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Dumpshock Forums _ General Gaming _ What would really happen to someone who uses Charisma as a dump stat

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Apr 27 2014, 09:57 PM

So, you know how in role playing games, Charisma is usually the "dump stat" because it's the least important.

Upon reflection, I think that most RPGs don't enforce realistic consequences for the entire party having CHA 1, so to speak.

Imagine we're talking about a group of people we either want to hire, or entrust with some important task. Let's say a group of plumbers, or a group of lawyers.

CHA 1 would mean that these guys all give the worst possible impression. They are abrasive, don't seem responsive to your needs as the client, don't give the initial impression of being very competent, and give you an uneasy feeling if you are giving them something to do that is do-or-die.

You probably wouldn't go with them if you had a choice. In the context of Shadowrun, you would think that a team meeting this description would consistently get suicide missions or cannon fodder jobs, or at least stupid jobs that aren't that important. The whole party having CHA 1 you would think would actually create a situation where they would basically have no career and deliberately be put at risk more than they otherwise might.

Think about a Dungeons and Dragons type setting. If the heroes all give the impression of being drunken aggressive idiots because they all have CHA 3, you'd think that the people who send them on quests would basically use them as cannon fodder due to lack of confidence. Like, if I were the king, and a bunch of CHA 3 adventurers showed up, I might tell them to assault the goblin's cave or whatever, but since they seem like a bunch of idiots, I'd consider sending a second party after them to, say, assassinate the Goblin King while the first party is causing a distraction by assaulting the front gate, or something like that.

That would actually be an interesting D&D game. The PCs arrive in the Hall of the Goblin King to find that the King has already been assassinated. But by whom? No time to think as the cry echoes through the cavern, "The king is slain! Take revenge on the murderers!" Later it turns out the King sent his level 9 thief to do it because he thought you party was a bunch of louts.

Posted by: KarmaInferno Apr 27 2014, 10:06 PM

Remember that Charisma in most games influences Intimidation checks.

So a person with low Charisma isn't particularly intimidating either. Perhaps they don't have a particularly impressive force of personality, or are otherwise not believable as a threat.

-k

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Apr 27 2014, 10:38 PM

QUOTE (KarmaInferno @ Apr 27 2014, 05:06 PM)

That's why in my interpretation, low CHA means they look like a lout or an incompetent. It doesn't even mean a crass badass, it means a guy who comes off as an idiot.

Posted by: Ashmire Apr 28 2014, 01:42 AM

Well, I can tell you some of this, because I am a real person who is, effectively, min-maxed for Mental stats with Cha for a dumpstat---aka Asperger's/High-functioning Autism. We do, in fact, have an appallingly high unemployment rate( around 80% unemployed or underemployed) and there is a depressingly high likelihood that I will never find a husband or boyfriend( particularly as my particular form of low Cha manifests most strongly as inability to conform to the expected stereotypes of heterosexuality even though I am actually straight. Still, others have managed before me so it's not totally hopeless, just frequently frustrating. )
However, we also tend to be exceedingly GOOD at what we do, and there ARE certain people, even in our very shallow charisma obsessed society, who are aware that Cha dumpstat often really DOES mean highly optimized for certain jobs, and there are also for some reason certain people who, despite not having any particular social handicaps themselves, seem to see nothing wrong with my behavior and express surprise that anyone else does( although the ones who do see it get incredibly mean about it). I think the real situation might be too complex to model well in an RPG, because not all interactions are created equal. I was very happily surprised when I got very glowing performance reviews from my supervisor, specifically including favorable mention of my excellent "professional manner", at my recent student internship doing Medicaid coding audits, because it's a job where precise thinking matters more than being sociable.

I also think that linking Intimidate to Charisma in such a way that you can't do it without a high stat is actually incredibly stupid. I intimidate the hell out of practically everyone any time I'm not retreating into my shell completely. Most of the time, true, it is completely the opposite of my intent and does have negative consequences, but, not being a complete idiot, I have learned to "imitate myself" under circumstances where it IS helpful( scaring away bullies twice my size is a lovely feeling, and I have done it more than once). On some occasions I manage to imitate a more socially skilled person, but this is very tiring, I can't keep it up too long, and strangely seem to suffer memory loss as a consequence of it ( in an RPG, you could very well model this by making it some kind of readily available, but somewhat damaging or limited, spell or drug, I guess).

Bottom line, I already live in a world where I get penalized for being who I am unless I find my way into certain specific niches, I'm not sure there would be much point in playing an RPG with even harder consequences.

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Apr 28 2014, 02:19 AM

QUOTE (Ashmire @ Apr 27 2014, 09:42 PM)

I also think that linking Intimidate to Charisma in such a way that you can't do it without a high stat is actually incredibly stupid. I intimidate the hell out of practically everyone any time I'm not retreating into my shell completely. Most of the time, true, it is completely the opposite of my intent and does have negative consequences, but, not being a complete idiot, I have learned to "imitate myself" under circumstances where it IS helpful( scaring away bullies twice my size is a lovely feeling, and I have done it more than once). On some occasions I manage to imitate a more socially skilled person, but this is very tiring, I can't keep it up too long, and strangely seem to suffer memory loss as a consequence of it ( in an RPG, you could very well model this by making it some kind of readily available, but somewhat damaging or limited, spell or drug, I guess).

Well, if it makes you feel any better, you sound like a unique and wonderful person.

Anyway, to address your point, the fallacy occurs because Charisma is a rather broad attribute. It covers both the stuff you need to get along in terms of friendly social relations, but also the force of personality needed to intimidate someone. These can be different attributes in real life but in the game they're mashed into one, since there isn't a "Force of Personality" stat versus an "Empathy" stat, for example.

As I see it, in the game, you wouldn't be harshly penalized for having low CHA unless the whole team has low CHA. As long as the team has like 2 people who speak for or represent the group things should be OK. They seem competent and the Johnson assumes they're the ones in charge and all is well. It would be better if everyone seemed competent and awesome, but the group wouldn't get totally marginalized unless everyone had CHA 1.

Posted by: ShadowDragon8685 Apr 28 2014, 08:09 AM

QUOTE (KarmaInferno @ Apr 27 2014, 06:06 PM)

In my experience, this tends to result in frustrated players taking steps to ensure the party in question, who isn't feeling particularly intimidated because they come off as bumbling, realizes that just because they're bumbling doesn't mean they aren't dangerous.

Basically, it's like calling the bluff of a guy who's holding a gun to your face. Even if he's stuttering and looks like he's meek, he still has a frigging gun to your face.

Player Characters don't like having their bluffs called, especially when those bluffs are based by demonstrated intent to use violence if their bluff is called. In a game like Shadowrun or Eclipse Phase, they might decide to go above and beyond in the name of making an example to ensure that in the future, their threats are taken seriously.

Yes, I am guilty of this myself, and no, I'm not sorry, either.

[ Spoiler ]

Not exactly an analogous situation, but...

My group was in Seattle, doing some running, and we'd fucked up royal. A girl (child, like, 10 or so,) with family connections to the Yaks had been kidnapped from her boarding school by a hypercorp, and was being held in a black lab in Redmond, where they were doing Experiments! to her. (This was all totally legit, and the straight dope of what had happened to her.)

We'd been hired by her uncle, a FedBoeing mid-level manager, to get her back. Well, we had a number of fuck-ups, including waiting an hour after we thought we might have been noticed to see if anybody reacted to the intrusion or not (they did: they snuck all the research subjects and staff out the back, save the girl we needed, who was still being experimented on.) When we rescued the girl, there was a doctor and an orderly working on her; the doctor was evidently more afraid of her employers than us, and self-terminated. The orderly was less afraid of his employers than us, and helped us move her, but on the way out he fell down and started twitching. (Nanite kill-switch; the fuck-up here was that I shot him to put him out of his misery rather than having one of the free spirits use Flesh to Stone to keep him alive until we could get him to someone who could reverse the nanite attack.)

Anyway, then came the next fuck-up, and the major one. Something was off about the whole thing, but when we met the girl's uncle and his hired latino muscle to hand him over, she identified him as her uncle. At that point, the game session was winding on, and we wanted to get paid, get our Karma, and go to sleep, so we handed her over rather than, say, prompting her for a family tidbit to ensure identity.

Turns out he wasn't her uncle at all, he was some schmuck who'd killed her uncle on vacation and assumed his identity, going so far as to work a week at her uncle's job, in order to have us extract her for him. That was bad. Then when we did some ShadowSEA digging, I got contacted by PyramidWatcher to tell us that the muscle guy was some serious no-good goon into apocalyptic prophecies and blood magic.

So, we shat a collective brick upon realizing we'd basically handed the chosen sacrifice over to an apocalyptic blood mage, and started tearing the Seattle infosphere apart to try and track them down. Despite some truely herculean efforts, these guys were good, and were scrubbing a lot of their data trails, and at one point we wound up basically waiting, waiting, waiting. Our last lead had been a chop shop near Loveland that they'd sold their rental car too, claiming it wasn't working (it was.) The chop shop had asked no questions, taken the car, and put it on a boat to shanghai. I was feeling pretty wrathful, was kind of frustrated, and figured we needed some cash anyway, so we decided to screw with them/blackmail them.

I slapped several hours worth of Hard Encryption on their whole system, locking it up completely, and told them they could either pay me what they expected to make from the sale of the car (which we'd had to send a spirit to analyze, and couldn't really get a good forensic account of as it was in a shipping container and the spirit wasn't exactly a forensic scientist,) or pay someone else much more to unencrypt it.

They decided to take a third, deeply unprofitable option. Not only did they decide not to pay us, they sent a courier to the appointed drop, who dropped off a package. Instead of containing cred, it contained frigging White Star - that's right, they got WWI on us.

We got ripshit pissed, and so had our two Free Spirits (both Free Spirits of Fire, amusingly enough, though of two different traditions,) materialize above the chop-shop and junkyard just before the help was due to get in, and incinerated the whole place, just burnt it to the ground. They really shouldn't have called our bluff. Especially not with phosgene gas.

Posted by: Blade Apr 28 2014, 08:38 AM

Most of the people I play Shadowrun with rarely use Charisma as a dumpstat. Strength is more common and sometimes Logic or Edge. And even then, I've rarely seen players have an attribute lower than 2.

Posted by: KarmaInferno Apr 28 2014, 01:25 PM

QUOTE (ShadowDragon8685 @ Apr 28 2014, 03:09 AM)

In game terms that'd be a circumstance bonus.

Possibly a big one. Better yet, it shouldn't be decided with a simple skill check. Play it out.

-k