Charisma skills

[Alex Johnson]

In working on an RPG concept I had, I have run into a problem where I'm too good at my stated goal.  The game will be generic (multi-genre support) and will be skill-based.  I don't like rules or options heavy systems, so my stated goal was to work with the skills ideas of other systems and distill them to their essence so that the skill list which everything relies on doesn't get too long or out-of-hand (ala Rolemaster/Spacemaster).  So I looked through the skills in D&D 3E, RM/SM, Star Trek, and WEG Star Wars and crunched them.  But for this skill I have currently labelled "Charisma" whose purpose is to cover influence over others (D&D's Charisma more or less), I ended up using the description of the ability in some of the skills.  This has had the sad effect of greatly limitting my skills based on this ability.

Charisma skills (5):  Disguise, Influence Animal, Influence Sentient, Leadership, Teaching.

The idea of the two Influence skills was every RPG seemed to have a Handle Animal type of skill, and a number of human/humanoid influencing skills such as diplomacy/negotiation, bribery, conning, intimidation, etc.  All the skills affecting intelligent creatures seemed to have the same intention and when put into my game mechanics, the same resolution mechanic, so it seemed logical to combine them all.  Even thinking about other things like Perform type skills, these are in other games as Charisma and are described in terms of mechanics that alter the mental state of another being, so again it gets rolled into Influence Sentient.

So I'm asking for input from the crowd at the Forge.  What skills can I put under Charisma that would not be subsumed into Influence Sentient?  I don't want to break this one skill into many, because it easily covers a dozen skills in most systems.  I'm trying to keep each ability's skill list to 8-10 (preferrably 10 for Charisma, because I personally think it is important in the way I want my games to play out).  Perhaps you could suggest a means to expand the definition of this ability so that it would encompass additional skills.  Changing the name of the ability is also okay, but only if you expand it's purpose so I can add more skills (but not too many).

[LandonSuffered]

It really depends on your game design and how important these Charisma skills are in the actual game play.  There's no one "right way" to do skills. 

For example, if your game is one where contested character action is important, there's no reason not to simply call the skill Influence Sentient.  Heck, you could just call it Influence period.  In fairy tales it always seems the beautiful maiden was as deft at handling forest creatures as she was at handling foreign princes and dwarves.  And doesn't Gandalf have as much ability in dealing with horses and eagles as he does with the free races of Middle Earth?

On the other hand, if a large part of your game is going to stress contested social interactions, you may need specific skills.  Some folks would say that the ability to Intimidate someone is a vastly different skill from the ability to Seduce/Sweet Talk...and likewise a lot different from Fast-Talking/Conning folks.  The ability to Bribe is more about knowing the market than having empathy for someone and building a rapport.  Likewise, training a hunting falcon is a lot different from training a warhorse!

Check out the Dying Earth RPG where social interaction is more essential to the game than combat...every person has a Persuade skill, but there are SIX different methods of persuasion in which one can gain skill.  Likewise there are six different Resist methods for resisting persuasion!

An even earlier example to look at is TSR's original Top Secret game where the ability to gain information from a contact was based on the method you wanted to use but based on different attributes.  For example, trying to get info via Conning used different attributes then trying to get info by Intimidation (the latter used Physical Strength...and gave you a bonus if you also had a hand weapon!).

So decide on what you want your game to be about...that is, what you want the players' characters to be doing in the game.  Maybe it's not important enough to have more than five Charisma skills!

[Alex Johnson]

I don't have access to those two games, but your points are taken.

Let's look at some of the types of stories/settings I want to portray to give you a better look at where Charisma sits in my games.  First off, I'm a big fan of this "dump stat" in D&D, and all my characters have Charisma as their highest or second highest ability score.  I find I'm usually surrounded by 8-10 Cha characters and players who don't care, and then I get to wow them and take the table.

So one situation I'd like to have common to my games is a lot of the interactions you'd see in Stargate SG1, especially the early episodes.  Daniel is sort of the front man for the group and often has to relate customs and translate between the team and the aliens.  Rather than just translating, he puts his own input into the conversation along the way.  He negotiates, he is diplomatic (where Jack is not, despite being group leader).  Even when the situation is grim and negotiation is impossible (talking to the automated terraforming vessel), he works to communicate the plight of the Ankarans and offers an unexpected solution that is not a compromise:  the ship can transport the Ankarans to a world suitable for them but not the extinct aliens, then return and finish terraforming the Ankaran's world.  Jack also performs a lot of Charisma based actions IMO, but of a very different nature.  He leads a team (authority requires Charisma), he bluffs and intimidates bad guys at times, definitely a few cases of disguise/pretending to be one of the other team, and the like.

The system will not be one to run into fights all the time.  Stealth, deception, and diplomacy all seem safer approaches to solving the problems I want to set forth.

[J. Scott Timmerman]

I personally like the idea of having one or two extremely broad social skills, and allowing individual characters to extrapolate on the subtleties in difference of usage, using specialties.

There would be, for instance, two skills:  Empathy and Influence

Empathy would represent any social action that is perceptive in nature.  Seeing through lies and discerning emotion would be the primary uses.  In D&D terms, think about the Sense Motive skill and certain social uses of the Spot skill.

Influence would be anything from selling an item to seduction to intimidation; whenever a character is rolling to get a desired reaction.

The idea is that there is no true fine line between different skills that you can truly say applies to all characters.  This is perhaps the reason skill sets get out of control when different skills can be used for the same purposes.  It's that there are subtle differences that may or may not exist for all characters.

Yes, there are sometimes where a character may wish to use a combination of salesmanship, seduction, and intimidation all in the same Influence roll.  The idea is that the goal is to Influence the other character.  When you put the action in terms of the goal, you don't have to make separate rolls for all the different ways you are trying to convince the person.

The individual characters will often take specialties that define these lines between different types of actions.  As long as the specialties are well defined; i.e., the group can figure out which ones apply to a given situation, it's not an issue.  And not every character has to think about how many ranks they might have in a specialty if they don't even have it.

-Jason Scott Timmerman

[LandonSuffered]

Hmm...here's how I see your Daniel situation.  Why is Dan the "front man?" Well, he can communicate in ancient languages (a skill generally based on intelligence/knowledge in most games) and he knows the customs/traditions of the aliens (another skill based on having a particular knowledge).  Jack has fighting skills (tactics, guns, whatever) and Dan has knowledge skills (customs, languages).  If you create situations where fighting is the way of resolving an encounter (for example, "they refuse to negotiate!"), then the characters with fighting skills come to the foreground.  On the other hand if communication/negotiation is needed, then the character with right skills gets his/her turn in the spotlight.

Especially regarding SG...well, I'm only familiar with the movie, but I seem to remember the James Spader character ("Dan?") not being especially Charismatic...he was a bumbling, nerdy scholar-type.  Another example of this kind of character in film is Milo (voiced by Michael J. Fox) in Disney's Atlantis cartoon.  Sure, he winds up with the girl in the end (as did Spader) but not because he was a suave or charismatic individual.  He WAS a linguist and pacifist, like the Spader character in the SG movie.

Those skills you listed earlier – Disguise, Influence, Leadership, Teaching – all of these I could call knowledge or "smarts" based skills.  For example:

Disguise: anyone can dress up like a stormtrooper, but are you going to be able to talk your way past the cell block guards? You need a knowledge of their protocol and procedures. In an alien culture, you need a knowledge of language and customs.

Influence Animal: while some people have definite knacks for working with animals, training animals is fairly specialized knowledge.  The Crocodile Hunter had charisma, but that wasn't what allowed him to wrestle his namesake (more like physical training coupled with a knowledge of zoology!).

Leadership: again, some people have it and others don't but organization, administration, and tactics (small group or large) are all knowledge that can be learned and taught.

Teaching: the best teachers find way to relate to their students, but the best teachers are subject matter experts armed with a variety of teaching techniques (because different students learn better from different methods).

As for influencing people...well, negotiation is a fine art and different folks take different angles when trying to convince another to their own point of view.  But knowing your subject (what they want and how they think) is of paramount importance.  Some people do this naturally...and its these folks one might call "charismatic," "charming," or "born salesmen." Others need to learn listening skills, speech and debate...or simply hire good speech writers on their behalf (not necessarily the most charismatic of folks themselves!).

The point being, you don't need to stay stuck in the D&D paradigm.  Originally, D&D didn't have any "skills" and Charisma actually served a valid purpose:

A)   It provide a bonus or penalty to all encounters (important when you get surprised in a dungeon by a "wandering monsters."
B)   It provided a limit to how many henchmen you could hire along in your party (also important when the body count is high).

With the sweeping changes made to D&D the last few years, Charisma no longer serves either of these purposes.  Assigning skills to it is just a way to try making it less of a "dump-off" attribute (not very successfully, as you note yourself!).  Maybe if Charisma (as force of personality) powered ALL spells and spell-like abilities, regardless of class...but then, where would that leave all the people who've been playing ugly sons of bitches for years??

Personally, I say let any player try any social-type skill use...and then assign hefty bonuses and penalties based on circumstance.  I'm not saying "penalize for bad acting," I'm saying reward the guy who puts away his gun, speaks the locals' language, and knows which hand to eat with!

[Monkeys]

Charisma does mean 'influence sentient' - at least in role-playing terms.

If you want to break it down, it seems to me you can break it down into

i) influencing particular sentients, or

ii) influencing them in a particular way.

examples of i) would be animals vs intelligent creatures, and then different sub-groups within the intelligent creatures eg maybe there's a skill covering influencing nobles which is seperate to the skill of influencing peasants, or influencing elves is different to influencing hobbits (maybe for elves and nobles you use the Charisma attribute + the Courtly Ettiquite Skill, for hobbits you use the Charisma attribute + the Cooking Skill, and for animals the Charisma attribute + the Wilderness Lore skill).

examples of ii) would be Intimidate vs Flatter. Perhaps Intimidate is more likely to work, but has bad effects later on as compared to Flatter.

examples of both i) and ii) would be something like Haggle - it only works on intelligent creatures, specifically someone who's selling something, and it only has the effect of making them accept a lower price, rather than making them believe, love or fear you.

In my limited experience, the trouble with having 'type ii' differences, is that it can tend towards a situation where you can pick which one to use. If you can equally Flatter, Intimidate, or Con the same NPC, you're better off having a high value in only one of these scores and ignoring the others. Also the 'story difference' between the three approaches isn't reflected by a 'game difference'.

So my ignorant recommendations would be:

i) have only one number representing Charisma, or

ii) have different sub-types of Charisma based on the type of NPC, not on the approach the character takes, or

iii) if you do have differences based on the approach the character takes, make the results clearly different (for example that successfully Intimidating someone is much easier than Flattering them, but is likely to have bad effects later, whereas Flattering them is difficult, but if successful will yield long-term results) - however I'm not sure how you'd avoid the problem of it being more effective to load up on one such sub-type and ignore the others.

[J. Scott Timmerman]

For any single type of a Charisma specialty, there are only a set of situations in which it will become useful.  The narrowness of the usefulness is impetus enough to diversify.  For instance, sexual seduction only works on those attracted to the character's sex and species, and further barriers can arise even within that small set.  In most situations, it won't be useful.  Of course, among other Charisma specialties, there may be several that are useful.

I find that D&D doesn't have a good way of differentiating the seduceability of characters.  The alignment system means that you have to convince, for instance, a lawful person that an action is reasonably within their alignment before being able to convince them to act a certain way.  And there is a chart giving bonuses and penalties to DCs to convince NPCs of different things.

Exalted uses Virtues: Compassion, Conviction, Temperance, and Valor.  That way, you know that Intimidate is never going to work against someone with a maxed-out Valor.  That person believes in death before surrender, and will endure all kinds of torture before talking.

Likewise, a person with a maxed-out temperance will be unseduceable, a maxed-out conviction character never strays from her course, and a maxed-out compassion character would never harm another worthy being.  Of course, there are magics to overcome even these levels of virtue.  And most characters you encounter are not maxed out in anything.

The point is, the fact that NPCs have varying levels of each of these allows the ST to create situations which require the PCs to attempt a different method than they did before.  It gives the ST a mechanism by which monotony can be discouraged, and the diversity of these (Charisma/Manipulation/Appearance + Investigation/Presence/Performance) skills/specialties becomes useful.  I myself prefer a system where these virtues can be broken down further character to character, and White Wolf did present such a system in their Player's Guide in 1st edition. 

Furthermore, Social Combat makes the whole process of using these skills more than just a one-roll thing.

What I'm trying to say is, differentiation of NPCs is important to determining the usefulness of any skill.  If every NPC encountered is equally susceptible to the same skills, then a PC is going to load up on just one.  It's just like Combat.  If every enemy has high SR or is within an antimagic field, the gamist PCs are going to take warrior levels instead of arcane levels.  If all the enemies have similar resistances to each other, the PCs are going to min/max; i.e., the gamist Wizard might focus on beefing up only one spell, and battle becomes monotonous again.

-Jason T.

[contracycle]

I don't particularly like disguise, but maybe you need terms that are more action oriented?  Like, Deceive, Impress, Manipulate, Flirt, Encourage, Sooth

Then you DO leadership by carrying out Impress and Encourage actions, you DO seduction with Flirt and perhaps Deceive.  Whether or not this extends to influencing animals need not be specified at this level, you could allow all the same actions and apply a blanket penalty for communicating with animals, for example.  I think a jockey can be said to Encourage and Sooth a horse.

[Ron Edwards]

I'd like to second Gareth's (contracycle's) comment. I'd also like to reinforce Landon's point, that there isn't one way to do skills "right," and that you must think in terms of how you want to see skills being used during play itself.

If you were to put those two points together, can you make the combination work for your game?

Best, Ron

[Alex Johnson]

Ron, Gareth's comments are something to think about.  I do like the presence of leadership as a charismatic quality, so I am unlikely to subsume it under the other manipulation skills.  I strongly disagree with what Landon wrote.  He doesn't even know where I'm coming from in my examples from Stagate SG1.  I definitely do not believe that leadership and teaching are wholy or primarily attributable to knowledge.  I have seen the army, I have been to a leadership camp, I have instructed martial arts (children and adults separately).  Definitely for teaching you need some knowledge of what is being taught, but I've witnessed the smartest, most knowledgable people being the worst instructors and people who didn't know the subject at all learn it with or one step ahead of the students wow entire classes and get far better grades from their students than the intellectuals with all the book smarts in the area as could be.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Alex,

My mistake: I forgot to specify that I was talking about Landon's first post, which was the one that I think goes well with Gareth's points.

I wholeheartedly agree with your points about teaching.

Best, Ron