I have an excellent example of an Uncouth character. I was just running a game with a bunch of Shadowrun (and in two cases, RPG) newbies last night. It was the first New York mission, and as you know, in Manhattan, a degree of subtlety is called for. One of the characters kept hitting on every female NPC there was. Femal NYPD, Inc. officer? Receptionist at the MDC Headquarters? Random corpbrats at the rave? Mara Blaine? Everyone. Every time Lin Yao came up in gameplay, he talked about hitting that, though thankfully this didn't occur when the time actually came. I'm considering letting that character have Uncouth retroactively.

While Etiquette is about knowing the rules, I don't agree that Uncouth necessarily implies that you're unaware of being unaware. It's a roleplaying issue. I'm sure that the unfrozen caveman (not the lawyer (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ) is aware that he doesn't know what all the flashing lights are, and might choose to avoid them. Or, to attack them, depending entirely on his temperament.

You're right that being unaware of being unaware is an option here, but my point is that it's not quite fair to make it mandatory.

How do you know you're botching a social situation? In the real world, you know by being able to read how the people around you are reacting to you. In SR, reading how people are reacting to something is a Social test. How does an Uncouth character so at Social tests? If you don't have the relevant skill, you're unaware. Can't even try, right? So unless you actually bought a skill to reflect it, no, an Uncouth character, by the rules, has no idea that they're socially inept.

I didn't say they knew they were botching it. I said they know that they have no idea what they're doing.

They know they don't know the rules; they don't think they know the rules.

I'll have to disagree that "A twisted literal reading of the rules say something totally insane" is a reasonable justification for requiring characters to do something totally insane.

If they don't know they're screwing it up, why in the universe would they ever think they don't know what they're doing. Hell, most people who ARE screwing things up think they know what they're doing. Humans, as a rule, have a hugely overinflated sense of their own skill. How many people do you know who will admit to being poor or even average drivers? Everyone thinks they're better than average drivers. By definition, at least half of them are wrong. This is in a system where they know when things are going wrong (near-misses, traffic foul-ups, citations from law-enforcement), and they are still convinced that they are good at it, it's other people who are screwing up. If a person has no way of knowing whether or not things are going well, they'll almost definitely be of the opinion that they are doing well and are a skilled individual in the task at hand.

I wouldn't entirely agree with that point : even if a character won't know why, he's bound to notice if he almost always fail to get what he wants out of social interactions.

He might fail to notice the pretty gal he's hitting on isn't interested, but when she dumps the icecubes from her glass into his pants before turning heels forbiding him to come within sight again, he'll figure out it didn't work as hoped.

In might opinion an uncouth character can know his social skills are abysmal. What he will have a hard time with is figuring out the specifics of what he's doing wrong beyond 'I'm no good with talking'. Others may fail to consider they might be the cause and instead get pissed at 'them snotty jerks who won't listen to me' - but not all will pin the blame squarely on others.

People of small-to-moderate skill think they're better than they are. People of zero skill do not assume they're good at something, and they're perfectly capable of knowing that they have no idea. There's a difference between admitting that you don't know what a widget is, and *knowing* in your head that you've never seen that widget before.

Shifters and Centaurs, for example, are Uncouth; they do not assume they know how to be metahumans. They may *try*, at first, to treat metahumans as they would other animals/centaurs, *or* they may decide that something alien definitely is not a fellow shifter/animal/whatever. Again, it depends.

You're right, but my experience in bars and from talking to women (I know, I'm surprised they'll talk to me, too) indicates that when this series of events occurs, the male in question reaches the conclusion that his social skills are lacking exactly 0% of the time. The actual conclusion reached by the uncouth individual in this scenario is generally that the woman in question is either a "dyke" or a "bitch."



I'm going to refer you to the above referenced example on this one.

In the case of Centaurs and such, I posit that while they know they are unfamiliar with the social cues of mainstream metahumanity, they have no way to know whether they are adapting well or if the people around them are just bigots, and it doesn't matter how polite or correct in form their social responses are. Unless, of course, they buy an appropriate skill to help them with that, as I've been saying all along. In short, it is not just important, but critical that Uncouth characters pick up some minimal social skills at least if they want to make it in the shadows.

Or even worse, "She's totally into me."



Or at the very least, they listen to the Face/team leader when they tell him/her to shut up the moment that he/she says something at a meet.

Listen to the expert and do exactly as told by said expert? What a novel idea... it'll never work, though...

I know, I know. Hope springs eternal, and all that.

You never go full retard in Shadowrun.

Mesh

Asperger's isn't full retard.

Not even close. The 1 Log, 1 Int street sammy probably is, though. I would die happy if I never had to see that character again.

But....But Sloth love Chunk!

I'll also point out that the Etiquette skill is also used to blend in to a social situation and not attract unwanted attention.

So if your players don't have any Etiquette, you can make life difficult for them any time you want.

Yeah. Sad is the Uncouth character who never learned enough Etiquette to at least keep their head down when the gangers are picking fights at the pub.


And, yeah, Asperger's is considered part of the autism spectrum, but a decent number of people diagnosed with it as children cope to the point that they fail to meet a lot of the diagnostic criteria as adults but would still often be considered loners and a bit awkward. Real life is rarely as binary as a diagnosis. Amusingly enough, I was considered a possible Asperger's case when I was a very young child because a general lack of empathy and being a pinch behind in a few motor skills, but as it turned out I ended up being a rather decent athlete, a very good shot and did just fine socially aside from a tendency to get into arguments rather often. A better diagnosis probably would have been "Kind of a jerk."

I wouldn't do this on a regular basis, or even a semi-regular basis, but once every blue moon.

Throw them a Troll Johnson that doesn't trust the pretty dandelion eater or the smooth-skins. He only wants to talk with another of his kind. Obviously this won't work if the meta-types in my example doesn't match up, but you can alter it to whatever fits. Maybe the Bouncer at a club you need to get into is an augmentation addict and wants to talk to the chromed razor-boy, who knows.

I'd at least throw them one run one time where they HAVE to do some talking, but not necessarily all of it and don't make it anything absolutely crucial that be accomplished via social skills.

How long the game runs and how many players you have should determine how often it comes up (can't have one person steal the spotlight too often), but yeah, you need to make sure everything written on the character comes up at least once. You don't want your players in the position of playing the same character for more than three years and having four knowledge skills that never come up, even tangentially (yeah, that happened to me. It sucked).

Easy as pie to come up with some thing that requires the group to split up for a little while.

Face has to handle the district manager (Snap audit) but they also need some one to distract his orc secretary for five minutes so that the team can roll some gear down the hall with out her getting suspicious.
Perhaps the face heard her say she thought he (Mr Uncouth) was cute.

And if you feeling mean, the vict... Mr Uncouth Distraction could end up with her doing all the talking and end up with a date for Saturday night.

Think Lulu, from the STEPHANIE PLUM NOVELS by Janet Evanovich.


Four to Score # Chapter 1, p. 1
"If people were cars, Lula would be a big, black '53 Packard with a high gloss chrome grille, oversized headlights, and a growl like a junkyard guard dog. Lots of muscle. Never fit in a compact space."


High Five # Chapter 1, p. 4
Does filing for Vinnie. She's what is gently referred to as a big woman, weighing in at over 200 pounds, standing five-foot-five, looking like most of her weight's muscle. This week her hair was died orange and came off very autumn with her dark brown skin.



Or....

Break the Face's jaw.

Drug the Face.

Have the face get falling down drunk.

Pull the Face off and have some one come up and make chit chat.

I would like to point out that uncouth IS pretty severe. It treats you as unaware for social skills you don't have. Unaware characters annot default on that skill.

No opposed negotiation. No rolling intimidation - or resisting it. Time for an etiquette check? Failed. The only way to come out ahead with Uncouth is to use karmagen - you get 40 points, pick up the influence group for 20, and intimidate for 8.


For the most part, the roleplayin aspects of being a socially unaware jerk can be achieved by taking Incompetent: Etiquette instead of Uncouth.

I have some examples and roleplaying suggestions for those who wish to roleplay a character with the uncouth quality. Note that I am not stating that I think qualities should or should not be roleplayed, I am simply trying to help approach such disadvantages from a roleplaying stand point.

A point I would like to make is that uncouth does not automatically mean asshat. Popular fiction has provided us with many examples of uncouth characters who are relativley nice.

Uncouth Examples:
Doctor Temperance Brennan (Bones)- Dr. Brennan is perfecly nice and mostly polite despite the fact that she is uncouth. She has a penchant for stating the truth in every situation. She is also fond of verbally expressing her observations and conclusions. She does not do this out of spite, however. As far as she is concerned the world is simply a large experiment that she is observing.

Bosco Albert "B.A." Baracus (The A-Team)- B.A. is another example of a relativley nice uncouth. He has a tendency toward irritation and a willingness to ignore societal niceties, but he is loyal and supportive of his friends. His uncouth status comes more from a dislike of the rules of society etiquette than from asshattery.

H.M. Murdock (The A-Team)- Murdock is kind of a mirror to B.A. when it comes to couth. He tends to disregard social etiquette as much as B.A. does. However his uncouth status more about his tendancy to say whatever the hell he wants coupled with a willingness to be percieved as a complete loon. Murdock is uncouth simply because he's crazy.

Anya Jenkins/Anyanka/Aud (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)- Anya doesn't seem to recognize the difference between personal and public topics. She also has an almost pathological tendancy to tell the truth, especially about her feelings and opinions. When you put those together you get a perfect storm of uncoth. Despite this she is upbeat and quite nice. Yes, I like Buffy, shut up.

Mary Shannon (In Plain Sight)- Mary's version of uncouth is difficult to explain. She tends toward sarcasm and dislikes bullshit. She also has a very low annoyance threshold. Put that together and you get someone who will call anyone out on their bullshit and sarcastically mock anybody. Despite her abrasive personality she is actually rather nice. Sort of. It's complicated.

Thats a good point and one use of Etiquette that I think some GMs overlook is as a sort of "Social Stealth".

The roleplay options are extremely open. The quality is focused more on the results of the action, so the flavor of it can be anything you can imagine, but inevitably the character somehow put's their foot in their mouth. How you want your character to get to that point is up to you. It in no way forces a brutish jerk.

Now I'm tempted to make a character based on the movie Malibu's Most Wanted, but I don't know if I can subject my group to that... Uncouth, Ork Poser... it writes itself though...