... and mine is CHA.
Greetings from the tabletop, where my very first D&D analogy comes into play!
Days like today make me really wish I had just listened to what mom had said all those years ago and invested more in my Diplomacy skill set. Oh sure DEX is the most flashy, STR is always useful, CON is handy when you're out for a night of drinking (pub crawl!), and INT is most useful for grad school itself, but having a good CHA score to bolster your people skills is something I've always considered to be less important.
No one has ever accused me of having tact. Just the opposite- people can almost always tell the moment I'm upset about something, or if I simply don't have the patience to deal with them at a given moment. Usually this works out well enough, because as people read that I don't want to be bothered, they leave me alone (also sparing themselves from incuring my impatience and/or scathing sarcasm). But that one unfortunate person that comes along and can't tell tends to ruin my whole day. Usually I end up displaying said impatience by coming off as a total bitch (not intentionally, I swear!), so the other person's day is pretty much ruined too. Misery does love company.
This is when having some sort of Diplomacy skills would really be useful.
I'll be honest: most characters I play (except for that chaotic evil one...) reflect my personality more or less accurately. Of course they all have certain traits augmented or diminshed to make them different characters, but mostly I play what I know: a snarky, standoffish rogue with a plethora of practical skills but always lacking a way with people. It makes me a very valuable member of any adventuring party when dungeon delving, solving puzzles, or committing burglaries, but when it comes time to ply people for information or schmooze our way onto a magistrate's good side, the whole party is really better off if I just stand quietly in the back, trying very hard not to filch something.
Days like today are a good reminder that I still need to work on my patience. I would never want to backtrack and retrain for better people skills (because gods know I need all the DEX I can get!), but maybe I should keep this in mind the next time I'm trying to figure out how to distribute my level-up points.
Until then, there's always Bluff checks!
