GURPS Influence Skills: Force Surrender

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by MrFix

Unless a committed Nazi has Unfazeable, Indomitable etc, he can be threatened, intimidated, persuaded or seduced to change sides, give aid etc.

Only to a believable extent. Influence skills aren't mind control.

[MrFix]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Only to a believable extent. Influence skills aren't mind control.

GURPS books are very precise on setting what is believable, what is unrealistic and what is cinematic/supernatural.
Influence skills, according to basic set, never produce result better than Good (Very Good for Sex Appeal), neither is in the realm of brain control and EXPLICITLY mention foes and enemies with good reaction to you.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

The GM doesn't just set an NPC's reaction arbitrarily. The GM has a reason for it.

Suppose the crook is a serial murderer who has finally been cornered. He has no family, no money. He's tough and doesn't fear physical abuse. He knows there's enough evidence to convict him of his many crimes. The police have cornered the murderer and demand his surrender. The murderer knows that if he surrenders, his life is over. The GM decides that in this situation, no amount of negotiating or threatening could possibly convince the murderer to give himself up, because he would lose the only thing that he has left to care about: his freedom. When the police try to get him to surrender, no matter how they do it, he refuses. No influence rolls will convince him otherwise. No special advantages blocking influence rolls are needed.

Having a certain mindset doesn't free you from being manipulated, that is an advantage that costs points. The man you outline can still be manipulated via psychology, trickery etc. At the very least, he can be persuaded not to fight the police and instead take his own life if he won't surrender. All are purview of Influence skills.

[Stormcrow]

Now you're changing the premise. We were talking about being forced to surrender, not being influenced in any way. The criminal could be Fast Talked into making a mistake that leads to capture, but that's not what you were asking for. He could be driven to kill himself. But there's no room in his mind for surrender, by rules-supported GM decree.

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The requirement that you talk with them limits your ability to use Influence in the middle of an ongoing fight. Combat has a second by second time scale; most attempts at Influence take longer than that. Chapter 6 of GURPS Social Engineering discusses the (limited) types of social interaction you can engage in during combat (or pauses in combat); I think they're pretty much what's allowed under the RAW.

One of the things that GURPS doesn't incorporate well is the jerky, halting nature of some fights. It rewards continuous actions and doesn't do much for allowing punctuated flurrys of activity with separations where the combatants warily circle each other or hunker down behind cover and trash talk or negotiate or Fast Talk. If the start of combat time cuts off communications then we can't have that situation where one force has cornered the other and is trying to talk them down to releasing hostages or surrendering because at any second someone might throw a blow or pull a trigger. If blows or bullets have already been traded there is no mechanism to bring about narrative time other than GM fiat. And of course there is the problem that PCs often carry way too much in the way of weapons AND ammo obviating the need to engage conservatively, husband those rounds and make shots and strikes count by using Aim and Evaluate which would cause pauses in the action.
There is also little upside in many settings for taking prisoners rather than slaughtering everyone. An example to illustrate the opposite is Anglo-Norman warfare which was a complicated affair with family members on different sides of many conflicts. Capture and ransom was much preferred to facing Aunt Matilda with Uncle Fulk's blood on your surcoat.

So how do you slip in a soliloquy imploring capitulation or truce or arrange for your players to do so?

[Black Leviathan]

Influence rolls are generally not something you can accomplish in a 1-second combat round. You might pull of a Fast-Talk, literally fast. If you make an amazing fast talk you might pause a battle long enough to use your silver tongue to make an influence roll. but otherwise you're doing a long action for about 15 minutes or about 900 rounds of the enemy attacking you. The chances you could convincingly use Sex Appeal on someone you were just trying to kill? I wouldn't say impossible but yeah, some ridiculous skill penalties apply.

Generally the reaction roll you're going to encounter is the initial reaction when the cops pull guns on the suspect or when the fight starts going bad. Opponents will flee only if they feel fleeing will give them more safety than surrender

[MrFix]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

Influence rolls are generally not something you can accomplish in a 1-second combat round. You might pull of a Fast-Talk, literally fast. If you make an amazing fast talk you might pause a battle long enough to use your silver tongue to make an influence roll. but otherwise you're doing a long action for about 15 minutes or about 900 rounds of the enemy attacking you. The chances you could convincingly use Sex Appeal on someone you were just trying to kill? I wouldn't say impossible but yeah, some ridiculous skill penalties apply.

Generally the reaction roll you're going to encounter is the initial reaction when the cops pull guns on the suspect or when the fight starts going bad. Opponents will flee only if they feel fleeing will give them more safety than surrender

There's exactly ZERO rules that state that you need 15 minutes to deploy influence check. Talking is a free action, and limiting it is a GM option.

There is a Kromm statement that intimidating in combat is 1 concentrate maneuver.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...434#post113434

Originally Posted by Kromm

If you're fighting for your life, you're not going to be very intimidating. The idea is to stand there over the body of your last victim, coolly biding your time, and ask who's next. I'd say that's a Concentrate maneuver and takes a full turn in battle.

Shooting an accomplice dead and then closing in, screaming "Drop it or you're dead, <expletive>", waving your gun around, should be an appropriate use of Intimidation and only result in the most hardened criminals carrying on with the fight.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by MrFix

Does that mean that if, for example, a GM sets a crook as somebody who reacts to Police Officers only as 'Bad', Police officers cannot improve their standing with him via influence skills, and can only make influence rolls to request aid etc, with penalties for 'Bad' reaction?

I note that you turned my entire discussion into "<snip>," and did not respond to most of the points I made in it.

It seems to me that this discussion is falling into a pattern that I've seen from a couple of other participants in these newsgroups. You are asserting a specific conclusion, or a set of such conclusions, as following from the rules of GURPS. The response has multiple people, with diverse points of view, telling you on one hand that you are not interpreting the GURPS rules as they are meant (and that includes hearing it from at least one of the people who wrote some of those rules), and on the other than they don't stand up to reality testing, which is one of the great metarules of GURPS. Your response seems to be to continue arguing that yes of course your interpretation is right.

That hasn't worked out well in previous discusssions as an approach. Above all, it deprives you of the opportunity to learn anything from old GURPS hahds. And the weight of opinion seems to be sufficiently against you so that it can't be anticipated that you'll have a chorus of people saying, "Yes, of course, you're right, why didn't we see that?"

So it might be worth reflecting on what you want to accomplish in this discussion and whether you're doing so. Maybe a different approach would get you somewhere more productive than I think this one is likely to be.

[MrFix]

Originally Posted by whswhs

-snip-

I turned it into a snip because the post would look stupid with a huge quote and a few lines of a question.

The question is legitimately trying to understand the conclusion of your post and your points, and it did not warrant trying to paint me in some negative light. Are you really trying to help me learn GURPS by not responding to my question?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by MrFix

The question is legitimately trying to understand the conclusion of your post and your points, and it did not warrant trying to paint me in some negative light. Are you really trying to help me learn GURPS by not responding to my question?

Responding to your question would require a fairly long answer, analyzing a number of points raised by it.

But you know, I just gave you a fairly long answer with a fair bit of analysis; and what I saw was that you <snip>ped it. I can't even tell what specific points I made in that answer your question is meant to take off from. That makes it hard for me to have confidence that you would treat a response to your current question any less dismissively.

I'm not getting a sense of dialogue here. Rather, it feels as if your approach is aimed at letting you control what is said, in the interest of enabling you to make points and not of helping you understand what people are saying to you. I'm certainly willing to do the latter; I don't find the former interesting.

I don't really want to go on debating with you, so I'm stopping now.

[MrFix]

Originally Posted by whswhs

-Snip-

Okay, thanks for your help none the less.