Charisma

This post was prompted in response to the discussion on Tao of D&D in the last few days - What does it mean to have Charisma at a certain value? How do we view it from the perspective of the game? How does it reflect on the real world?

The first step is to establish what Charisma actually means. For an initial glance we can look to Men & Magic to get this excerpt:

Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, and so forth. Its primary function is to determine how many hirelings of unusual nature a character can attract. This is not to say that he cannot hire men-at-arms and employ mercenaries, but the charisma function will affect loyalty of even these men. Players will, in all probability, seek to hire Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and/or Clerics in order to strengthen their roles in the campaign. A player-character can employ only as many as indicated by his charisma score. In addition the charisma score is usable to decide such things as whether or not a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover. Finally, the charisma will aid a character in attracting various monsters to his service.

AD&D PHB:

Charisma is the measure of the character's combined physical attractiveness, persuasiveness, and personal magnetism. A generally non-beautiful character can have a very high charisma due to strong measures of the other two aspects of charisma. It is important to all characters, as it has an effect on dealings with others, principally non-player characters, mercenary hirelings, prospective retainers, and monsters. It absolutely dictates the total number of henchmen a character is able to retain. It affects loyalty of all hirelings and retainers. It is the key to leadership.

And finally, the AD&D DMG:

Many persons have the sad misconception that charisma is merely physical attractiveness. This error is obvious to any person who considers the subject with perceptiveness. Charisma is a combination of physical appearance, persuasiveness, and personal magnetism. True charisma becomes evident when one considers such historic examples of Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonoparte, and Adolf Hitler. Obviously, these individuals did not have an 18 score on physical beauty, so it is quite possible to assume that scores over 18 are possible, for any one of the named historical personalities would have had a higher charisma score - there can be no question that these individuals were 18's - if they would have had great attractiveness as well as commanding personal magnetism and superb persuasiveness.

Cursory overview of these descriptions shows two things: One, that Gygax only considered appearance to be only of a multitude of factors in determining Charisma; two, he felt that the majority of players had the impression reversed, and considered it the most important factor. So great was his exasperation that he later saw fit to present Comeliness as a seventh ability score in UA.

How much of an impact should appearance have? We can see a bit of Gygax's idea by taking a glance at the correlation between Charisma and Comeliness. It is important her to consider that this seventh stat was added into the game with the intention of being retroactively applied; thus, rather than Charisma being influenced by Comeliness, the reverse applies. To point: CHA 18 indicates +5 to Comeliness. This is enough to put the "average" human of Charisma 18 at a rate of 15, which is deemed as 'good looking'. Many will be beautiful, but far from all. There are beautiful people with a piddling Charisma of 10, though they are the extreme rare (unless we take the 3d6 bell curve as representative of the entire population, and not as representative to adventuring groups). Of course, this is all merely a glance at what Gygax thought seemed reasonable - he never used Comeliness in his home games, and I don't plan on doing so either.

The point in all of this is that while I find Alexis' presentation interesting, I find that it puts too much emphasis on the 'presence' and appearance of the characters in question. I would instead find it instead worth putting more focus on the other components. Taking into account both those factors presented, as well as the mechanical influences, we can pin these to:

• Physical Appearance
• Personal Magnetism
• Persuasiveness
• Overall Personality
• Leadership Ability

I would make a rather common addition - and I have in regards to my own games - and that is the factor of ego; in other words, the sheer force of 'self' that a character maintains. This factor cannot be subsumed under a physical ability score; likewise, Intelligence and Wisdom are distinct from this factor. On the other hand, it fits cleanly into the realm of personality, and in this manner Charisma. But we'll get further into that, further down the line.

Consider the Paladin. Why must a Paladin have a score of 17 Charisma? Does the church only select beautiful people to represent them? It's an amusing thought, but not a reasonable one. It's not an unreasonable suggestion that Charlemange's Paladins were all good looking - but they're not the ones Gygax was basing the class on. That would be Holger Carlsen, from Three Hearts and Three Lions. What does he look like?

His physique was a different matter. He was gigantic, six feet four and so broad in the shoulders he didn't look his height. He'd played football, of course, and could have starred on his college team if his studies hadn't taken too much time. His face was of the rugged sort, square, with high chekbones, cleft chin, a slightly dented nose, yellow hair and wide-set blue eyes. Give better technique, by which I mean less worry about hurting their feelings, he could have cute a swathe through the local femininity. But as it was, that slight shyness probably kept him from more than his share of such adventures. All in all, Holger was a nice average guy, what was later called a good Joe.

Here is the imagined many of (minimum) Charisma 17. I don't think it would be inaccurate to match this description as being "attractive"; during his adventures in the Other World, he certainly doesn't have any problems attracting feminine attention. It might be argued that his Charisma is suffering a temporary deficit for lack of his full memories, and that might be a fair assessment. But where is this deficit? No failures show in his actions in the story, in any of these areas.

His behavior is worth considering: Contrary to the meme conception of the Paladin as a hack-and-slash baby grinder that "SMITES EVIL" and spams detect evil in every direction... Holger really is genuinely a "good Joe". He helps people out when they request it, even if it means going out of his way to do so. Even when dealing with the Elves, Giant, Werewolf, Nixie, and other agents of Chaos, his initial reaction isn't to go in slashing away - he thinks carefully, negotiates first whenever possible, and only puts down enemies when they prove an immediate and severe threat. His first thought is always towards protecting others; nevertheless, his group follows him with absolute faith, despite only this short time together. Intellect comes first and foremost.

The response from people? They're drawn to him. Strangers are willing to stand up for him against their own lord. He engages with the common folk easily, despite his status as stranger in a strange world. The feelings aren't of fear - they're feelings of inspiration. This is only amplified by his status as the Knight with "Three Hearts and Three Lions" - in other words, by how people know him as being of the Paladin nature.

When we otherwise look at the fiction which informed D&D, what else do we see? John Carter is in the same boat as Holger Carlsen - His appearance is handsome, though not an exceptional case, but he draws people to him in other manners - through his strength of arms, reputation, and exceptionally strong force of personality (the sort that permits him to continually challenge the world around him, and inevitably change it for the better). On Earth he's another soldier; on Barsoom, where he truly belongs, he's Warlord. Conan develops to be much the same as he advances through his adventuring career, becoming someone people are inspired to follow in his time as King. The former is marked as "18" in Giants of the Earth; the latter is marked at "17" in Supplement IV and varies from "15" to "18" by age in Gygax's wonky Conan article. Unlike the others listed thus far, Conan is extremely attractive. He also lives in a world where you can't throw a rock without hitting a beautiful girl, though, so he's more or less a special case.

Charisma 18

What about more recently written works? The immediate example that comes to mind - perhaps to the point of being a meme in its own right - is Griffith. I'd pitch in Reinhard von Lohengramm (pictured) as a personal favorite for the "Charisma 18" crowd. This is besides the point of Charisma, but the Church Knights of the Belgariad (the main cast, at least - there's a lot of them) are my definitive "Paladin" examples - and what I'm going to personally consider when I imagine a character of Charisma 17 (pinning Martel as the 18 of the series - and potentially the Princess Ehlanna as well, considering both her talents in social manipulation and her outstanding beauty). I'm not touching ASOIAF until the damn series is finished, so I'll get back with musings on that pop culture phenomena in a few decades.

So far we've covered over some examples of high Charisma in action, as well as a breakdown of its component factors. There is one last point that needs to be covered here - the implied setting of the D&D, and what that tells us.

First and foremost - (LBB) D&D does not assume medieval fantasy. It's medieval flavor draped over a heavily Americanized ideal of the world. Distances between settlements are enormous. The wilderness is an unexplored place - not an evil place, but an untamed one. In perhaps the most American sentiments possible, weapons are pretty easily accessible, and there's an absurd amount of gold floating around. This is the wild west with elves and wizards and trash. The lords aren't a prim and pampered nobility; they're unruly, independent knights. Mercenaries are all over. Peasants are rugged frontier folks ready to take up arms and revolt because someone looked at them funny. To top it off - unless you're playing AD&D by the book, the women are just as bad as the men! And since this is all swords & sorcery, they must all be attractive unless otherwise convenient to the story.

Mama has a 4-5pt unarmed strike. Do you really wanna risk the belt?

This is the optimistic viewing. You could take a more "realistic" view, but I don't think medieval is the right direction - you still need open expanses for monsters all over, relatively isolated lords, and a lot of suffering. Welcome to pre-20th century Russian flavored fantasy. To get an idea for what I'm thinking of here, I'd go with Dead Souls as the ideal model (and the premise of an amazing adventure hook, if applied in this sort of setting); Gogol's bleak depiction of Russia, and its eccentric cast of nobility, is stellar.

(as an aside: Bringing up Russian literature - the titular character from A Hero of Our Time, Pechorin, is another great literary example of a figure with high Charisma; in this case, one who is particularly misanthropic.)

Both of these scenarios have a characteristic in common - The men of high and low station are both alike, either in their virtue or in their vices. They are blessed together, or they are damned together. Considering that D&D is inherently built around the idea of advancement, the former makes more sense, but I can imagine ways to bend the latter as well. The former makes no allowances for common-folk being cowed - though to be manipulated or motivated are separate matters. The latter makes no stipulations for 'beautiful' people in the least, with Charisma instead being marked by how well a person can manipulate his way out of the worst parts of his awful life.

Ultimately, all of this is going to be more-or-less campaign specific. The sort of fiction you're attempting to emulate is going to determine what these scores mean. For myself, I would categorized Charisma as being composed of the following factors:

• Physical appearance (3.0)
• Personal magnetism (2.0)
• Communication ability (2.0)
• Listening ability (1.0)
• Situational flexibility (1.0)
• Courage d'esprit (2.0)
• Energy (2.0)
• Firmness (1.0)
• Staunchness (1.0)
• Strength of character (3.0)

This gives us 10 points of interest. The majority - which evidence leadership ability - are tied into those aspects of Clausewitz's "genius of war" which do not fall directly under Intelligence. Obstinacy is given as a negative trait - related to strength of character, but opposing it. These are weighted in accordance to the relative importance - physical appearance, for example, is heavily weighted, but even a beautiful person can have below-average charisma if they are otherwise as human beings.

I considered for a bit putting together a "3pt" to "18pt" list, and even went so far as drafting one up. But I don't like. There's too many factors to consider, and I consider my own list too bereft of useful detail; Furthermore, there is no way to consider all of these factors in a manner that is relevant to the game table. In this regard, I see value in the idea of emphasizing physical appearance - it gives a solution which can be applied in a very real sense at the table. But at the same time... it's not the kind of game I would see myself running.

For a final note, this is what Charisma governs in my games:

• # of retainers
• Reaction adjustment
• Ego rating 
• Resistance to charms, etc.
• Resistance to possession
• Kidnapping targets

Maybe I'll write some sort of formula calculating all 10 points together. It might be fun. For now I'll just leave it at this, since it's been an exhausting amount of game-adjacent writing. I'll have to make up for that by cleaning up and posting one of my old adventure sites for the next post here.

Supernatural Hit Dice

Last September, before I came around to the idea of making public blog posts, there was one which really caught my eye on Necropraxis about the idea of a damage threshold for the supernatural. I loved the concept and thought it would be a great idea to put it into practice. I just needed to wait for the right opportunity to come up. It's been a few months, and I have, so I wanted to throw up the results.

Putting it in Practice

My players had no idea what was going on. They knew that "something" was up when I started asking for their die rolls instead of damage, and when the DM narration started to yield a lot of "useless" attacks. Initial arguments supposed that their attacks weren't hitting. But the dice rolls didn't support that. The next theory, and the most amusing one, was that only every second attack worked. Then a question over the materials used. Then the theory that it absorbed magic.

I had the goal of creating a "hopeless" feeling, and it worked out well: The group ended up fleeing, ironically right on the cusp of success. Explanation's came later, and everyone liked the principle. So we did a bit of fiddling, and I'm posting the end results here, now that time has passed.

Goals

The intention here is to make it possible for a human to harm a supernatural creature without the use of magic weapons. I want it to be damn hard for a normal man, possible for a fighting-man, and doable for a hero. I want a super-hero to not just be able to carve up lesser demons, but to face off against stronger ones. I absolutely don't want a wizard to blow through these with fire-balls - magic should be effective, but the goal should be to dispel, not blast apart.

Implementation

On the PC end:

1. Class based damage die. Fighters inflict 1d8 (1d6 w/small weapons), while other classes inflict 1d6 (or 1d4).
2. Level-based damage bonus for Fighters. This begins as +1 at Hero level, improving to +2 at Myrmidon, +3 at Super-Hero, and then scaling at a reduced rate up to the 19th Level (+6).
3. Magic weapons have no "plus" to damage - Except "Slaying" weapons, which do have a damage bonus, making them damn effective.
4. Fighters of high enough level have an option to learn huge versions of weapons, which inflict 1d10 damage when used by a character of high enough STR.

On the monstrous end:

1. Supernatural creatures possess Supernatural Hit Dice. These are treated as "HD+1" in terms of Attack Throws and Saving Throws.
2. Each SHD has a threshold. The exact amount is determined by the degree of how "magical" the possessor is.
3. The lowest value (6+) is for things like demon possessed humans or the undead; things which have become "magical', but are innately still derived from mortals. They can be hurt by normal men, but only with a good amount of luck.
4. The common value (7+ to 8+) is for various sorts of lesser demons, or other things which are "supernatural, but not exceptionally strange". It is possible for any fighting-man to harm opponents of this sort, with difficulty. Normal men don't have the "oomph" to do it.
5. Powerful supernatural forces, such as name demons, can be hurt only by actual heroes (9+), and put down in good order only by the truly super-heroic. Some could even be stronger (10+) but these would be the top of the top - the Orcus and Demogorgon types, if you will.
6. The absolute most powerful (11+) are creatures on the order of the divine. It is possible for the super-heroic to harm them. You need that much grit, to dare and make a god bleed. I suppose you could also set even higher numbers, but I see no reason to go beyond this point.

This also adds into my "Resistance" mechanic of choice. That is to say: Rather than a monster taking "half damage from fire", the expression is always given based on die. Given the above, it might be noted that at a certain point, most magic-user spells become useless: Even if a fireball does 10d6, if the threshold is set to 7+, you might as well be swinging a torch. Vulnerability is important. If you're battling an Ice Demon, use fire. If you're battling a Fire Demon, think twice? This also helps to replace the long lists of resistances held by demons, devils, and other sorts in most D&D editions - Instead, the more important part is what specific specimens are weak to.

I have to say, I love how it all spins together. Fighting-men are impressive in their own right. Picking out the right tools, and doing your research, is also important: Even a modest dagger, if enchanted with special properties, can give you an edge (if you want to take down a Witch-King, you had best have a barrow-blade). For everything else, there's bashing it until it died.

Potential Projects

Right now I have a small stack of draft posts waiting to be cleaned up and posted. I'm not entirely sure what direction to head off in, so I figure I'll outline a few things that I'm aiming to discuss:

• I've been working for some time now to compile my personal fantasy heart-breaker, which I refer to at home as "Black Spire" or alternatively "Ierbon" (though at home the game is more reference to as "the game on Saturday" or just "D&D"). It's a hack of OD&D with bits of Arduin and a few OSR-inspired mechanics strapped onto it, diverging in a major way only in terms of magic.
• Related to the above, I've been working to expand upon the campaign setting itself, and make it into something which could maybe be published. I'll try to post bits of this as I come - mostly from in-world, first person perspectives, since I think that's a lot more interesting.
• While it's certainly not publishable, I've been sitting on an unfinished Elder Scrolls based table-top RPG for about 5 years now. I want to go back, revise it, make it mechanically compatible with other old-school games, and then release it. Of course, that'll take some play-testing first.
• I want to play Classic Traveller. I have the books, I don't have interested players. If I ever manage to accomplish that, I'd like to start fiddling there, as well, for setting adaptation. But it's better to actually play the game first, you know?
• I like writing in general, so I suppose bits of that might come up. I've been going through a lot of fantasy novels, too, so commentary on that might come up.

That's the direction I'd like to go, so we'll see about actually sticking to the road?

The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way

There’s a lot of good reasons that “Experience for Gold” is such a FRP staple, and there are a lot of people who have elaborated on those points. The four which have the most relevance for me at the table are almost certainly:

• Mechanical incentive to adventure.
• Puts treasure collection over massacre.
• Gives the whole party a shared goal.
• Simplified bookkeeping.

As someone growing up in the era of widespread video games, I can’t help but wistfully desire a system that had a greater focus on actual skill development. I think that Chivalry & Sorcery takes a pretty good stride in this direction, but I also have zero hope of finding a group of live players willing to approach it. The trade-off for ‘realism’ is not worth it for a game like D&D. If pressed between the old-school method and the more modern system of encounter-by-encounter level advancement (either in terms of monster extermination or in terms of milestones), then I will pick the former every time. That said, I don’t like running the system on its own. While it does turn down the overall blood-lust of the party vs. a modern system, it doesn’t necessarily encourage role-playing so much as it does simple avoidance. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but one which I would think requires far more engaging stealth mechanics than D&D presents. So there are a few steps I like to take besides these.

Allied Treasure

Principle: When you befriend a faction in an adventuring site: Your party splits Experience equal to the full value of all treasure held by that faction at the time. No double-dipping!

The meaning of this: Should the party get a few luck reaction checks and establish peaceful contact with one group in a dungeon (bandits, beast-men, a lone giant, etc.) then they may turn it into an opportunity for acquiring experience. For these purposes I define “befriending” as essentially one step further up the reaction scale than an initial “Friendly” disposition. In-game terms, this implicates that there still exists some task the party should accomplish to fully win the trust of their potential partner (and sometimes more than just the one). There is no benefit for double-dipping here. If the party already earned experience from treasure held by a monster in this manner, they won’t gain experience again. However, they will still gain the more tangible benefit of having the physical treasure in their possession, which they can potentially pawn of for the sake of training, research, carousing, or the simpler purpose of resupplying.

Thus a sort of trade-off persists here: The party could put the bandits they met on the first dungeon level to the sword, or they could form an alliance with them, expanding their influence of the first floor. The former means both the piddling experience awarded for defeating a group of monsters (or men) and a bit more gold for the party’s coffers, while the latter implicates a much lower present risk of harm in battle, and perhaps a lower future risk of travels through that area in the future. Overall, this serves as a method of encouraging role-playing, and helps to provide a form of meta-game reward for a different suite of player skills. Both of these I find entirely in tune with the old-school ethos. On a related note, if further amplifies the benefits of a high Charisma score at the lower levels, where avoiding combat is at its most critical, but the funds to pay off a henchmen or hirelings are at an all-time low.

Quests

Principle: Completing missions of note results in experience awards.

This should be prefaced: Much like the rules for allied treasure, there is no double dipping here. If the king offers a reward of 5000 gold coins to bring the head of a dragon, that is the reward. Quest rewards are applied more for those situations where the circumstances are noteworthy, but the material reward is limited. The general scale that I use for quest experience is to treat it more or less as a monster, in terms of risk. Demogorgon, the highest ‘threat’ in AD&D, is weighted at a bit over 75,000 XP, which I suppose serves as good of a baseline as any as the ‘absolute highest’ (though the number would amount to 3750 XP in my home-game, which operates a bit closer to the silver-standard in terms of price modeling). I wouldn’t offer any awards less than 100 XP.

In practice: The party meets a young boy who lost his dog near an old ruin. The party is already going in there, but decides to keep an eye out, out of some strange sense of kindness. If the ruin in question is relatively barren, save perhaps a few rats and goblins (the dog being kept in a pen with the intention of being made into a meal), the reward would be an extra 100 XP for the party. Greater complications, such as a wizard being caught up in the affair, could potentially boost it up to 250. On the other hand, a more crazy quest (something like “G3”) could be closer to 10,000. The most ludicrous of tasks (and here I refer to the likes of H4) are where numbers of 50,000 or higher come into play.

Merit-Based Awards

Principle: Do things to gain experience.

There are a few things that I do to give out experience, taking a bit of inspiration from Arduin in this regard. The general list of things I use, excluding spur-of-the-moment bonuses, is summed up as follows:

• Undergoing a resurrection, reincarnation, or similar trauma.
• Being the sole survivor of an expedition.
• Defeating a stronger opponent in single combat.
• Coming within a few points of dying.
• Leading a successful expedition.
• Taking up the point guard/rear guard position.
• Mapping the dungeon.

The numbers here aren’t very high – No more than some 500 XP as a bonus and as little as 50 XP. But those numbers can certainly add up over time, and mean something at lower levels. Unlike Hargrave, who apparently disliked treasure as a source of experience, I prefer not to award XP on the basis of individual actions: casting spells, disarming traps, etc. If you’re choosing to cast spells or disable a trap at all, then (in theory) you’re already doing for a tangible benefit of some other form. Instead, these rewards are for those things which already go ‘above and beyond’ the call of duty.