On being Feared

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Hide

Why do you ask in the first place? Is she looking forward to being “less fearful”? Or do you want to create a situation “tuned” to her advantage?

Supposing your player has been playing continuously these 4 years, with the same PC, I guess she had room to make “adjustments”... And after 4 years the advantage is still there; so there should be a reason.

This seems like kind of a strange argument. On one hand, I could read it as, "The character was created with the advantage; she should be played with the advantage, including its inconvenient features, and not change it." And that rather seems to say, "You can't have your character become a different person." On the other hand, it could be, "The character has been played with this advantage up to now; she can't start being different now." But it seems to me that trying to become different has to start at some particular time, and if you don't allow the character to take that first step then you are not allowing them to take the journey at all, which reduces again to "You can't have your character become a different person."

And I see that as a limitation on roleplaying. It allows the character to be a type, but not a person.

My take is rather that the character should be able to change, but that the process of change (a) shouldn't be instant or costless and (b) should give rise to interesting roleplaying as the character runs into complications arising from her change of course.

At this point, the player has decided (a) that the character wants to stop being indifferent to respectability and go for a higher-Status lifestyle and (b) that she wants to have people serving her. She hasn't yet dealt with the actual process of recruiting hirelings, or thought about the implications of making them afraid. What I'm trying to do is think through those implications ahead of time, so that when she does take that step, I can present her with the right set of reactions and problems. The "loyalty of slaves" rules are one possible way to approach this, but not the only one. But one way or another, if she is trying either not to make people afraid, or to gain benefits from people that (she will learn) are hard to reconcile with making them afraid, she shouldn't be able to just stop; she should have to make an effort. If this were a trait with a self-control roll, it would involve attempting such rolls and eventually buying the trait off, from (9) to (12) to (15) to quirk-level to gone. Since it's a social trait that reflects other people's reactions, it should involve taking actions that influence those reactions. And since Nergul is smart (IQ 14) but has very few social skills, that's likely to involve rolling against various things at default for a while. In fact, the player has discussed this with me a little, and concluded that her goal is for Nergul to gain a point of Savoir-Faire (High Society)—but if she does, how the skill and the advantage interact will be something I need to have worked out.

acrosome mentions have the character "dress down" as a way of foregoing the advantage. But being able to hide your belonging to a certain category of person isn't always that simple. Consider, for example, the classic bodyguard who puts on a nice suit and looks like a bodyguard wearing a nice suit that hides neither his muscles nor his shoulder holster. It might be possible for Nergul to hide her being a necromancer, but that could take, say, a Disguise roll—and again we have "you have to roleplay it and make some skill rolls." Or maybe Nergul can do the equivalent of the king showing up in a military uniform and being addressed as "general so-and-so" to short circuit some of the protocol; that might be a way to use Savoir-Faire.