Hey guys.
I'am looking to create a Gnome Sorcerer of whom has a very strong personality and spirit (i.e great at spell casting) yet is somewhat anti social, bad at telling lies and lacks charisma in a social sense.
How would one go about representing this?
Mabye have his Charisma score of normally 17 but give him a penality to this score when rolling for skills like Bluff and Diplomancy?
That is exactly how I would RP that. Awesome Charisma as a base score, but only puts one rank (if any) into all of the associated social skills.
Far more easy to do that with an Int based caster, but I think if you *actually* played him as such it could be quite an interesting character to play/be in a session with.
How about a trait house rule like this?
Spiritual Charisma: Your high charisma stems more on your strong personality and inner spiritual power rather than on your power to persade, lead or bluff. To represent this when rolling for Bluff and Diplomancy checks your Charisma modifier counts as 2 less than normal. I.e If your modifer was normally +2, it would be +0 for these checks.
Just don't put ranks into the applicable skills, and you won't be good at them. Ranks matter a whole lot more than your base ability score ever will.
And if you want your magic to be hard to resist, take Spell Focus.
Use the Sage wildblooded archetype which uses INT to cast and dump CHA? Especially if your DM will let you get a +2 to INT instead of +2 to CHA, I would :D
Or Celestial Wildblooded use Wis instead of Cha.
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I don't think any GM is going to give you flack for taking a self-imposed RP penalty to social skill rolls.
I had a character with above average Charisma that was not interested in social skills either. I didn't give him any ranks in social skills because he had no intention of using them. He simply told the truth and gave facts.
Me: Do this or I will punch you in the face.
DM: Roll intimidate.
Me: I'm not trying to intimidate him. I'm simply telling him that if he doesn't do this, that I will punch him in the face. He can do with that information whatever he likes.
DM: He tells you "Go suck an egg, I don't want to do that!"
Me: I punch him in the face.
DM: Initiative...
I had bonuses to Social Skills because of my Charisma and even a bonus to certain situations granted by the DM because of my reputation, but had no interest in using them. My character was of the "I'm going to tell you how things are going to be and it would be in your best interest to agree with me" school of thought.
Edit:
Interestingly enough, I was the leader of the party (not the face) because the other characters respected my guy's honesty and he even had some very loyal troops once he got Leadership.
I don't see why you couldn't intentionally fail a skill check in the way you can intentionally fail a save.
Alternately, totally max out Bluff (or Perform acting) but only use those skills to be abrasive in social situations. As to lies, just because you CAN tell lies doesn't mean that you WILL, or sarcasm might be this guy's favorite form of communication.
"Oh, yeah, of course our crazy evil barbarian won't chew your ear off if you tell us the information. We'll let you go with all of your equipment, too."
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I don't think any GM is going to give you flack for taking a self-imposed RP penalty to social skill rolls.
Your fellow party members may though. I was in a game with a player who was playing a "pacificist cleric". He had a bunch of self-imposed disadvantages, but didn't gain any benefits. It made fights tougher than they should have been and the character was one of two which died in a nasty fight a few weeks later.
We're talking about social skills here. As long as he makes it known that he isn't going to be the party face from the get go, he should be fine. Nobody gets on to the barbarian with the int and cha of 7 because nobody expects him to be the face...