Which optional rules do you use for social traits?

Sorenant · 11-20-2020, 04:18 PM

Similar to my last thread asking about which optional/house rules people uses regarding muscle-powered damage, I'm creating this thread to ask how the social aspect of a game is implemented on other's game. That is, do you use rules from supplements like Social Engineering or Boardroom and Curia? Do you have specific house rules tweaking social advantages or disadvantages?

I personally believe that Advantages should be purely beneficial, a player shouldn't have to shy away from a trait that might enrich their characters because it comes with some string attached. So I removed the "Reliability" part of Contacts. It makes the advantage more desirable and indeed, players actually began to take these for their characters.
The other change I've done to my game (though I'm still experimenting) is to remove Rank and use only Patron. The Rank advantage never sat well with me (one of the reasons is that low levels are barely useful, and high levels doesn't make sense for adventuring character) so I've been trying several changes to it like those found on Social Engineering and as of recent I adopted a rule based on Pulling Ranks but sort of in reverse. Instead of using patron-to-rank tables and assistance rolls tables, I use the frequency of appearance as a measure of how favored the character is by the entity. This way I don't lose time with AR rolls and characters doesn't have to be high ranking members themselves to get sweet benefits from it, they might just be a favorite of one (eg Adam Jensen and David Sarif).

11-20-2020, 04:18 PM	#1
Sorenant Join Date: Jan 2015	Which optional rules do you use for social traits? Similar to my last thread asking about which optional/house rules people uses regarding muscle-powered damage, I'm creating this thread to ask how the social aspect of a game is implemented on other's game. That is, do you use rules from supplements like Social Engineering or Boardroom and Curia? Do you have specific house rules tweaking social advantages or disadvantages? I personally believe that Advantages should be purely beneficial, a player shouldn't have to shy away from a trait that might enrich their characters because it comes with some string attached. So I removed the "Reliability" part of Contacts. It makes the advantage more desirable and indeed, players actually began to take these for their characters. The other change I've done to my game (though I'm still experimenting) is to remove Rank and use only Patron. The Rank advantage never sat well with me (one of the reasons is that low levels are barely useful, and high levels doesn't make sense for adventuring character) so I've been trying several changes to it like those found on Social Engineering and as of recent I adopted a rule based on Pulling Ranks but sort of in reverse. Instead of using patron-to-rank tables and assistance rolls tables, I use the frequency of appearance as a measure of how favored the character is by the entity. This way I don't lose time with AR rolls and characters doesn't have to be high ranking members themselves to get sweet benefits from it, they might just be a favorite of one (eg Adam Jensen and David Sarif).