Resistance to Sex Appeal

[vicky_molokh]

Peter, you seem to be putting much faith into common sense of people. :)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Sorry, but that has got to be technology-dependent. Specifically, it has got to be dependent on the availability of realiable contracepties (and to a lesser extent, abortion methods).

In a low-tech setting, the threshold for a female character of fertile age needs to be higher, than in a present day setting.

You will eventually have the opportunity to read the treatment in Social Engineering and decide for yourself whether it makes sufficient allowance for that. I was just offering a brief summary here.

Bill Stoddard

[Danukian]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Sorry, but that has got to be technology-dependent. Specifically, it has got to be dependent on the availability of realiable contracepties (and to a lesser extent, abortion methods).

In a low-tech setting, the threshold for a female character of fertile age needs to be higher, than in a present day setting.

Ever read Romeo & Juliet, The Tain, or the history of Pocahontas? Sex Appeal is a skill as old as The Oldest Profession...

[Grouchy Chris]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

I am disturbed by not being able to build a form of Immunity that cannot be overcome by someone with empathy.

Again, if that's how you want your universe to work, simply disallow Cosmic Empathy. How hard is that?

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

Again, if that's how you want your universe to work, simply disallow Cosmic Empathy.

And if I were to do that, how would you penetrate Indomitable (Cosmic +50%) [23]? You seem to have leapt to the baseless conclusion that I want indomitable to change, when I actually want extra options:

1. Indomitable (Cosmic +50%) [23]

And

2. Immunity to social skills (Cosmic +50%) [45]

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

A player can, on the other hand, decide that their character is simply not attracted to certain types of other characters. If you're playing a straight woman, another woman's Sex Appeal won't work on her and in some cultural milieux may creep her out. Likewise lesbian/man, straight man/man, gay man/woman.

Force players to declare the sexual orientation of their characters during character creation. I do that in my homebrews. The available options are hetero, bi and homo in Modern Action RPG, with asexual also a possibility in Sagatafl. If undeclared, sexual orientation defaults to heterosexual.

It is also automatically is own-species-and-similar-species only, e.g. a human can be seduced by an elf because elves look like humans, but not by a dragon, because dragons look nothing like humans.

Apart from asexuality perhaps costing points (which it does in Sagatafl), it boils down to having an extra field on the character sheet, for the player to fill in, along with age, hair colour, height, weight, skin colour and so forth. Stuff one can with eminent reasonability demand to know about the character before game start.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

But not those with cosmic empathy. You've made the hole smaller, but you haven't plugged it.

GURPS can't fulfil the desire to plug holes to perfection. I'm fine with that (largely; in some cases such as elemental immunity, it makes a lot of sense to me if inavoidably bound to a corresponding suspectibility/weakness/whatever for a reverse element. The game mechanical infrastructure needed to support that woulb e quite bulky, though, and since you can get almost all of the way with Injury Tolerance and DR, there's not much reason to complain about that).

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Bad analogy, the defence already stops all attacks, I want to stop it being bypassed.

So, a better analogy: I want a special kind of DR that can't be bypassed by any attack, which can be built with:
DR (Cosmic +50%; Hardened +6 +120%) [13.5/level] This DR can never be bypassed, it subtracts from any attack.

That looks too cheap. Far too cheap.

[vicky_molokh]

Regarding declaring a character bisexual: this should be a Quirk or so, as it increases the demographic of characters who can use Sex Appeal on this character.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

In a low-tech setting, the threshold for a female character of fertile age needs to be higher, than in a present day setting.

That isn't borne out in reality. Modern settings, with their age-of-consent laws and mass-media moralism, encourage some of the highest levels of sex avoidance seen in human history; assertions to the contrary are nearly always the propaganda of said mass-media moralists. The majority of myth and history is dedicated to recounting who shagged whom and ended up knocked up. And it isn't as if intrinsically non-procreative sex acts were invented recently . . . there are prehistoric carvings depicting most of them. Unless you use a Clintonesque definition of "having sex," I think it's a given that people past puberty had sex about as often in era X as in era Y, for arbitrary X and Y.

Here's another thought on that: My father is a genealogist – one who has in fact been decorated by my country for his work in that area, not an amateur. As he tells it, part of why it's hard to trace lineage back past a certain point in most societies is because of records: people weren't literate, documents weren't durable, and/or record-keeping was reserved for the upper classes. But an equally big part of it is because truth be told, outside of a few times and places that were ultra-conservative about marriage, most people were bastards. To first order, humans have sex casually and "marry" as a temporary arrangement when that leads to pregnancy. It isn't a popular view of the species with modern religious folk and those who pretend to blue blood, but genealogy and genetics support it rather unequivocally.