The Big Picture

As a writer and a role-player, I am a believer in numbers.  I believe that numbers are the reason why D&D became a phenomenon at all.  Whatever some might say about the actual role-playing, or the spirit of adventure and so on, none of it would have gotten off the ground without the six basic ability stats.  Ozymandias recently wrote a post about the fundamentals of D&D.  For me, the fundamentals are in the game's design, and the understanding of that design.  The six ability stats, and their conjuration, is the one single eureka moment in role-playing.  We don't give enough thought to how much the game hinges on these numbers.

It has bugged me for years that in the strictest of game terms, where so much of the game relies upon self-image and understanding clearly what that image is, that we have never been able to identify clearly what it means to have a "12" constitution as opposed to a "13" constitution.

We know how to make the numbers dance.  The 13 gives us a very slight edge on the 12 where it comes to checks and rolls ... but honestly, if the two persons were standing side by side, how do we see that this one is a 12 and this one is a 13?

There are only 16 variations in body type, after all, between characters that can barely function with a 3 constitution and those who are the very peak of condition with an 18.  That's not very many.  You would notice if your body were suddenly given a spectacular one point boost in resilience, health, fortitude and endurance.  You would really notice.  You'd be out right now, running and bicycling ... and probably high as blazes, since that boost in constitution would mean an unholy blast of both endorphins and adrenaline.

Yet ... we're supposed to ignore all that.  Who has posted their personal list of subdivisions, hm?  I've never seen one.  Apparently, we think it's impossible, or that it just doesn't matter.  The only third reason I can think of is that people just haven't thought about it.  That seems ... hard to believe.

Louis XIII, King of France from 1601 to 1643;
my game world takes place in 1650.

I had a commenter today who disputed my interpretations of charisma points, which is exactly what I expected.  There's no question my interpretations were weird.  I had a bunch of pages open, I was researching the hell out of charisma, trying to fine-tune the descriptions for each point of gain through a careful use of the thesaurus.  At each point along the pathway, I considered the next logical advancement.  The complete Quasimodo of a charisma is improved by pity, then sympathy, which leads to tolerant indifference.  If I could think of a sliver between sympathy and tolerant indifference, I would have used it.  The next step up the ladder is occasional notice ... the plain girl, the schoolteacher, to whom everyone is polite but no one wants to marry.  From there, I could see a pattern of attention for the individual following a path of social class.

Common people will marry and associate with common people, but the middle class doesn't and neither does the gentry.  Once your charismatic enough to gain the attention of the middle class, you fall out of the orbit of the common; increase further and the gentry get interested in you.  Then, finally, the real players take notice: those with real power and those with titles.  With each group, it is the same progression ... from inattention to some attention to complete attention.  And as you rise above the class, they see you as less and less attainable.

Of course, we in the 21st century, have been taught by films to believe that everyone is attainable.  Fat, ugly men in television sit-coms are constantly married to women with model bodies. Men in their 70s have affairs with beautiful women in their 30s.  It is a fantasy.  Viewed coldly, it is a ridiculous fantasy ~ which we justify by supposing it can be made to work with money.  And the ditzes from Orange County encourage that mockery.

My world, however, takes place in the 17th century, not the 21st.  There's no film, no "entertainment industry," there's a profoundly calcified social strata at play and most people live and die within 10 miles of where they're born.  Masques were worn by attractive women who moved in the upper circles; attractive men gathered in tight cliques and ~ like the Karate Kid ~ acting like complete assholes towards everyone who did not measure up to their evaluation.  Beautiful milk maids were the stuff of fairy tales ... in other words, so completely and absolutely unlikely that these stories became told over and over as fantasies for people who were tittilated by an amazingly attractive woman living in a fireplace.  We've deluded ourselves, in this century, with the belief that the fairy tales had a hint of truth in them ... but of course, we never apply that "hint of truth" to the magic that's cast or the "happily ever after" that neatly wraps up the story.  We're perfectly ready to be jaded about that nonsense.

So as I envisioned characters getting more and more attractive and personable, I thought about how uncomfortable that would be for common folk.  This fabulous popular and attractive fellow of 15 charisma walks into a workman's bar in the evening; the workers have had a hard day's labor behind him, but this fair fellow is on a first name basis with the mayor, he's a bon vivant around town and he has a fine position as the master of the dockyard, which he obtained through being very likeable.  What is the worker going to say around this fellow?  Can the workers be themselves, while this fellow is here?  Can they cut up and tell rude jokes, and bitch about the leaders of the guild, with this fellow in the room?  Of course not.  So they all get very quiet.  And polite.  Oh, of course, the fair fellow is pleasant, even generous.  And it is very kind of him to take notice of us common folk for a bit.  But he makes us nervous.  And he reminds us we are never going to look like he looks, or talk like he does, or have what he has.

That is only going to get worse as the charisma increases.

For myself, I ended up there without intending to do so.  I simply saw no other way around it.

But I was going to take a moment and talk about those who commented about the subjectivity of charisma.  I was asked, is the charismatic person still charismatic if they're in a culture that is not their own?  Surely, charisma only applies to one's own people ... what with different customs and attitudes, charisma must diminish when it shifts elsewhere.

I honestly don't know where that comes from.  We have endless stories of explorers entering lands on all the continents being embraced and beloved by complete strangers in utterly odd parts of the world.  It wasn't at all uncommon for a European to make friends in Japan, among the Hurons and in the deepest parts of Africa ... the charismatic individual simply cast their own habits aside and adopted the habits of the natives.  "Going native," like Gordon of Khartoum or Lawrence of Arabia, goes back beyond Alexander the Great, who fell in love with Persian customs and married a Persian woman, after conquering the country.  We know his fellow Greeks thought this very, very strange.  Dio and Plutarch both write extensively about Alexander's beauty, charisma, communication skills ... and about the obsession he developed for prostration (look it up), which was very NOT Greek.

Charisma has far more power than merely to manipulate.  Charisma is an adaptation.  It allows the individual to become our best friend, by embodying all the characteristics we want to see in a best friend.  The high charisma individual moves through the crowd, mutating instantly from person to person, so that each person feels special, each individual feels like they really know the fair fellow.  But the fair fellow is, in truth, unknowable.  He isn't just one person.  He is hundreds of people, at once.

He could win over the common folk in the bar, if he wanted to.  He could don their clothes, he could go down into the mines with them or work in their fields, and soon he would be adopted as one of their own.  Because he is just so darn likeable.  But honestly, why would he?

One in a thousand might find that interesting.  Thomas More did, and so did Francis of Assisi.  Victor Hugo had that strain in him and so did Leo Tolstoy.  But most beautiful, capable, charming people despise the meek and the common people.  The meek and the common have nothing they want, while they can perform the same mastery of language and likeability with princes and kings.  Why would they wallow in the muck with the pigs?  Why would they enter the bar at all, except to see what it was before getting back in their coach and going to their more interesting, diverting lives?

Please don't think that any list like this I put together is mere manure slung at a wall.  I am not merely invested in doing such things right, I'm working from a very large pile of sources, the sort that most role-players wouldn't think of reading.  Though I urge you to read them.  They're difficult and complex, and full of references that it takes decades to feel certain about, but the depth of information is amazing.

I'm reading a book now, called War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450-1620, by J.R. Hale.  I'll give a taste:

"There was probably no single year throughout the period in which there was neither war nor occurrences that looked and felt remarkably like tit.  There were a number of unstable frontiers ~ Scotland/England, Spain/Portugal, France/Spain, French/Imperial Burgundy, Christian/Turkish Hungary ~ which were zones of constant raids and counter-raids, where no one worked unarmed and no garrison force could do what it liked best to do, namely, pawn its arms and make love to taverner's daughters.  The practice of reprisal, whereby a shipowner was empowered by government to recover by violence the value of goods lost by piracy or unlawful sequestration in port, grew into privateering, or piracy-by-licence that made marines, guns and convoys as necessary in peace as in open war.  Moreover, as frontiers, after surveys by land commissioners and the construction of strong-points, did become more stable, especially in the later sixteenth century, their place as zones whence military escalation was always possible was taken by 'those who are called to be the rulers of states should have glory, expansion and enrichment as their principal aims.'  But he did not see expansion as leading to enrichment, though he hoped that wars of conquest might at least recover theri costs.  No government, no privte theorist saw profit as a tenable aim of war; enrichment was to be achieved by a more methodical development of a country's own economical potential and the nurturing of favorable balance of exports against imports.  This process could be benefitted by war, but only to the extent that a foreign war calmed, by diverting, civil passions and gave governments the excuse to pack off the unproductive elements in society ~ rogues, vagabonds and paupers ~ to be slaughtered."

What does any of that have to do with charisma?  To begin with, the above is real.  It isn't dragons, it isn't wizards sending people off to recover quest McGuffins, it's the hardcore business of managing power in huge, massive chunks, with unfathomable consequences hinging on wrong decisions.  The mastery of those decisions ~ what keeps the subordinates from killing off the kings pulling the triggers on the wars and legal justifications and pushback, is charisma.  It isn't strength, it's intelligence to some degree, it's certainly wisdom ... but it is most of all the other stats employed by people who are capable of being liked enough to get a law passed without being murdered in their bed.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, this above was the game.  And for those with the charm to get in the door to take some small part, the halls of power offered something the local bar just didn't offer.  When making a system that defined what charisma was, and how it was applied, I didn't limit my framework to whether or not the girl at the bar looked nice.  I went all in.

I do wish that people would really get it into their heads how vast role-playing is ... all from a set of numbers and rules to play with them.