Resistance to Sex Appeal

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Fwibos

All true. But I am not saying Sex Appeal = Will have Sex with them. I am saying Sex Appeal = Very Good Reaction. I think in this way it can be used against people not specifically attracted to your gender, but it comes with penalties and the risk of a very bad reaction.

I'm heterosexual, and slightly homophobic (something I believe is common among heterosexual men). Trust me: There's no chance of a Very Good reaction, if a man tries to use Sex Appeal on me. I'd react very negatively to it, although I'd try to be polite about it for various reasons.


Or to put it another way, the gist of my previous post was to attempt to suggest to you that perhaps you're not a Kinsey 1. Perhaps you're a Kinsey 2, meaning that you are primarily heterosexual but with some degree of open-mindedness about male-male sex, whereas I am Kinsey 1 and thus instinctively reject that possibility.

That's not an attempt to insult or attack you; I'm simply trying to clarify how things work here at my end, as best I understand them.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Heck, getting into more straight forward uses of Sex appeal, I've seen women try to get cheap or free drinks out of bartenders with it (generally unsuccessfully), I know women try to get out of traffic tickets with it (No reports on success rate), and I've seen girls and women use it to get other students to do their homework.

Well, yeah, I actually didn't mean what I wrote last time (the part you quoted).

What I meant, but completely failed to express, was that we non-adventurers/non-spies use Sex Appeal for the purpose of sexual manipulation. "Buy me a drink" and "do my homework for me", makes perfect sense to me.

I'm not sure whether your tank top example counts. This goes into the Sex Appeal skill being useful for choosing "appropriate" clothes, and for putting on make up, and so forth. Maybe that'll fly. I'm undecided.

Your professional examples were interesting and meaningful. Thanks!

edit: I think I've figured out what the root of my "problem" was. I was interested in talking about how adventurers and spies use the Sex Appeal skill, not in talking about how normal people use it, so I formulated the normal-people part with a completely silly lack of subtlety. I make no apologies, but I do admit to feeling silly about it.

[Grouchy Chris]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Yes, and my question to kromm lead to your conclusion?

Exactly. Q: "What if you wanted Immunity to 'All Influence skills even from people with empathy'?" A: "Use Indomitable (Cosmic) and disallow Empathy (Cosmic)." This does what the question asks for. You then ask "how would you penetrate Indomitable (Cosmic +50%) [23]?" That's a new request.

1. Indomitable [15]
Protects you from social skills, except from those with empathy or cosmic social skills.

2. Immunity to social skills [30]
Protects you from social skills, except from those with cosmic social skills.

3. Indomitable (Cosmic +50%) [23]
Protects you from social skills, except from those with empathy (Cosmic +50%).

4. Immunity to social skills (Cosmic +50%) [45]
Protects you from social skills, from everyone, always.

Well now you've complicated things. Option 2 is immune to Empathy (Cosmic) but not Intimidation (Cosmic), while option 3 is immune to Intimidation (Cosmic) but not Empathy (Cosmic). Is that right? And you want all four of these options to be available in the same universe?

Also, can I take it that by "social skills" you mean influence skills, or do you also want immunity to Leadership and Detect Lies and the like?

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

Well now you've complicated things. Option 2 is immune to Empathy (Cosmic) but not Intimidation (Cosmic), while option 3 is immune to Intimidation (Cosmic) but not Empathy (Cosmic). Is that right?

Option 3 is vulnerable to Intimidation by people with Empathy (Cosmic).

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

Also, can I take it that by "social skills" you mean influence skills,

Yes.

[Kromm]

Adventurers and spies just about always use Sex Appeal identically to Fast-Talk, Streetwise, Intimidation, etc.: To make an NPC give up information or goods that are effectively plot tokens or needed steps along the path to plot tokens. I can count on one hand how often actual sex has been the goal of the sexy social engineer in my current campaign, whereas I would need an order of magnitude more fingers and toes to count the number of times her goal has been a key, password, file, or simply admission to a restricted area.

[Fwibos]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I'm heterosexual, and slightly homophobic (something I believe is common among heterosexual men). Trust me: There's no chance of a Very Good reaction, if a man tries to use Sex Appeal on me. I'd react very negatively to it, although I'd try to be polite about it for various reasons.


Or to put it another way, the gist of my previous post was to attempt to suggest to you that perhaps you're not a Kinsey 1. Perhaps you're a Kinsey 2, meaning that you are primarily heterosexual but with some degree of open-mindedness about male-male sex, whereas I am Kinsey 1 and thus instinctively reject that possibility.

That's not an attempt to insult or attack you; I'm simply trying to clarify how things work here at my end, as best I understand them.

No Offense taken. I am a Kinsey 2, and have the quirk broadminded*. This makes me think that using the Kinsey Scale may be too granular for the game. Which means Sex Appeal only works on your preferred Gender. I just don't like to see people resist Sex Appeal because it is bad for them.

*and also Thinks everything is funny, which causes a -1 reaction penalty to those who are the butts of my Cancer/Aids/Tasteless Jokes.

[Fwibos]

Originally Posted by Bruno

...

I was expected to use a combination of Savoir Faire and Sex Appeal on a more-or-less daily basis in my job as front-receptionist/secretary/primary client liason to play hostess for clients and potential clients while they were waiting for my boss. Nobody was under the illusion I was offering sexual favors, and nobody was particularly under the illusion they might get anywhere: our clients were mostly elderly and socially conservative men who'd grown up with semi-ornamental secretaries, and there's just a certain kind of man in his 80s who will chat up any woman stuck near him for more than five minutes.

(snip)

Heck, getting into more straight forward uses of Sex appeal, I've seen women try to get cheap or free drinks out of bartenders with it (generally unsuccessfully), I know women try to get out of traffic tickets with it (No reports on success rate), and I've seen girls and women use it to get other students to do their homework.

I think this is a generational thing. I love to flirt, but it seems most girls (under the age of 35) tend to worry that it may lead somewhere. I learned to flirt from older men, and they didn't expect it to go anywhere, they just wanted to flirt. Same here, mind. I don't expect anything out of it, but because I flirt a lot, I have a reputation of expecting. Since my ego is pretty big, I tend to blame society. :D

So, if I had to hazard a guess in GURPS terms what's ahppening with these girls is they flirt, and imply using body language that the possibility of sex is there. This trick is not lost on most men, and so when a girl tries a half-assed attempt and then asks for something, most men (and women) can see through it a mile away. It comes off as false, and disingenuous.

In Gurps terms: They are using Sex Appeal (Which I judge to take about 20 minutes to an hour), in less time (say, a minute) at a huge penalty.

Originally Posted by Bruno

There were quite a few complaints about him, but last time I checked the college still hadn't fired him.

He must have bought Tenure, the jerk.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

And secondly, the question is to what extent people - and in this particular context, especially young women - can exert control over their sexual response. Their "horniness", to us a crude word that I happen to think is appropriate in this context. In this case, I do think the recent introduction of modern contracptives have reduced the pressure on young women to keep their legs together. I could be wrong, though.

The primary aspect of how susceptible young women are to sexual arousal isn't the only variable. There is the secondary aspect of a family wanting to preserve a daughter's value on the marriage market, and thus taking pains to see that she's not left along with a man who's not her father or brother, perhaps even hiring a servant to watch her. And there's the tertiary aspect of a young woman capturing the loyalty of her dueña and getting her to cover up while the young woman meets a suitor. We had great fun with this in my 18th century Buffyverse campaign. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fwibos

Some of us are discussing if Sex Appeal should work on Heterosexuals of your same gender. I say absolutely, no need for cosmic, it can. There may be penalties to it, but it can work.

Depends what you mean by "heterosexual." The basic rule is "if they're not even potentially interested in you, don't bother to roll." That applies if they're asexual, or exclusively interested in the sex that you are not, or in a species that you are not, or if they have a relevant Vow or Code of Honor (a seriously meant marriage vow is equivalent to a vow of chastity—in fact, it is a vow of chastity, by the exact technical definition of the word).

But for "not interested in your sex," there are lesser forms: +3 or +8 to Will, or -3 or -8 to reaction rolls. It doesn't cost anything to have one of those, because it doesn't cost anything to be strictly straight or strictly gay. (Usually, anyway. In one of my campaigns, I allowed "heterosexual" as a quirk because the cultural norm was "bisexual.")

So I think it's up to the player to decide how seriously they're attached to partners of a particular sex.

Of course, there are always the benefits of Androgynous looks.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Adventurers and spies just about always use Sex Appeal identically to Fast-Talk, Streetwise, Intimidation, etc.: To make an NPC give up information or goods that are effectively plot tokens or needed steps along the path to plot tokens. I can count on one hand how often actual sex has been the goal of the sexy social engineer in my current campaign, whereas I would need an order of magnitude more fingers and toes to count the number of times her goal has been a key, password, file, or simply admission to a restricted area.

In the "action film" or "caper film" sense of "adventurer," surely.

On the other hand, I think of my high fantasy soap opera campaign, in which, let me see. . . .

two of the PCs ended up as a couple
two other PCs ended up as a prospective couple
two of the PCs had an established relationship as master and servant that included lots of sex
one of the PCs was part of a group of three young men who spent a lot of time trying to score
one of the PCS, a soldier, successfully courted a woman from one of the noble families
one of the PCs, another soldier, came to an understanding with a girl of her own age from a noble family, after first meeting her at a formal dance
one of the PCs, another soldier, pursued several young women soldiers, and eventually married one of them after finding out that she was pregnant by him

Well, anyway, let me say that there were lots and lots of "can I get him/her interested?" rolls. Not that such rolls would necessarily be Sex Appeal rolls. Whether you choose to call such characters "adventurers" and such experiences "adventures" depends on what "adventure" means to you; in any case, my campaigns often include a lot of scenes such as that.

Bill Stoddard