[Social Engineering] Using Disguise / impersonation, and the modifiers involved

[arnej]

I've been following this both to learn about SE (which I have but haven't had a chance to pore through) and to answer a question about a specific character.

What would be the penalty for my young Elf nun to disguise herself as an old Human nun, a role that she uses regularly and has for some time? (The PCs actually met the old nun version first...) Similar skill sets, differing personalities.

arnej

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by arnej

I've been following this both to learn about SE (which I have but haven't had a chance to pore through) and to answer a question about a specific character.

What would be the penalty for my young Elf nun to disguise herself as an old Human nun, a role that she uses regularly and has for some time? (The PCs actually met the old nun version first...) Similar skill sets, differing personalities.

That's really a judgment call. Just as a flying guess, -2 for different but quite similar race, and maybe -1 or -2 for age (it's easier to add wrinkles and sagging skin than to hide them). The latter would depend on the age difference, though.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by dcarson

How about yourself but with less favorable traits? The classic of playing dumb or being overweight instead of very muscled?

That's not really what "cultivating a persona" is about. It's more about emphasizing your traits of character. If you wanted to emphasize bad traits that you actually had, I suppose you could do that in the same way as emphasizing good traits, though.

Bill Stoddard

[vicky_molokh]

An idea regarding modifiers for 'not like me' appearance:
Since the most radical differences are at the -5 end, and different species tend to range from -2 to -4, perhaps the modifiers should be based on a use of the Speed/Range Table?

Thus, one would estimate the 'distance' between two appearances, and then look over to see how much of a modifier that brings.
So Human <-> Prothean* would be -4 or -5, that would be 'distance' of 10-15.
A standard human impersonating another human of similar stature, sex, race etc. would be -0, thus 'distance' 2.

If the Disguise-user has Distinctive Features, those always add a direct penalty if they are to be hidden. If the target has Distinctive Features, the penalty should probably be softer (i.e. add to distance only), since adding them is likely easier than removing them.

* == Based on the default between Disguise (Human) and Disguise (Bug-Eyed Monster) being -4.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

An idea regarding modifiers for 'not like me' appearance:
Since the most radical differences are at the -5 end, and different species tend to range from -2 to -4, perhaps the modifiers should be based on a use of the Speed/Range Table?

That would not be the slightest help to me, at least. It isn't as if we had an objective, or still less a readily apparent metric of "how different are the forms of these two species?" You're proposing to avoid the difficulty of assigning a number subjectively by calculating it as the logarithm of another number that is also assigned subjectively. The procedure is more complex and contains no more information, since the scales are in one-to-one correspondence.

Bill Stoddard

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That would not be the slightest help to me, at least. It isn't as if we had an objective, or still less a readily apparent metric of "how different are the forms of these two species?" You're proposing to avoid the difficulty of assigning a number subjectively by calculating it as the logarithm of another number that is also assigned subjectively. The procedure is more complex and contains no more information, since the scales are in one-to-one correspondence.

Bill Stoddard

Actually, I was trying to avoid the problem of non-linear modifier stacking. Right now, the problem is that if anything within a single-species range is worthy of a -3 (let alone the mentioned -5 for opposite sex), you suddenly run into the issue that two modifiers taken together will result in your skill level being as penalised as if you were trying to impersonate a bug-eyed monster (-4).

Though frankly, the SRT only slightly absorbs smaller modifiers.