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Old 05-25-2014, 02:17 PM   #4
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: Influence Skills Modifying Reaction Rolls

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sindri View Post
It's also incoherent because it acts as if Reaction Rolls are a thing PCs do. They aren't, they're a thing GMs do. The GM rolls a Reaction Roll whenever he damn well wants, including when the PCs literally don't know of the NPC's existence.
He could, but it wouldn't mean anything. You make a reaction roll when the PCs are interacting with the NPC each time it matters how he responds. You could have rolled one before they met if you want, but as far as I can tell by the RAW it wouldn't matter what the result was, since you'd roll a new one the first time they cared what he did. And again each time they asked for something else. And in neither case would the fact the last roll was horrible not at all influencing the odds this next one will be great....

Reaction rolls (and influence skills) are quite blunt instruments. I'd hoped Social Engineering would do something about that, but it didn't really. A major rewrite (perhaps on the model of Control Points) would be interesting, but I don't know that it would be all that much better - social interactions are so multidimensional it's hard to flatten them to a single scale of a few named reaction levels.
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