Hacking 2e: Charisma

The primary ability of bards and face-characters across many editions, Charisma gets a fair shake here, with three adjustments that tie to “a character’s persuasiveness, personal magnetism, and ability to lead.”

Of course, this is assuming your game uses henchmen, morale, and reaction rolls. Online discussion makes it clear this was not always the case. The 90s was the era of story-driven games and director-DMs, the age of Vampire: The Masquerade. Rules that inflated the party or harkened back to D&D’s wargaming roots were no longer in vogue. The 2e core books themselves present morale and reactions as optional (while not calling them that), encouraging DMs to make calls on how the NPCs behave based on common sense, rather than relying on random rolls.

Obviously, if these rolls do not exist and these extra NPCs are not available, Charisma becomes the ultimate dump-stat, useful only to meet the prerequisites of the paladin and bard. It also threatens to turn Charisma into the ‘make them like me’ ability check, wherein the player may expect to ‘beat’ social interaction via direct check, since there is no mechanic to adjudicate this otherwise. As these are both undesirable outcomes, retaining these adjustments requires reinforcement of the rules which they modify. That comes later; for now, we’ll address the columns as they stand.

 

Actually, one last note before we get to the columns.

Charisma has always been presented as the character’s leadership skills and the force of their personality, but occasionally it is defined as physical appearance and beauty. It’s the first thing mentioned in OD&D, Holmes Basic, AD&D 1e, and B/X (though Holmes weirdly adds ‘sex appeal’ and notes that dragons and witches keep the attractive ones). The AD&D 1e DMG has a very funny and overly defensive aside on this, which (to paraphrase) posits the following: Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler obviously had an 18 in Charisma based solely on their personal magnetism; since they were not known for being super attractive, this proves that scores above 18 are possible, because if they had been hot, they’d break above that score. Enlightening.

The driver failed his save and was
aged 10 years by ghost Hitler.

 

This would later be supplemented in Unearthed Arcana with the Comeliness score, which gives entirely too much specific information about reactions to physical appearance, exhibiting the worst basement-dweller tendencies of the early games. 2e goes out of its way to note that Charisma is “not a reflection of physical attractiveness,” but then does an about-face in the later Player’s Option: Skills and Powers by creating the Appearance subability, a Comeliness score in all but name. 3e puts ‘physical attractiveness’ into Charisma’s description, but shoves it to the end. Finally, 4e and 5e don’t mention it at all. Through this timeline, we can see Charisma’s connection to beauty moved from an essential element to being completely rejected.

BECMI is the interesting outlier, in that Mentzer discards the idea in the same year that Gygax overemphasizes it, going so far as to state that Charisma has no effect on other characters unless the PC is actively talking to them. I think this is the best answer to the issue, and it’s the one I’ll use.

Thanks for indulging me. Let’s move on.

 

1. Maximum Number of Henchmen

Whether we call them retainers or henchmen, these are the NPCs under the player’s control which add a great deal of the flavor and mechanics we’re here for. You don’t find this stuff in the later editions; it’s one of the unique old-school concepts which makes AD&D such an interesting game. Henchmen (and followers, hirelings, etc.) as a game mechanic deserves its own post, so I won’t dwell on it here.

AD&D 2e states unequivocally that this value is a lifetime maximum. Once you get all your henchmen killed, that’s the end of it. This rule comes from Oriental Adventures (Zeb Cook’s rule-change workshop, of sorts), and represents a break from OD&D, 1e AD&D, and Basic, which indicate no such restriction. If we take a much-later Gygax’s word for it, the listed value was always meant to be how many henchmen a PC could have at any one time.

Errata by forum

 

If that’s the case, the numbers seem inflated. A party of 5 PCs with only average (10–11) Charisma scores could potentially field up to 20 extra NPCs. That’s a monstrous number of extra retainers scampering about which the DM needs to factor into any encounter, and this doesn’t even take into account any high-Charisma PCs. Granted, this can and should be mitigated by making henchmen expensive, but I’m still in favor of pulling these values down to a more reasonable territory. At a score of 18, I think you shouldn’t have more than 5 hangers-on per character, and middling scores should stay in the realm of 2 or 3. This is a nerf, but I think it’s a fair one if I’m going to develop a version of these rules where henchmen matter.

 

2. Loyalty Base and Reaction Adjustment

Your adjustments to retainer morale and reactions from other NPCs. I like these values, they’re not stingy and they have some heft at higher scores. However, given that they both adjust how your Charisma affects NPCs, and since the numbers are pretty close to begin with, I’d like them better if they were just one set of values. Let’s smooth them out and call it ‘Morale/Reaction’ for now.

 

3. Awe Power

It’s a bonus Deities & Demigods column! This adds “reverential fear or dread or overpowering desire to worship” to 19+ Charisma scores. It’s notable for being the only ability score addition that didn’t make it into 2e, likely because Zeb & Company weren’t looking to make you a god just because you found the Tome of Leadership and Influence. It’s not making its way to this hack job either, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it. This section of Deities & Demigods also introduces the idea of negative Charisma, which induces Horror instead of Awe. It’s great stuff and we’ll leave it where we found it.

 

Final Table

Charisma	Number of Henchmen	Morale/Reaction
1	0	-8
2	0	-7
3	0	-6
4	0	-5
5	1	-4
6	1	-3
7	1	-2
8	1	-1
9-12	2	–
13	3	+1
14	3	+2
15	4	+3
16	4	+4
17	5	+5
18	5	+6
19	7	+7
20	7	+8
21	10	+9
22	15	+10
23	20	+11
24	25	+12
25	30	+13

 

I think this will work for our purposes. The henchmen bloat is pulled down to levels that are functionally relevant to play at the table. This still allows for massive parties if the PCs have the means to build a full cadre, but we have to draw the line somewhere. Meanwhile, the morale and reaction adjustments are cleaner, offering a bit of a boost at lower scores and a slight nerf at higher ones. I think this is a fair trade-off for a clearer and easier to use table.

When I started messing with these tables, I didn’t expect this to become a whole series, yet here we are. Since I’ve tied an additional two of these abilities to saving throw bonuses, it seems only right that I finish with a deeper dive into saves, their historical use, and what I expect from them in any 2e-derived system.