Another Role for Charisma

Following a long conversation with JB in the last post, I find myself thinking that there must be room for the amount of charisma that a character has somehow influencing the outcome of the conversation, after the conversation is opened. It would be logical that four or five sentences into a conversation with an NPC, the charisma kicks in.

I am not prepared to consider charisma “a gift.” I consider it a disposition; a willingness to put one’s own immediate gratification aside and make other people feel important, or give other people a sense that you are sincere, predictable and ready to support their wants and their causes.

I think many people try very hard to adopt this disposition and fail, often horribly. Salespeople and bad politicians in particular will often try to have us believe that they have our interests at heart, but their tone and their guesses at what we consider important are so off-the-mark that we are soon feeling squeamish about how slimy and insincere they are about their wanting us to buy something or believe something.

Yet even these people have some success … because very often, a significant proportion of the population is so willing to believe, they will dismiss the apparent sleaziness of the speaker and concentrate on the apparent message. I’ve watched this personally happen so often that I don’t have much respect for most people; it’s hard for me to see trust as a charismatic influence when cynically I’ve seen trust arise amazingly often in spite of the speaker’s painfully obvious self-aggrandizement … and time and again I’ve seen that self-aggrandizement become textbook after the politician was elected or after the renovation of an acquaintance’s home proved twice as costly because the company was shoddy and half-way criminal.

But you cannot tell some people, “Don’t trust that guy,” and expect to hear reason. There are people in this world who will trust their lives and all of their money to the most reprehensible, repulsive, stupid, incomprehensibly incompetent people imaginable.

I have been told all my life that I am charismatic, almost as often as I have been told I’m intelligent. I don’t see it, myself. In any case, I’m not disposed to be charismatic. I know from experience that if I’m prepared to lie flat out to people, and tell them what I know they want to hear, their opinion about me and my motives instantly improves. If I pander to the boring lives that people want to talk about, if I approve of the moronic decisions people are apt to make, if I overlook the obvious defects of character that cause people to cheat their customers or absently fail to clean a table they’ve just used to cut raw chicken (and I cannot begin to describe the endless examples of restaurant kitchen life that would make your heart shudder), then I will be looked upon with greater appreciation and importance than I receive through being honest. We can argue that it is charisma that makes a first impression a positive one, but I can argue just as thoroughly that unrestrained lies and a complete lack of moral principles will do just as well and get the same results.

It's a shame he missed his opportunity to be swimsuit model.
And before people start screaming "personal magnitism" at me,
show real, honest-to-pineapples proof of it; argue causes with
me, not results.  I think he was a motivated sociopath;
and that, in spite of what most believe, is more than enough.

We have plenty of proof of that from history. And we usually slather an argument overtop of it, like the old saw that Hitler was charismatic. We don’t have a single bit of film that suggests charisma ~ but we do have extensive eye-witness accounts of his petulant mannerisms, his profound level of god-like megalomania, his screaming fits at not getting things his way, his inability to listen to the advice of other persons, etcetera, etcetera. But then, we can’t figure out any other way that he could have possible convinced all of Germany to murder so many people and act so irresponsibly all together, so it MUST be charisma, how can it not have been charisma?

I’m not convinced. From observing my mother’s German-Canadian relatives, all of them racist down to the bone, I’m not sure the culture their antecedents came from needed much of a push. And given the economic climate of Germany in the ’20s, I’m quite ready to believe that all that was needed were a group of very, very willing men to put their shoulder to the wheel. But here I’m not arguing facts, I’m arguing from emotion and anecdotal evidence, meaning any of this has as much value to the conversation as a pair of dingo’s kidneys.

I only present this to establish the baseline from which I view charisma.

Arguing from facts, when I look at the Wikipedia page on Trust as a social science, I don’t see any significant arguments presented there that invoke the “compelling attractiveness and charm that can inspire devotion in others,” the definition under charisma. The word has no real meaning in psychology, except to describe a particular kind of leader. This means we can argue all the live-long day about what celebrities have or what politicians and great leaders have, but none of it applies to day-to-day speech in a manner that has been tested and retested.

“Trust” is something that exists in our mind, and our mind alone, and who we trust says much more about us than it says about the abilities and personalities of others. And if that is the case, I don’t know how to frame rules that empowers those with charisma to enforce their will on other persons. I cannot think of a single time in my life when someone with “charisma” caused me to change any belief that I’ve had ~ but I can think of plenty of times when I’ve changed my beliefs stupidly, and temporarily, out of lust or greed. And I can equally think of quite a lot of people I’ve met who were clearly treated as though they had charisma, that I despised right off. I’m thinking of the blonde shithead from the original Karate Kid, who was pretty much a perfect representation of every popular kid I knew in school, or the slack ass bosses I’ve had who were loved because they were slack ass and not because they were great conversationalists.

I have known charismatic people that I’ve liked; but the charisma was always an icing on the cake. They were capable and charismatic, they were ambitious and charismatic, they worked hard and they were charismatic, they were brilliant and they were charismatic. The substance in the person was never, ever, their charisma.

So I am at a loss. I don’t have to “believe” in charisma to give it a game function. I’m happy to empower charisma to increase morale in followers, or to grant a fighter or cleric or thief with high charisma a special place among, specifically, fighters, clerics and thieves. I suppose I’m prepared to let a paladin get their questions answered without his needing to be of some profession; perhaps there is an argument to be made that everyone recognizes a paladin when they see one, so the “celebrity” glow carries on to such a person. I can make like stipulations for bards and, to some extent, for druids.

But I simply balk at any rule that argues the position, “I turn on the charisma; does she fall in love with me?” And that, Dear Readers, would represent almost all the approaches I have ever seen a character use where it comes to accessing the benefits of their charisma.

This has been a very negative post. And I doubt it has produced any value, except perhaps to clear my head. I repeat. It would be logical, given arguments made by JB, that four or five sentences into a conversation with an NPC that the charisma kicks in, somehow.

But I don’t know how.