[Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Greetings, all!

One of the cliché feats ascribed both to spies-in-training and streetwise hobos is the ability to find a specific person, who is not officially listed in any official documents, while dropped into a foreign city with nothing except a normal set of clothes. Some urban legends also claim that true experts could do it while evading a 'wanted' warrant on their head.

Now, this seems like something that could be made interesting, and even might be a reasonable mission in a semi-realistic private eyes campaign if toned down a bit. But what can be done to make in more engaging?

Social Engineering gives guidelines - roughly an IQ or skill roll at -5 for a city of one million people. But that's more like something for a barely-relevant search, not for a focus of a small arc.

Perhaps a better way would be using some sort of clue-based gradual search, where you learn about possible places or people who might be the next link or something.

Thoughts?
Thanks in advance!

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

First would ask your self what do the PC know about their target?

Name?

Description?

Occupation?

Hobbies?

The latter two means you can be a little more overt in the first step and advantages what part of the cirt are those people found / hang out so that they can narrow down the search locations

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Well, Description + (original) Occupation seems like an interesting challenge, since the name can be easily changed for someone who doesn't have a passport anyway, and an occupation can be changed to some extent. I'm looking for stuff that is borderline heroic, but still doable.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

For an extended search, find informants. Seek to gain favorable relationships with local organizations (not necessarily legal!). If you can provide evidence of Status, use that to gain favors through Benefits of Status.

Bill Stoddard

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

I'm 90% likely to use this as quest in my current campaign. (Whether it will end up as a full-length or a single-session quest is hard to tell.)

I'm considering toning down the town size to perhaps a 100-500k population, a former mining boom town that is slowly becoming a ghost town (with people gradually leaving) due to the boom being over and the mine gradually emptying up (simply put, the economy is declining slowly but surely).

Some ideas of clues to give (not sure how much would be too much or too little):

• A semi-correct/semi-erroneous facial composite drawing of the character. Notably, race (which is characterised by skin, eye and hair colour) is grossly misjudged. However, height, sex, age etc. are correct.
• A phone number, which is by now obsolete, because the NPC either gave away or thrown away the SIM card, and now somebody else has it. (This is likely a chance for the face or investigator to get the most spotlight.)
• Perhaps some info on the NPC's interests/hobbies, which might give an opportunity to figure where else to look.
• Sure knowledge that the NPC speaks a specific language fluently, and knows a specific Cultural Familiarity. (This is a small clue - the town is a melting pot, but the listed CF/language combination are reasonably common there.)
• (For one PC only.) A dubious but actually true name, upon hearing which the NPC will drop suspicions and talk. (Not the NPC's current fake name; this clue is pretty important, and only makes sense in context, but the point is one PC can perform this check, but will likely not rely on it.)

The first question about hiring informants would be, who such informants are? Who would know all newcomers to the city for a prolonged period of time by address of living and/or work, including the insignificant or the quiet ones?
A crime lord would likely know (or have underlings who know) all the new gamblers, pickpockets etc., though that seems a bit optimistic regarding such a criminal organisation's ability to be informed of new petty criminals. But who would know all the new Status 0-ish people (e.g.: wal/mart reception worker, janitor, apothecary assistant, computer operator, waitress, secretary, street advertiser).

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Yes, the guidelines are for looking for a type of person, not a specific person. To find a specific person who isn't in the phone book, you have to actually investigate. If it's a runaway teenager then you check their communications, talk to their friends, look at their credit card activity, and then move on to flashing their picture in the hooker strolls and checking the morgues.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

"slowly becoming a ghost town" sounds to me like there's already evidence of that. The town I live in has under 20K people, but it's got business, and the population is holding steady. It's just hard for me to accept a definition of a town with 100K+ people including the term "ghost town". The cities near me have around 40K people. Boston, Massachusetts has approximately 645K people.

I don't know... It just sounds weird. I suppose "Ghost Town" would be based more on number of people compared to how many the city could support at its normal level. Anyway, I'll get back to the actual post subject...

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

I'm thinking of something like Detroit, which got reduced from almost 2M to something like 700k people within 50-60 years, and gained empty, abandoned, run-down districts.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

I think a big part of it is the type of target, and whether they're consciously trying to hide. David mentions the teenager, and it sounds right. If we're talking about an opponent "agent" of some kind, I think you're pretty much screwed without a lucky break.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Ah... good example. You have convinced me of the appropriateness of your choice of words. :)

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

We're talking about a person who generally lays low (as in, participates in neither public-flashy nor criminal activity, but still holds a mid/low-Status job, and walks about various business in free time), and while has some evasion-handy skills (notably Acting, Disguise and Streetwise), is neither on alert nor has reason to actively avoid detection.

In short, the NPC will only go into all-out 'evasive agent mode' if convinced the party is out to get the NPC, which requires a major screw up.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

You have neglected the most important information. Why is he worth looking for?

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

And why does s/he not want to be found?

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

That is in fact not true in Social Engineering. There are guidelines there for adapting the mechanic to looking for a specific individual rather than a type. One of them is that you make the modifier negative for bigger communities and positive for smaller ones, for reasons that I hope are obvious.

For all sorts of GURPS things, there is both a quick one-roll mechanic and playing it out in detail. For example, you could play out a job day by day, or allow a monthly job success roll, depending on how interesting it is to roleplay the job. Single search rolls for finding a specific person are the same sort of thing. In some games you're going to want to fast forward to what happens when the person is found.

Bill Stoddard

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Long story short, because there is evidence of said NPC possessing unique skills. Okay, not unique, but remarkable, and with evidence that said NPC will not demand an outrageous price for the services.

Moved away from a location where things got too hot (essentially avoiding a shady war between two illegal factions). Not exactly hiding, since there is little reason for the potentially hostile faction to bother going all the way after the NPC. I think this sort of half-hearted evasion is the level of difficulty that is reasonable for a quest.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

You said the guy is holding a low key mid level job? So he has known whereabouts. Unless he's getting paid under the table, there will be a money trail. An account that gets used, or at least a location where checks are cashed. If the employer requires a residential address for a simple employment record check, the employer has a home address. If the person has a job, there are people the person has contact with in order to perform their job. If all you're looking to do is get in touch, leaving a note at the employer might even prompt the guy to get in touch with you if what you're offering is tempting enough.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Oh, of course the employer knows where the target lives. (Actually, this need not always be the case, but in a low-suspicion mode, it is the case.) But that's only useful if the PCs already know who the employer is (and the fact that the target is employed at all). I'm not sure just walking around asking all possible employment places with a composite is picture going to produce anything better than a random roll at -5 or so every cycle.
Hmm. Is my number of clues too scarce?

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Depends on the skills hes known for, if he still practices them in the new area then that is a lead. If the job he now holds is known or the kind of work he is also known for that is another lead.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Well, the skill set is Chemistry!, which, in the setting, includes TL^ stuff like bits of alchemy and rather customisable pharmacy.
But I see that sort of skill set as requiring a bit too much in the way of credentials (which the character lacks), thus I'm thinking of something less impressive than a pharmacist.

I'm considering the option of the NPC becoming a salesperson/consultant in a joint over-the-counter-drugs-and-assorted-cosmetic-and-household-stuff chain*, i.e. a job that could benefit from said skill set, but does not require having any actual special licenses. On one hand, searching for a jack-of-all-trades chemist in apothecaries/drug stores seems like a reasonable direction of search. On the other, the fact that the drug store section personnel and the other stuff section personnel typically are in separate rooms, and don't talk during work hours much, will prevent the walk-in-and-instantly-figure-the-NPC-looks-familiar resolution.
Thoughts?
(I'm preferring to make several different paths of investigation possible, as most RPG players are notorious for their randomly interchangeable absolute cluelessness and Holmsian insight.)

* == We have such a chain around here, so one is certainly reasonable in a fictional setting.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

I'm resurrecting this thread, likely for the last time, since the very issue I'm asking about is going to arise real soon - either next weekend, or perhaps even touched in the session that is planned for today (if things go according to plan and the PCs act in a hurried manner.

A question on informants: what sort of person would be a suitable informant - one that is both well enough informed about any newcomers to the city (most importantly, those who aren't registered in any official records*), as well as sufficiently non-covert that such an informant can be found by the party faster than the NPC in question? Oh, and one that would actually willing to sell the information to the PCs?


* == The locale has very loose border controls, and it is considered totally normal to go by train from one city-state to another without showing anyone a personal identification document. OTOH, luggage customs are serious business, and import of large amounts of valuables is taxed.
The town in question has a sufficient level of corruption that finding a job that is off the record is quite doable.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

For some situations, innkeepers and the barkeeps of certain establishments. For more subtle ones, the inkeeper's emplyees.

In the right kind of environment, the beggers at the city gates. They get a good look at EVERYONE coming in, and they are certainly willing to sell the information.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

That's really dependent on setting and narrative; it's hard to give a general answer. But you mention people who aren't in official records. You would want, probably, an underworld Contact with a high Streetwise (if the target is self-employed) or an organizational Contact with a high Administration and maybe a Security Clearance (if the target is working for some secretive organization). If they don't have a defined Contact of the right sort, they would need to search for the appropriate sort of person—which is not a search for a named individual but for a person in a suitable role; on the other hand, it's probably at -5 if they're using general IQ or ordinary skills, as such people don't hang out signs. They might have to get past an organizational gatekeeper even to talk with them.

Alternatively, they could try searching for indirect traces, coming up with a profile of the person, and then looking for records of transactions they would have engaged in, analyzing appropriate neighborhoods to narrow them down to a small enough neighborhood to avoid the penalty on searches, and so on. I think you're looking at Intelligence Analysis rolls preceded by data gathering. You might want to review the SE rules on gathering rumors for a start, for the HUMINT part. But they also would want to hunt for electronic records, possibly doing a massive data search.

I would suggest that you give your players the choices of (a) brute force search, (b) finding an informant, or (c) doing Intelligence Analysis after gathering data—and tell them they need to come up with the process for whichever they do.

Bill Stoddard

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

I would use something akin to the MH2 rules for investigation.

A thing to note:
You need enough info starting out to uniquely identify one person. Not half a dozen. Not zero.
This list:
Will make it all most impossible. You've given them bad info. It points to someone who does not exist. Now there is the magic name thing, but is the guy going to drop all pretense if a group of people start blabbing around town? If the party asks seven people if they are "the real slim shady" will it work when the "real slim shady" is number 8? Assuming the party needs to be sparing with the name, they'll have problems. (If they don't need to be sparring with the name, they can simply post an ad in the local paper asking "will the real slim shady please stand up?".)

What might happen: So the party makes a list of people with the same hobbies/language/CF as the target. They track down the phone and figure out where it came from. Our target "slim shady". He doesn't match the description. They ask him where he got the phone. He gives them a plausible dead end that goes nowhere. Party continues to search for someone who matches the description. After an exhaustive search they conclude that nobody in the city matches the information given.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Yes, I'm trying to get some use out of those. I'm certainly finding them more inspiring than the vast-but-hard-to-follow advice of Mysteries.

I'm assuming you mean in the end. It's (IMHO) perfectly okay to start chasing half a dozen trails only to exclude all but one by the end of the adventure.

Thanks, this is why I'm asking about balancing the trivial against the impossible. The good news is, the party decided to, instead of going to the town where she currently is, to look at the city from which she retreated (thus spending extra time for extra clues). That's a somewhat unexpected turn of events that will allow them to filter out some/all of the false leads, and likely get some more info on the character (e.g., if they're insistent and resourceful, a new composite).

I actually have a pre-planned lead for the phone that does give roughly one half of the information required to pinpoint the NPC (but has to be united with another half from another source).

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Hmm... maybe I didn't quite explain this right. The description the PC's have needs to specify one person.

If the PC's are given the job of "Find the man with natural blue hair, grey eyes and a chicken tattoo on his ankle. He is 23 years old." And they go to New York and low and behold, they find three people who have all those qualifications? They won't be able to find the "right" one. OTOH, if the "right" person is actually 25 years old, they won't be able to figure it out. They want a 23 year old.

The description can be pretty vague "The blonde kid who worked at my Dad's store three years ago" is enough as long as there is only one blonde kid who worked at the Dad's store three years ago. If there were three its not. If there were zero its not.

Basically when the PCs are given the target, whatever they are given as a description must describe one, and only one person.

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Those facts are not the task. Those facts are the means by which they are to perform the task. They may or may not have means adequate to the purpose. Any description you can give, if the requirement is only, "Find a person of this description," will be not "find a specific individual" but "find a person in such and such a category" and will use those rules. (Thus, as a city gets bigger, on one hand the chance of your finding some person who fits a description gets better, but on the other hand the chance of finding a particular individual gets worse.)

Bill Stoddard

Re: [Social Engineering] Find a specific person in a foreign city (Known Individuals)
 

Yeah, the actual goal is 'find a highly competent and extremely versatile alchemist who is very likely to cooperate with the sort of stuff PCs do (and in fact already having cooperated with their patron/guild several times)'. It just so happens that the clues for finding the most likely candidate are such-and-such.

Also: a setup where Clue A is (secretly) wrong but the process of following Clue A eventually reveals both the fact that Clue A is wrong and reveals a Clue B (which is true) - is still a workable quest for an investigation, right?