls apart where it interacts with the poorly designed magic system (why are good and evil clerics both wise? what does being gorgeous, or having strong leadership skills have to do with spontaneously casting magic?). We have to make some concessions because it the rules are all shoehorned into the concept of the game to make it somewhat fair.

So far from what I've read, I have to agree with what a few people have said - Casvenx and Naivatkal in a nutshell - but I still want to offer my own opinions 'cause I like to ramble.

On Charisma:

I think the term physical attractiveness should be looked at more closely as it involves a wide spectrum of things. It's not simply beauty of a person, though it is a large chunk of it. Heck, movement patterns are involved in determining physical attractiveness. Another scope of this is the way a person conducts themselves; how they come off to the world around them. People who are more kind to others around them, display intelligence, and are honest are viewed in the top range for physical attractiveness.

In short, physical attractiveness doesn't only mean you're beautiful/handsome, you're a decent person to others as well. The term physical attractiveness is one's worth in the bottom line of sexuality and desirability. They are physically attracted to you and it's not all based on looks alone.

Also, the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" (as much of a pun as that is for D&D) could play into this. People have varying levels of what traits they think are attractive. For a woman's appearance as an example (or stereotype), not everyone likes blonde hair, blue eyes, and giant boobs - actually I personally know more men who don't find natural blondes appealing than I do who prefer them. Beauty doesn't translate into only a few traits. People will decide for themselves what they think is beautiful. You can't decide for them.

I'm a sociology major. We study this kind of crap for a living and get paid for it!

Moogle wrote:

Also, the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" (as much of a pun as that is for D&D) also should play into this. People have varying levels of what traits they think are attractive. For a woman's appearance as an example (or stereotype), not everyone likes blonde hair, blue eyes, and giant boobs - actually I personally know more men who don't find natural blondes appealing than I do who prefer them. Beauty doesn't translate into only a few traits. People will decide for themselves what they think is beautiful. You can't decide for them.

Oh Gods. No. Don't bring subjectiveness into it. In D&D these things are objective, which is why we have scores for them on our own character. Bringing the subjectiveness of it all brings it to game-breaking levels of complicatedness. You can put mods on your character's responses or whatever, but looking at the actual numbers of the scores you can't take into consideration if the object/subject is an orc or an elf or an anthropomorphic squirrel.

Of course, in real life I agree with you. Both in the subjectiveness of things, and that attraction (which is a separate thing from personal physical attractiveness too) is a scale that includes kindness and honesty and intelligence among a lot of other things. But that's one of the compromises we make to play this game, those things are not considered in 'charisma'.

The "objectivity" behind those game aspects (character creation ones in general) by and large don't exist for RP or Lore reasons but for Mechanical ones and in fact is why you get SO many "exceptions to the rule" when it comes to the lore and storyline in the novels and the like, since that is a mechanical barrier that most of the writers realize would be overly narrow in definition to strictly follow while trying to write realistically for characters.

Its similar to alignment in that you don't need to "check all the boxes" to be Evil, rather it is a balance of factors. That said I would argue anyway that the reading of "Physical attractiveness" being effected by Charisma is not the same as it saying Positive correlates to Positive or that a factor seen as Positive is such across all races and views.

If you're a very charismatic orc for example how would you meet both standards of "beauty" for orcs and elves with that orc? I instead see it more along the lines that another Orc might view them as beautiful but an elf would view them as intimidating (assuming what Orc's find attractive IS that terrifying muscle mountain form). Both postive mechanical charisma aspects but RP wise very different ways it comes into play.

Moogle wrote:

Also, the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" (as much of a pun as that is for D&D) could play into this. People have varying levels of what traits they think are attractive. For a woman's appearance as an example (or stereotype), not everyone likes blonde hair, blue eyes, and giant boobs - actually I personally know more men who don't find natural blondes appealing than I do who prefer them. Beauty doesn't translate into only a few traits. People will decide for themselves what they think is beautiful. You can't decide for them.

I agree fully with this bit here. I used to view Charisma by the in-game definition that Kraniumbrud posted, but I stepped away from it a long time ago after realizing how silly it is. In order for characters to be believable I think subjectivity has a place there in terms of how they view/see things. Beauty falls under that and most definitely shouldn't be limited by class selection(Who ups Charisma over 12 as a Fighter?) or anything else mechanical. We aren't playing cardboard NPCs here, after all.

Alaria- wrote:

(Who ups Charisma over 12 as a Fighter?)

Anyone that wants to play a charismatic fighter should raise their score above 12, regardless of what mechanics benefit their build the most. Why should only the scores that relate directly to particular mechanics get used, and the rest ignored? Is it fair for that fighter to be charismatic (as well as strong and durable and agile) without the score and ability point sacrifice to show for it, if the sorcerer nextto them doesn't get to be really strong/durable/agile as well because they mechanically have to put their scores into charisma?

Naivatkal wrote:

What about the gorgeous person that has a shit personality and no one likes them? Does that mean they have an 18 CHA just because they are gorgeous? Or should they have a lower CHA to accommodate the fact that their personality (the biggest portion of CHA given it's one of them non-physical stats) is in the crapper? On the flipside what about the persuasive person that is butt ugly? Should they have an 8 CHA because they are ugly? It's not cut and dry, and yes you have to account for beauty as well but CHA is recognized as a non-physical stat and you have to balance it correctly.

where does it say its a non-physical stat, it clearly says that physical attractiveness is part of the stat.
so, yes you can be ugly as butt and stil have high charisma, see hitler and what have you, but you cant be pretty and not have a decent charisma, it clearly says in the stat details.

If we choose to ignore that, thats fine, but until such is decided we should go by the rules laid down by 3.0/3.5

Casvenx wrote:

Alaria- wrote:

(Who ups Charisma over 12 as a Fighter?)

Anyone that wants to play a charismatic fighter should raise their score above 12, regardless of what mechanics benefit their build the most. Why should only the scores that relate directly to particular mechanics get used, and the rest ignored? Is it fair for that fighter to be charismatic (as well as strong and durable and agile) without the score and ability point sacrifice to show for it, if the sorcerer nextto them doesn't get to be really strong/durable/agile as well because they mechanically have to put their scores into charisma?

100% agree to this.

I think that ignoring the physical attractiveness of the charisma stat, is much akin to ignoring that a int 6 char has problems articulating themselves, or a low wisdom keeping thier head focused

The problem is charisma shouldn't even be a stat. Charisma in every sense of its definition in both D&D and real life is entirely subjective to those peceiving someone. That real smooth talker on the stage is going to come off as likable to half the people in the room while the other half sees them akin to a greasy snake-oil salesman. Why? Because charisma is entirely 100% perception of the witness based on their experiences, past, and tastes. It's not a quantifiable, objective trait that exists in a vacuum like the other stats are. If you have 40 strength, you can lift a Buick, if you have 40 int you spend your time amending Grand Unification Theory - regardless of if other people exist or not. That quiet guy in a corner? Half the room will see him as antisocial and unlikable, the other half will see him as mysterious or magnetic. That guy with scars who talks plainly and is a little rough? Half the room with think he's an unlikable thug, the other half will find him trustworthy as a salt of the earth working man. Any? Because charisma has nothing to do with the man himself, but the past experience and tastes of those around him. Charisma is entirely subjective, just as asking 100 people "is blue the best color? " is.

If 4 different DMs witness a 30 charisma PC giving a speech each of them will gauge that interaction differently and they will all be right because what they experience is colored by their tastes, not the actual experience of the event or speaker.

No one can tell Rashad "you should like my PC because they have 40 charisma" when the way they conduct themselves is reminiscent of someone in his past he wronged him or something they say offends him culturally.

Charisma has as much business being a stat as "fashion" or "sense of taste" does.

MightNMagic wrote:

The problem is charisma shouldn't even be a stat. Charisma in every sense of its definition in both D&D and real life is entirely subjective to those peceiving someone. That real smooth talker on the stage is going to come off as likable to half the people in the room while the other half sees them akin to a greasy snake-oil salesman. Why? Because charisma is entirely 100% perception of the witness based on their experiences, past, and tastes. It's not a quantifiable, objective trait that exists in a vacuum like the other stats are. If you have 40 strength, you can lift a Buick, if you have 40 int you spend your time amending Grand Unification Theory - regardless of if other people exist or not. That quiet guy in a corner? Half the room will see him as antisocial and unlikable, the other half will see him as mysterious or magnetic. That guy with scars who talks plainly and is a little rough? Half the room with think he's an unlikable thug, the other half will find him trustworthy as a salt of the earth working man. Any? Because charisma has nothing to do with the man himself, but the past experience and tastes of those around him. Charisma is entirely subjective, just as asking 100 people "is blue the best color? " is.

[citation needed]

For serious: Your point is basically alright but your numbers and proportions are pure speculation and hyperbole. Appearance can be quantified because short of weird fetishes there are a number of traits that we can all agree constitute "ugly". And when it comes to the other factors - you keep saying "half this, half that" when in reality it's more likely to skew one way or the other based on the individual in question. 85-15, 30-70, 99-1. Absolutely if you average the individual in question, the audience's reaction will average out in turn. But we're not a population of averages.

MightNMagic wrote:

The problem is charisma shouldn't even be a stat. Charisma in every sense of its definition in both D&D and real life is entirely subjective to those peceiving someone. That real smooth talker on the stage is going to come off as likable to half the people in the room while the other half sees them akin to a greasy snake-oil salesman. Why? Because charisma is entirely 100% perception of the witness based on their experiences, past, and tastes. It's not a quantifiable, objective trait that exists in a vacuum like the other stats are. If you have 40 strength, you can lift a Buick, if you have 40 int you spend your time amending Grand Unification Theory - regardless of if other people exist or not. That quiet guy in a corner? Half the room will see him as antisocial and unlikable, the other half will see him as mysterious or magnetic. That guy with scars who talks plainly and is a little rough? Half the room with think he's an unlikable thug, the other half will find him trustworthy as a salt of the earth working man. Any? Because charisma has nothing to do with the man himself, but the past experience and tastes of those around him. Charisma is entirely subjective, just as asking 100 people "is blue the best color? " is.

If 4 different DMs witness a 30 charisma PC giving a speech each of them will gauge that interaction differently and they will all be right because what they experience is colored by their tastes, not the actual experience of the event or speaker.

No one can tell Rashad "you should like my PC because they have 40 charisma" when the way they conduct themselves is reminiscent of someone in his past he wronged him or something they say offends him culturally.

Charisma has as much business being a stat as "fashion" or "sense of taste" does.

all of what you just said, but about wisdom and int aswell.

in this game, everything about a char is defined in 6 stats, and the skills of charisma clearly benifits from a beautiful person, ask 100 people and 99 will agree and taylor swift might be a twit, but she is stilll beautiful, and her performance level benifits from this, some aspect of the nature of beauty as a inspiration/performance aid, is part of 3.5 expressed in the stat charisma.

your problem is with stats, hells I can find subjective things about strength dex and con aswell.

While not really contributing to a solution now, just wanted to say it's also hard to rp the high mental stats not just because they are high, but because charisma and wisdom and intelligence are all kinda linked. A wise person wouldn't find any wisdom in acting uncharismatic and would therefore maybe try to be more charismatic, so having wisdom at 30 and charisma at 8 wouldn't make much sense. Same goes Intelligence, a smart wizard wouldn't walk into a cave filled with orcs for a book if it meant he would most likely die, or throw around spells because it's fun in the town square. Also it's hard to split wisdom and intelligence apart and I still find it hard to see how a smart person would be unwise in all the examples I've seen so far.

The rambling done, I think what I mean is that it's hard to be an intelligent character, without being wise or charismatic. (Because prejudice and tropes aside, it's shown scientifically that smarter people are also generally smarter socially.)

When it comes to how to rp these stats, I think the best advice is to imagine a character from films or books or real life that has stats that are close to or similar to your character, and try to rp your character like those characters, just try to imagine how that character would act in that and that situation.

Examples:
Wisdom: Yoda, Gandalf
Intelligence: Sherlock (maybe?), Dr.Who
Charisma (Though this could be up for debate): Jack Sparrow, Tyrion Lannister, James Bond

Also, for wisdom then consider how your character is wise. If your character is evil, find out why it's wise to be evil, what's so alluring about it? Don't walk around as a sage of Bane without seeing the wisdom in it.

MightNMagic wrote:

The problem is charisma shouldn't even be a stat. Charisma in every sense of its definition in both D&D and real life is entirely subjective to those peceiving someone. That real smooth talker on the stage is going to come off as likable to half the people in the room while the other half sees them akin to a greasy snake-oil salesman. Why? Because charisma is entirely 100% perception of the witness based on their experiences, past, and tastes. It's not a quantifiable, objective trait that exists in a vacuum like the other stats are. If you have 40 strength, you can lift a Buick, if you have 40 int you spend your time amending Grand Unification Theory - regardless of if other people exist or not. That quiet guy in a corner? Half the room will see him as antisocial and unlikable, the other half will see him as mysterious or magnetic. That guy with scars who talks plainly and is a little rough? Half the room with think he's an unlikable thug, the other half will find him trustworthy as a salt of the earth working man. Any? Because charisma has nothing to do with the man himself, but the past experience and tastes of those around him. Charisma is entirely subjective, just as asking 100 people "is blue the best color? " is.

If 4 different DMs witness a 30 charisma PC giving a speech each of them will gauge that interaction differently and they will all be right because what they experience is colored by their tastes, not the actual experience of the event or speaker.

No one can tell Rashad "you should like my PC because they have 40 charisma" when the way they conduct themselves is reminiscent of someone in his past he wronged him or something they say offends him culturally.

Charisma has as much business being a stat as "fashion" or "sense of taste" does.

If not for the potential to create a dickwaving contest and hurt feelings, it would be amusing to me to see that subjectivity measured by having players estimate the charisma of other PCs, or at least a pass/fail on charismatic or not.

I tried out that experiment here to some degree.

OpenTheRift wrote:

I know we have talked exhaustively of honoring the charactersheets 4 int and 2 charisma - and we all have the ability to put on that mask.

What about high stats, 20 charisma, wisdom, intelligence. These are arguably impossible for players to properly emulate. And we don't have a dm overseeing us to smooth the bumps all the time. How do you handle this dilemma?

I truly think that the message the DM team put together was slightly flawed. The "Playing your stats" issue really is a real issue when a character with less than 8 int puts together facts like someone with average intelligence or higher. It's pretty powerful to do that, and I really think that the DM team was particularly frustrated with 6 int characters doing smart things. They put out their blanket statement that obviously does not apply to 30 cha characters that obviously cannot enthrall the entire server to do their bidding.

Try to concentrate on giving your characters greater than 8 int if you ever want them to figure out anything greater than making fire.

high stats also means high wiggleroom with the nature of the stat, you can ignore any part of the stat as you see fit, this is due to a dm would never say to you "no you cant weaken your char", the stats have wriggleroom when you allready encompass the paragon of that stat

You dont have to be the smartest guy at everything when you have a int of 40, perhaps your minds is so much in overdrive that you do not even consider normal problems.

Charismatic 40's can choose just to be stunningly beautiful, and let that represent your charima, enigmatic being of light, that could inspire hope in people just by seeing such beauty, ignore the whole grand inspiration speech thing.

Wisdom 40 guys, would probably be hard to argue, but again, it might be the same case as int, in either case, you have wiggleroom as you see fit, wisdom charisma and int as high stats do not need to force rp.

which is kinda the case for the physical aswell...but why wouldnt yu want to rp having 40 in dex

I maintain that while you can remove benifits of a stat at will, I would not say that this means you can add them at will aswell

Of all the nonsense surrounding Charisma, "Charisma = physical attractiveness" is the most in need to die first.

In first edition, there was a stat introduced called "Comliness" that measured physical beauty (yes, we used to have 7 stats back then). The things it did were outright silly and stupid (low Comliness got you attacked, high scores outright charmed others). Gygax realized how silly this was and sank it halfway through 1rst edition. He did such a 180 that when 2nd edition was released, they went out of their way to explicitly spell out that charisma has _nothing_ to do with physical attractiveness and in an article on charisma published in Dragon magazine, Gygax stated he divorced physical attractiveness from charisma because beauty is in the eye of the beholder (ie, utterly subjective to the viewer and not a property of the bearer) and it was ludicrous to think a goblin would ever be so attractive to an elf, dwarf, or human to solicit anything other than revulsion. When speaking about Charisma in the article, he suggests that it won't be part of the next edition because players shouldn't be limited in their ability to portray their characters by die roles, only personal ability (and the fact that players and DMs seemed to hate what few mechanics Charisma even affected and almost never seemed to bother with rolling encounter reactions).

WoTC came along with 3rd edition and remade several past mistakes, charisma being one of them. They've somewhat learned from the past and nuked "physical attractiveness" from Charisma at least as they've made it clear in 4th and 5th edition they've nothing to do with each other.

Other "mental stats" (Int, Wis) do _not_ share Charisma's problem. They're not subjective. A person with 30 Intelligence easily falls somewhere on a chart of ability. Their counterpart in Wisdom will easily make good decisions based on past experiences and have little problem understanding others' emotions. Given no human alive in real life could claim to boast such super-human scores and ability, that's what dice checks are for.

Playing your stats

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