[quote="Fallout Wiki]Charisma is one of the Primary Statistics in the SPECIAL character system. It represents a combination of appearance and charm. A high Charisma is important for characters that want to influence people with words. Modifies NPC reactions, and Barter prices. [/quote]
What Abilities/Skills/Traits should be attained through the Charisma attribute?

Persuade- Open a dialouge with non-hostile NPC and attempt to make them see your point of view, you may be able to convince the NPC to unlock a door for you, give you information, or even fight by your side.
Call Truce- You wave the white flag of surrender and attempt to open a dialog with your enemy. Instead of having a set dialouge with random NPCs, your given a very basic list of choices that will result in a radomized voice statement: Intimidate, Charm, Beg, Bribe, Reason, Seduce
INTIMIDATE- Best used when your oponent is weaker than you, a stronger oponent would just crush you
CHARM- Best used when your oponent is mostly ambivelant, and has no deep seeded hatred of you.
BEG- Best used when your oponent is a big ol' softie, but they might demand that you..
BRIBE- Attempt to offer your oponent something of Value to spare your life
SEDUCE- As in the original Latin Meaning, "To lead Astray". With Temptation and Enticement

This is by far one of the attributes I thought I would never use, but one day I got the idea to make a James Bond type of Character in FO1 and I have been using charisma ever since.

Haha, I love some of your ideas for the attribute though. Always is fun to deceive in the world of Fallout.

I loved charisma with my characters in Fallout. Interesting idea for use in the MMO. Just not sure how useful it would be for a player to be able to do that. Now if an Enemy NPC randomly did that, that'd be kind of cool.
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What would be absolutely great if your CHAR value would influence your character customization options.

In example, a CHAR of 1 will only unlock imperfect facial traits like zits and cross-eyes etc. missing teeth, hunchback nose - where a char of 10 would unlock every possible option (nice smoothy skin, all that)

Ghouls ofc get a -2 to char to start with , maybe a nice boost to rad res Frank "Not even cockroaches kill their own species Fred".
Fred "Well Frank, Cockroaches can't carry guns, now can they".

Charisma in Fallout thus far has mostly yielded only non-combat options. I like the idea of having your Speech skill expanded to include combat roles. It could prove to be a life-saver/party-saver to have a smooth talker with you in a firefight, because you could start losing the fight, and someone has to talk your way out of it. I think something along those lines would be a welcome addition. And not only the chance of success in the dialogue itself would be based on the 'designated bullsh***er', but the very chance that you could be even given 'any last words' could depend on the highest charisma character in the party. *shrug* I dunno maybe that'd be a bit silly.

I also think that charisma should open up some legitimate aggressive combat bonuses, such as having some of the actions you mention activate automatically (namely intimidation). The higher my charisma, the better my chances of successfully driving you into a freezing fear-inspired trance or causing you to panic and drop some of your loot, and then running off into the hills (you should still get xp as though you killed them if you successfully scare them off). Scary looking characters/critters like Ghouls, Super Mutants and Deathclaws, although having penalties to their Charisma stat, should get a bonus to just their intimidation rolls for the sake of just making sense. On the other hand, who's gonna run away from a molerat?

Some perks for combat based on charisma would be nice. I already posted stuff like this but I'm a monumental dork so I'm gonna post some more anyway.

"Born Leader" Your party has an additional ##% to their chance to resist intimidation.

"Team Player" If you and a party member are using the same type of weapon, you both get ##% to accuracy.

"Go to Guy/Girl" Allies below 50% health will gain ##% to their damage resistance if standing within ## feet of you.

"Father/Mother of Lies" In random encounters, you have a ##% chance that an enemy will betray their allies to fight by your side. They will eventually part ways with you and remain neutral (unless you shoot them in the back).

"All Talk and No Shakes" Whenever you would suffer withdrawal from a chem, you can attempt a charisma check to 'will power' your way past the negative effects. This only lasts until the next time you would get the shakes, though.

"Criticism" You now gain 1/2 your charisma score to your critical hit table. This is in addition to your normal luck bonuses.

Anyway. You get the idea. I know charisma is supposed to MAINLY be used in non-combat, dialogue-driven gameplay sequences, but having a handful of combat roles for it would help balance it out I think. If nothing else, to add style points to combat with charisma characters. There has consistently been more fighting in Fallout games than talking, even when you go through the game as a speech character. So a little boost would be nice. Key word 'little'. But noticable.

I like your ideas, keep em' coming

I think it's important for every SPECIAL to have value. So how to make Charisma a useful stat?

1. What if Charisma affected the aggro range of mobs? Perhaps it would not have the same result on every type of encounter... I mean does a Deathclaw care how purdy you are? But it would perhaps make more sense for a human with a high Charisma to be able to get closer to a raider before the raider decided to attack? Might be some possibility here for high Charisma people to be better pullers in certain situations?

2. Tied to 1, what if people with higher Charisma have a lower chance to get adds if they pull a group?

3. Perhaps Charisma can affect weapon skills , combat abilities which are more crowd control in nature (i.e. using concussion grenades, smoke bombs, lights to distract encounters as opposed to dealing damage). Maybe also as the ability to modify taunting / detauting?