Social Skills Options

[Zen Shooter01]

I've noticed that many dumpshockers think that social skills are unbalanced. I wanted to say a few things about that.

Social skills are really important in any setting that's even slightly realistic. Even in places like real world Mogadishu or South Central LA, social encounters outnumber combat encounters by a wide margin. Social skills are how people get along.

The average citizen of the 6th World is a Face. Not a very good one, but a Face nonetheless. They use their social skills more often than any other skill they've got, any time they speak - or don't speak, because that gives a social impression, too. Social skills are essential to any character to keep people from calling the police. Seriously, calling the police. Walk into any 7-Eleven and say as much weird, spooky sh!t as you can think of, see what happens.

That said, though, don't hesitate as the GM to pile on the negative social skill modifiers. If a PC is asking someone to do something that will land them in jail, don't be afraid of saying minus 10. The first paragraph under Social Modifiers in SR4, pg. 122, says the gamemaster should apply modifiers as he feels appropriate.

And don't be afraid to make social rolls into extended tests. If you walk up to a stranger at a party and tell them to kill their children with poison, you're not going to get very far. But if you take them down to Jonestown and brainwash them thoroughly for a year, you can get a different result.

And don't forget about reputation - being influential in and of itself can make people hate you. Think of Britney Spears, Osama Bin Laden, Hillary Clinton. These are all widely influential and widely admired people who are also widely despised. If a PC can make people jump out the window by suggesting it to them, anyone who's seen it happen is likely to be suspicious of the character (or regard the character as a god).

[Moon-Hawk]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I think the #1 reason people have negative feelings towards social adepts is because, for some reason, the regular caps are trivially easy to blow past for social skills.
Any other skill you're running up against the attribute cap, the skill cap, and then scraping up a few points of bonuses here and there.
Social skills have many, many sources that qualify as bonuses and aren't affected by any of the caps, and thus you create Mango, the Pornomancer.

[lunchbox311]

Negotiation Basics

[WearzManySkins]

[sunnyside]

@lunch. Avoid the URL tags here. They do retarded stuff and clinking on your link doesn't work. I had to pull the link out by using the quote option. Also, if you wrote that you'll want to grammar check it.

For skins and others

EDIT: hold on this forum is retarded with URLs

EDIT#2: here you go

[lunchbox311]

My bad.... did not check the link ahead of time. BTW: no, I did not write it, it was from an RSS feed I was checking.

*shrug*
sorry

Edit: Thanks for the fix, I was about to just copy paste in a spoiler tag. Just nice fluff is all.

[sunnyside]

Some people have a problem with the huge social dice pools that can come up. However with some of the magic spells out there I don't really have a problem with that. Usually those mega pools involve magic and all sorts of other stuff.

I think the real problem people have with the social skills/spells is that they can be annoying in how they interact with an adventure.

For example in many RPGs the combat skills get out of control. But that's easy to fix in the writing. Just get better guards/drones. And SR is deadly enough just throwing in a single fairly unspecial sniper will often give even experienced teams a nasty encounter.

But social skills/spells in SR get to the point where you either have to

A. Let them talk the guard into going and getting what they want for them. A bit extreme but spells can pretty much do that, social skills too when you get down to it. Bottom line is if you aren't careful scenes get spoiled.

B. Nerfing the skills they paid a ton for. (doesn't matter how you phrase it, if they pay a ton of BP for special abilities and all that, and you do something so they can't do stuff way more impressive than others who haven't, then you're bending them over and shoving the nerf sword all the way in.) The spells don't take so many BP but the same deal there.

C. Constantly treat people like drones/comlinks with firewall 2. So for example guards on an inner door won't let guards from an outer door even get near them. Johnsons are monitored by remote hackers looking for weirdness and have hard spending limits. etc etc etc. Which is kind of a blend of A and B.

[Glyph]

To me, the biggest problem with social skills is GMs who allow characters to roll their social skills for ridiculous things, rather than treating them as the subtle form of influence that they are. For instance, in negotiating with a Johnson, the team always has the option of walking away from the job, and the Johnson has a hard limit on what he can offer to the group.

Like Zen said, don't be afraid to pile on modifiers or make things extended tests. And don't be afraid to veto the more extreme attempts - social skills aren't mind control. If Mongo the ork face tries to pick up the frigid lesbian who is a closet humanis policlub member, it ain't gonna happen.

[Geekkake]

Similar to what Zen and Cain already said, the negative modifiers can pile up quickly in a social situation. The best example is the security guard of the facility you're attempting to infiltrate. For instance, take the place that I work; management is dead-obsessed with security. If you even hold the door for someone without seeing them scan their badge, that's an immediate write-up, and they don't fuck around with write-ups prior to firing. So right there, that's "Harmful to NPC" and/or "Disastrous to NPC", depending on how much I like my job, a -3 to -4 modifier. If I can't see the person's badge when they're trying to get in the door, I'm immediately suspicious (-2 mod) because everyone's supposed to wear it around their neck on a lanyard. There's an easy -5 to -6 modifier, and I don't even like my job. Moreover, my building doesn't require the excessive security measures present.

Add that to the fact that the security guards are always watching the front door and giving shit for basic common courtesy (holding the door), and that every inch of the building is watched by cameras despite the relatively low-security situation I work in, and you can see how social rolls won't (in the case of infiltration) really help. And while every corp overlord won't be a crazed, conspiracy-spouting Vietnam vet like mine is, it's easy to see how problems can mount.

Of course, none of this applies to, say, getting more money for fenced gear, or buying for cheaper, but the easiest way to look at it is, no matter how disarming a social adept is, no one's going to ruin their livelihood to support it. Maybe you can get that AK for well below market price, because you're such a great friend, but the seller is going to expect a favor later on.

[Crusher Bob]

Of course, the real problem is that SR4 is an esentially linear system. Assuming it will take, say, 4 sucesses to convince you to do something (You had no strong feelings either way and someone threw 12 dice at you).

Now, the pronomancer adept walks up and tries to talk you into something. Your suspicion gives him -6 dice but he still has at least 12 dice left over to convince you with.

The solution is probably based in changing the requirements to convince someone to do something, so that the pronomancer can brainwash you in a mere week with less dedicated social monsters taking months.

Anothe thing possibly worth borrowing is intimacies and motivation from Exalted. They are what motivates your character and what he cares about and social skills making you do something in relation to them are much harder (or easier).

[Geekkake]

I don't have the sobriety or patience to research: are there no sex-based detriments to the quote "pornomancer"? Or don't I understand the concept? Because frankly, I don't care how hot he is, I'm just not interested.

[Critias]

[Glyph]

[Geekkake]

This plays into a basic question of RPGs: Should anything be possible with a fantastic enough dice roll? I'm generally a proponent of the "shit yes, but it better be, y'know, fucking amazing" school of thought. So make your own penalties based on those circumstances. It ain't canon, and some kids are gonna object. But really, there's holes and breaks in every system, and it's up to the GM to spackle them when need be, and committee the ruling later.

So toss another huge penalty on a Seduction roll for turning a straight ganger gay. Naturally, even remotely turning an eyebrow would be absolutely Disastrous, so there's another -4, and maybe add another -N for the guy being, y'know, straight.

[edit]: Ultimately, I think Critias has the right of it, with regards to teamwork. But it's a rare, and indispensable team that looks at things that way.

[bibliophile20]

[Critias]

[Geekkake]

I think Critias, again, raises a good point. Of course, if you have a group described in his example, it's doomed to failure anyway. I was being a bit chauvinistic, I realize, toward my own style of gameplay - which is to say, generally "realistic", with a smidge of cinematic if the players want to really risk their characters' lives to make it happen by attempting crazy dice rolls.

Sorry for the confusion.

[sunnyside]

I think the team method is what we all would like to see happen.

Which is where I think the range of skills availible comes into problems, because the super skills move people away from the neccesity of a team effort.

Remember there is mind control in the game. Magic has influence, alter memory, control emotion. lotsa fun so people do what you want and don't think they were manipulated. This is kept somewhat in check because people might notice the magician casting the spell, or some astral security might notice the effects of the spell on the person, etc etc. But magic is capable of messing with peoples free will.

So where does that leave the 30 die of a social adept? Remember they can change their appearance at will, including skin color and their voice. That allows for a lot.

And 30 dice? The real world has seen nothing like 30 dice on a social test. The most stunning mundane ever probably rolled 15.

The problem as I see it, is that if someone throws their stuff into incredible combat or movement abilities the GM doesn't have a problem with it. Especially if the effects aren't related to a die pool. You can act three times in the time it would take someone to act once? Cool. You can run up walls or walk on powdered snow without leaving a trail? Nice. Even other applications of large combat pools or exagerated circumstances slide by. For example the sniper who can headshot a running target at 3/4 of a mile over iron sights , without zooming in, and while wounded (maybe -10 modifier vs a 20 die pool).

But doing something even more incredible than that socially blows their mind. And if they did allow the stuff to work it would probably hurt team play. And the char in question would be one dimensional.

Personally I say just talk your players out of being the superface. Have them only allocate a handfull of resources to it and then put the rest into combat and infiltration or something.

[lunchbox311]

[Critias]

[Moon-Hawk]

Like they say on Fear the Boot. (no, I'm not affiliated, but I hightly recommend the podcast) 90% of games that fail, do so because they failed at the group template level.
It doesn't matter what you're playing, before you make characters everyone needs to sit down together and have a conversation about what type of game they want to play, and how (basically) they want their characters to interact.
It's not a problem with this system, it's something that's true of any system.

[djinni]

[Zolhex]

I have a player who plays a social adept he does real good yes and he plays the character quite well.

However because he is a major social player he can't even go to clubs with out making contacts. true they are mostly 1/1 contacts but hey once you get a contact you need to work them to keep them.

Ok granted he could just say screw it and they would disappear but then that gets around and he runs the risk people think of him as a user not a contact thus people don't want to deal with him.

My player has like 40 or 50 contacts???? (Jump in here Magus if you read this.) I mean come on he is dumping nuyen left and right when I make him to keep everyone happy. Now while I've not been hard core on making him keep them happy you as a gm could do so with your players. trust me after a short time of them paying through the teeth they will want a new character.

My current thoughts are that Magus is retireing his guy partly cause he has contacts all over the world and so he makes a better fixer than runner but also the costs he could face keeping them happy in game.

So social adepts are cool but not that great to play after sometime. Play a regular joe with some negotiation and some etiquette. Or play an uncouth character and screw the skills :rotfl:

[Buster]

You lost me on the last post. You're allowing players to buy contacts with cash? How does that work exactly?

[Glyph]

I think he's talking about contact upkeep.