[Basic] Skill of the week: Fast-Talk

[SimonAce]

Fast talk can be used by default usually this results on bad bad things but sometimes everyone gets lucky.

In one of my fantasy games, an unskilled player used it to make the P.C.s who had done something amazingly stupid and killed someone they really were not supposed to into local heroes.

The player came up with a great story about how "dangerous" the bad guy was and rolled the dice against his default skill of 7,

He rolled a natural 3 and as it was a perfect critical and fit the story in the end the characters became local heroes for a few days, were given a fete and slunk out of town.

Wisely they did not return ever.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Maybe not if you are a typical murder hobo, but if you are expecting to deal with these people again tomorrow it has weaknesses. Though certainly most influence skills have a lot of overlap of applications.

The major problem with Fast-Talk is that it is fundamentally short term - if they think about it long enough that it is no longer a [snap] decision, they can change their minds. It's best use is to convince people to do things they are never going to think about again and thus will never reconsider - they give you a trivial refund, or waive you through the checkpoint, or sign your petition to get you to go away and forget you. If it's not the sort of encounter people forget about in a few minutes, Fast-Talk may not be the best choice. Despite what it says in Basic it's actually rather marginal for confidence artists (a good con is more involved, and takes more time, than Fast-Talk will readily support).

Fast-Talk seems well suited to short cons, like confusing the cashier who's giving you change. For long cons, you want Acting, and quite possibly Leadership to work with a group.

[Icelander]

Fast-Talk sees its normal use in avoiding suspicion in any modern Covert Ops or Monster Hunters games I run, but for some reason, no specific instance sticks in the memory. Guess that plausible stories for being somewhere you should not be tend to be as boring as possible and involve flashing important-looking papers* and/or carrying a clipboard.

More memorable uses of Fast-Talk in my games tend to be Specious Intimidation. The Callous Smooth Operator merchant prince and rogue character in my fantasy game provides a convincing counterpoint to the official use of Diplomacy, Politics or Savoir-Faire (assisted with History, Poetry and Writing) skills to get enemy officers to surrender.

While the other PCs (nor their men, for that matter, as ransoms are the principal method for soldiers in the setting to get rich) would never countenance mass murder even for a garrison which refused to surrender, Fast-Talk made for a convincing argument that the invanding army would refuse to take up arms to defend the former conquerer from their freed slaves unless they surrendered immediately. And Intimidation allowed for quite graphic eluciation of the fates likely to follow for the soldiers and their wives and children at the hands of the riotous slave populace.

In actual fact, the slaves were still cowed, leaderless and utterly outmatched by the disciplined invading force that had already started to disarm them and organise into temporary work battalions. But a willingness to play fast and loose with the truth, combined with awesome skill scores at Fast-Talk and Intimidation, were enough to hand the PCs the important port town of 5,000 citizens (and a garrison of 2,000 and some 2,000 more slaves for the duration of the war) without needing to fight the majority of the defenders.

*I have actually been a party to doing this in real life. In Romania a couple of years after Ceausescu, some men with what I then believed to be AK-47s (more likely to have been PM md. 63/65s) barred the way to me and my father as we tried to enter a football stadium where we were the only fans from the visiting team (aside from those travelling with the players). We did not understand their threathening Romanian and had but recently escaped a riot where the crowd tried to overturn the bus in which the visiting team arrived. My father, desirous of the men with guns ceasing to point them at us and also in favour of having said men in guns protect us from the rioting locals, decided to wave around a set of impressive looking papers** and claim to be from the Icelandic embassy***. He demanded to be escorted to the VIP section of the stadium set aside for diplomats.
The combination of incomprehensible but fancy-looking papers with a stream of orders, and an absolute refusal to understand anything but acquiescence, cowed the armed guards into obsequious obedience. As an honour guard was detailed to escort us to the VIP area, my father explained to me that as these policemen were trained under a dictatorial Communist government, it would never occur to them to question the authority of anyone sufficiently arrogant waving around papers.
**Which were actually a gift certificate in Icelandic.
***We don't have one in Romania, nor anywhere near it, really. I think we have maybe 15 embassies in total.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Guess that plausible stories for being somewhere you should not be tend to be as boring as possible and involve flashing important-looking papers* and/or carrying a clipboard.

Indeed, a good use for the Convincing Nod perk. (I've done this sort of thing in real life, though not as impressively as in your situation - I make a habit of trying to get into places for which I have authorisation without actually showing said authorisation.)

[Flyndaran]

The common problem I've seen from a couple of habitual liars is their tendency to over explain and defend their actions.
I know that if I were supposed to be someplace, I wouldn't care what you believed. I just want you out of my way, so I can do what I need to do.
K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid.)