Talk:Tome of Prowess (3.5e Sourcebook)/Bluff

This is an int skill? Is this a typo? It's charisma definitively!--Parakee^Talk 14:27, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Not a typo. A well crafted lie is done by intelligent people who are able to tell just enough of a lie to sell it without overdoing it. And the later abilities, assume identity, mock, and the assorted false "persona" abilities, are much easier to imaging a particularly smart person doing well than a particularly charismatic person. A person's natural charisma might even get in the way of those things, since they have to subdue their own personality to get those across.

Or at least that's my fluff justification. The more meta game justification was that I didn't want social skills to be exclusively the domain of Charisma, and I also wanted skills to be balanced relatively evenly over the various attributes (notable failures: Str and Con). This was an assignment that was easy enough to fluff and also served the meta game points, and so it went the Int. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 19:14, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

...But the social skills are dominated by Charisma for a reason. It's the ability dedicated to social interactions. And it's perfectly possible to be very, very smart in academic matters, yet very, very, stupid when it comes to socializing. Just ask me. Or anybody with Asperger's Syndrome, for that matter. Aspies (like me) tend to have sky-high Intelligence, but rock-bottom Charisma. I can chat well enough online, but face-to-face... most of the time, I'm either incredibly silent or incredibly awkward. Let me put it like this - Intelligence is academic smarts, Wisdom is "street smarts"/"jungle smarts", and Charisma is social smarts. I have loads of the first, but not so much of the other two.

Anyways, it's much easier to get people to believe what you have to say (even if it's totally false) if you know how to sway them, which doesn't really have anything to do with being a smart person in the academic sense. Or the jungle sense. It has everything to do with being able to relate to people, tell them what they want to hear, put them at ease in your presence, smooth-talk them, etc. And that's the domain of Charisma. Not Intelligence. (While I'm on this tangent, I think Search should be Wisdom-dependent instead of Intelligence-dependent. Searching well relies on perception, not brain capacity, and I would know, because I can't search worth a damn!) Both Intelligence and Charisma don't get much to influence outside of skills and class features, but that means that both of them should get a larger share of skills than the other abilities. --Luigifan18 (talk) 22:45, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

As stated above, I'm just as concerned about spreading out the skill love as making the assignments make sense. Charisma dominating the social skills was a terribad idea, and I have no interest in going back to it. I don't want to tell the person who dumped Cha "sorry bro, you can't contribute in social stuff". I want to tell them "well, you suck at making friends and scaring people, but you can contribute to social stuff in a different way if you want". So if I were going to move Bluff out of Int, I'd put a different social skill in and I think the rest fit much less well.

I'm also sort of ignoring the default mental attribute interpretations here, and so I disagree with your attribute descriptions. As far as I'm concerned, Int is not a measure of how much you know or book smarts, but is instead a measure of how flexibly you can apply the things that you know. The mental analogue of Dex you might say. Similarly, Cha is a measure of how well you project your personality and will, the mental analogue of Str. And Wis is the zen attribute, a measure of your ability to take weird mental shit and push through it anyway, and the mental analogue of Con.

With that in mind, a highly intelligent person might come up with off the wall but effective solutions to a problem while a person with a low intelligence won't really think outside of the box. And that sort of flexible thinking makes for good liars in my experience, much better ones than simply being able to project their presence and be personable. I'll give you a counter example with your aspie one. I would agree that the aspies I know are not particularly charismatic, and are not good at making people like them or telling them what they want to hear. This means that they suck at influencing attitudes and pushing to close a deal, things that are covered by the Affability skill (a Cha skill). And they don't tend to be strong enough in personality to be particularly imposing, even if they actually are physically imposing, and so not great at Intimidate (also a Cha skill). But they know enough and can apply it in weird enough ways that they are all really good at spinning the truth into whatever form they need it to be. Which makes those who practice it better at bluff than less smart people who practice bluffing, and fits nicely with Int as the Bluff key attribute. And that's not even touching the other abilities in here that a smart, flexible person would be better at doing than a charismatic one.

You don't have to like it or buy that justification of course, but that's what it is. And for the mechanical reasons above, I'm unlikely to change it. If you're not down with that, you're welcome to change it in your own games of course, but I would consider any move back to "Cha is the social attribute" a poor one from an including people in multiple parts of the game perspective.

On the tangent, Search has been broken up a bit. Finding traps is part of the Devices (Int) skill, because two rolls for that is annoying mechanically. It is also part of the Perception (Wis) skill because a lot of them have trigger or activity points that you can actually find and do stuff to even if you don't have any idea how they work. Finding secret compartments / doors is currently in Perception, but may get duplicated in Devices anyway since there isn't that much difference between them and a mechanical trap that doesn't hurt you. That you can't search worth a damn could thus be explained as you not being particularly perceptive and also not being trained to know what to look for. And I'm not sure what you're getting at with the "don't get much to influence outside of skills and class features" part at the end, but I am pretty much against weighting some attributes with skills more than others. I have tried to spread around the mental attribute dependency of casters a bit more, and have tried to spread around the save dependencies so that there are primary and secondary attributes for each one. Undoing that by making some attributes more important than others in the skills seems like a step backwards to me. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 04:39, 1 November 2012 (UTC)