Charisma! What is it good for? (Shopping)

[tigen]

I'm not sure if CHA should be ditched yet, it'd be nice to find some more uses for it...

It seems like, if you want to keep it around, you'd want to focus on things that would matter mostly in the early game. Later on, everybody gets a high CHA, so you'd have to be careful about conferring great benefits onto that without some other balancing. That's kind of unfortunate that this game is balanced around "statgain" instead of having alternative character builds and strategies.

I wonder what would be enough to compel somebody to actually change their strategy to choose a higher charisma. Having some potentially-neutral monsters sounds pretty cool, but still relatively unimportant. Unless, perhaps, they are made especially tough or annoying for their level

[ekolis]

I wonder what would be enough to compel somebody to actually change their strategy to choose a higher charisma. Having some potentially-neutral monsters sounds pretty cool, but still relatively unimportant. Unless, perhaps, they are made especially tough or annoying for their level

Such as humanoids, dragons, and uniques? It always made me wonder, why everyone in the game was against you - every apprentice mage, every novice paladin, every rogue and warrior, and all the so-called "intelligent" creatures such as ancient red dragons and zephyr hounds... intelligent monsters tend to be among the most dangerous, as well as the most logical targets for the "charisma effect", so why not do it? Heck, maybe if you roll a critical success, some of them might even help you out by attacking the other monsters! Imagine fighting a gang of novice mages and suddenly a couple of them decide to surrender in the face of your "superior tactics", and start casting magic missiles at their pals!

[bebo]

some of the proposals here are quite interesting, but imho are more in the territory of variants rather than vanilla;

if i had to cast my vote i would say to remove charisma altogether; adding stealth in it's stead though leaves me a bit perplexed, not only from a flavour point of view, but also beacause it's mechanics would have to be completely reworked and balanced - which might be good, adding sneak attacks, bonuses for rogues, etc

[Zikke]

Did anybody else read the title of this thread to the tune of War by Edwin Starr?


Or just me...


Charisma! (hooh! Good God y'all) What is it good for? (Absolutely nothin). Say it again now!

[PaulBlay]

Did anybody else read the title of this thread to the tune of War by Edwin Starr?

I wrote it to that tune.

[Magnate]

I wrote it to that tune.

It would have been quite eerie if you hadn't.

(@Zikke - yes, I certainly did. I tend to think oh "hooh!" as "hurgh!" though ...)