Fenris Punk | What to do about Charisma

What to do about Charisma | Details

Posted on 2026-01-31

On Charisma

The last year I have run some games playtesting. The website here is stale for what I have actually used and where I want this to go.

In terms of Ar Zed, the four stat systems are interesting and they have given me some thoughts about how the classic six ability scores relate and differ from each other and how they act as higher level scores. The main thing these ability scores first do is break up mind and body. The STR, DEX and CON are usually easier to understand, at least for me. But they are not analogues for the mind scores. If STR is the power and DEX is some measure of speed-precision, then how does that relate to INT and WIS? And if CON is related to fortitude-stamina, what does that even mean for CHA? Why at that point is CHA not more involved with mental grit instead of the norm that passes it off for PvP mind games? Under the analogues, to me it seems a person's witty response would come from WIS rather than CHA.

So whether or not anyone else agrees with me, my current model for the game goes more like this:

With these, I admit some terms could have better words attached to them. But at least in English this means no more ambiguity between the C for CON and CHA. Because now we have G for GRT meaning Grit.

With this model I find it a lot easier to derive role-playing actions and map them back over to the actual stats of the character, rather than keeping track of tens of stats, scores, or character state.

Decoupling The Game

One of the most common decouplings in games is when game designers build their rules agnostic from a setting. The most popular RPG game in the world typically uses or is used for Tolkien-style high fantasy. But take away the magic and it could be used for almost anything pre-1800 in the real world.

What else can we decouple? Possibly some aspects of role-playing. I think my idea will be unpopular. It takes the role-playing, the RP out of Charisma. And then it removes Charisma as a stat. The bard players will certainly dislike this.

Other Ways to Decouple

There are some other game features that are unrelated to role-playing that we just associate with RPGs. Action Economy is probably the big one. There's no reason why one group of players with the same role-playing rules cannot use the randomized turn order while another group uses table seating clockwise round-robin. They both ensure everyone gets to play, and it has nothing to do with the actual role-playing. One is random and the other one is more related to who likes what snacks are at the table (this can also be random).

For Action Economy, not only the turn order but the static turn order. Some games such as SR have not only turns but passes. Other games, albeit electronic, such as FFT have a clock that increases by the speed of the character each tick where the next person who hits the target, usually 100, is the next person who takes a turn. All of these are fair in that everyone does get to play and they are relatively consistent. But none of these are directly or need be directly coupled to the role-playing itself. And for the previous examples of random or mostly random turn order, they do not even need to be coupled to the character stats.

Even when the turn order uses a clock, it need not be directly tied to character stats. Imagine everyone having the same base clock tick, but a role-playing aspect such as heroicism that increases the speed for a single tick. Or an injury that reduces it.

HP

Even players who have never heard of the FFT clock can sympathize with the common notion that HP is a clock. When it drops below 1, your time is up. But even in DND that does not necessarily mean you die, it just means you cannot play anymore, at least temporarily. The thing about most games is there's no concrete tracking of character injuries. With the described highly common 0 HP cliff rule, rarely do players have a lasting limp, lose a finger, or require surgery to close up a wound. But there are other rule systems that instead use a random chart for injuries when HP drops below 1. The Ar Zed rules do this. A player who drops to 0 will roll for the injuries table. And then if they don't die completely, they get a second wind and return to 1 HP, or in some other games for excample they get HP equal to whatever the CON score or modifier is.

So from this, even if the exact number from HP is related to the ability scores, the rules behind HP are unrelated to those ability scores in terms of meeting some threshold for success.

Why Decouple

I can immediately think of three good reasons to decouple the different rules of the game.

One useful reason for decoupling the rules is that if we do, we can use variations that make more sense for our groups of players. Again, one group of players might prefer turn orders that are about where everyone sat down at the table just for easy of consistency, while others want some turn order related to their character stats, how they role-play, or in-game magical buffs.

And remember, there's also setting.

Furthermore, as much as I love archetypes, I typically make them in order to make character creation easier. But if the rules are simplified and the stakes for min-maxing a character no longer depend on knowing the ins and outs of the rules, then we can shift character backgrounds away from archetypes and/or stats and into the role-playing. And then archetypes become a tool for verifying if the rules map back to reality (or legend) rather than just a tool for kickstarting a game for someone who does not know all the rules.

I think that argument works for archetypes as in characters, but perhaps not so much for weapons or other items in the game. Some game weapons are very specific and generic. But these do not have backstories. A dagger for example is just a dagger. The drunk failed hero has a backstory. So I would consider the need for an off the shelf dagger and an off the shelf character different.

So if we decouple the rules, we can design a game that not only works for many different people but for many different games. And then the game is not the rules specifically, but the game is the game design itself.

Fenris Punk Game Rules

So moving forward, the game design is the main goal. And the specific rules for Core (I need to rename it) and Ar Zed are for 6-score and 4-score (or stat) character ability rules.

I have not done a good job here differentiating between stat and scores.

For now, I think with the above six ability scores for Core, that leaves mostly the following renaming:

And at this time I will stop here.