[Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Body Control: An cinematic martial arts skill, with prerequisites of Trained by a Master, Breath Control and Meditation. This gives you control over your body at a deep level, allowing you to feign death convincingly, to flush poisons from your metabolism, and to use the skill in place of HT to resist afflictions, magic and psionics (note that getting +1 from this requires spending 12 points on Body Control, which is more than a point of HT, although it gets better as you buy more Body Control). It's not exactly a compelling buy at this price. Having it in a talent or wildcard skill could help with that.

Looking up the skill is slightly complicated by the existence of the magical College of Body Control, and the Body Control chi power in Martial Arts and Powers.

Martial Arts clarifies the skill's use in resistance and offers simplifying options, some of which I've assumed above. It also offers the option of using Body Control in place of First Aid and Physician for treating one's own injuries. The skill also appears in several styles, talents, and so on. Technical Grappling suggests that trying to use Body Control instantly for resistance is at -10 in a realistic campaign, but I'm rather doubtful about the skill being available at all in a realistic campaign; Martial Arts p57 has some realistic feats that can look like Body Control, when done right.

Chinese Elemental Powers has some abilities that work well with Body Control and Thaumatology offers it as a way of resisting misapplied elixirs and a replacement core skill for body-centred ritual magic; Ritual Path Magic does the same for "inner alchemy". Bio-Tech doesn't mention the skill, although it touches on the magical college. Powers points out that another resistance use for the skill is avoiding crippling of chi powers, and Mysteries suggests it for use in judicial ordeals. The Attribute Substitution perk (Power-Ups 2: Perks) to base Body Control on Will can sometimes be very appropriate.

I wonder if Body Control could be useful in misleading users of Body Language skill, by avoiding or faking "tells" and, by extension, in making Feints that are harder to resist, given that reading body language there is a normal part of combat skills.

What have you done with Body Control in a campaign? Have you ever used it as a base for magic, or frustrated a poisoner? What else can it do?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Yeah this one is a vry rare used skill in my experaince.
We have used it as a Control skill for a Super or two and I allow Metabolisim Control to add to most uses as if it were a Talent.
However both tend to be taken for color and background then actual use.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Hugely popular in Cherry Blossom Rain.

First, all ninjas used poison on their shuriken, and a few other, less honorable opponents also favored poison. Body Control became the ticket to putting an end to that. I also allowed Body Control to act as First Aid (on yourself), which is an optional rule, thus was useful for taking care of your own wounds.

But I also made it the controlling skill to quite a few chi powers. Thus, it could trigger things like regeneration. It also resisted quite a few enemy chi powers.

It started as one of the core skills of our chi-master, Daisuke, and made him something of a weird tank, because he has a mystical defense (body control protected his body, and mental strength protected his mind). So some other players began to follow suit and studied Daisuke's patient ways.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

It should be possible to use it for real world "tricks" like raising or lowering your body temperature.
With concentration, I made myself get a fever to get out of going to school. (Yeah, it never occurred to me to just lie.)
But that can be dangerous as I once raised it to 103.

Overall, the skill does need some creative GM-ing to make useful.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Not much use by PCs seen.

However, right now I have a major NPC antagonist who used to cause a medical alert by inducing extreme bradycardia (he's a captive in their base). If the need arises, he will also use it to fool a polygraph (though the PCs are disinclined to use one, believing them to be too unreliable), and if things got to the worst stuff, perhaps even commit suicide with it (besides, he believes he'll reincarnate eventually, so getting set free is nice, but if not possible, death is merely a setback).

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

In reality that would likely be a technique of Meditation or Autohypnosis. If you can do it without training, it may be a quirk (or Perk, in GURPS terms) of your physiology.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Or Temperature Tolerance: takes time, effectiveness based on margin of success. It has potential to have more usefulness than a perk.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Obviously not a fully realistic setting. But under optimal conditions and skilled use, polygraphs are at best 70% accurate.

Facial recognition software for identifying emotions and pain especially are getting creepy accurate. You skill use idea might help with hypothetical acting penalties against such programs.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Software is probably best represented as having a Body Language score, as this is precisely what it is doing. Even though it's probably doing it in a more inhuman way. And maybe has a Technique or two for specific subsets of Body Language. Either way, it is normally resisted with Acting.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

But controlling micro-expressions is not realistic. So I would prefer some use of a cinematic skill to overcome it rather than just allowing mundane skills to have cinematic effect.
I suppose that's just my preference.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

When I heard that teh microexpressoanalytix is teh undefeatable back during the pitch for Lie To Me, I was immediately suspicious. Every time someone advertises something as irresistible, incapable of failure etc., BS meters go off the scale.
Forcing someone to rely on a cinematic skill to resist Body Language and Detect Lies seems very fishy from a gaming perspective too.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

There's very little proof that "microexpressions" actually mean anything useful at all.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

More a description of all movements of the face and body that humans can't detect than anything specific, I would say.
If a program can detect something we can't, then I'm fine calling them such things.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

The hierarchy I was thinking of is:

Acting can resist Body Language or Detect Lies (BL/DL), with a contest of skills, as per RAW.

Body Control might have a serious advantage in such a contest. A success could just mean that BL/DL didn't work at all, or could enable actively misleading them with a contest of skills.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

It's at least as realistic as microexpressions are. The whole point of Body Language, face-reading, etc. is to be informed about the subject's emotional state in a given context, and it's not as if people can't manipulate their own emotions, or distract themselves with painful stimuli or memories, or have poor laaguage skills most of the other tricks and dodges from BLADE RUNNER-related properties.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

I'd let someone roll against Body Control as a complimentary skill to Acting when resisting Detect Lies and Body Language. Not sure about just rolling against Body Control on its own. Maybe a Will-based roll to resist polygraphs?

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

They haven't been shown to actually mean anything. If a machine can detect them, and they are meaningless noise, then it's not really useful. Garbage in/garbage out.

Even if they do mean something, they mean that the person has a thought (that they may not even be consciously aware of) about something briefly that causes an emotional response, it isn't necessarily relevant to anything they are saying or that the interrogator is interested in.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

I meant my posts to refer to emotional states only, not complex lies and subtle deception.
The real research is geared toward pain identification in hospital settings. Identify the drug seekers and how much to treat actual pain.

I personally was mocked by two nurses in the E.R. for complaining about my sore throat. It was one of the worst pains of my life.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Complimentary Skills are always a good thing.
As for resisting polygraph, maybe I'd even go further, such as making it skill+2 to +5, since it's a pretty rare skill that allows rather fine control of body functions. I mean, it better be good compared just using straight Will even after a minimal point investment. Besides, opponents can always decide to ditch the polygraph entirely, particularly if they have Intuition.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

That's a good point. For 8 points, you probably should get better than just "as good as what you'd have had without it". Heck, even if you used an optional specialty specifically for fooling polygraphs, it still costs 4 points to do what you could with Will. Rolling at +2 would make it cost 2 points to match Will and do anything else Body Control lets you do. Thinking on it, I'd even make Fool Polygraph an average technique that defaults to Body Control+2 and can be bought up on its own.

[EDIT]
Actually, thinking more about this, if you were to take Resistant to Polygraphs (+3), it'd run [2]. So that's Will+3 for 2 points, as opposed to Will+3 for [16] with Body Control (Polygraph Results). Perhaps screwing with a polygraph should fall under not-typically-stressful routine use category that anyone with the skill should be able to accomplish. Give fooling a polygraph a +4 bonus, so that with 2 points in it, you pop out at attribute+3.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Oh. It's Very Hard. Right. Skill+4 then, maybe even +5. It's really a very narrow application, IMHO.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

Polygraphs are easy to turn into inconclusive results.
My (sister-in-law) is a pathological liar that has taken some before. Always weird useless results.

Getting them to label a lie as a truth takes "tricks" that are supposedly not that hard to learn.
I wouldn't say those have anything what so ever to do with willpower, except in a cinematic setting that has lie detectors rather than polygraphs.

Almost by definition they must be administered without stress as that reduces their accuracy even further. TV examples are always done horribly wrong. You can't spring a question on someone and expect anything other than shock.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

RAW already accounts for that.

Well, those tricks are very well represented by Controllable Disadvantage (Compulsive Lying) [1]. So yeah, not all that hard to master.

Well, TV examples of almost everything tend to be horribly wrong 90% of the time.
Lie To Me was actually the one which highlighted the unreliability of polygraphs, and demonstrated it by applying eustress to a test subject who wasn't specifically trained to fool the polygraph at all.

Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Body Control
 

But she doesn't qualify for Gurps level compulsive lying. More like an odious habit and reputation in my opinion.
Thankfully, she's exceptionally bad at it. For the most part, only other equally screwed up relatives ever trust anything coming out of her mouth.
Even when she confessed to her infant cousin's murder, the cops didn't believe her. And any infant related crime leads to lack of objectivity and need to "solve" quickly.
(Long story: She was innocent but in the house and unaware at the time of the incident.)