[DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

So I'm starting up a brand new DF campaign to replace the old Fantasy one, and one of my players has chosen to go a Celestial. They've commented that folk would give a Celestial character a free pass in many situations where blame is being assigned, what with them being angels (or at least descended from one) and always detecting as Good etc.

Now, whilst I'm happy to have peasantry with dirt between their ears see the nimbus and basically assume they can do no wrong - not everyone in the world is so gullible, and GURPS runs on a "you get what you pay for" policy. The Celestial template does give you a universal boost to reactions with their improved appearance, so they're likely to make better first impressions, but it lacks anything like the Honest Face perk, or a Reputation of being good (as opposed to just functioning as a Good entity when magic or the like checks that soul-variable). Even the Celestial Nimbus perk is basically just a light accessory perk in disguise.

So, how far can half-angels avoid suspicion and blame when not acting good, simply because of their race?

Note: Using Fast Talk to convince folk that you're only smiting evil wrong doers, and not just murdering merchants for their wares, does not count in this case, as that still requires you to make social influence rolls as usual. Although how large a bonus you get (if any) to said roll because you're a Celestial is still up for debate.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Absent relevant advantages, they have no special ability here. I suggest the Honest Face perk.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

As far as their Advantages allow - I would say if someone wanted to make this an important character element, take Social Regard or Reputation. Be generous with letting the player take these things if they want to spend points in that direction, but ultimately the player decides if they want them and they will not be freebees.

Ultimately, being put a pedestal is not always a positive. People might hold celestials to unreasonably high standards and react badly when those are not met.

People know celestials always detect as good - it could make people more suspicious, because you can't actually determine their moral outlook in the usual ways.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Wasn't Lucifer an angel?

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Might you hold "falling" over them like a sword of Damocles?
Tell them their celestial appearance is contingent upon their continued "good" behavior?

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Barring advantages and disadvantages to the contrary, I'd say that a known Celestial would be more able to avoid suspicion but less able to avoid blame than a full mortal would. "You're from a higher plane, so you know better."

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

The half-celestial presented in DF3 has no specific requirement to be good, they just detect as good. Given that Celestial and Infernal have the same point cost, you could probably give them a feature whereby they can actually change templates based on their behavior (this could result in some divine gifts becoming unusable), but it's not something built into the race as written.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

They have a racial Feature that they always detect as "good" when it comes to supernatural effects like weapons which will only allow the morally good to wield them and pentagrams that blast good-aligned critters with hellfire when they step on them.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Lucifer was still capable of assuming a fair seeming appearance.

I would, generally speaking, have the unwashed hordes assume that as an "Angel", the character can do no wrong. But anyone with a point in relevant Theology would be able to remember how Lucifer was not only the fairest angel, but also the one closest to the Lord.

Of course, that's all dependent on if your setting has a psuedo christian theology for angels.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

There is a perk that lets you make an intimidate check without talking to someone, you could adapt that for Fast Talk (or what ever talky skill you feel is appropriate) and then simply discourage them from using it in other ways.

Another possibility is a sufficiently positive reputation that everyone just overlooks their actions.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy assumes a dirty, gritty kind of fantasy where even the "cute" halflings and leprechauns are, respectively, gangsters and foul-tempered little brutes. Everybody is looking out for #1, which is why the saintliest clerics still accept payment in gold procured through theft and murder. As the (brief) rules for social order in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons suggest, the authorities are harsh, unforgiving, and prone to dishing out corporal punishment. This is the context for celestials.

Turning to the racial write-up: "Some people believe that celestials exist for a Reason and are the Chosen. However, if divine servitors are forbidden to fraternize with mortals – as clerics claim – then it seems more likely that celestials descend from rebel angels, or that angels aren't divine servitors." Which is to say that the prevailing belief is that celestials are the offspring of fallen angels who can't keep their pants up. They get exactly the same amount of slack as anybody else with +1 to reactions thanks to Attractive, but not one iota more. Their racial feature of counting as Good has nothing to do with how they're perceived in mundane interactions; it's a technicality or loophole in cosmic law that hinders as often as it helps, and only matters in supernatural affairs. Only some fool who relies entirely on Detect Evil spells would let that influence him.

In short, ordinary people in the dog-eat-dog environment assumed in DF generally acknowledge that celestials are pretty. Beyond that, any awe they might feel is balanced by an apprehension that angels are dangerous, mercurial, and maybe a bit rapey. Thus, celestials don't get a free pass. And note that the author is well aware of the Honest Face perk, which he gave to gnomes and halflings so that they could live in polite society despite being known to be gifted thieves and kleptomaniacs, respectively. Celestials don't have this because they're at least as likely as anyone else to draw blame when things go wrong . . . maybe more so, when things go supernaturally wrong or someone experiences virgin birth.

If a player wants a "can do no wrong" celestial, then by all means let her buy Honest Face. Agents, assassins, bards, cutpurses, innkeepers, servants, and thieves all have it as a standard option, allowing sketchy people who are card-carrying members of the demimonde, lowborn classes, and underworld to hang out with holy warriors and get audiences with kings. Perhaps more pertinently, it's suggested for clerics of love, who also have holy ties with a decidedly carnal shadow.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

"Fairest and fallen, greeting and defiance!" (a wizard's standard greeting to the Lone Power in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series)

"under the general rule that they can be opposed to the crap It pulls without being rude to it. The goal, after all, is to get It to stop acting out and go home, and who knows, in the long run being polite may help…" —Diane Duane

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

The Perks Convincing Nod and Honest Face would work well together for someone that people won't suspect of doing anything wrong.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Geeky aside: In Milton, Lucifer is amazed and dismayed that the real Angels don't recognize him after his Fall. "If thou beest he, but O how fall'n! how changed!" etc. Sure, he can shapechange, and Adam and Eve don't see through his disguises, but the Angels see through him right away and in Hell, the fallen angels hardly recognise one another. Plus they can take damage: unfallen angels can't.

Still, DF is a silly format and I guess you have to overlook the absurdity that an actual angel would go dungeon crawling for loot, so hey, whatever suits your format/world. If there are Celestials who go grubbing around for gold and murder merrily for the challenge, I guess they would have a less robust reputation for innate goodness?

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Ah. I see Kromm pretty much covered my second paragraph in his post. I should really read the whole thread before posting, huh?

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Just gonna throw this out there too.

In D&D the "Celestial Blooded" (Aasimar, Half-Celestials, etc) are often greater mistreated than Humans. You know, because people don't like different, and seeing something with weird eye colors or feathers instead of hair, etc, can be off putting.

Villager A: "Why are monsters attacking us?"

Villager B: "That dude with the gold eyes probably dragged them in!"

Celestial: "Yo, I'm half celestial! No way!"

Villager A: "Do you got a business card to prove that?"

Villagers don't have "Hidden Lore" to know what a celestial is, or means really.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Social Regard is what fits the concept. It also can't be taken away from the character. It's an intrinsic part of the category that the character visibly belongs to, without the moral conduct of the individual character being at all relevant.

Reputation can rise (if under +4) and fall according to actions, and is tied to the individual.

But this also means that Social Regard can't reasonably be purchased after gamestart, if it comes from the character's species. It'll have to be present from the start, throughout the character's entire life, people he encounters always reaction to him at this bonus of +X. Social Regard can also come from something non-biological, such as being old, and that can be purchased. It's just not reasonable when it's species-derived.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

I'm not so sure that in a setting with overt supernatural elements on every street corner, it wouldn't make sense to purchase racial Social Regard in play . . .

Maybe angels/half-angels/half-demons/demons have some visible indicator of their Goodness or Evilness that changes with their deeds. Angelic types who do good deeds and protect life get progressively shinier, or acquire a visible halo. Demonic types who engage in treachery and destruction start withering small plants and making animals bay. The ability to change in this way is a 0-point racial feature, and perhaps all that distinguishes (part-)angel from (part-)demon is what they've been doing to trigger this feature.

In that case, points earned doing Good stuff could be spent on Social Regard (Respected) and points earned doing Evil stuff could be spent on Social Regard (Feared). Since Evil is customarily an "easier" path than Good, maybe being Feared could be paid for in part by taking Frightens Animals, Lifebane, and similar dark traits.

And needless to say, in a setting where a class of entities physically manifests incontrovertible symbols of their Good and Evil deeds, common folk will recognize and react to those symbols in much the same way they eat some mushrooms but avoid others, or trust proven healers more than necromancers who travel by zombie-borne sedan chair.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

I know I saw a feature of angels being that their wings turned red, black and dingy colors if they did evil in some settings.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

That reminds me of an old SF story where some university students summoned a demon, but managed to knock it unconscious and drag it off to a hospital. The hospital psychiatrists had a little chat, and a little while later, the angel was cured...

The plot-line was that a demon is just a sick angel. The other plot-line was that this proved the existence of the supernatural, and caused the global multivac to shut down in a puff of logic.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

I do not follow what this means, and it's not just because I'm not familiar with the term "multivac".

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

"Multivac" was the name given by Isaac Asimov to a super-computer in a series of stories. Often enough Multivac was in charge of running the world. The name was a play on the early Univac brand name.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

One of the earliest computer manufacturers was called UNIVAC. The term "multivac" was in vogue in SF for a while for a more advanced computer, playing off the uni- and multi- prefixes. (EDIT: I see that Anaraxes beat me to this part of the answer.)

Computers of almost any sort are only good with mathematical logic - the existence of something supernatural would be something that they probably wouldn't be able to handle.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Well, under the tropes of SF of the time, I guess. Realistically, some computer network that would be capable of running the world would be an AI (and, absent real AIs, we don't really know what they'd be good or bad at), and the computerized help that runs big parts of the world would generally ignore evidence of the supernatural as being out of scope for the problems they're tasked with solving.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Found the story title.

The Devil Was Sick by Bruce Elliott. In the far future, a student summons a demon as his thesis project, then takes it to the Sane Asylum where it's cured by advanced technology.

The multivac I referred to upthread was responsible for determining whether or not a given thesis had already been studied; students were unable to graduate unless they did something original, which after thousands of years of study, was increasingly hard to do.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Why? Who would program a computer to catastrophically fail when faced with facts that disagree with previously understood facts? That would mean the A.I. couldn't ever have learned to begin with.

"Recent experimental evidence disproves Relativity while simultaneously uniting a new theory with Quantum Mechanics." Oh noes! Catastrophic shutdown! That's silly.
It's mainly people that go bonkers when faced with their own mistakes.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

What is this "A.I." you speak of? We're only allowed one improbable assumption per SF story, and the one here is "a computer system that reaches around the world".

(Just because we have it now doesn't mean anybody expected it then.)

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

We're only "allowed" one improbable assumption? What, are the Sci-Fi police going to come and burn all my Asimov novels now?

This side-conversation started with the discussion of a world-spanning AI system.

But if you decide to ignore the AI system part, it's even more ludicrous that the computer would catch fire/implode/whatever from being presented something outside its parameters.

What actually happens when dumb computers get nonsensical input is one of
a) validation routines reject the input (I refuse to believe!/You must be mistaken, Hal)
b) attempts to process the input and aborts, basically taking extra time to get to a)
c) attempts to process the input and crashes, which is a decidedly non-lethal condition. It can certainly cause an annoying service interruption, but it's not system-death.
d) processes the garbage input and produces garbage output, then continues largely unmoved by the experience.
Q: "Has this thesis ever been done before?"
A: "Coconut."
There may now be lingering coconut-related nonsense in the database that needs cleaning up, but again, this is nonlethal.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Well, yes. It's called the Unicorn in the Garden rule (after the James Thurber story of the same name) - go past one improbable assumption and suspension of disbelief gets snapped.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Early computers were very physical and didn't have fancy things like input filtering and such. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc945sNB0uA

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

We have A.I now? I see much more evidence of Artificial stupidity than Artificial Intelligence. :)

Take Amazon recommendations for example.. It recently discovered that I had read and liked a Conan the Barbarian book. It therefore recommend to me a book of Christopher Hitchens essays.

I see a _lot_ of stuff like that.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

iirc, the multivac didn't so much give up in a fit of blue smoke as realise that it had made so many decisions based on a flawed premise and thus ruined too many promising careers as a result. It concluded that its programming was not fit for purpose. It probably went looking for a programmer or counsellor or whatever handles such advanced computers to tell it what do do next (or ran its self-diagnostics package), and stopped its main job in the interim as a precautionary measure while the problem was resolved. All the story notes it that it the immediate aftermath of the event, it was effectively out of commission for its usual task.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

He meant global spanning computer nets. Which even now we don;t have anything even remotely resembling MULTIVAC.

Re: [DF] "But I'm a (half) angel!"
 

Every super popular work of science fiction and fantasy has far more than a single improbability.