Tact is not something that many of my characters have had over the years, occasionally, but they’ve tended to be very direct. I wonder why.

Having a high natural charisma or the ability to be persuasive doesn’t always indicate tact, and some situations must be handled delicately.

In our turn-of-a-new-leaf Call of Cthulhu campaign, one would never accuse my character, Terence McSweeny, of tact. Far from it. However, his counterpart, Alfred Smalls, was a master of it.

This didn’t mean that he never spoke his mind. He certainly did, but he was able to defuse situations and prevent things from escalating on more than one occasion. He seemed to have an knack for it.

I don’t know what it said on his character sheet, but I do know how he got played.

He wasn’t necessarily somebody you would associate with being a master of social situations. He certainly wasn’t, but he did have the ability to say some pretty outlandish things to people and have it sound somewhat rational.

Eventually, he got thrown in the insane asylum for a while, but that’s another story.