Charisma vs. Role Playing

When you create a character, there are usually six basic attributes to determine: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. The first three are physical characteristics. The next two are based on knowledge. And then there's charisma.

Physical characteristics need attribute points. The character doesn't actually exist, so their body is abstract. General knowledge also is an abstraction, because we cannot plan out their entire lives and determine every single thing they know or their intuition. But charisma is different.

Charisma basically affects all of your words. Players with high charisma are better at communicating. They are more likely to succeed when trying to be diplomatic, deceitful, threatening, or charming. The problem here is that the players are pretending to be the character in the present tense. They are the character's charisma. The words they say, the tone they use, every aspect of verbal communication is actually being conveyed. There is no need whatsoever for an abstract value to determine this.

I personally believe that the idea of giving character's a charisma score betrays the idea of actually role playing. It allows anybody to simply roll a die and let that do the talking for them. In extreme circumstances, players will say things like "I use Diplomacy" as though it was a magic spell. But what kind of diplomacy are you using? Who are you talking to? What do you know about them? What could you say to grease the wheels to get what you want?

Admittedly, I am a person whose actual charisma is pretty high, so I'm biased. I understand that some people aren't so great at communicating or thinking on their feet. The abstraction can allow for people to have diplomatic or wily characters without actually being such themselves. But I still find that to be a step against role playing.

I think that, since role playing games already confer so many great lessons in thinking and strategizing, the best approach is to think of role playing as another one of the lessons to learn. Get exposure and get experience and practice how to be a cunning character. It is something that you don't need dice to determine, which is also a great skill to have for real life, where the same is true.