Social Skill Questions, Reparcelling and Rebalancing

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by johndallman

If you're in a campaign where you aren't a nomad, and have a reasonable expectation of meeting people again, Fast-Talk is often a bad idea. People you've fast-talked often get disgruntled about it when they realise and are harder to deal with next time.

Well it also depends on whether the person is important. Being able to lie convincingly to people who aren't going to shift from being enemies or even people who might but can do bad things with information right now is also important

Originally Posted by johndallman

It is excellent when what you want the target to do is actually reasonable, or you have something worthwhile to offer. If neither of these is true ... you have a problem with using Diplomacy.

It's excellent. If it had no weaknesses it would be rather better than excellent.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

No Fast-Talk. I'm playing the one who forges alliances and turns enemies into uneasy allies. I'm not playing the one who fools everyone for 10 minutes, and leaves a long queue of enemies for the rest of the campaign as a result.

It feels like you are in a situation that rather favours Diplomacy. You never need to lie to a question?

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

As for being good for asking reasonable things:
Actually, I got burned on many GMs who believe that it is absolutely impossible to ask anyone to do anything non-reasonable. Not hard, but rather 'do not even bother rolling' impossible. So I got out of habit of trying. I vaguely started making steps into trying the over-the-top requests (for information!) once I realised that Caine has something like Elicitation (Diplomacy) 22 and something like a +8 total Reaction Modifier. But that's something of a single experiment with a single success.

It's a real problem in GMs which is significantly encouraged by terribly balanced social rules in a lot of games.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Someone's a specialist, someone's a generalist. Some combatants walk with their signature rifle named Betty; someone's a One-Man Army with skill points in 8 different ranged weapon skills.
I think I said it somewhere before that it's not nice when each and every social character needs to have the absolute same set of advantages or skills. Having some proficiency in more than one, of course, helps with flexibility!

What's the strain at higher CP totals?

Some people are dedicated social characters, some people aren't but dabble in social stuff by being an expert in one skill and some people are playing at low enough points that being the dedicated social character means they can only afford to be good at one skill.

Concepts that rely on being the person who uses social skill x begin to strain when they reach higher CP totals because they run out of things to buy. At higher CP totals the person with social skill x either is doing that as a side thing or is an NPC.

Additional social skills are totally unlike additional weapon skills. Weapon skills past the first are mostly background skills that occasionally come in handy when something goes wrong. Social skills past the first are additional capabilities all the time.

It's good for there to be variety in dedicated social characters but I think you are looking at the wrong place trying to achieve that with advantages and skills. There's some differentiation in things like what kind of appearance is chosen and what Influence skill you skip if you have most of them but not all but I think techniques should probably be where most of the differentiation occurs.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Are you sure you're writing what you think you are writing?

Yes? I think it's lame because "that's lame" comes to mind when thinking of someone who using Sex Appeal to solve 90% social encounters. I'm a fairly introspective person so I can put together reasons behind that, but I'm not perfect and what I think is the reason I think it's lame may not be the actual reason why I react to the suggestion by thinking it's lame.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Hmmm.
Fast-Talk, Intimidation, and to some extent Savoir-Faire are also an act, at least to some extent.
Fast-Talk is all about confusing or misleading people one way or another.
Intimidation is about getting people to treat you as a bigger threat than rational analysis would indicate.
Savoir-Faire is about using essentially 'social ritual lies'.

On the other hand, one can also see Diplomacy, Intimidation, Sex Appeal, Streetwise and Savoir-Faire as revelling in one's coolness:
Diplomacy as revelling in politeness and reasonableness.
Intimidation as revelling in badassitude.
Streetwise as revelling in street smarts.
Savoir-Faire as revelling in good breeding and manners.
And of course Sex Appeal as revelling in sexiness.
The latter, in fact, is quite similar to Intimidation in that it can have little to no verbal component but suffer little to no penalties for it.

Indeed it isn't alone in that. Fast-Talk for example has that feature too. It doesn't matter because Fast-Talk is already awesome. Sex Appeal has significant weaknesses in the cool department anyway.

Savoir-Faire isn't really about using 'social ritual lies', it's mostly about not screwing up and performing rituals adeptly. A few of those rituals involve white lies but they don't make up the core of the skill.

What I'm referring to with revelling is about demonstrating that you are self aware of what you are doing. Skills react differently to this. You don't revel in your Savoir-Faire abilities unless you want to humiliate someone. Only a few uses of Diplomacy won't be worsened by revelling in how good you are. Revelling in sexiness describes some approaches of Sex Appeal, but there's a difference between that and revelling in your Sex Appeal skill. "Look at how well I am manipulating you with my sex appeal" generally spoils the actual influence while saying to a group "look at how much I have frightened you with my intimidation" isn't a problem at all.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Jokes aside, are you trying to prepare for using those rules in an actual campaign, or just having fun constructing a thing that is perfect on paper but mostly unplayable?

I'm having fun constructing a thing that should be perfectly playable for a currently mostly theoretical future campaign.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Let's face it: it seems neither of us is good at what GURPS calls Savoir-Faire. We're geeky tinkerers, not haughty social butterflies.

Uh... I'll admit that Savoir-Faire isn't my strongest social skill. My dojo haven't been formal enough to really need Savoir-Faire (Dojo) and I've never been a member of the Mafia, military or police. I haven't worked as a servant either. If I had to pass as three status higher than I am I'd perform better than most of my peers but I haven't really spent time studying the skill in any depth.

My inclinations tend towards the geeky tinkerer and of course I'd get totally shown up if I tracked down a professional social engineer but I'm pretty good at a lot of social stuff if I turn on the charisma.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Coming up with an argument is not impossible. But I think we've seen this type of people on this very forum. Those who examine social interaction on an almost-metagame level of detachment, and dismiss the argument out of hand based on the outcome it tries to achieve.

Of course the are many campaigns where actual metagame concerns impede social skills at least a bit. "No you can't get the king to do [thing that damages the foundation of the actual gameplay]". That can be a problem if it isn't made explicit that things will work that way or if there's no real chance that they king wouldn't do that.