[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Sindri

I personally don't keep any Storyteller or Storytelling system information but the most broad strokes in easy recall so for me it doesn't illustrate much.

Oh well, it was worth a try - many gamers in my circle find Storyteller-style descriptors easier to visualise / map onto their understandings of characters and events.

Originally Posted by Sindri

They're absolutely not approaches. Approaches in some sense conflict but charisma and influence are additive not alternatives and a lot of the time you can't even replace one with the other during a period of time because only one is a possible tool.

Reliance on raw Charisma, i.e. acting without deliberate adjustments to one's behaviour, in order to avoid upsetting the effects of natural charm, is very much in conflict with reliance on technique, the mastery of clouding people's minds by picking the right word for this specific situation. The two approaches are very much antithetical. Harmony versus Discipline. Performer versus Technician. Intuition versus Logic. It's like that.

Originally Posted by Sindri

You don't have to conceptualize what you are doing as pushing but there is no fundamental difference between pushing thought of as pushing and pushing not thought of as pushing because there isn't anything magical about social interaction.

My point about pushing is the use or invention of a technology to modify the process of social interaction. Propaganda is a commonly thought-about modern example. Consciously modifying your facial expression is a rarely talked-about ancient one.

Originally Posted by Sindri

I refuse the line! I haven't been capitalizing manipulation and I'm not talking about Social Engineering's use of the term. Influence skills are Influence skills.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Or refuse the agreement, or whatever it's better called.

Originally Posted by Sindri

That's not what I'm talking about.

Then maybe I lost the point, or it wasn't quite explicit enough for my eyes.

Originally Posted by Sindri

It doesn't matter. It's understood that there exist people who have leveraged social skill to get promoted in mostly non-social jobs and that sometimes people get promoted for one useful ability while lacking others.

Please give me the benefit of either assuming I'm not stupid or refraining from trying to snipe cheap rherotical points.

My point was that it was not automatically unethical for someone with strong social abilities to decide to leverage those into more social traits.

When I say 'Influence', I do not necessarily imply that it is always a bad thing. I do say that it results in the thing you note in the first of these three paragraphs.

Originally Posted by Sindri

It was never intended to be a branch, it was intended to bring to mind the sort of person whose social achievements are significantly buoyed by people who strongly agree with the positions that they espouse. That's the sort of thing people point to in an attempt to show that there were general forces that allowed the person to achieve what they did and that they thus could have been replaced by a number of people. Actual theories of the methods of history don't have anything to do with anything.

It still takes a lot of social effect to get those forces to help oneself.

Originally Posted by Sindri

They do, but they still end up with each level of strength adding like a tenth of a d6 of damage and that's just less perceptible than the previous table. You just put up with it because that's implicit in rescaling ST damage so that ten levels don't add as much damage.

If anything, it might be better to rescale the other way around - ditch the DR70 golden RHA, and recalibrate firearms damage round the sw/thr table.

Originally Posted by Sindri

The lowest level of appearance removes bad reactions and triples the chances of good reactions in my table.

Hmm. I guess you have more common Reaction Rolls than I do. A tripling from ½% to 1.9% or reduction from ½% to 0% is subtle but notable in combat, where you roll many times; for something that only gets rolled 1-3 times per character (most of the time), it's much harder to notice.
BTW, does it look right to you that even an Attractive character is only found to be attractive enough to consider a private date 1.9% of the time, and for anything more serious - never at all, except through active Influence on the attractive character's part? It doesn't to me.

Originally Posted by Sindri

One could make an aesthetic argument that other social traits should have a cap similar in magnitude to right sex appearance.

Well, they do have a cap. Reputation is capped at ±4. Voice at +2. Charisma is rather informally capped at +5 for normal humans (by real-world examples). Status can go up to 8 on Terra, but it's atypical to have PCs that high. Talents are normally capped at +4.

Originally Posted by Sindri

It's a good way to avoid meaningless anecdotes.

Interesting. Usually I'm the one who is asked to stop focusing on the typical/average and to look at the unusual, the PC-material sorts of people. But I guess a proper system should be able to handle both the average and the remarkable.

Originally Posted by Sindri

I prefer no bonus. There's no reason to bake anything else at all into the has-+1-to-skill-with-this-limited-list advantage. Frankly I'm not sure if I'm going to end up having talents at all either.

Hmm. An anti-talentist. I remember only one other one.
Well, I do find some of the alternative benefits quite flavourful and interesting. Being able to 'unbake' them out of package deals would certainly be nice.
Likewise, 'unbaking' Reaction Bonuses out of them would be nice too.

Originally Posted by Sindri

My primary aim here isn't nerfing the ease of hitting high reactions it's cutting down on the extremeness possible with +0 reactions, making the number of categories odd so there is balance between good and bad reactions and removing kludges that classes like potential combat use to make the reactions make sense. Making it harder to hit high reactions and thus making differentiation at high reaction bonuses is just a bonus and it's frankly rather tiresome that it's the part getting most of the attention.

Well, I guess you already heard my approach to removing extremeness of +0 reactions (if you missed it: rolling 1d+7 instead of 3d for characters who are super-average in their treatment of all sorts of people). About making the number of categories odd - maybe there's good in this; I'm not sure yet if it's worth the trouble, but the goal itself doesn't look to be harmful. I'm interested in hearing what you meant about treating combat differently and what other kludges you are talking about. Yeah, let's take a look at those issues.

Originally Posted by Sindri

We want to produce different flavours of specialists. The way we get there is by making them want all the traits.

I don't find 'everyone wants/takes(if able to) everything' to be more flavourful than 'here is A, B and C, and you can opt to have some combination of them or just focus on one, without hamstringing your character'.

Right now in the campaign I play in, there's the Charismatic and Talented Diplomat who mostly focuses on the Elicitation technique (my character), the eccentric and distant emergent AI who apparently bought off Low Empathy and is now engaging in tricks of rhetoric and sophistry and risk-benefit analysis to get what 'he' wants from people, the eye-candy whose social tactics are mostly very passive, and the kid whose ability to be socially okay despite Cluelessness are a mix Reaction Bonuses from being a talented engineer when talking business and an overall cuteness factor in all other areas. And this is a rather short list of possibilities. Doing it so that every social character will want Appearance and Charisma and skills and Reputation would, IMHO, reduce the diversity.

Hmmm, I see a new haggling addition. Gotta read that, a bit later.