Self-Control Rolls for Odious Personal Habits?

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Except that the Basic Set does that with a few disadvantages. Bully, for example, has a -2 reaction penalty for -10, which is basically an OPH, but there's also a self-control roll. Likewise, Sadism has a -3 to the reaction roll, as well as a self-control roll, all for -15. (The reaction penalty for Sadism is listed for "[t]hose who become aware of your problem" but Bully has no such qualifier.) Still, it's weird—if the self-control roll for Bully is for extra behavior, does that make others react even worse? Why doesn't it grant more negative points?

It's a bother, to be sure, and many of the frequency situations are better as a Reputation rather than an OPH, which is assumed to be operating all the time but it might not have caused a bad reaction this time. But there is precedent—Bully outright, and to a lesser degree Sadism.

I believe the self-control roll has to do with behavior, not with reaction penalty. That is, people who know you're a sadist reaction to you at -3 whether or not you're beating people with whips, but given that beating people with whips might cause additional problems ("You did what with the prisoners?! We were supposed to exchange them back!"), you have a self-control roll to avoid acting that way.

I've never viewed self-control rolls as a way of getting out of a penalty. The purpose of such disadvantages is that they define how your character behaves, and that behavior causes a problem, but sometimes you might not want to behave that way (sometimes you don't want to snap and start shouting at people, or beating prisoners, or hitting on girls, even though most of the time, you do those things), so you have a self-control roll.