Resistance to Sex Appeal

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

A book dedicated to Social Engineering would seem the place to write such rules. I would even go so far to say that if the book were to lack such rules or only feature vague suggestions that boil down to 'use a Quick Contest, but possibly with modifiers for X or Y', I wonder what is in it.

A book called GURPS Social Engineering needs to be much more like GURPS Martial Arts than GURPS Fantasy. It needs to be dense with innovative new rules that make social engineering focused adventures equally interesting and mechanically distinct as combat focused ones.

Believe me, 90% of the book is exactly that. And there are several general frameworks for using one social skill to aid another social skill, starting with the complementary skills mechanic from GURPS Action. But the main focus is on interactions between individuals, or between small groups, or of a single individual with an organization. That material used up most of the room in the book, including the pages that were added between the first and final drafts.

Bill Stoddard

[Edges]

Originally Posted by gjc8

Of course they're just as susceptible to Sex Appeal as other people. They're also just as susceptible Fast-Talk and Charisma. But it's much harder to convince them to have sex. This is a vital distinction.

Sex Appeal is about more than just sex. It's about using sexual attraction to earn a favor. It CAN be used to get sex, but it can also be used to convince a guard to let you through a security checkpoint, or a priest to let you sleep in the church on a cold night, or a soldier to let slip confidential information during a barroom conversation.

Right.

Originally Posted by gjc8

Sex is just another favor. It's a much harder favor to get from someone with Vow: Chastity, because they're much more reluctant to give it. Just like it would be harder to get a soldier with Fanaticism to betray his duty. Or to convince a victorious opponent with Bloodlust to spare your life.

I think we agree with each other. My point is that if you want to be immune to Sex Appeal, you buy the advantage not the disadvantage.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Believe me, 90% of the book is exactly that. And there are several general frameworks for using one social skill to aid another social skill, starting with the complementary skills mechanic from GURPS Action. But the main focus is on interactions between individuals, or between small groups, or of a single individual with an organization. That material used up most of the room in the book, including the pages that were added between the first and final drafts.

Bill Stoddard

Here's hoping you've succeeded with that.

A book that did this would probably become the most important book in my GURPS library and a powerful argument for those not playing GURPS to change over.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Edges

My point is that if you want to be immune to Sex Appeal, you buy the advantage not the disadvantage.

Well not according to the author of the book on the topic.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Icelander

As for the difficulty of writing rules for small-unit tactics, I refer you to GURPS Tactical Shooting. There are a lot of new rules there. One of the problems with the playtest manuscript, though, was that it was heavy on 'this is how things work in the real world' and much lighter on having these things have game effects. That was fixed during playtest and the result is one of the finest game books I've seen.

I would say that Tactical Shooting has almost no rules for small unit tactics. The (valuable) section on small unit tactics adds rules for turning corners and a little more for entering through doors. Otherwise it talks about how to use and represent small unit tactics under existing combat rules. (And the turning a corner rules don't actually do anything as best I can tell.)

What it has are a lot of rules that enrich the rule systems that are relevant to small unit tactics.

[Edges]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Well not according to the author of the book on the topic.

I guess not. But I never said it wasn't a house rule.

[Edges]

Originally Posted by whswhs

You completely did not communicate that.

Nor did I communicate the opposite.

Originally Posted by whswhs

That in itself is not a problem. In fact I would never tell a player, "Your character can't break his marital vows." If the character had such a Vow, and was tempted to break it, and the player roleplayed the struggle with temptation and the surrender and the regret, I might well give extra eeps.

Me too. :)

On the other hand, if the character just bounced into bed with everyone who asked, I would start taking away eeps for "You took the disad but you didn't roleplay it. It's not free points!"

It's not free points if you suffer from a nervous breakdown every time. Just as Cannot Kill isn't free points even though it doesn't strictly prevent you from killing people.

We might differ in that I would not accept a simple successful Influence roll as good enough reason for someone with a Vow to break it. Influence rolls are basically for short-term persuasion and agreements; if you take a Vow seriously you don't make a short-term decision to break it . . . that's the same thing as not having a Vow, not really. I might look at it otherwise if the person roleplayed the reluctance to break the Vow, and the decreased rolls based on the Influence roll penalty, and the exploitation of those decreases by the seducer . . . in other words, if it were played out as a real fight and not a simple Quick Contest.

What is reason enough to have a PC act is something I'll leave up to the player. I can see a player saying, "Yeah, I've got a margin of failure of 9 here. I think it's better to sleep with him and suffer the guilt than to be at -9 when playing him in chess in 20 minutes because my character is plagued with sexy thoughts. Besides, it's kinda cool to take one for the team. And if I don't win, they'll surely kill us all."

I also don't believe that how seriously someone takes something will translate directly into how well they are able to resist going against it. I might take courage very seriously and still be a coward. I may take my VoC to be the most serious thing in my life and still be lousy at maintaining it. In fact I know people like this. They get so bummed out every time they screw-up (no pun intended) that if they were a GURPS character, I would have no problem allowing them the points for the disadvantage.

But I agree, in many cases, I would want to see it played out like a real fight and not just a Quick Contest. I think your assumption that I wouldn't is what led to our misunderstanding.

A Vow should make it hard to act against the Vow. The struggle with yourself over whether to give in should be like the struggle of the alcoholic to put the whiskey away unopened. Would you call it good roleplaying if an alcoholic just put the bottle away whenever his friends made their Influence rolls?

Bill Stoddard

I have allowed Influence rolls from party members to give a bonus to the alcoholic's rolls to resist his addiction. It gives meaning to, "What!? You left him alone? But there's a whiskey bottle in there." I think thy all roleplayed it rather well. In fact IIRC, after some time the alcoholic eventually ended up only scoring a flat success after bonuses from the party and his player decided that that was close enough to binge anyway. He had a flair for the dramatic. It made it somehow more meaningful that he finally caved after so much help from his friends. Much fun was had by all.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Here's hoping you've succeeded with that.

A book that did this would probably become the most important book in my GURPS library and a powerful argument for those not playing GURPS to change over.

Well, you will have to judge for yourself when you see it.

What you were asking for is like asking for rules for combination moves and multi-person tactical handoffs in GURPS Martial Arts. And yes, there were some. But GURPS Martial Arts was building on a basis of general purpose rules and maneuvers that took up three chapters of the Basic Set, and that already defined many different ways to roll dice: feints, all-out attacks and defenses, acrobatic dodges, moving and attacking, yadda yadda. The Basic Set had a few pages here and there on social interaction. So to have a foundation for combination moves and rehearsed cons and the like, Social Engineering needed to create an expanded vocabulary of social interaction moves and to distinguish more clearly among what was already implied by the Basic Set rules. And then it between it needed to define social maneuvers. What you wanted wasn't even the frosting; it was the decorative "Happy Birthday Icelander!" on top of the frosting. And you get both general principles and a few examples.

If it's any encouragement to you, I myself have been running games with high-intensity social interaction for decades, including some where the social interaction made up 90% of the play. I learned new things about GURPS social mechanics, and figured out new things about socially interactive gaming, while writing this book. The playtesters were a tremendous help, bless their black refractory hearts.

Bill Stoddard

[Icelander]

Bill, to better clarify what I'm talking about, I should probably elaborate.

You made the point that a single QC of Influence skill vs. Will ought to be unable to completely change the outlook of a single character. I agree with this point, by the way.

On the other hand, I disagree that Mind Control or other supernatural Powers are the only way to cause someone to act contrary to his principles. Going by fiction, psychological research and personal experience, it is possible for Influence skills to have such dramatic effects as to cause someone to violate his Vow of Chastity, to cause a Fanatic to turn his back on the cause or even to gradually corrupt a decent ruler until he becomes a black-hearted tyrant. The key difference from uses of Influence skills as they are presented in the Basic Set that this is not a single act, but a sustained campaign of social manipulation that requires a lot of time, effort, skill and preparation. You have to know your target, tailor your approach to him and strive to control as much of his environment as possible.

Such uses of Influence skills are the core of what real-world Social Engineering is about. Realistically, a single QC of Fast-Talk is probably not going to get you handed a huge sum of money in exchange for a title to the Golden Gate bridge. Any use of Influence skill to obtain something to which the target attaches enormous import, usually including a lot of money, is going to be a sustained effort requiring more than a single lie.

As such, I don't consider it icing on the cake for GURPS Social Engineering to have rules for sustained uses of social skills for more dramatic results than a single QC. I consider it a core purpose of the book.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

On the other hand, I disagree that Mind Control or other supernatural Powers are the only way to cause someone to act contrary to his principles.

Never said that they were. What's distinctive about them is that you apply them with a single Quick Contest based on raw psychic or magical power against the Will of the target. It's like the difference between carefully planting demolition charges to blow open a door and "Hulk smash!"

Going by fiction, psychological research and personal experience, it is possible for Influence skills to have such dramatic effects as to cause someone to violate his Vow of Chastity, to cause a Fanatic to turn his back on the cause or even to gradually corrupt a decent ruler until he becomes a black-hearted tyrant. The key difference from uses of Influence skills as they are presented in the Basic Set that this is not a single act, but a sustained campaign of social manipulation that requires a lot of time, effort, skill and preparation. You have to know your target, tailor your approach to him and strive to control as much of his environment as possible.

Such uses of Influence skills are the core of what real-world Social Engineering is about. Realistically, a single QC of Fast-Talk is probably not going to get you handed a huge sum of money in exchange for a title to the Golden Gate bridge. Any use of Influence skill to obtain something to which the target attaches enormous import, usually including a lot of money, is going to be a sustained effort requiring more than a single lie.

As such, I don't consider it icing on the cake for GURPS Social Engineering to have rules for sustained uses of social skills for more dramatic results than a single QC. I consider it a core purpose of the book.

Well, it wouldn't take an entire book to explain reaction rolls and Influence rolls, either. A lot of the book is about mechanics for using other rolls to better the odds. There's also an entirely new mechanic for rolls that represent seeking long-term trust. And there's material specifically on dealing with complex organizations in various ways— the sort that might need to be circumvented to get access to something big.

We probably didn't cover everything. But it's as comprehensive as the playtesters and I could make it.

Bill Stoddard