Self-Control Rolls for Odious Personal Habits?

[Bruno]

An automatic reaction penalty with minimal qualifiers is -5/level. A reputation with basically everyone basically all the time.

Disadvantages that include a reaction penalty and a self control roll include

• a behavior that you struggle to control (with a self control roll)
• possibly some skill penalties
• a reaction penalty with a qualifier - people who know about your disadvantage/have suffered your disadvantage generally.

That's like a Reputation with a frequency of recognition, or a Large Group instead of everyone - it's just not worth as many points as an almost-guaranteed Reputation.

Bully, On the Edge - these are all bad reaction inducing - and they make you do stupid things - you mock or harass people you should be nice to, you keep putting your life at risk pointlessly.

Bully is a -5* behavior attached to a -2 Reputation from a Large group of people.

On the Edge is about a -10* behavior (cf Berserk which is an even worse behavior with offsetting bonuses) attached to a -5 Reputation complex (-2 from most people witnessing this, +2 from a small number of people witnessing this). In a boring life as a white collar worker, you will still find ways to trigger On the Edge, but not nearly as commonly. I'd give monthly rolls for someone who "just" commutes to work at a desk job, to see if they're too insane in traffic or take too much risk jaywalking a busy road.

Odious Personal Habits are behaviors or qualities that don't generally hinder your characters actions other than the reaction penalty. Body odor (not to the severity of Bad Smell), punning, spitting, drooling: this isn't really a list of things that will get you in trouble even if nobody's watching you.

Many of these disads are -5/reaction penalty but that's certainly not a rule. It's definitely not the same as a Reputation with Everyone All The Time.

Phantom Voices is a Self Control disad in disguise - it only offers the equivalent of the 15- level (the mechanic is inverted, you must roll under 6- for the disad to activate, rather than over 15- but the probability is the same). All levels of Phantom Voices give a -2 to reactions from people who notice your problem, but they cost -5, -10, or -15 points. The first level is essentially nothing but the reaction penalty - you have a 6- chance of behaving in a way that lets people know you have a -2-reaction-penalty-worthy problem. Further levels decorate your problem with personal problems, like being temporarily deaf, fright checks, or doing dangerous things.

The standard form of Excommunicated is a Social Stigma that's only worth -5 points even though it comes with a -3 reaction penalty - the assumption is that unlike the other Social Stigmas, people can't necessarily guess it just by looking at you; it's effectively a Reaction penalty with Almost Everyone with you being Sometimes recognized. The -10 point version makes you recognized all the time, but it's still only with Almost Everyone. In Dungeon Fantasy they add -3 to beneficial clerical spells cast on you, but in a sense this is noting that "Almost Everyone" certainly includes the deities powering those spells.