
Finoan |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

One, how did you manage to accomplish that? I'm not aware of any way of getting a -1 in more than one stat using the standard rules.
Two, it will probably be fine. The INT penalty will mean you have fewer skills trained. Lower CHA means that a bunch of skills won't be as effective.
So you probably won't be going for a Demoralize build. You might not have much to do when you aren't in combat fighting things.
But if all the campaign focuses on is combat, you should be fine.

SuperBidi |

My fellow brothers and sisters of Pathfinder I come seeking math advice.
If a fighter has a -1 in both intelligence and charisma does this pose a disadvantage if the fighter is not the face and not the knowledge guru?
Not much.
It depends on what you want to play. If you want to focus only on combat then you won't feel it. If you want to have some out of combat impact, it will make it slightly harder, but not greatly (as you will still have 3 Legendary skills even with such low intelligence). You should go for it if it's what you want. It's very hard in PF2 to fail at building a proper character.

Tridus |

It'll mean there's more noncombat encounters than usual where you have nothing to contribute, and probably makes you not good at using things like Demoralize in combat.
How hard that's going to hit will depend on how combat focused what you're doing is. An adventure that relies on a lot of skill challenges will probably give you problems. If it's a more straightforward combat scenario, you're fine.

![]() |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

The non-combat part of the game is pretty important. Skill challenges and such earn you a lot of loot and other rewards. And many skill challenges are designed so that multiple characters need to earn successes to get the best outcome. So, it's not just the skill monkey character that does all the work out of combat, or the face character that does all the talking.
As a martial, I think a solid approach is to pick one mental stat as your favorite, and put boosts in it an take the related skills. So in your case, pick up wisdom skills like Nature, Survival, Religion and Medicine.
If you can manage to get at least a +2 in it at level 1, and just increase it every five levels, that's good enough that you can contribute decently to various skill challenges.
---
The "every martial has one favorite mental stat" is a pretty smooth way to do things. Barbarians often like wisdom (nature skills) or charisma (intimidation and being a tribal leader). Rangers like their wisdom/nature skills. Swashbucklers of course go for the flashy charisma stuff. Fighters and rogues can go in any direction - intelligence works well with item Crafting and shield Repair. Champions get a lot out of charisma, since being obviously the chosen one of your deity is a good social starting point, but they also like having shields in good repair.

![]() |

I mean having a minus one is always a disadvantage.
Regardless, in your situation, it depends. But I'd imagine if you end up having to make a lot of varied skill checks, you'll probably be wishing you had that extra skill you lost to your negative int modifier.
You're also locked out of demoralise, basically, as you've not got much chance of succeeding, so if your party doesn't have someone doing that, you might struggle.

![]() |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Every class description has a list of things you might do in different situations.
During Combat Encounters...
During Social Encounters...
While Exploring...
In Downtime...
If you don't have a skill or ability to use in each of those situations, it helps if you at least have some idea of how to role-play it, how to fail forward or fail in a fun way, or how to use another skill to fill in, like using Athletics in place of diplomacy. "We could arm wrestle to decide who is right." or Athletics in place of Intimidation. "I can only hold this anvil over your head for so long, best you start talking fast." That could be a good way to aid someone else's Intimidation roll.