[Peter Knutsen]

Vicky talks a bit about having Influence skill rolls modify the outcome of Reaction Rolls.

That may well work, but while perusing the many long posts in this thread, another approach occured to me:

GURPS already has a precedent for treating some acquirable traits in a special manner, i.e. not handling them as skills. The two examples that come to mind are Combat Reflexes and Languages. Neither are at all handled in a skill-like manner, yet both are obviously inarguably acquirable, whereas the aquirability of almost all other non-social Advantages in GURPS is a matter for debate (and neither Combat Reflexes nor Languages are Advantages of a social nature).

So why not do the same with Influence skills?

Instead of treating them as actual skills, based off IQ or HT or PR, or floatable to any of those or to something else, treat them as Advantages. Price them as advantages. Apply approximated Limitations when necessary.

GURPS seems to say that +1 to Reaction Rolls costs 5 points.

Following from this, the Influence skills could be replaced with flavoured/aspected RR bonuses.

All of them get some sort of "Requires Active Usage" Limitation. Charisma, as a genuine advantage (probably inborn, rather than something you can learn), doesn't have this. It's automatic, always-on. These Influence skills-as-advantages would lack that.

That's not much of a Limitation, but still having it is flavourful. Maybe -10%.

Furthermore they're each applicable in different time frames. Sex Appeal is probably the fastest to use. Just a quick smile, and (depending on what you're posing as and who you're trying to impress) a wiggle or a swagger. Or a well-timed "wardrobe malfunction" (a male character "suddenly" ending up shirtless would not be seen as vulgar in most cultures. A second or two.

Diplomacy seems to me to be at the other end of the scale. Probably takes most of a minute for normal use. So bigger Limitatio0n there.

Intimidation is usually in-between, but GURPS IIRC has a provision for a bonus to Intimidation rolls if the chaacter can demonstrate superHuman ST. I'd say that if such a demonstration can be performed, it can be performed in a second or two, thus faster than an Intimidation attempt not based on extremely high ST.

Carousing usually takes some time (middle ground'ish), but occasionally all it requires is telling a very appropriate joke (not too rude, but still edgy enough) or actively including someone who's presently sitting at the outskirts of the drinking circle. I'd say either call it middle ground'ish, like most other Influence skill-advantages, or else divide up so you have quick uses (the two examples I've given) as well as slow uses (which probably takes even longer than Diplomacy - sit and drink and joke and swap stories, with the occasional dancing or flirting or the like, for many minutes).

So depending on skill speed, that could be a Limitation from -5% and up to -15% or even -20% (not going by RAW with these Limitations, but trying to maintain some fairly fine distinctions, and/or going by what sounds right).

Finally some uses are overt, others subtle. Many people object to overt attempts at manipulation, and by that I argely mean Sex Appeal and Intimidation, while subtle attempts at social manipulation are hard to "put one's finger on". Think of it in terms of asking a subtly manipulative character to stop being subtly manipulative: What specifically will you tell him to stop doing?

Overt sounds like maybe it should get a Limitation to reduce cost, but on the other hand overt manupulations have their own innate potential for backfires, so I think it's better just to have a very explicit +0% Overt modifier that doesn't change cost (hence the zero) but which is still very much present to remind the GM of the potential for fun complications.

Sex Appeal, of course, should be further Limited by Sexual Orientation Of Target (and to a large extent species as well, although we all know that mutual attraction can happen between Humans and Elves in most fantasy worlds, due to them having somewhat overlapping instinctive standards of beauty).

A character being more skilled at any of those can then be handled via buying several levels, e.g. several levels of Sex Appeal Advantage, or several levels of Intimidation Advantage. Sex Appeal skill tending to get better results ("Very Good") is handled via the levelled Sex Appeal learnable Advantage being cheaper than the others (due to its additional -?? Dependent On Sexual Orientation Limitation) and so players will tend to buy somewhat higher levels of that, compared to the others.

Is this better than the RAW? I don't know. But I'm not entirely happy with the whole letting players choose whether they want to take an RR or use an Influence skill. It's a very strange choice to make; it risks getting metagamey; and inexperienced players may well choose suboptimally relative to the abilities of their characters, which is a massive suspension-of-disbelief problem as characters would presumably be familiar with their own abilities since they've had them for years or even decades, and also there could be a blatant discrepancy between player-written backstory (in which the player has "written in" his conception of the character at being very skilled at one or two specific social skills) and actual play (where the game-mechanically clueless player plays his character in such a way that the character can not be said to be observably good at using those one or two specific social skills).

With this solution, social skills are still learnable, but now they affect Reaction Rolls directly instead of replacing them.

This solution does require, though, the removal of Charisma as a generic bonus to Reaction Rolls. It has to go away completely. One could either ditch Charisma from the system entirely, or else modify Charisma strongly. For instance one could make it a binary trait, similar to Language Talent, which reduces the cost of all Influence Skill Advantages, perhaps by 1 per level. That would be somwhat odd, since whereas there is an infinite number of Languages, the list of Influence Skill Advantages is very, very finite, and also very, very short. I think it could be made to work, though, and I'd recommend treating this binary Charisma as being an inborn trait, not learnable.

Charisma should still give bonuses to those social skills that haven't been replaced with Influence Skill Advantages, though. For those, I think Charisma could be treated like Voice, that is give a fixed +2 bonus, so that it is not levelled, and then priced accordingly, at perhaps 10 CP (which might well be fairly balanced for characters who have or want to buy a large number of levels of Influence Skill Advantages).