Static situational social modifiers?

[Peter Knutsen]

Back about 15 years ago, when I was at a folk high school, one of the other students looked like he had a chromosome disorder. Not the Down's Syndrome look, but some other serious disorder. His face made it look as if something was wrong with him.

But to the best of my knowledge, nothing was. He was sub-par in height, but he was of average intelligence. He wasn't retarded. He just looked like he was. Even to the point of one other person asking me what was wrong with him ("nothing, he just looks that way").

He had a permanent trait that affected other people's first impression of him, shifting their assumptions in a particular direction. Something much more nuanced than the like/dislike that we get from GURPS Reaction Roll mechanic, or from Sagatafl's very analogous Impression Roll.

Most people don't react with dislike when they meet someone with the retard look. But their reaction is strongly influenced by it, in a fashion more subtle than what can be caught in a one-axis like/dislike system.



I'd really like to nail down a list of the 4-10 most important, most relevant, and most interesting such first impression-flavoring trait axes, so that Sagatafl's character creation rules can offer options to build characters who have benefits or drawbacks in each of those areas.

GURPS gives two examples of such traits: Honest Face and Pitiable.

Honest Face makes it easier for you to fake innocence. People are less likely to assume you're guilty, less likely to assume you have an ulterior motive to what you're doing. Pitiable aids you when you request help from others, when begging for food or money, and when asking for more elaborate help in critical situations.

Honest Face can be turned into an axis: You can have something about you, something permanent (i.e. something biological) that makes you look innocent, that makes other people more likely to assume your innocence than they would otherwise have been, or you can have something about you that makes you look guilty. Or you can be neutral in that regard - like most people are.

Can Perceived Intellect work the same way? It's obvious that characters can have permanent biological conditions that cause them to be perceived as less intelligent than they actually are. The retard look. Or a serious speech impediment. But it's not clear to me that there are any biological traits that produce the opposite effect with any consistency. In some cultures and time periods, people wearing glasses are perceived as intelligent or educated (not that most people discern properly between the two), but that's highly world-dependent, instead of being a biological universal for our species.

What about Pitiable? It seems to me that it's about making the character look harmless and in need of help, appealing to the nurturing instincts that we all have albeit in different strengths. Reversing it would then make the character seem independent and in some ways "strong". The reversed version should give a penalty to requests for help, but might give a bonus to uses of skills such as Intimidation, whereas the non-reversed version should then give a penalty to Intimidation skill rolls.

Sagatafl used to have 3 such axes: Authority, Innocence and Intimidation, but I always knew that was a very incomplete list, and almost certainly also an imperfect division of the subject.

Authority seems to be related to perceived intelligence. Everything else being equal, if an emergency happens, and different strangers give different advice, people you don't know anything about, which one are you going to listen to? If one of them has the retard look, then the other one wins. If one of them has a speech impediment, especially if it is serious, then unconscious biases makes it likely that the other one will be the one listened to.

Authority, Innocence, Intimidation/Helplessness, Stupidity... That's four, but it seems to me that Authority and Stupidity can be combined.

It also seems very plausible that tall men can get a bonus to Authority due to being tall, and the same makes a lot of sense for women. So while being tall doesn't in any real sense causes tall people to be perceived as more intelligent, it does make them more likely to be the ones that end up listened to and taken seriously.

Same with the retard look. Absent other information, if you look that way, the other guy is more likely to be listened to. Same with speech impediments. So maybe it makes more sense to talk about Authority Potential than about Perceived Intellect?



But what other static modfiers make sense? Which have you noticed, in your personal life, in your social life, or in serious fiction?

One idea I have is Stable vs Nervous. A character perceived as Stable is assumed to be brave and trustworthy, disinclined to fleee, whereas a character perceived as Nervous is assumed to be a coward and to not have self-control (he's believed to be likely to have many serious psychological Flaws). But that, too, seems to be somewhat related to Authority, and less strongly to Perceived Intellect.

Sagatafl also has a tendency towards the C/I distinction, on one side combat, brawn, strength and courage, and on the other intellect, strategy and self-control.

That's seen in many places, including the Animosity Flaw where various flavours of it might cause the character to underestimate the target group for C ("all Christians are weak and cowards") or I ("all pagans are stupid"), or both, or the MPOW Flaw, Must-Prove-Own-Worth, in which a character belives (wrongly or correctly) that he is being underestimated and feels compelled to prove himself, which can be in the martial arena, or the intellectual arena, or some other arena.

If I can get a list of 3-5 "flavours" to do 98% of the same work that I can get out of a longer list of 5-9 "flavours", then I'm somewhat inclined to go for the shorter list, and combine some "flavours".

It is important that everything can be tied to observable real-world phenomena, though. I don't want anything resembling the "just because"-style of GURPS' Talents. I want characters to be able to observe and subsequently analyze each other.

[Icelander]

Obviously, a basic one is (distinct from mere aesthetics, which is related but not the same), would be 'sexually attractive' vs. 'sexually repulsive'. Or even 'asexual', in that some people may be perfectly nice looking, but difficult or impossible to imagine in a sexual sense.

I'm pretty sure that editing a few phrases around will reduce the chances of mods interfering with your thread. "The [term] look" is probably disouraged as a descriptive term.

[Irish Wolf]

Is there an opposite of Honest Face? Autistics often have trouble meeting the gaze of others, creating the impression that we're not trustworthy because we won't look someone in the eyes. (In fact, it's extremely uncomfortable to look someone in the eyes, for reasons I have trouble elucidating. It has nothing to do with honesty, however - we tend to be more honest than average, actually, because we generally don't lie well; a good lie requires being able to "read" your target and figure out what they might believe.)

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

Is there an opposite of Honest Face? Autistics often have trouble meeting the gaze of others, creating the impression that we're not trustworthy because we won't look someone in the eyes. (In fact, it's extremely uncomfortable to look someone in the eyes, for reasons I have trouble elucidating. It has nothing to do with honesty, however - we tend to be more honest than average, actually, because we generally don't lie well; a good lie requires being able to "read" your target and figure out what they might believe.)

Shifty-eyed makes perfect sense to me. Thanks!

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Obviously, a basic one is (distinct from mere aesthetics, which is related but not the same), would be 'sexually attractive' vs. 'sexually repulsive'. Or even 'asexual', in that some people may be perfectly nice looking, but difficult or impossible to imagine in a sexual sense.

Sagatafl actually has that already, somewhat analogous to Extreme Sexual Dimorphism from GURPS, and distinct from the Appearance secondary attribute. I just skipped mentioning it, because it's quite "localized" in its relevance.

The female version, Curvy Body (because Curvaceous Body is too long, and furthermore prone to spelling errors) is fairly well established, in giving a bonus to the use of the Seduction skill, and a bonus to high-sexual charge First Impressions (that is, not business meetings and so forth), and if I keep the Dazzle concept, then it gives a bonus to that too.

One variant of Curvy Body may work only if the character dresses in form-fitting clothes, while another shows through almost regardless of dress style (you'd have to dress like a nun in order not to stand out).

The male version is a lot trickier, but ultimately is about having the right skeletal frame shape to begin with, and then building an appropriately large amount of muscles on top of that (the later being trainable). Not all strong and fit men have this effect. I tend to refer to the boxer Brian Nielsen as an example. Even when he was fittest (I believe he's retired now), he admitted that he looked like a bag of potatoes.

I'm just not sure how sexually repulsive, i.e. the opposite of Curvy Body or Manly Stature, differs from below-aveage appearance, though.

The distinction between a female with Curvy Body and one with high Appearance is quite clear to me, and similarly a man with utilized Manly Stature vs a man with high Appearance (an example of the later could be early Leonardo diCaprio - I sometimes joke about a sex change operation, some time prior to "Blood Diamond", changing him from a prettyboy into someone who can be taken seriously).

One obvious "reversal" of Curvy Body is unCurvy Body, but that tends to look like Fat to me, i.e. a severely above-average Adiposity score.

Or Skinny... I'm thinking most women with Curvy Body will lose it, (usually) temporarily, when they drop to a sufficiently low Adiposity stat, but for some that may happen at Thin, others at Skinny, others again not before they reach non-Lethally Anorexic. A few may need to maintain Chubby or even Overweight in order to keep Curvy Body.

Likewise, some women might lose Curvy Body if they get too overweight. Others who never had it may become downright unCurvy. But I'm not sure how detailed I want to be there. I'm not simulating fashion models and porn stars, after all.

I do have one female Ärth NPC who got depressed (because her IMF-style counter-missionary fellowship started failing in its missions) and gained a lot of weight, but after she had outside help with solving the problem, she started exercising (lots of running, and climbing the mountains of Western Iceland), and changed her diet slightly (being a Druid, it makes sense she'd have some understanding of nutrition) and dropped down to her earlier weight, over the course of a couple of months.

But that was a very deliberate lifestyle change, and highly unusual in any medieval fantasy world. The main purpose of tracking Adiposity is so that characters can survive longer in a starvation situation.

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Back about 15 years ago, when I was at a folk high school, one of the other students looked like he had a chromosome disorder. Not the Down's Syndrome look, but some other serious disorder. His face made it look as if something was wrong with him.

But to the best of my knowledge, nothing was. He was sub-par in height, but he was of average intelligence. He wasn't retarded. He just looked like he was. Even to the point of one other person asking me what was wrong with him ("nothing, he just looks that way").

He had a permanent trait that affected other people's first impression of him, shifting their assumptions in a particular direction. Something much more nuanced than the like/dislike that we get from GURPS Reaction Roll mechanic, or from Sagatafl's very analogous Impression Roll.

Most people don't react with dislike when they meet someone with the retard look. But their reaction is strongly influenced by it, in a fashion more subtle than what can be caught in a one-axis like/dislike system.



I'd really like to nail down a list of the 4-10 most important, most relevant, and most interesting such first impression-flavoring trait axes, so that Sagatafl's character creation rules can offer options to build characters who have benefits or drawbacks in each of those areas.

GURPS gives two examples of such traits: Honest Face and Pitiable.

Honest Face makes it easier for you to fake innocence. People are less likely to assume you're guilty, less likely to assume you have an ulterior motive to what you're doing. Pitiable aids you when you request help from others, when begging for food or money, and when asking for more elaborate help in critical situations.

Honest Face can be turned into an axis: You can have something about you, something permanent (i.e. something biological) that makes you look innocent, that makes other people more likely to assume your innocence than they would otherwise have been, or you can have something about you that makes you look guilty. Or you can be neutral in that regard - like most people are.

Can Perceived Intellect work the same way? It's obvious that characters can have permanent biological conditions that cause them to be perceived as less intelligent than they actually are. The retard look. Or a serious speech impediment. But it's not clear to me that there are any biological traits that produce the opposite effect with any consistency. In some cultures and time periods, people wearing glasses are perceived as intelligent or educated (not that most people discern properly between the two), but that's highly world-dependent, instead of being a biological universal for our species.

What about Pitiable? It seems to me that it's about making the character look harmless and in need of help, appealing to the nurturing instincts that we all have albeit in different strengths. Reversing it would then make the character seem independent and in some ways "strong". The reversed version should give a penalty to requests for help, but might give a bonus to uses of skills such as Intimidation, whereas the non-reversed version should then give a penalty to Intimidation skill rolls.

Sagatafl used to have 3 such axes: Authority, Innocence and Intimidation, but I always knew that was a very incomplete list, and almost certainly also an imperfect division of the subject.

Authority seems to be related to perceived intelligence. Everything else being equal, if an emergency happens, and different strangers give different advice, people you don't know anything about, which one are you going to listen to? If one of them has the retard look, then the other one wins. If one of them has a speech impediment, especially if it is serious, then unconscious biases makes it likely that the other one will be the one listened to.

Authority, Innocence, Intimidation/Helplessness, Stupidity... That's four, but it seems to me that Authority and Stupidity can be combined.

It also seems very plausible that tall men can get a bonus to Authority due to being tall, and the same makes a lot of sense for women. So while being tall doesn't in any real sense causes tall people to be perceived as more intelligent, it does make them more likely to be the ones that end up listened to and taken seriously.

Same with the retard look. Absent other information, if you look that way, the other guy is more likely to be listened to. Same with speech impediments. So maybe it makes more sense to talk about Authority Potential than about Perceived Intellect?



But what other static modfiers make sense? Which have you noticed, in your personal life, in your social life, or in serious fiction?

One idea I have is Stable vs Nervous. A character perceived as Stable is assumed to be brave and trustworthy, disinclined to fleee, whereas a character perceived as Nervous is assumed to be a coward and to not have self-control (he's believed to be likely to have many serious psychological Flaws). But that, too, seems to be somewhat related to Authority, and less strongly to Perceived Intellect.

Sagatafl also has a tendency towards the C/I distinction, on one side combat, brawn, strength and courage, and on the other intellect, strategy and self-control.

That's seen in many places, including the Animosity Flaw where various flavours of it might cause the character to underestimate the target group for C ("all Christians are weak and cowards") or I ("all pagans are stupid"), or both, or the MPOW Flaw, Must-Prove-Own-Worth, in which a character belives (wrongly or correctly) that he is being underestimated and feels compelled to prove himself, which can be in the martial arena, or the intellectual arena, or some other arena.

If I can get a list of 3-5 "flavours" to do 98% of the same work that I can get out of a longer list of 5-9 "flavours", then I'm somewhat inclined to go for the shorter list, and combine some "flavours".

It is important that everything can be tied to observable real-world phenomena, though. I don't want anything resembling the "just because"-style of GURPS' Talents. I want characters to be able to observe and subsequently analyze each other.

Love this thread. Perhaps we can generate a long list of perks for this type of thing. I would use them!

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Pmandrekar

Love this thread. Perhaps we can generate a long list of perks for this type of thing. I would use them!

Obviously most of the material I develop for Sagatafl can be ported for use in other systems, especially other systems following the same basic "you make a character by spending points" trend, such as GURPS, FUDGE, BESM, Hero System, and so forth.

But some of the traits of this kind would be disadvantageous to the character, not advantageous, and so in GURPS they would be disads worth -1 CP or more (I don't believe "physical Quirk" is correct, but I'm no expert on all the fine details of GURPS). And yes, often "or more", because I think some of these types of traits are quite potentailly painful for the character, having what I often refer to as a high "suck factor".

On the other hand, some of the traits seem to me to warrant a bonus in some types of situations and a penalty in other types of situations. I generally disdain such "zero sum"-style thinking, with great vehemence, because it is often something that RPG designers use as an excuse not to think things through, not to contemplate a variety of plausible consequences, and to avoid any sense of having a duty to think broadly.

But in this case, I think it may actually be simulatively correct, in some cases. For instance, if you have a static biological condition that makes you look highly intelligent, you're more likely to be taken seriously in situations where it is important or desirable to be taken seriously - when one wants others to take what one says as being the factual truth - but in other situations, it's a downside, e.g. if you're a con artist. When you're trying to con someone, you don't want to be perceived as too clever, because that might make the mark suspicious (unless you can find a mark who has Overconfidence). Various (learnable) skills can be used to mitigate such negative modifiers, but it's always more desirable not to have such static biological conditions in the first place. edit: Even if you look normal, you can use Acting skill to appear dumb, same way you'd use your Acting skill to appear normal when usually you appear clever.

Likewise, if you seem helpless, being shaped such that you appeal to other people's protective and nurturing instincts (bonus to begging, to asking for aid, asking for information), you ought to have a general problem with the Intimidation skill.

What about a Bright Young Eager Thing, a more limited version of the trait that aids specifically in requests for information, and which has double effect on characters who by nature or profession are inclined to disperse information, such as teachers and librarians (and some types of parents)? That might be a Perk in GURPS (with a slight downside in that if the information can be looked up, the teacher or librarian might refuse to help actively, simply giving a reference, and assume the asker is bright enough to figure it out). The question is whether that, as a trait concept, is strong enough to warrant inclusion in Sagatafl's character creation rules.

And secondly what it looks like. Which observable trait, or combination of observable traits (and which is it known that biological Humans can have), does the character have, that creates this effect?

And, still, I'd like to nail down a list of the most general such modifiers. I can't go GURPS' route of "just make it a Perk". For one, the trait pre-existing in the character creation rules, as a visible option, can have a strongly inspirational effect on players during the character creation process, massively broadening their thinking, especially players who come from narrow-focus systems such as D&D4 (or the various "indie" games, so narrow in subject matter that they fall - loudly - outside my understanding of what an RPG is), who have been trained to think in constrained terms, instead of the "all of Human variety" that Sagatafl strives for.

[reddir]

There is one point which I think need clarification when discussing traits in any point-based system.

A '0-point' feature can mean two very different things.
1) Minimal game impact. This feature has, and is intended to have, almost no impact in the game. It is a bit of description that adds a touch of color to the character.
2) Finely balanced. This feature is a really combination of possibly highly significant traits, both positive and negative, which happen to derive from one feature.

It is a good idea to detail the effects if they can be significant.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by reddir

There is one point which I think need clarification when discussing traits in any point-based system.

A '0-point' feature can mean two very different things.
1) Minimal game impact. This feature has, and is intended to have, almost no impact in the game. It is a bit of description that adds a touch of color to the character.
2) Finely balanced. This feature is a really combination of possibly highly significant traits, both positive and negative, which happen to derive from one feature.

It is a good idea to detail the effects if they can be significant.

That's very true, and that's also what I'm going to do. I don't like to leave many things open for interpretation, because that gives the GM far more power than he needs to have.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I'm just not sure how sexually repulsive, i.e. the opposite of Curvy Body or Manly Stature, differs from below-aveage appearance, though.

Repulsive is repulsive. I'm talking about people who are impressive in appearance and demeanour, but who suffer extreme difficulty in being viewed as sexual objects. Imagine very old Popes, Virgin Queens, etc.

Also, this exists with ordinary people. Someone who looks avuncular and likeable, but excites no sexual interest whatsoever. Or for women, motherly and warm, with young men who admire and like her being squicked out thinking about how she might have had those children.

If you're doing things this detailed, I think you should account for real-world stuff like that. In GURPS, it's generally either Perks or Quirks, in extreme cases Modifiers to Advanages or Disadvantages.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

The distinction between a female with Curvy Body and one with high Appearance is quite clear to me, and similarly a man with utilized Manly Stature vs a man with high Appearance (an example of the later could be early Leonardo diCaprio - I sometimes joke about a sex change operation, some time prior to "Blood Diamond", changing him from a prettyboy into someone who can be taken seriously).

He's simply a man with high Appearance and a Quirk called something like 'Boyish' that makes it hard to take him seriously. Given the fact that he's better at acting (i.e. Performance skill) than most of his generation in Hollywood (and anywhere, really), it was pretty inevitable that he'd buy that Quirk off as he acted in more movies and acquired a Reputation appropriate to his skill. The fact that he hasn't won an Oscar yet might suggest that he still hasn't bought it off, though. Certainly there are still people who dismiss him as a 'pretty-boy' instead of realising that he's the best actor of his generation.

But I hope that eventually his Reputation will catch up to his artistic talent. Not to mention his gift for selecting quality films. Seriously, compare the average quality of his films (whether you personally like them or not) with the average quality of anyone else's films.

Great artist. And no, I'm not in love with him. I have a purely manly and non-romantic appreciation for his talent. Shut up.