[SE] Selling fish to a fisherman

[Flyndaran]

I would imagine the most realistic way to get an executioner to refuse thier job would be to quietly whisper the names and locations of his children.
Intimidation with plausible threats.

[weby]

First another real life example: "Selling oil to Arabs", while I was working in Dubai, I met a person who sold Russian oil products to the gulf states and made a good living at it...

But on the question:
Impossible things should indeed be impossible.
But it is often more fun to make something basically impossible instead of fully impossible.

As example the current characters in my fantasy campaign often see skill roll difficulties at -30 and similar, with the highest penalty that they have succeeded in was -57. And yet the best skills are around 30.

To succeed in such tasks is more than just rolling dice. They must search for bonuses and often research how to get such.

[Flyndaran]

It's the old problem that AD&D had. Once you give the gods stats, players start to think of R.A.W. ways to kill them.
Unless the GM outright says, "No.", it means, "so you're saying, 'there's still a chance?'"

(Please correct me if I mangled my nested quotes. It's not something I remember ever being taught in English class.)

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's the old problem that AD&D had. Once you give the gods stats, players start to think of R.A.W. ways to kill them.
Unless the GM outright says, "No.", it means, "so you're saying, 'there's still a chance?'"

(Please correct me if I mangled my nested quotes. It's not something I remember ever being taught in English class.)

This is intentional with some of those gods, which is why I've been thinking of making stats for the pantheon of Madlands.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's the old problem that AD&D had. Once you give the gods stats, players start to think of R.A.W. ways to kill them.
Unless the GM outright says, "No.", it means, "so you're saying, 'there's still a chance?'"

That's probably the point. At least some percentage of gods has been killed by humans.

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In social interaction situations, the GM has the right to say, "The guards don't respond to your attempt to talk them into letting you go," or even, "The guards beat you to a pulp and throw you back into your cell." It's just not a given that social skills or ordinary social advantages such as appearance can always work.

The GM does of course always have the right to say whathever he or she wants, but is it really a good idea to do so in this case?

It seems very unlikely to me that a person would be so insusceptible to being pursuaded that no level (even superhuman levels) of social skills and advantages could persuade them. Even if there are a few such cases, they should be far rarer than getting an automatic critical failure on your roll.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's the old problem that AD&D had. Once you give the gods stats, players start to think of R.A.W. ways to kill them.
Unless the GM outright says, "No.", it means, "so you're saying, 'there's still a chance?'"

(Please correct me if I mangled my nested quotes. It's not something I remember ever being taught in English class.)

This always seemed like a strange way to look at the problem to me. If you want the players to be unable to beat them, just give them good enough stats.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Andreas

It seems very unlikely to me that a person would be so insusceptible to being pursuaded that no level (even superhuman levels) of social skills and advantages could persuade them. Even if there are a few such cases, they should be far rarer than getting an automatic critical failure on your roll.

"Unable to being persuaded anywhere any time"? Nobody's suggesting that. However "In this situation, by this person using that method, to do that thing"? Yeahno, I absolutely believe that.
Some people are pretty impossible to terrorize into doing something because they have a complete breakdown and can't do anything except have a severe panic attack.
You just can't Fast-Talk someone who doesn't understand the language you're using. That's not a penalty, that's flat out impossible.

And sometimes you just run face-first into someone's personal quirks (small Q, not the GURPS trait). Trying to impute a threat to a headsman's family members may result in him making a point of killing you badly so you die a slow, gory, and painful death. Presuming you can even identify them - without that information you can't really do it at all.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Andreas

The GM does of course always have the right to say whathever he or she wants, but is it really a good idea to do so in this case?

I might even say "essential."

At the level of ability you're talking about, what you have is social skills that are equivalent to Mind Control. And I'll stipulate that that is a possible fictional idea.

Back when I ran a high-end supers campaign, one of the PCs had both Mind Control and high mental stats. In almost any normal situation, if he chose, he could just short circuit the conflict by telling the opposition to stand down. That made for dull scenarios and annoyed the other players, who had powers like Hitting Things Really Hard. Eventually I worked out that most of the opposition needed either to have high IQ, or, lacking that, to have high Will (the Hulk may be IQ 6, but he's Will 16 or better).

A character who can do end runs around scenarios doesn't make for interesting play. You're going to end up needing to come up with entire opposing forces that are immune. And then you come down to playing gods vs. gods, or supers vs. supers, or monsters vs. monsters, with normal humans being no more effective opposition than mice. Which is a legitimate genre, but it has its limitations. If that's not the genre you want, it's better to disallow irresistible social influence abilities.

[Gigermann]

Originally Posted by whswhs

At the level of ability you're talking about, what you have is social skills that are equivalent to Mind Control.…

This is actually the origin of my issue, from the last time someone decided to play a Face Man in one of my games. As I started working on the campaign, I realized that even with a Skill 14 versus a "normal" guy (Will 10), unless some penalties are racked up, the Face Man will be able to short-circuit every fight.

Then and now, I wanted to let the player do what he's good at, and not arbitrarily decide that this guy can't be manipulated, but I also didn't want to end up with a bunch of Will 18 mooks—I dislike that sort of response immensely, as a player. I don't have a problem with saying "no," but I don't want to say "no, because the story/GM requires that you can't do that here"—I need a legitimate reason, not a meta-game reason. Effectively, you're granting a character a situation-specific version of Indomitable.

If you can assess enough penalties on the action, to the point where the attempt is pointless, as long as everyone agrees those penalties are legitimate, the issue is resolved. Then the question is "why/when?" and "how much?"

(Side Note: the player-in-question added Bad Luck to his character, to give me, as GM, a free "fail" whenever I needed it)

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I might even say "essential."

At the level of ability you're talking about, what you have is social skills that are equivalent to Mind Control. And I'll stipulate that that is a possible fictional idea.

Back when I ran a high-end supers campaign, one of the PCs had both Mind Control and high mental stats. In almost any normal situation, if he chose, he could just short circuit the conflict by telling the opposition to stand down. That made for dull scenarios and annoyed the other players, who had powers like Hitting Things Really Hard. Eventually I worked out that most of the opposition needed either to have high IQ, or, lacking that, to have high Will (the Hulk may be IQ 6, but he's Will 16 or better).

A character who can do end runs around scenarios doesn't make for interesting play. You're going to end up needing to come up with entire opposing forces that are immune. And then you come down to playing gods vs. gods, or supers vs. supers, or monsters vs. monsters, with normal humans being no more effective opposition than mice. Which is a legitimate genre, but it has its limitations. If that's not the genre you want, it's better to disallow irresistible social influence abilities.

I can certainly see how that could be a problem in many genres, but would not the natural solution to that problem be to not allow too high social skills and advantages (or make them more expensive)?

It seems to me that it would be better to just not allow certain powerful traits if they are problematic, than to have immunity to those traits come up with implausible frequency.

Originally Posted by Bruno

"Unable to being persuaded anywhere any time"? Nobody's suggesting that. However "In this situation, by this person using that method, to do that thing"? Yeahno, I absolutely believe that.
Some people are pretty impossible to terrorize into doing something because they have a complete breakdown and can't do anything except have a severe panic attack.
You just can't Fast-Talk someone who doesn't understand the language you're using. That's not a penalty, that's flat out impossible.

And sometimes you just run face-first into someone's personal quirks (small Q, not the GURPS trait). Trying to impute a threat to a headsman's family members may result in him making a point of killing you badly so you die a slow, gory, and painful death. Presuming you can even identify them - without that information you can't really do it at all.

It is certainly more likely that they would be immune to a specific method, but even then it seems like it should be rather rare. Some people do have breakdowns when others intimidate them and you might run into someones quirks, but that might very well be because the attempt was not good enough. Reading your target and tailoring your approach to them is part of having a high skill. Levels of skill far beyond what is possible for humans should probably have much better odds of success than the best humans.

Is it really completely impossible to fast talk with someone who you don't share a language? It is certainly very hard, but it is after all possible to communicate to some extent with gestures etc.