What is charisma? Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Well, a while ago, I had started a thread where I wanted to explore what exactly the nature of "charisma" in a person is, but it got locked.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...44&hl=dupre

So here's attempt number two.

Lots of RPG systems have a statistic for characters which is called "charisma". Usually "charisma" impacts things like if a character can lie successfully or not, how well a character bargains with vendors, how many NPCs a character can convince to follow him/her, whether or not a character can interrogate a hostile individual, and things like that. So "charisma" is a pretty broad category to the point that it can be a bit hard (IMO) to answer the question, "what is charisma?" in a satisfying way. We can say, "this measures the personal magnetism of the character", "this measures how pretty the character is", or whatever, but these conventional definitions seems pretty vague or generic. When you think about it it's easy to describe having STR 8 well, but when you think about how electrifying in a very diverse set of ways a person can be in terms of their interpersonal interactions CHA 8 actually feels very abstract and vague to me. I think the key when we're thinking about characters is to come up with examples of people you'd call "charistmatic" in the RPG sense because this would then give concrete examples of the quality.

I'll give the example from my previous thread...

Back when I was in college, I knew a young female, an aspiring musician, who had one of the most attractive personalities I've ever encountered. This female in question was vivacious, playful, imaginative, and often somewhat sexually coy. She could be very physically playful, in that she might tackle a friend Hobbes-style as a joke, which a lot of times females aren't. What's more, she liked RPGs. I remember she played Ultima Online sometimes and she also played in a Shadowrun 3rd edition game I GMed.

The flip side to this scintilating personality was that at times she could get very moody, which again in my experience is pretty typical for people who are extremely upbeat; oftentimes they alternate between highs and lows rather than staying closer to a moderate middle level like most people do. I knew some males who were at different times romantically involved with her and due to their position they needed to deal with her lows as well as her highs.

What I'd realized after I left college was how much I missed this female. I used to dream about her and I realized that while there are other people who might be very vivacious probably most of them wouldn't be exactly like her. I realized that I surely should have spent more time with her while I'd still had the ability to do so and for a long while afterwards I felt kind of sad and strange inside as I considered this. Anyway, this was many years ago and now I'm over it, but my point is that because of this individual's personality she was extremely charismatic and the great extent to which she was charismatic never fully dawned on me until it got to the point where I'd never see her again.

Come to think of it, perhaps in general RPG systems could be improved somehow if instead of just a generic charisma statistic there were actually several charisma sub-statistics. For example, something like the old "comliness" stat, maybe something like "commanding presence", maybe something like "empathy", things like that. Those in turn could specifically impact seperate charisma related issues like number of NPCs, diplomacy checks, or marketplace bargaining, which would all be determined by the different charisma sub-stats.

Did anyone play the old PC game, "Midwinter 2: The Flames of Freedom"? That game actually did have different aspects of charisma which the player could use in interactions with NPCs. The interactions were a bit abstracted, and the player could choose to try and convince NPCs on different bases, including IIRC on the basis of commanding authority, of lies, of sex appeal, of intimidation, and so forth. The player character had strengths that would make these approaches more or less likely to be successful depending on how the player chose to create the player character.