11-19-2014, 01:56 PM | #41 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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11-19-2014, 03:44 PM | #42 | |||||||||||||
Join Date: Nov 2011
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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Oh but you get to roll a control die. Gygax would be so proud. Quote:
I suspect that Bond and the nosferatu don't have as extreme reaction modifiers as they could justify, but Bond might be somewhat placated by no longer needing to overcome rolled Very Bad reactions with modifiers. Quote:
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Attributes are also point crocks, I just can justify them. Quote:
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11-20-2014, 03:04 AM | #43 | |||||||||||
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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Not acquainted with the concept of a control die. Unless you mean Alternity, in which case the control die is always a d20. Quote:
Now, a celebrity reacting very favourably towards a bunch of nobodies pretending to be reporters (and displaying a few cool but creepy feats of investigation) is certainly not something to be expected. But you know what they say about real life: "Real life does not need to confirm to the probable, or plausible, or expected, but rather contents itself to be possible"; having the game support a similar approach seems to be fun, and the unexpected outcome was lots of fun and tension and drama. Quote:
As for Bond being placated - well, I'm not quite sure. For someone who invested heavily into Charisma, Appearance, Fashion Sense and whatever else he has, having reduced chance of disastrous moments seems to be less important than reduction in the chance of awesome moments. Quote:
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11-20-2014, 04:49 AM | #44 | ||||||||||
Join Date: Nov 2011
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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Bonus points for an All The Tropes link though. I don't think it's necessary for part of the definition of teaching to be efficacy. I'm more happy calling people who are good at teaching people good teachers than someone who now qualifies as a teacher. That said it seems like we both understand and agree on the actual point. Quote:
"Apparently some dude from a film from the seventies." Since that isn't very helpful I'd describe a realistic version as someone with some good Reaction Modifier (wiki article describes him as having old-fashioned and courtly manners), good rolls and cascading circumstantial bonuses. If you want a version that can reliably achieve this I might uncap Charisma. Quote:
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I find it coherent and worth less than infinite points to have +1 to all IQ skills. The number of IQ skills isn't bounded though, there can always be one more. So if you want someone to be able to buy +1 to all the IQ skills that means either a bulk discount or a trait representing the ability to retroactively purchase skill levels for new skills. I prefer the first since it's more aesthetically pleasing and skills have substantial overlap (how much is the tenth Professional Skill worth, really). Talents are for a limited number of skills though, so you could just buy those skills instead. Furthermore if a character who would have bought all the skills in a Talent up anyway exists than the Talent is just a straight discount for that character. Quote:
What does the musician with the Talent's Talent represent? It's not "belonging to genre a" because that's a bonus that is highly specific to the audience and people can play in multiple genres. It isn't natural talent that is somehow distinguishable from honed skill because having a high attribute can represent being naturally talented at the Talent's skill and a whole bunch of others. It's not being more of a Performer than a Technician because a lot of people like Technician music more than Performer music. If it isn't about being a Performer how does it justify not being tied to specific skill levels. No, Reaction Modifiers linked to Talents are ridiculous. People don't almost all react better to people with narrow natural talent compared to people who are generally talented or untalented but with highly honed skills. I guess, but I'm writing for my players who all play RPGs in a general sense and are thus quite qualified at picking up new rules even if they grumble and are going to have to put up with stuff like The Deadly Spring anyway. Last edited by Sindri; 11-20-2014 at 04:57 AM. |
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11-20-2014, 06:25 AM | #45 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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I quote from the OP: "Expected requests or transactions go smoothly." |
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11-20-2014, 06:51 AM | #46 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2007
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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I don't know how strong the "centering" effect will be, but that's findoutable if anybody were to consider trying that solution. |
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11-20-2014, 08:32 AM | #47 |
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Location: Europe
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
Vicky talks a bit about having Influence skill rolls modify the outcome of Reaction Rolls.
That may well work, but while perusing the many long posts in this thread, another approach occured to me: GURPS already has a precedent for treating some acquirable traits in a special manner, i.e. not handling them as skills. The two examples that come to mind are Combat Reflexes and Languages. Neither are at all handled in a skill-like manner, yet both are obviously inarguably acquirable, whereas the aquirability of almost all other non-social Advantages in GURPS is a matter for debate (and neither Combat Reflexes nor Languages are Advantages of a social nature). So why not do the same with Influence skills? Instead of treating them as actual skills, based off IQ or HT or PR, or floatable to any of those or to something else, treat them as Advantages. Price them as advantages. Apply approximated Limitations when necessary. GURPS seems to say that +1 to Reaction Rolls costs 5 points. Following from this, the Influence skills could be replaced with flavoured/aspected RR bonuses. All of them get some sort of "Requires Active Usage" Limitation. Charisma, as a genuine advantage (probably inborn, rather than something you can learn), doesn't have this. It's automatic, always-on. These Influence skills-as-advantages would lack that. That's not much of a Limitation, but still having it is flavourful. Maybe -10%. Furthermore they're each applicable in different time frames. Sex Appeal is probably the fastest to use. Just a quick smile, and (depending on what you're posing as and who you're trying to impress) a wiggle or a swagger. Or a well-timed "wardrobe malfunction" (a male character "suddenly" ending up shirtless would not be seen as vulgar in most cultures. A second or two. Diplomacy seems to me to be at the other end of the scale. Probably takes most of a minute for normal use. So bigger Limitatio0n there. Intimidation is usually in-between, but GURPS IIRC has a provision for a bonus to Intimidation rolls if the chaacter can demonstrate superHuman ST. I'd say that if such a demonstration can be performed, it can be performed in a second or two, thus faster than an Intimidation attempt not based on extremely high ST. Carousing usually takes some time (middle ground'ish), but occasionally all it requires is telling a very appropriate joke (not too rude, but still edgy enough) or actively including someone who's presently sitting at the outskirts of the drinking circle. I'd say either call it middle ground'ish, like most other Influence skill-advantages, or else divide up so you have quick uses (the two examples I've given) as well as slow uses (which probably takes even longer than Diplomacy - sit and drink and joke and swap stories, with the occasional dancing or flirting or the like, for many minutes). So depending on skill speed, that could be a Limitation from -5% and up to -15% or even -20% (not going by RAW with these Limitations, but trying to maintain some fairly fine distinctions, and/or going by what sounds right). Finally some uses are overt, others subtle. Many people object to overt attempts at manipulation, and by that I argely mean Sex Appeal and Intimidation, while subtle attempts at social manipulation are hard to "put one's finger on". Think of it in terms of asking a subtly manipulative character to stop being subtly manipulative: What specifically will you tell him to stop doing? Overt sounds like maybe it should get a Limitation to reduce cost, but on the other hand overt manupulations have their own innate potential for backfires, so I think it's better just to have a very explicit +0% Overt modifier that doesn't change cost (hence the zero) but which is still very much present to remind the GM of the potential for fun complications. Sex Appeal, of course, should be further Limited by Sexual Orientation Of Target (and to a large extent species as well, although we all know that mutual attraction can happen between Humans and Elves in most fantasy worlds, due to them having somewhat overlapping instinctive standards of beauty). A character being more skilled at any of those can then be handled via buying several levels, e.g. several levels of Sex Appeal Advantage, or several levels of Intimidation Advantage. Sex Appeal skill tending to get better results ("Very Good") is handled via the levelled Sex Appeal learnable Advantage being cheaper than the others (due to its additional -?? Dependent On Sexual Orientation Limitation) and so players will tend to buy somewhat higher levels of that, compared to the others. Is this better than the RAW? I don't know. But I'm not entirely happy with the whole letting players choose whether they want to take an RR or use an Influence skill. It's a very strange choice to make; it risks getting metagamey; and inexperienced players may well choose suboptimally relative to the abilities of their characters, which is a massive suspension-of-disbelief problem as characters would presumably be familiar with their own abilities since they've had them for years or even decades, and also there could be a blatant discrepancy between player-written backstory (in which the player has "written in" his conception of the character at being very skilled at one or two specific social skills) and actual play (where the game-mechanically clueless player plays his character in such a way that the character can not be said to be observably good at using those one or two specific social skills). With this solution, social skills are still learnable, but now they affect Reaction Rolls directly instead of replacing them. This solution does require, though, the removal of Charisma as a generic bonus to Reaction Rolls. It has to go away completely. One could either ditch Charisma from the system entirely, or else modify Charisma strongly. For instance one could make it a binary trait, similar to Language Talent, which reduces the cost of all Influence Skill Advantages, perhaps by 1 per level. That would be somwhat odd, since whereas there is an infinite number of Languages, the list of Influence Skill Advantages is very, very finite, and also very, very short. I think it could be made to work, though, and I'd recommend treating this binary Charisma as being an inborn trait, not learnable. Charisma should still give bonuses to those social skills that haven't been replaced with Influence Skill Advantages, though. For those, I think Charisma could be treated like Voice, that is give a fixed +2 bonus, so that it is not levelled, and then priced accordingly, at perhaps 10 CP (which might well be fairly balanced for characters who have or want to buy a large number of levels of Influence Skill Advantages). |
11-20-2014, 09:11 AM | #48 | |
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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My gaming blog: Apotheosis of the Invisible City "Call me old-fashioned, but after you're dead, I don't think you should be entitled to a Dodge any more." - my wife It's not that I don't understand what you're saying. It's that I disagree with what you're saying. |
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11-20-2014, 12:44 PM | #49 | |||||
Join Date: Nov 2011
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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If you are running an intrigue heavy game though a social engineer will get tripped up by weird rules. They meet someone new in a party and are charming but don't have much time to break out influence skills, don't need to insure a really good reaction and thus have no reason to risk messing up trying to influence them and they may not even want be seen trying to impress them before they have a chance to research them. Later in the party they get information that means that they do need to get a really good reaction from them but when they meet again and they start trying to actively impress them they've already made a Reaction roll and thus can't do an Influence roll. Quote:
A discount-other-advantages advantage isn't a good idea in GURPS. Aside from some peripheral stuff with time spent rules the system really isn't designed so it's legitimate for something like that to exist. Quote:
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11-20-2014, 02:02 PM | #50 | |||
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Reaction Table House Rules
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If you don't like music being used as an example, let's use films: a film can either be a precise adaptation of a book, or an innovative approach that improves on the plot and dialogue on the book, but it can't be both at 100% simultaneously. Quote:
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(Continued in next post.) |
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house rules, influence skills, reaction modifiers, reaction rolls, social engineering |
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