The most charming character I ever had wasn’t charming at all. In fact, he was quite reprehensible, and people could sense that from a mile away.

In a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game way back in 2011 I played in a game run by Joe the Lawyer as the Game Master. It was a great campaign, and Duras was my magic user. I totally named him after a Star Trek character, sue me.

In the beginning of the campaign. He was rather fond of using the old spell, “Charm Person”, which is something that I think we kind of didn’t appreciate as much in the past when we were children. It’s permanent, just as long as you don’t push the person that you have charmed too far. It takes a lot of tact, but you can slowly but surely create an army of yes men. You just have to know how far you can push them before things break, and that got to be quite a game in and of itself.

I’ve seen it done by other people when I was running a game, and I’ve done it with some other characters. It’s one of those things I couldn’t believe we didn’t explore more as kids, but then again, we were hacking and slashing and happily killing goblins at that point, not thinking long-term conquest and power.There are many different games that use something similar, and any time the results or effects are permanent as long as certain conditions are met, it starts to become this really intriguing long game.

It couldn’t possibly have any analog here in the real world, could it? No, that would be crazy. How could that happen?