[Basic] Skill of the week: Fortune-Telling

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Not

Here's a question: if fortune-telling is malarkey, why does it require specialization?

Because you need to know what the traditional malarkey is for your method in order to convince the believers you are doing it right. If you are making up your very own fortune telling method, you can use any specialization you want, but if you are using a deck of Tarot cards, and turn over Death, you might not want to tell your client it predicts it will rain tomorrow.

Personally I'd probably do that with a single skill and either Techniques or Skill Adaptations now, but required specializations is the older approach to the same thing.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Because you need to know what the traditional malarkey is for your method in order to convince the believers you are doing it right.

Quite true. There's a lot more to astrology, for example, than just knowing your birth date.

I like the comparison with the Elicitation technique. If you go that route, you'll still need an appropriate Professional Skill for the domain-specific knowledge if the character has a certain style. A used car salesman is not a Tarot reader.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

The skill would perhaps be better named "Cold Reading", though there's more to Fortune-Telling than that as described in Basic.

Whether or not it's part of Acting or Fast-talk seems to be a question of taste for skill granularity.

Actually the part that isn't Cold Reading is a specialty of Performance more than anything. There's often a good case for having an actual Cold Reading skill in an RPG for finding stuff out by looking at or briefly speaking with someone - which in GURPS terms might absorb some or all of Body Language, Detect Lies, Interrogation and Psychology, maybe a bit of Criminology and/or Forensics and the Empathy advantage, but turning it around to present the information to the client as a psychic prediction *isn't* going to be the main use of a skill like that.

[Terwin]

I am currently in a campaign that is just finishing up where my character has fortune telling, slight of hand, and Professional skill(Illusions).

He is a natural philosopher(aka early scientist before the scientific method) with a particular dislike for charlatans and those that are trying to take advantage of others.

(This is a world where originally only the uneducated believe in things like Magic, except that suddenly all sorts of fantastic things are being reported out near the borders. Of course this skeptical scholar turned out to have multiple levels of Magery, barely tolerates the term 'magic', and only because the party is in a distant land where he has no authority, so he bites his tongue and tries not to 'educate' the locals about the true nature of this 'energetic luminous aether' energy that has started suffusing his home kingdom and lets him do things he had previously though beyond natural law)

[RogerBW]

If I were designing GURPS from scratch, I think I'd make an explicit split between (1) the non-supernatural, cold and warm reading, etc., perhaps as an interpersonal skill, and (2) a supernatural ability which would be some type of magic and not dealt with by a pure skill at all.

But in both cases there needs to be some way of indicating familiarity with a particular style and set of props (astrology and tarot have very different ways of doing things). That might be a skill in itself, or the equivalent of a style perk.

And then you can lay performance on top of that…

If you get more sophisticated, you could have someone with genuine power who also needs the interpersonal skills because brutal predictions need to be shaded into something the client is willing to hear, or they won't get any benefit from them. But this is probably a subject for a novel rather than a game.

I recently mentioned on my blog that a character I'd like to play in a modern-magic campaign is a scamming "magician", with lots of practical psychology and nothing but contempt for his believing victims, who suddenly finds himself landed with real power.

This skill has shown up on three player characters in my files: a ritual magician in a Weird War II campaign (tarot is part of the expected trappings), a Russian elementalist in the same game (pyromancy is an expected skill in that tradition), and a hard-bitten space merchant captain who took Dream Interpretation for reasons that have never been clear to me.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

The skill would perhaps be better named "Cold Reading", though there's more to Fortune-Telling than that as described in Basic.

I agree that cold reading should've been emphasised more in the skill description (currently, it takes some explaining to ensure that you actually get information in your chat that will look like a supernatural discovery to the target). But I'm opposing the idea of renaming it to Cold Reading specifically because it would skew the skill in the other direction. Currently, when building a low-key fortune-teller, you can get by with a single skill for the main job; you also don't need to come up with a new Professional Skill. Just like Packing is enough for a caravan cargo handler, Falconry is enough for a falconer etc.
GURPS' pricing scheme is such that it would benefit from a finite skill list. Going into 'You need Acting, Fast-Talk, Occultism and Professional Skill (Cold Reading)'* is just another form of skill bloat (on the charsheet if not in the rulebook).

* == Hypothetical example somewhat exaggerated for emphasis.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

just another form of skill bloat

I'm with you there. Unfortunately, the large number of fine-grained skills is endemic. Cutting down the 200+ skills to a more manageable number would take a lot of editing. And I'm not sure what happens to the build points when you have fewer skills to buy.

Cold reading does seem like a straightforward Elicitation. The awkward part here is the Influence skill that's the base. Fast-Talk is the closest. The description as "talking people into doing things against their better judgement" doesn't quite fit (that's only one goal the cold reader might have), but that could be phrased more broadly.

Malloyd has a good point that the info-gathering part of the skill is already scattered among Body Language, Detect Lies, Interrogation, and Psychology, so those would need to be part of the overhaul as well. Perhaps lump the first three together under Interrogation and include cold reading there as well as just another style or Technique. That perhaps helps emphasize the mundane nature.

That still leaves a gap for representing knowledge of all the details of astrology, Tarot reading, etc. But that seems like a reasonable Hobby / Professional / Expert skill.

[Donny Brook]

Really this skill should not exist in mundane form.

Cold Reading should be a skill of its own or a technique of Interrogation, Body Language, Intel Analysis, or Detect Lies.

Doing readings for suckers should use Performance. (And the fairly special case of Astrology involves use of an easy specialization of Astronomy).

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

R(And the fairly special case of Astrology involves use of an easy specialization of Astronomy).

Except that almost everyone with any knowledge of Astronomy utterly refuses to have anything at all to do with astrologers.

[Not]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Except that almost everyone with any knowledge of Astronomy utterly refuses to have anything at all to do with astrologers.

Which TL are we talking about here?