Player A: lets hunt
Player B: sure
Player A: got cha?
Player B: nope...Sometimes players want to form a party so they can hunt or make a quest together, and low/1 CHA simply gets in their way. Situations like this are sometimes solved with going back and forth from Klamath to the Stranded Ship (just to give an example), or even dual-logging into a leader alt. The first solution means losing time in an activity that is just not fun, while the other is metagaming and feels close to cheating.
The following suggestions are some simple ideas that imho would smooth up some aspects of the game at least a bit:
Stackable Mentats effectIn 2238, Mentats increase a character's Intelligence and Charisma. Apart from the changes in low INT characters' speech, the really important effect is the CHA increase as it allows characters with relatively low Charisma to lead a slightly bigger party of players.
If the effects of Mentats were stackable, a characters with CHA 6 would be able to lead as many people as a character with CHA 10, as long as he has the resources to get enough mentats. It's basically about paying a bit so your non-specialized-leader character can lead a few more guys.
Mentats do not produce any effect that would give the character a (direct) advantage in combat, so I personally don't think it'd be back if we could swallow three mentats in a row for a nice +6 CHA bonus. 3 Mentats + 1 Beer and a guy with 3 Charisma reaches 10.
Items to increase Party PointsObviously not about leading other player characters, but NPCs... I leave the idea in case players who are more experienced in managing mercs/slaves/travellers are interested: what about adding some items that would increase our character's Party Points while being used? There could be different items with different pros and cons, for example a weak tribal helmet (I had something
like this in mind) or a weak "leader" armor like
the ones used by the vexillarii in New Vegas.
The concept behind this - the character is wearing special equipment that makes it easier to be seen and identified by their followers during combat, so they are able to lead more people (NPCs in this case, of course). However, this equipment would not offer good protection as it's made of leather and pieces of wood, bones, etc. Their stats would be similar to Leather Armor or L.A. MkII. The PP bonus should be attractive (but of course not exaggerated) to compensate the low protection.
I also thought about "war drums" (something like
this), an item that would give the character a lower PP bonus, and which the character had to only put in one of their active slots.
