Conspiracy "everyman" skills

[Railstar]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

• In addition to Disguise, Mimicry. Mimicry is an often-overlooked, but essential, part of impersonation. Disguise might make you look like someone, but if you don't sound like them, your options are sharply limited.

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

It's all three, actually. Disguise lets you look like someone, Mimicry lets you sound like them, and Acting covers behaving like them consistently.

I wouldn't consider this an "everyman" task, even in a conspiracy game - impersonating specific individuals to those who recognise their face or voice would be a highly specialised task. Also a very high-risk strategy since if you're making Disguise checks at all you're probably making a lot of Disguise checks, and if I realise your nose is fake, that's a red flag even if I don't know the person you're pretending to look like.

(although using your own face for anything shady carries its own risks)

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

Yeah, by the literal reading of that, it seems like it does. I don't like that that basically completely makes Mimicry (Speech) completely irrelevant, though. I mean, Mimicry isn't even easier than Acting, so we can't claim it's a hidden optional speciality or something! So, personally, I'd rule as I explained above - Acting covers behavior, Mimicry covers speech. I suppose I could see ruling that the note in Acting about covering "voices" means it covers things like verbal tics or patterns of speech - Mimicry lets you sound like General Ripper, but it's Acting that lets you know exactly how often to refer to "his essence" in conversation to fool his subordinates.

Acting has some stiff penalties for impersonation. -5 if you're not well-acquainted with the subject, -5 with acquaintances, -10 for close acquaintances. With Mimicry, you just get a flat -3 to mimic a specific person, and it's treated as a Quick Contest vs the IQ of anyone who knows the person mimicked well (essentially any time I'd call for a Quick Contest for Mimicry would be a situation where Acting suffers the full -10).

Also I'd rule a Disguise success + Mimicry success + Acting failure would be viewed as "General Ripper isn't behaving like himself today, something strange is going on?", a point on the suspicion-meter instead of going straight to "Imposter! Get him!" It could seriously mitigate the consequences of failure at the Acting roll, which can be a very valuable investment when Acting would be at penalties from -5 to -15.