Self-Control Rolls for Odious Personal Habits?

[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Self-control number probably isn't appropriate because the problem of an OPH isn't that actually you acting on it, it's other people reacting to it.

Not displaying your OPH in the moment isn't going to do you any good unless the people you're interacting with don't know it's there.

I'm willing to go with one of the other reaction-penalty Disads, since they're all pretty much just flavors of '5 CP per -1 reaction penalty' with various Limits. I just want a Limit that's a Will roll, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Put another way, I'm aiming for something equivalent to 'OPH: can't stop talking about trains', except he's gotten enough anime-style slaps upside the head that he's learned to occasionally stop talking about trains and be more pleasant company.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Alternately you could always just apply Self-Control Ratings to the disad. I don't see how it would break anything.

You go from "I do a thing that gives me a -2 to reactions all the time" [-10], to "I do a thing that gives me a -2 unless I roll a 6 or less" [-20].

I think in the very least, adding a self-control roll should apply a -50% limitation to the disadvantage.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

I'd have gone for that, but going from '-2 reaction: 10 points' to '-2 reaction: except on a self-control roll of 12 or less (x1 cost): 10 points' doesn't quite seem to make sense.

Here's the problem. You can't really control what other people think of you. OPH behaviours aren't compulsive behaviours. They're unconscious ones. They're things you do without knowing that you're doing them. And often they'll make people think ill of you when they've never even met you because they've heard that you're annoying.

If you can control your compulsion to be cruel but factual then you've probably got a quirk and a reputation.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Here's the problem. You can't really control what other people think of you.

I'm not sure I buy that. What if I'm not racist at all, but people think I am? Is that Odious Personal Habit (Racist) -2 [-10]? I rather think it's more likely to be Reputation (Racist) -2 [-10]. A reputation is what people think of you. An Odious Personal Habit is something you do. It's a habit. It's like Callous or No Sense of Humor. It's not that people think of you as being this way, it's that you are this way.

This does cause some problems (You can look up threads arguing about Callous and "Crazy Eyes"), but these disadvantages aren't about what people think of you, it's how they react to your behavior.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I'm not sure I buy that. What if I'm not racist at all, but people think I am? Is that Odious Personal Habit (Racist) -2 [-10]? I rather think it's more likely to be Reputation (Racist) -2 [-10]. A reputation is what people think of you. An Odious Personal Habit is something you do.

Mechanically the difference between between an OPH and a Reputation is that an OPH is a reaction penalty you can't escape just by finding people who have never heard of you. Instead you have to find people who have never heard of you and get what you want before you slip and start doing that annoying thing.

[DataPacRat]

Thank you, everyone, for your suggestions. For now, I'm going to go with:

[-5] "It's so hard to restrain myself around those who willfully blind themselves to what the evidence implies." Odious Personal Habit: Prefers the truth to being popular: Reaction penalty -2 (10); Limitation: Accessibility: Self-Control Roll of 12- (-50%).

[whswhs]

I wouldn't ever start applying self-control or frequency mods to OPH.

In the first place, it explicitly says that you don't do it all the time; rather, the penalty affects people who notice you doing it. So the fact that you might not be doing it at a specific moment is taken into account.

But in the second place, because it's a habit, anyone who knows you will come to be aware that you're doing it. Your being able to force yourself to hold back when it's urgent might delay this, but won't stop it. You shouldn't be able to avoid it just in a reliable way. If you can, I'd say it's no more than a quirk!

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I wouldn't ever start applying self-control or frequency mods to OPH.

Except that the Basic Set does that with a few disadvantages. Bully, for example, has a -2 reaction penalty for -10, which is basically an OPH, but there's also a self-control roll. Likewise, Sadism has a -3 to the reaction roll, as well as a self-control roll, all for -15. (The reaction penalty for Sadism is listed for "[t]hose who become aware of your problem" but Bully has no such qualifier.) Still, it's weird—if the self-control roll for Bully is for extra behavior, does that make others react even worse? Why doesn't it grant more negative points?

It's a bother, to be sure, and many of the frequency situations are better as a Reputation rather than an OPH, which is assumed to be operating all the time but it might not have caused a bad reaction this time. But there is precedent—Bully outright, and to a lesser degree Sadism.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Except that the Basic Set does that with a few disadvantages. Bully, for example, has a -2 reaction penalty for -10, which is basically an OPH, but there's also a self-control roll. Likewise, Sadism has a -3 to the reaction roll, as well as a self-control roll, all for -15. (The reaction penalty for Sadism is listed for "[t]hose who become aware of your problem" but Bully has no such qualifier.) Still, it's weird—if the self-control roll for Bully is for extra behavior, does that make others react even worse? Why doesn't it grant more negative points?

It's a bother, to be sure, and many of the frequency situations are better as a Reputation rather than an OPH, which is assumed to be operating all the time but it might not have caused a bad reaction this time. But there is precedent—Bully outright, and to a lesser degree Sadism.

Those are explicitly broken out as different traits than OPH. The intent seems clearly to avoid suggesting that the rules for them are to be applied to OPH.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Except that the Basic Set does that with a few disadvantages. Bully, for example, has a -2 reaction penalty for -10, which is basically an OPH, but there's also a self-control roll. Likewise, Sadism has a -3 to the reaction roll, as well as a self-control roll, all for -15. (The reaction penalty for Sadism is listed for "[t]hose who become aware of your problem" but Bully has no such qualifier.) Still, it's weird—if the self-control roll for Bully is for extra behavior, does that make others react even worse? Why doesn't it grant more negative points?

It's a bother, to be sure, and many of the frequency situations are better as a Reputation rather than an OPH, which is assumed to be operating all the time but it might not have caused a bad reaction this time. But there is precedent—Bully outright, and to a lesser degree Sadism.

I believe the self-control roll has to do with behavior, not with reaction penalty. That is, people who know you're a sadist reaction to you at -3 whether or not you're beating people with whips, but given that beating people with whips might cause additional problems ("You did what with the prisoners?! We were supposed to exchange them back!"), you have a self-control roll to avoid acting that way.

I've never viewed self-control rolls as a way of getting out of a penalty. The purpose of such disadvantages is that they define how your character behaves, and that behavior causes a problem, but sometimes you might not want to behave that way (sometimes you don't want to snap and start shouting at people, or beating prisoners, or hitting on girls, even though most of the time, you do those things), so you have a self-control roll.