3.5e Charisma Feats

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Charisma Feats

In D&D, Charisma is often what's called a “dump stat”: something that routinely gets assigned the lowest attribute score, when players are making up their characters. There are various reasons for this, but ultimately it boils down to the fact that D&D is still about going into dungeons, killing monsters, and taking their treasure [attr. Ryan Dancey, ca. 1999]. This is a generalisation, and it won't be true for all campaigns, but it's probably true for many of them.

The Charisma stat has two main uses in D&D:

1. It affects interpersonal relations via skills like Diplomacy and Bluff.
2. It governs spellcasting for sorcerers and bards (and a few others). Related to this is how it affects saving throw DCs for monster spell-like abilities.

Charisma does play a few other roles, besides these two. For instance, clerics need good Cha for turning undead, paladins add their Cha bonus to their saves, and undead use their Cha bonus instead of their Con bonus for Concentration skill checks. The uses listed above are most likely the main ones, though.

The first use isn't often a priority when much of the action in the game revolves around killing the other guy. The second use is irrelevant for characters other than sorcerers and bards. Taken together, this leads to the ubiquitous fighter (or ranger, or barbarian) with 8 Cha. Not only is Cha thus a superfluous stat, but it's counter to genre convention, where heroes — even the non-spellcasting ones — tend to have forceful personalities.

Here, then, are some feats to give Cha some relevance to the aforesaid mission of killing monsters and taking their treasure. They take the 3E slant of treating it as a semi-mystical “force of personality” stat, as opposed to measuring physical appearance, sociability or other psychological traits.

Those feats with [fighter] after the feat name can be taken as bonus feats by fighters. At the DM's option, all of these feats can also be taken as bonus feats by knights.

(Text above used with permission through the OGL, C. Hong Ooi 2004.

Table: Charisma Feats

Feat	Prerequisites	Benefit
Combat Presence	Intimidate Skill, Base attack bonus +6, Cha 13+	Intimidate foes in a radius around you.
Fortune's Favor	3rd level, Cha 13+	Reroll any one roll, per day.
Indomitable	Cha 13+, Base attack bonus +2	Gain +1 luck bonus to AC.
Unyielding Soul	4th level, Iron Will, Cha 13+, Base attack bonus +2, Indomitable, Con 13+	Take damage instead of the effect of a mind affecting spell
Fateful Strike	Str 13+, Power Attack, Indomitable, Cha 13+	Add +2d6 and +2 to hit (level) to one attack a round, while taking 1d6 damage, character level times per day
Fateful Strike (Variant)	Str 13+, Power Attack, Indomitable, Cha 13+	As Fateful Strike, but only Character Level / 4 + 1 times per day
Soul of Battle	Base attack bonus +9, Indomitable,Cha 15+	Gain +1 luck bonus on attack rolls.
Spirit of Fury	Base attack bonus +12, Iron Will, Str 13+, Power Attack, Indomitable,Cha 15+, Fateful Strike, Con 13+, Soul of Battle	Gain an additional +2d6 with your Fateful Strike.
Taunting Wit	Cha 15+, Bluff Skill	With a bluff, cause enemy to lose AC.