[RogerBW]

I miss the "Interview" skill from Cyberpunk 2020. (Also the "Persuasion, Lie & Fast Talk" skill but that's another thread.)

People who've been through real-life intensive questioning, or those who've had sufficiently good simulations of it in escape-and-evasion or similar courses, seem to be of a uniform opinion that everyone will talk eventually, but it can take a while, and the harder the interrogator pushes the more likely he is to get back fabulation. Social Engineering seems to get this close enough to right for game purposes.

There is certainly a genuine Interrogation subskill that one might call "careful interviewing", the sort of police technique that gets suspects to go over their stories repeatedly from slightly different angles while the questioner looks for inconsistencies. This doesn't have to be overtly aggressive, though it's never going to be friendly; saying "look, we're all tired, let's just run through it once more and then you can go" is certainly a valid tactic.

It's not something that's come up very often in my games, which is a bit surprising really. A lot of the time a malefactor is caught dead to rights, and no special interrogation is needed as I know he's entirely happy to save his own skin. Such NPCs should probably fabulate more.