Arelith

Hey,

I want to discuss Teerifying Rage for Barbarians and the fact it uses a charisma based skill - Intimidate. Ive read alot about the argument for using Cha or Str as its baseline. However in the instance of Terrifying Rage using INtimidate with Charisma as its bonus seems all kinds of wrong.

Im fairly sure a Barbraian with Terrifying Rage does not go into battle with his flowing hair, charming smile, his amazing good looks combined with savvy smalltalk to stun you into a position of Terror?

Should Terrifying Rage not be based of the overwhelming Physical Might of the Barbarian as he comes thundering towards you, thus STR being used for Intimidate instead?

Of course this is just how i view it, i would welcome further input and views.

Charisma isn't solely physical appearance. Charisma is the force of personality your character can "push" on other characters. A character with low charisma would have a challenging time intimidating a large number of people successfully, while a character with high charisma could affect more than a few characters easily.

SRD 3.5 wrote:Charisma measures a character’s force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and physical attractiveness. This ability represents actual strength of personality, not merely how one is perceived by others in a social setting.

Being intimidating relies on the perceived threat of your character doing an aggressive action, and not the act itself. Strength alone doesn't convey the threat you're trying to "push" with intimidate. In D&D it does make sense. In our game, it also balances out Terrifying Rage slightly because having an additional 14-16 in intimidation would increase the DC by 2-3.

Also keep in mind it factors in total character levels and base constitution into the DC, along with total intimidate skill. Penalties from low Cha can be cancelled out with a single potion, and from there the Barbarian's large assortment of intimidate gear and skills wins out.

If they made it strength-based I'd say that makes sense, sure.

As far as it being charisma based, that's fine too. Both make sense.

You might say a low charisma barbarian couldn't be intimidating but.. The maxing out of the skill means they're intimidating despite otherwise being low charisma in every other area. Skill reflects training and being an intimidating monster is something an epic barbarian learns.

Lastly, the DC of Terrifying Rage is custom scripted for Arelith. If your strength bonus was added instead of charisma it would make the DC much higher so it'd likely have to be scripted again to get the average numbers back to where they are now.

So.. You have a fair point but it's probably not something that's going to get messed with and it's "good enough". Though you never know.

Pathfinder had a feat that ADDED strength to intimidate (while still keeping charisma), but that probably be a little wonker/strong for arelith.

Coding does include con, and as other have pointed out, charisma has less to do with looking pretty and more to do with force of 'persona'. Like charismatic leaders are not necessarily pretty, though there can often be a co-relation. After all better looking people are better perceived by society and tend to naturally have more confidence. But your sorcerors can be as ugly as you want them to be.