How to play ability scores

Last updated 2013-04-05 by the DM.

: In progress.

It's easy to play a character who's just like you. It's much harder to play someone very different. Here are some tips that might help. While these tips apply to almost any role-playing game, I'm going to use the D&D ability scores as examples.

9-12 is average. These people look plain or mildly attractive, and they don't stand out in any casual interactions.

High charisma might include some of the following:

• Physically attractive.
• Good management or leadership skills. This can be hard to role-play if you don't have these skills yourself, but some game systems provide rules-based mechanisms, such as D&D 3rd edition's Leadership feat, which can help.
• Always makes eye contact.
• Smiles a lot.
• Doesn't insult or degrade others, but rather treats everyone like they're smart and funny, and that their opinion always matters.
• Is always the first to greet someone with a smile and a handshake.

Low charisma might include some of these:

• Physically unattractive.
• Habits such as twitches, nail-biting, scratching all the time or nose-picking.
• Doesn't talk much.
• Talks a lot, but is loud and/or obnoxious.
• Puts his foot in his mouth a lot.
• Rude and insulting.
• Makes bad jokes all the time, including puns that don't quite work, or, for extra confusion, that don't work at all (oh, I bet you're drinking wine because you complain a lot!). Laughing at his own jokes helps too.
• Extremely arrogant.
• Speech impediment.
• Speaks in a monotone.
• Mumbles a lot.
• Extremely unemotional.
• Won't make eye contact (looks down all the time, or, in the case of one person I've met, looks just over your shoulder while talking to you).

You might pick one of these for each point outside the average rainge. For example, there could be one negative trait for an 8 charisma, three for a 6, five for a 4 etc. An extremely low charisma character (3 or below) basically has no idea how to interact with other people, or has no ability to interact. This is the autism range.

An average character might have one item from one list and one from the other. Even a high-charisma character might have some unattractive traits.