Have charisma malus any sense on BG environment?
Arthas
Member Posts: 1,091
Just asking because I was checking the malus on the silver armor (made by silver scales) and it has a malus on charisma. I don't understand if it is a good idea or not to be honest. If I was to make a mod for BG, should I remove the malus?
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That's kind of classic dragon behavior too. They sleep on a hoard of treasure and then you, the brave noble adventurer, wake them up so you can kill them and take their stuff. Classically the dragon is some animal that has no use for its treasure, a metaphor for the futility of greed, but maybe a bit more morally questionable in a setting where dragons are as smart if not smarter than humans.
The Dragonlance setting, for example, is MUCH more about good vs. evil dragons than Forgotten Realms. It's a MAJOR plot point at several points through the history of the setting. They don't call it the First/Second/Third Dragonwars for nothing.
D&D Dragons are generally a bit more active and involved than "classic" dragons. Also even their psychology differs on type, though it's more pronounced with the good metallics than the rest, who will generally kill you on sight because evil.
If I recall Wulfgar had to kill a dragon as some sort of rite of passage, so they just slew a local one like that was a totally heroic thing to do.
But silver scales? That describes most armor in the game. In fact, the in-game icon for the Silver Dragon Scale is identical to the Full Plate Mail +2 from ToB. And we're talking about a game where you had to go to a special vendor to recognize elephant hide.
The latter would be better, honestly, and certainly seems more "good" as far as alignment goes, but for a fantasy environment, the former is a little more cool. Dragons wouldn't seem quite as kickass if you could see them plowing fields and building homes for humans every day.
On top of that, the metallic dragons have much shorter spans of time in which they go dormant. Chromatic dragons can sleep on their horde for up to decades at a time, but metallic dragons rarely sleep for more than a few years(though this increases as they grow older). Younger silvers in particular only sleep for maybe a year or two at most before becoming active again. So sightings and encounters with metallic dragons would be more likely to occur in one's lifetime than chromatics(where as accounts of encounters with chromatics would be memorable for their violence).
So there's certainly justification for the malus as a somewhat clumsy way of representing a certain amount of public taboo on wearing the skin of intelligent beings known for helping the younger races throughout history.
Aside from a lot of scripted events, there aren't many ways to mechanically represent that sort of social opposition. Since one of the primary bonuses of 2E Charisma is Reaction Adjustment, the way they handled it is a kind of sort of close approximation to what would happen at the actual table, only more broad in effect.
They're assassins. They're there to be hired. They specifically create channels to do so, in order for their business to flourish. That's not really the same as the kind of widespread influencing of public opinion you're talking about.
I also don't know where you're getting that these are all the assassins. You fend off like maybe ten assassins thoughout your journey. I don't think The Sword Coast was bereft of assassins by the time you left, because you'd singlehandedly slaughtered the entire industry out of existence.
If I were running a game where the players did this, I might rule that the PCs get a penalty to reaction adjustment among good-aligned factions and anyone friendly to metallic dragons in general. I might also plan out some interactions where the PCs' notoriety as slayers of good-aligned dragons comes into play just as I might do in another sense had it been evil dragons that the PCs were known for slaying. But in a CRPG, there's a limit to how nuanced such effects can be implemented, so a Charisma penalty seems like a relatively close fit.
Still creepy armor to have in the game though.
Couldn't you just say you found it on an already dead silver dragon?
If it's metallic it wouldn't rot I presume?
Regarding the Human Flesh +5, maybe people assume you skinned only Blackguards for it? Humans aren't always good, while Faerun silver dragons are after all.