Well, but the bonus party members were still a tangible bonus, which made higher-charisma characters useful even for someone focused on violence. Plus, those games also offered more non-combat options, so while Charisma was a dump stat for combat characters it was still a sensible place to keep higher than 4. Don't get me wrong, it was still mostly useless, but the fun value of hearing your party members chat was enough of a reason to take a few points. I wouldn't call "4 points minimum" a dump stat. Now I would though, since there's no legitimate reason to leave more than a single point in Charisma, even for a character that wants to be well liked and a brilliant negotiator. Heck, especially that kind of a character, since they are more likely to max out speech than anyone else, and having a high charisma becomes redundant then--but they can still benefit from higher agility and endurance and strength stats.
Damn, lost my post due to an outage, but yes--that's what I was doing. I've seen a lot of posts elsewhere about the virtures of Charisma, and it's simply not true. Mostly that, and also advising caution to others. Really, what I was mad at was the sheer math of it not adding up.Joviwan wrote:He's provoking the people who are trying to defend Charisma as being a legitimate and game-winning mechanic, not the people who put it into charisma because they like putting things into charisma.Ryan Thunder wrote:And if somebody wants to pour their resources into that useless dump stat, that's their decision to make. Not sure why you'd want to provoke anybody over it...
Is it just for the lulz?
Most stats, even shitty ones, have a passive benefit. Endurance provides quite a few extra hitpoints if buffed at start. Strength increases carry weight and sledgehammer damage. Agility gives you more action points. Charisma's only passive benefit is superior success rates in Speech checks, which is something that is redundant with skillboost clothes, liquor, and becomes obsolete when maxing out your speech skill. Even the other shitty stats also have some value from perks they unlock. The perks that Charisma unlocks are nearly entirely bullshit. Animals quickly stop being commonly encountered, and your charisma can't befriend robots, deathclaws or radscorpions, so good luck getting any use out of Animal Friend. The Child at Heart perk can save you about 500 caps, but that's it, the rest is just as easily obtainable via speech checks which you should be succeeding at anyway. Bonuses to selling price are irrelevent by the level you get Master Trader too, so who knows what good that is. At least that benefit is tangible though.
What really killed me was doing the math for a theoretical neutral character, and trying to plan out getting the most use out of Impartial Mediator, which is Charisma's biggest and most impressive perk, in my opinion. It provides a whopping +30 to speech so long as you maintain a neutral karma, requires a Charisma of 5 and is available at level 8. So even this is open to every plebian and doesn't convince me that Charisma is a useful, game winning stat--but it was partially convincing me to play my Charisma down the middle instead of in the crapper. However, look at the tradeoff.
For 4 points of Charisma you gain +30 to speech at level 8 for cost of a perk. But if I had put those 4 points of Charisma into Intelligence I would have been able to accrue an extra 32 skillpoints by level 8, making my speech higher without the cost of a perk, as well as benefitting me more greatly down the line and in situations where my Karma dips out of the narrow "neutral" range into "kinda good" or "kinda evil." Since Charisma's passive benefit is basically nonexistant for Diplomacy/High Charisma characters and entirely nonexistant for everyone else, it should have some useful perks. The fact that it's perks are useless too just point to bad design. Your average casual gamer won't be able to see that, and I think it's pretty lame to hide lackluster design choices by being intentionally vague about a stat's benefit.
