I would like to create a character with social phobia or at least an extreme introvert but i don't really know how i should distribute the stats for that(Despite having social phobia myself).
Because i'm going for a wizard i want a high intelligence stat but i'm kinda uncertain about charisma and wisdom, should i put my low numbers in both of them, just charisma, just wisdom? I would appreciate some thoughts from the community, thanks in advance.
The Stats can be in any distribution you would want. The fact that the PC would have the ability to be successful if they chose to is not the point of your character. There is a disconnect within the PC that is keeping them from realizing their potential in the way the world sees them. You would need to find the source of the difficulty. Do they feel all eyes are on them all the time? Are they afraid of failure? Are they self conscious of their appearance? What causes the anxiety?
I see this as a pure role play element. perhaps the PC can grow through the anxiety that is hampering them, perhaps not. The struggle of how to deal with it and still succeed is the challenge. Anyone with an IRL social anxiety would need to conquer their situation each day, even each moment, to be successful. Sometimes you fail but hopefully more times you succeed. This perseverance of overcoming anxiety has less to do with the Stats and more to do with mood, determination, and support. Perhaps as your PC grows more comfortable with the party they will be able to relax around them and feel better about themselves to open up to them. Strangers of any type should still make them nervous as well as many other new experiences outside of their control.
I think being in control would be a comfort to them. I don't know how you would want to play that. It may even be counter intuitive for your PC to be an "Adventurer". They would need a very good reason to be outside of their comfort zone so regularly.
I would like to create a character with social phobia or at least an extreme introvert but i don't really know how i should distribute the stats for that(Despite having social phobia myself).
Because i'm going for a wizard i want a high intelligence stat but i'm kinda uncertain about charisma and wisdom, should i put my low numbers in both of them, just charisma, just wisdom? I would appreciate some thoughts from the community, thanks in advance.
Charisma is the social skills attribute while Wisdom is how attentive, observant, and perceptive your character is. I think you can be a high Wisdom character and still be socially awkward. Make Charisma your lowest Attribute and then the rest of the characterization will be up to how you play them. How does your social anxiety manifest? Is it crippling shyness? Is it a grumpy and irritable facade to make people go away? Is it awkward staring and seemingly unrelated, if insightful, statements?
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Contrary to what some people might say, I think you might go both ways. Social Phobia is how you perceive the exterior, but that doesn't mean you are no charismatic to others. There are some introverts that still captivate people without any effort.
If that's the case, I can see someone with low wisdom that is unable to perceive how people actually see them and is always thinking bad things about its social interactions, when, actually, people do enjoy them and can even be persuade by them in one way or another.
Another way, with Wis higher and Cha lower, you could play it like cold and distant that simply doesn't connect to people and, thus, is very distant - but is still very perceptive and can read people decently, despite not connecting socially.
Or you could even have both low, being someone that is so disconnected with others that is almost in a total different wave length as other creatures and is unable to perceive its surroundings, while being extremely distant.
In the end, it really depends on how you wanna play and there is no way you can go "wrong".
I agree with WilsonJ. I don't think stats need to reflect this at all. You can have someone with high WIS (hyper-perceptive) and high Charisma (super chatty, loveable) who just cannot stop talking because they're nervous around people. You can have a low WIS/CHA character (unobservant, grouchy) who is uncomfortable around people because they're used to living alone. And you can have combinations of low/high or even average stats that show another facet of social anxiety.
I once played a druid with severe shyness. Had trouble looking people in the eye, was a selective mute because she didn't like bringing attention to herself by talking, relied on her twin to translate what she was feeling and to bail her out of overwhelming social situations. She had a high WIS and average CHA...and ended up being the most influential and captivating member of the party because she was so gentle and insightful. Just like in life, there's all kinds of people in D&D, so don't feel limited by the numbers on your sheet. :-)
I've had many people tell me that I am a good public speaker even though it terrifies me and I hate every second of it. You don't need to dump WIS to play a character with Sunlight Sensitivity and you don't need to dump CHA to play someone who is not comfortable around strangers. At the risk of sounding "woke," having a disorder does not equate to being weak.
If you have social phobia and want to RP someone with social phobia, just make them like you'd make anyone and then have them make the same social decisions you would.
This to me sounds like it should be 100% a roleplay characteristic, and you shouldn't worry too much about how it effects your stats. After all, charismatic performers (such as actors) still get stage fright despite having what we might call a good "charisma score", and some people irl with what we might call a "bad charisma score" (quiet, unassuming, mild-mannered, shy) aren't all absolutely lonely and friendless.
I would say your charisma "stat" doesn't quite determine a character's feelings about a certain activity, regardless of how good or otherwise they might be at it.
As a wizard, there's not a lot of demands on your charisma stat anyways, but that isn't to say even that it *must* dump it to play true to your character, you can just but optimize it as much as you would your INT or DEX, and you were probably doing that already.
Alright, thank you all for the various thoughts and ideas, that helped a lot.
I just have my strange perspective and while i have problems with people i'm still a DM and roleplayer. My Problem is that i can never really read people, that's why i had the idea with a low wisdom stat.
I'm thowing +1 into the "it's not stats, it's roleplay" pot. I am also crap at being social, tent to not want to go out and tend to want to leave. But I consider myself charismatic and inevitably end up being the life of the party or the outspoken one in the group.
Fears, Phobias and that sort of thing just comes under roleplay - there simply isn't a stat for them.
Alright, thank you all for the various thoughts and ideas, that helped a lot.
I just have my strange perspective and while i have problems with people i'm still a DM and roleplayer. My Problem is that i can never really read people, that's why i had the idea with a low wisdom stat.
I wouldn't dump WIS simply because you want to mechanically reinforce "poor reads" (so suboptimal insight). What is the character's non-social situational awareness? That's WIS derived perception. What about animal handling, medicine, and survival? Those are all skills you're willing to compromise because you really want a mechanical resolution to social phobia? As others have pointed out, you _could_ do that, but it's sorta missing the forest for one tree. The ability scores, while some try to track them to biological IRL performance and someone probably has done a table comparing WIS/CHR to EQ (for whatever worth that is), but these ability scores are broad brushes. Just don't take a proficiency in Insight.
CHR you could neglect too if you wanted some sort of lack of social "force of will" which is really what CHR is about.
If you or your DM have access to it, you could also not try to intentionally compromise the character's stats, but instead have the phobia handled under the fear and stress rules in Van Richtens Guide to Ravensloft. If your character avoids being the party face, this won't often be in effect, though it could be tested at Wizard conclaves, official inquiries where you must testify, stuff like that. This would make the character's phobia "in play" only when the specific phobia trigger is before the character.
As a DM who does take player sensitivities and personal histories seriously, I'd probably want to talk to you about how you want this phobia to play out. Basically, is this phobia something you want addressed in game (given this thread, I'm guessing yes) and if so how often? Is your character presenting social phobia because you're more comfortable playing and relating to a character that behaves more "like you?" Are you thinking of the game as quasi/pseudo "exposure therapy" where you see the character confronting and developing ways of managing the phobia? How comfortable are you with the DM "exploiting" the phobia say in magical dreams sequences that confront characters with their fears and the like." I'm not asking you to answer them here, as I'm not your DM. But keep in mind a DM on the sensitive to sensitivities side of the GM spectrum will likely want more info before putting a mechanical effect addressing a phobia in play. On the other hand there are DMs of the more exploitive mindset (it's not a popular mindset in modern TTRPG play but it's a mindset that exists) that will mine character sheets for "weaknesses," especially mechanical vulnerabilities in some conflation of adversarial sadism and "being challenging." I guess what I'm saying is, make sure you trust your DM before literally putting your personal vulnerabilities in play. TTRPGs _can_ be a literally wonderful place for a player to explore themselves through a player character proxy, but I would definitely say that's not a table universal across the hobby.
So, if I were going to go the phobia route with my character, I would go all-in on a low Wisdom score. The ability to resist fear-based spells and other effects is tied DIRECTLY to Wisdom, in most cases. If you want your character's susceptibility to anything fear-based to come into play where the dice are concerned, I would make Wisdom a dump stat.
I guess the sticking point for me is that having a low WIS implies that it's just the way you're built: you are inherently cowardly. I don't see phobias that way. Rather they are a mindset or a disorder that is acting upon you but not defining you. They can be momentarily or permanently overcome, which shows that your potential capability is greater than where the phobia is holding you. Stats are who you are at your core; roleplay is who you are today. This kind of thing falls firmly in the latter camp for me.
I would do it a different way that is not in the core rules, I would say you have disadvantage on all skills and tasks in front of people as defined by your social phobia. So if you are being watched by a group of people when casting an attack spell it would be at disadvantage as described by your condition. If you define it in a lesser way then define how it affects the PC and what triggers it.
Note: if it is an NPC you can do a lot more as you the GM control the action and narrative, the NPC can fail or succeed as necessary based on how you run your game. If you are trying for a PC then concrete flaws can sometimes become very problematic in game and for the rest of your group.
Alright, thank you all for the various thoughts and ideas, that helped a lot.
I just have my strange perspective and while i have problems with people i'm still a DM and roleplayer. My Problem is that i can never really read people, that's why i had the idea with a low wisdom stat.
Id hesitate to dump WIS purely off of conflating the WIS stat with just one of the skills under its umbrella (Insight, i.e. reading people).
Take Sherlock Holmes as he's portrayed (like or dislike) in Sherlock. He's crap at social situations, misses social cues when they're directed towards him or people close to him, and he either doesn't pay attention or doesn't care about the feelings of others, all implying a low (Wisdom) Insight score, you would think. However, he can notice minute details after only being exposed to them once and make intricate observations based off them, he can read people's reactions and their thoughts based off their facial expressions (when it comes to interrogations and not social situations) down to their microexpressions. He has an in-depth knowledge of medicine (Wisdom), great with dogs (Animal Handling, wisdom), and this never happened in the show but you get the sense that if he was ever chased through he wilderness by someone hunting him down, he'd probably be pretty good at avoiding being seen and finding sustenance (Survival, Wisdom).
So you might be tempted to equate low social ability with low wisdom, but in fact what you have is someone who's selectively* bad at Insight, and therfore social situations. Still quite competent at most WIS related skills.
*not selectively in that they've chosen to be bad at Insight, but selectively in that they are bad at insight in select contexts. As this is rather more nuance than the game system is meant to simulate-- being sometimes good at something and sometimes bad at it depending on the situation-- that's mostly why it falls into more of a roleplay category. Otherwise you're potentially closing a lot of doors on yourself unintentionally.
Alright, the title says it all.
I would like to create a character with social phobia or at least an extreme introvert but i don't really know how i should distribute the stats for that(Despite having social phobia myself).
Because i'm going for a wizard i want a high intelligence stat but i'm kinda uncertain about charisma and wisdom, should i put my low numbers in both of them, just charisma, just wisdom? I would appreciate some thoughts from the community, thanks in advance.
Homebrew: Magic items - Spells - Monsters
The Stats can be in any distribution you would want. The fact that the PC would have the ability to be successful if they chose to is not the point of your character. There is a disconnect within the PC that is keeping them from realizing their potential in the way the world sees them. You would need to find the source of the difficulty. Do they feel all eyes are on them all the time? Are they afraid of failure? Are they self conscious of their appearance? What causes the anxiety?
I see this as a pure role play element. perhaps the PC can grow through the anxiety that is hampering them, perhaps not. The struggle of how to deal with it and still succeed is the challenge. Anyone with an IRL social anxiety would need to conquer their situation each day, even each moment, to be successful. Sometimes you fail but hopefully more times you succeed. This perseverance of overcoming anxiety has less to do with the Stats and more to do with mood, determination, and support. Perhaps as your PC grows more comfortable with the party they will be able to relax around them and feel better about themselves to open up to them. Strangers of any type should still make them nervous as well as many other new experiences outside of their control.
I think being in control would be a comfort to them. I don't know how you would want to play that. It may even be counter intuitive for your PC to be an "Adventurer". They would need a very good reason to be outside of their comfort zone so regularly.
Charisma is the social skills attribute while Wisdom is how attentive, observant, and perceptive your character is. I think you can be a high Wisdom character and still be socially awkward. Make Charisma your lowest Attribute and then the rest of the characterization will be up to how you play them. How does your social anxiety manifest? Is it crippling shyness? Is it a grumpy and irritable facade to make people go away? Is it awkward staring and seemingly unrelated, if insightful, statements?
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Contrary to what some people might say, I think you might go both ways. Social Phobia is how you perceive the exterior, but that doesn't mean you are no charismatic to others. There are some introverts that still captivate people without any effort.
If that's the case, I can see someone with low wisdom that is unable to perceive how people actually see them and is always thinking bad things about its social interactions, when, actually, people do enjoy them and can even be persuade by them in one way or another.
Another way, with Wis higher and Cha lower, you could play it like cold and distant that simply doesn't connect to people and, thus, is very distant - but is still very perceptive and can read people decently, despite not connecting socially.
Or you could even have both low, being someone that is so disconnected with others that is almost in a total different wave length as other creatures and is unable to perceive its surroundings, while being extremely distant.
In the end, it really depends on how you wanna play and there is no way you can go "wrong".
I agree with WilsonJ. I don't think stats need to reflect this at all. You can have someone with high WIS (hyper-perceptive) and high Charisma (super chatty, loveable) who just cannot stop talking because they're nervous around people. You can have a low WIS/CHA character (unobservant, grouchy) who is uncomfortable around people because they're used to living alone. And you can have combinations of low/high or even average stats that show another facet of social anxiety.
I once played a druid with severe shyness. Had trouble looking people in the eye, was a selective mute because she didn't like bringing attention to herself by talking, relied on her twin to translate what she was feeling and to bail her out of overwhelming social situations. She had a high WIS and average CHA...and ended up being the most influential and captivating member of the party because she was so gentle and insightful. Just like in life, there's all kinds of people in D&D, so don't feel limited by the numbers on your sheet. :-)
I've had many people tell me that I am a good public speaker even though it terrifies me and I hate every second of it. You don't need to dump WIS to play a character with Sunlight Sensitivity and you don't need to dump CHA to play someone who is not comfortable around strangers. At the risk of sounding "woke," having a disorder does not equate to being weak.
If you have social phobia and want to RP someone with social phobia, just make them like you'd make anyone and then have them make the same social decisions you would.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
This to me sounds like it should be 100% a roleplay characteristic, and you shouldn't worry too much about how it effects your stats. After all, charismatic performers (such as actors) still get stage fright despite having what we might call a good "charisma score", and some people irl with what we might call a "bad charisma score" (quiet, unassuming, mild-mannered, shy) aren't all absolutely lonely and friendless.
I would say your charisma "stat" doesn't quite determine a character's feelings about a certain activity, regardless of how good or otherwise they might be at it.
As a wizard, there's not a lot of demands on your charisma stat anyways, but that isn't to say even that it *must* dump it to play true to your character, you can just but optimize it as much as you would your INT or DEX, and you were probably doing that already.
Alright, thank you all for the various thoughts and ideas, that helped a lot.
I just have my strange perspective and while i have problems with people i'm still a DM and roleplayer. My Problem is that i can never really read people, that's why i had the idea with a low wisdom stat.
Homebrew: Magic items - Spells - Monsters
I'm thowing +1 into the "it's not stats, it's roleplay" pot. I am also crap at being social, tent to not want to go out and tend to want to leave. But I consider myself charismatic and inevitably end up being the life of the party or the outspoken one in the group.
Fears, Phobias and that sort of thing just comes under roleplay - there simply isn't a stat for them.
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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I wouldn't dump WIS simply because you want to mechanically reinforce "poor reads" (so suboptimal insight). What is the character's non-social situational awareness? That's WIS derived perception. What about animal handling, medicine, and survival? Those are all skills you're willing to compromise because you really want a mechanical resolution to social phobia? As others have pointed out, you _could_ do that, but it's sorta missing the forest for one tree. The ability scores, while some try to track them to biological IRL performance and someone probably has done a table comparing WIS/CHR to EQ (for whatever worth that is), but these ability scores are broad brushes. Just don't take a proficiency in Insight.
CHR you could neglect too if you wanted some sort of lack of social "force of will" which is really what CHR is about.
If you or your DM have access to it, you could also not try to intentionally compromise the character's stats, but instead have the phobia handled under the fear and stress rules in Van Richtens Guide to Ravensloft. If your character avoids being the party face, this won't often be in effect, though it could be tested at Wizard conclaves, official inquiries where you must testify, stuff like that. This would make the character's phobia "in play" only when the specific phobia trigger is before the character.
As a DM who does take player sensitivities and personal histories seriously, I'd probably want to talk to you about how you want this phobia to play out. Basically, is this phobia something you want addressed in game (given this thread, I'm guessing yes) and if so how often? Is your character presenting social phobia because you're more comfortable playing and relating to a character that behaves more "like you?" Are you thinking of the game as quasi/pseudo "exposure therapy" where you see the character confronting and developing ways of managing the phobia? How comfortable are you with the DM "exploiting" the phobia say in magical dreams sequences that confront characters with their fears and the like." I'm not asking you to answer them here, as I'm not your DM. But keep in mind a DM on the sensitive to sensitivities side of the GM spectrum will likely want more info before putting a mechanical effect addressing a phobia in play. On the other hand there are DMs of the more exploitive mindset (it's not a popular mindset in modern TTRPG play but it's a mindset that exists) that will mine character sheets for "weaknesses," especially mechanical vulnerabilities in some conflation of adversarial sadism and "being challenging." I guess what I'm saying is, make sure you trust your DM before literally putting your personal vulnerabilities in play. TTRPGs _can_ be a literally wonderful place for a player to explore themselves through a player character proxy, but I would definitely say that's not a table universal across the hobby.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I guess the sticking point for me is that having a low WIS implies that it's just the way you're built: you are inherently cowardly. I don't see phobias that way. Rather they are a mindset or a disorder that is acting upon you but not defining you. They can be momentarily or permanently overcome, which shows that your potential capability is greater than where the phobia is holding you. Stats are who you are at your core; roleplay is who you are today. This kind of thing falls firmly in the latter camp for me.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I would do it a different way that is not in the core rules, I would say you have disadvantage on all skills and tasks in front of people as defined by your social phobia. So if you are being watched by a group of people when casting an attack spell it would be at disadvantage as described by your condition. If you define it in a lesser way then define how it affects the PC and what triggers it.
Note: if it is an NPC you can do a lot more as you the GM control the action and narrative, the NPC can fail or succeed as necessary based on how you run your game. If you are trying for a PC then concrete flaws can sometimes become very problematic in game and for the rest of your group.
Id hesitate to dump WIS purely off of conflating the WIS stat with just one of the skills under its umbrella (Insight, i.e. reading people).
Take Sherlock Holmes as he's portrayed (like or dislike) in Sherlock. He's crap at social situations, misses social cues when they're directed towards him or people close to him, and he either doesn't pay attention or doesn't care about the feelings of others, all implying a low (Wisdom) Insight score, you would think. However, he can notice minute details after only being exposed to them once and make intricate observations based off them, he can read people's reactions and their thoughts based off their facial expressions (when it comes to interrogations and not social situations) down to their microexpressions. He has an in-depth knowledge of medicine (Wisdom), great with dogs (Animal Handling, wisdom), and this never happened in the show but you get the sense that if he was ever chased through he wilderness by someone hunting him down, he'd probably be pretty good at avoiding being seen and finding sustenance (Survival, Wisdom).
So you might be tempted to equate low social ability with low wisdom, but in fact what you have is someone who's selectively* bad at Insight, and therfore social situations. Still quite competent at most WIS related skills.
*not selectively in that they've chosen to be bad at Insight, but selectively in that they are bad at insight in select contexts. As this is rather more nuance than the game system is meant to simulate-- being sometimes good at something and sometimes bad at it depending on the situation-- that's mostly why it falls into more of a roleplay category. Otherwise you're potentially closing a lot of doors on yourself unintentionally.