Part of the fun as a player or GM is manipulating your players/fellow PC's into believing that your option is the best possible choice. Sometimes this takes a little work, but it is oh so much more rewarding that just busting out your etiquette dice on them.

And if your character sheet doesn't happen to have Cha 6 and Negotiation 6?

Basically, if you can't use those social skills than there is little reason to play a social character. You may be able to convince the NPC gang to attack the other PC if they warrant it, but it doesn't stop them from just turning and gakking you.

I don't see the problem as long as social skills are not put to the point of mind control.

As for Shadow Dragons post, that is really the point where I would not be in the game unless it was pointed out in advance that we were trying to play completely psychotic immoral characters, with no foresight and an incredible lack of grasp for consequences. The actions he described would be taken by NPCs with poor wisdom and intelligence.

More intelligent shadowrunners (i.e. the ones being payed, and not dead) would not do things like damage the goods in an exfiltration, or be known for shooting hostages.

Is it stupid to loosen the bonds. Not really, what is she going to do, run a couple of steps before the mage looks over and stunbolts her? Or the sam wraps her up and puts her down, tightening the bonds?
Little consequences. If the PC gave me a reason that they wouldn't do that (they hate women, they try to remain 100% proffessional, they were gay, etc) I would take that into account and assign modifiers. Something like loosen the bonds would also be easier to do than take off the bonds or set me free. The latter is not possible without extended social rolls to sympathetic targets.

The thing is, social skills are an influence, not a mind control. If I had a player that spent the whole night womanizing, is playing a romantic roguish sort with a soft spot for a pretty face, when she succeeded on her negotiation check then he would loosen the bonds or he wouldn't be roleplaying. I would warn him, dock him karma and if severe enough metagaming "I am a PC and immune to whatever I don't want to do" then he/she would be gone.

No. What you should have done, if you wanted to do it that, would have been to hold an IC conversation with the PC.

Doing it this way, it really is

You say it would cost him Karma, I would say that he had failed to earn it.

Even so, it is a real choice that I'm offering them, and it only "costs" them a point or two of Good Karma. Let's say it was the same situation only the hooker was a mage casting control actions - that same player may need to burn a point or two of Karma Pool to override the effect. In your cost/benefit analysis of the situation is balance acheived? Social Skills are less powerful than magic, so it costs less to ignore.

And on the topic of Magic (you know where I'm going with this, but before you cry Strawman Argument please pause and hear me out), what exactly is the difference between social skills and control magic? I'm not arguing relative power, we both agree that magic can make PC's do things social skills can't. What I am speaking to is what I think is the core of your argument: The Player, and his/her right to control the actions of his character.

If a PC gets fast-talked into giving up sensitive information by a clever con-man you say that his character sheet has been taken away from him, and he may as well be an NPC. If the GM replaces that NPC with a Mage and Mind-Probes him for the info, has the player retained control of his character? I think you would say yes, he got hit by that spell, and the rules say the magician gets the info. It was beyond the control of the PC, and so no control was lost.

I submit to you that the same is true when the PC was taken by the fast-talker - it was circumstance beyond his control.

I think it is more than reasonable to assume that you are going to be lied to, fast-talked, conned, seduced, bullied, interrogated, and possibly even debated. They are all social skills, and they are all a part of life in the shadows. Yes, it can almost always be handled through role-play, but no matter how good the role-players in your group are, it cannot always be handled through role-play.

On the topic of magical control vs. social skills:
The big difference between magical control and usurping a PC with social skills is that magic is just something that happens to the character, like being shot, imprisoned, and so on. It may curtail the character's freedom or limit the characters actions, but it doesn't force you to play your own character a certain way. The biggest objection to rolling social skills against PCs is that it lets the GM or another player essentially turn your character into an NPC. That is a very frustrating experience.


It's a matter of degree, though. In the example that started the whole thread, I thought the GM's solution was pretty fair. I could also see it not being a problem in games where roleplaying is the first solution and the dice only come out to resolve a game-bogging situation. The worst of the problems (feeling like your core character concepts have been compromised, or feeling like your character has become someone else's NPC) could be mitigated if GMs realized that social skills are limited in their affect, as myself and others have argued.


By the way, magical control is not completely acceptable, either. Used by the GM, it can be, like cortex bombs, seen as railroading - it is a plot device that should be used sparingly and with caution. Over-used by players, it is a bullying tactic that can detract from the other players' enjoyment of the game. Someone who uses control manipulations excessively or abuses social skills is just as much of a munchkin as someone who plays a short-tempered troll sammie who bullies the rest of the group.


I have a question for the people who advocate rollin' dem bones. What would you consider to be an abusive or bullying player, as far as using social skills on other players who lack the stats to resist them? What would you do, in or out of game, to correct such a situation?

A player of mine was playing a doctor in a sci-fi game I ran using SR3 rules. I still love her solution to controlling the huge, overbearing gunslinger (think Jayne from Firefly, if you've seen it, except more vocal)...

After he got all shot up, she put him under for surgery. Implanted a tazing system in his chest cavity, rigged to his heart. Every time he fucked with her, she'd taze him. And she had the capacity to turn the voltage up from a 'warning zot' to a 'char the muscle' level.

Nothing says the next time the troll gets outa hand, you can't gas him and implant him. Or just cut off his head, if he's THAT outa control. Stunbolt works wonders on Trolls, too.

Oh noes! A horrible tazer system, used to keep someone in line!

Isn't that "taking away control of the character" from them?

I think the argument here would be as follows: "The choice of how he behaved was still his to make. He could still continue to make decisions. The threat of mild electrocution would influence those decisions, but it wouldn't make those decisions for him. He could continue to be a dick if he was willing to face the consequences."

Anyway, I could see this being okay in at least two situations: either the two players in this campaign were the sort who got along and roleplayed and storytold well enough and were non-competative enough that this sort of thing would be fun for both of them, or the guy playing the gunslinger was being unnecessarily obnoxious and strong-arming other PCs around and a means of evening the score was needed to keep everyone's fun from being ruined.




As for social skills: I continue to stand by my previous opinion. It just seems sensible.

Here's a question...

You have a player who's not good at picking up lies, playing the face.You have a player who's really good at lying, but who's character is the charisma 1 Sammy with no social skills.

The Sammy wants to lie. The face wants to pick up the lie.

Now.. in pure roleplay.. the Sammy's player lies, the face's player buys it (good liar vs bad at picking up lies).

In roleplay, with dice to determine success of things(Sammy, roll negotiations against the target 4! No negotiations? Roll charisma, target 8! Face, roll your 8 dice to tell this guy's lying through his teeth), you have the Sammy lying.. and the face, 99 times out of 100, catching him.




Yes, this can be countered by the liar being an exceptional roleplayer and telling the face that he's lying.. But.. now have it be two equally skilled characters. How do you tell? The liar randomly decides? Or.. roll the dice?

Or just give the player the finger, because you aren't allowed to use skills to tell if you're being lied to by another PC?

There's also the player who can't lie with a character who can.. and many many variations.


Not allowing social skills to be used on PCs because they 'take away control' also means that you're taking away a bunch of roleplay options between PCs, because they're no longer viable, in any group that isn't absolutely exceptional roleplayers.

We always roll before or after roleplaying a social scene out, pc or npc. If the rp'ed talk is smooth it may get a small advantage, but even so - dice influence the outcome. Roll poorly, and you over do it, or do a gaffe.

However, where PC's are concerned, they don't get told "he speaks the truth" but "It looks like he's speaking the truth" or "he looks honest" or such. Between PCs we usually look for spins and explanations to enforce the dice result, like "seems very reasonable, remember the day when... after all, he saved your life once... if he lied he'd be risking a lot for what?..." and so on.

Works well for us.

Wow... I take it youd never ever be hired for extraction work again eh?

Hardly.

But, see, when I extract someone I render them incapable of communications and almost always render them unconscious as well. While Rat's runners may not have thought to do so, well, it happens sometimes. And you pay for it, as they did.

I think this is one of those issues that comes down to group play style. In some groups, it's just not gonna fly. In others, it'll be handled just like any other PC v PC test. I have a feeling that the middle ground ("He IS your commanding officer, and he's getting that look in his eye again...") is the one that a lot of groups will take.

Honestly, I don't really have a problem with the concept of a character trying to con or intimidate another character, regardless of PC-ness. I think that a lot of the difficulty players are having is with the extremes to which they imagine this being used.

IIRC, one of the heaviest modifiers on the list is "act is harmful/dangerous to character." Let's be honest... "shoot yourself in the head" goes way beyond harmful or dangerous, way beyond "this will probably get you killed." Take a look at the Godfather 2 scene being talked about... there's never an implicit "i want you to kill yourself..." he just gets an already depressed and helpless-feeling character to think about the option. Sounds like a Negotiation roll with an awful lot of successes to me, if you can move someone from feeling down to contemplating suicide, and it sounds like it still only worked due to context. Setting something like that up (putting the character into that situation) is the kind of thing that could take an entire campaign. A player isn't going to be making one test to orchestrate that kind of thing, and it's not like the character on the recieving end of it isn't going to have a chance to try and realize what's happening, or find a different solution, all things that the manipulating character is going to have to talk him around, con him into believing won't work, or generally misdirect him away from. Lots of different uses of skills there, lots of resistance attempts on the part of the manipulatee.

Or, take the scary sammie PC physically Intimidating the scrawny techie PC with the low Willpower so he'll stop whistling "Battle Hymn of the Republic" for no good reason (probably an overreaction, but hey, he might have been doing it for hours). You've got a hulking metalhead holding a gun to the back of someone's head, I don't see what the difference between an intimidator being a PC and being an NPC would be. You want to play "in character," you want to play a role, well, you've got numbers that you've laid out to represent what your character is. That low Willpower should be a hinderance in this kind of situation, and while I'm more than happy when the PCs act appropriately In Character, if it degenerates into metagaming (the intimidatee *character* is giving his intimidator the finger, solely because the *player* knows the other player isn't actually going to hurt him), then the players aren't engaging in the roleplaying that people are trying so much to protect.

Character sheets represent, among other things, a numerical representation of the abilities the character we're roleplaying. Those numbers allow a GM to set the total value of a character (build points and karma points spread out however), and to influence the power level of a campaign.

Let's take a hypothetical (and it's a little ludicrous, but it DOES lead into my point). One day, Chris D. Player decides he wants to play a hard-as-nails enforcer, Timmy the Shotgun. Chris passes over his character sheet, I take a look at it, and note the distinct lack of any skill or attribute vaguely relevant to the use of shotguns; Timmy isn't even going to get by trying to default. He seems okay with this, however, so I let it slide. Later on, the drek hits the VAC system, and Timmy the Shotgun opens up on a bunch of security guards with his namesake... would I be interfering with his ability to play his role by holding him to the lousy results of his rolls? Would the player be justifiably upset when I tell him that he's really not accomplishing anything with all that buckshot, despite it being an integral part of his character concept? I don't think so... the fact is, the player has done a bad job of representing his concept within the system, if what he expects from his dice rolls is massively different from what he's getting.

So, when we go back to our techie at gunpoint, look at his actions for a second. With a low willpower and that cold metal pressed to his skull, this shouldn't even be a situation we're debating... the techie's likely going to do what the sammie wants, count himself lucky he survived, and maybe plot his revenge later. Since there's a social interaction going on, I'm all for roleplaying it as much as possible... the less the mechanics of the system get in the way, the better.

But the player has decided his techie is giving the sammie the finger and laughing about it. It's not like Does this sound like someone on the wrong end of a Predator? Does this sound like low Willpower? No... which means that the player has either misrepresented his character in the system (and should juggle some points to correct that, so that his systemic performance reflects the role he wants to play), or he's deliberately NOT roleplaying his character, who should be shaking in his boots right about now. Rather than letting the situation degenerate into an out of game session of "I intimidated you," "No you didn't," with the GM playing referee, it's much more efficient to just say "Roll it, and we'll talk about this later if you want," and make a note to remember the event when it comes time to hand out karma. Don't force the players to roll every time they talk to each other, just use the mechanism for dispute resolution.

If you're going to completely roleplay social interations, you might as well take the entire social skill list out of the game, and use the points on something else (or reduce your point totals to compensate). If you like running it where just the PC to PC interaction is freestyle, I'm glad you're playing the game the way you like it... in the end, that's really the point, and I envy the group that RP's well enough that they don't have these kinds of issues. The group I GM for is pretty solid, but metagaming can be a problem sometimes. That's why I like having the option of a systemic solution to disputes... it lets me tell my players "look, you've got a disagreement that's becoming OOC, this is the way the system handles it, and these are your character stats in the system. Roll it, see how it turns out, and let's move on." It prevents a lot of annoyance in the long run.

But...but...*sniff*...are you sure you don't want to be best friends for life?

I made you this bracelet.

Eidolon:
The reason I say exceptional roleplayers, is because I tend to consider myself a good one, and I have trouble with it sometimes -- specifically, the "lying" one. The last session we played.. well.. there were a couple occassions where our characters were all doing different things -- and one of the characters was going to do something that generally fell under REALLY stupid.

Now.. my shaman's pretty good at social, but not a face. Decent negotiations and etiquette, and so on, really high int. The other character isn't, although is really intimidating. Low int, low charisma. Now.. the roleplay part? We could have just done it -- my character is described as a "mind like a steel trap", and it would have been instant seeing through any lies. But, that's not really fair, because there are really bad days, distractions, and so on, so it's not certain. Had it not been something that could have resulted in much pain and suffering later, I might have been more willing to let it slide.. but, this was one of those things with a heavy risk of backfiring, so a good reason to catch the lie. So, how to determine if the lie is caught? Break out the dice. See what happens.

Other options? Let a character do something that could quite easily result in a quickened control actions by the bad guy.... (which is something that's been done to my character.. and the last order was "Do not by any word or inaction give away that I can still control you." Or something to that effect.) Get in an argument over how the cha 2 negotiations 0 bear shapeshifter can lie to the 30 year old elven shaman with etiquette and (Edit)charisma negotiations(end edit) at 4+, int 7, and so on. Personally, I like rolling the dice. Adds that little bit of randomness.



Now, all that being said, if your group is good enough to randomly allow social skills or their resistance to fail at inopportune times.. then I applaud you, and wish you many good games. Myself, I'd rather trust the dice to add a little randomness, for myself and others. Because, it's been my experience, without dice, people tend to do what's called "God Moding".. I hope I don't need to explain the term '

Oh, and for the record? I absolutely loathe the control manipulations. They don't appear often in our games, but they cause a lot of problems when they do.. usually for me. But, they're part of the game.. and as long as they don't show up too much, I'm alright. I do make it a point to make sure that people who use them on me do not survive though.

Excellent post, Stainless.

Flawless victory for Mr. Rat!!!

My favorite thing about allowing social skills PC vs PC is to make up for what some people don't have.

I personally am fairly charasmatic and socially inclined. If I am playing a character with low social skills and my poor antisocial bookwormish friend is playing the Face, social skills allow him to overcome his natural inability to con/fasttalk/convince me of things. If it was down to roleplaying, he would be completely ineffective at roleplaying his character.

In other words, in order to promote roleplaying, he would be unable to roleplay his character. That's like saying most of us should not roleplay shadowrunners because most of us don't know how to use a firearm, or how much explosives to put on the building or security procedures that might be in effect, or how to hack the matrix.

Skills give us a way to roleplay those things we cannot do/know nothing about. If you don't let people use social skills than you are effectively denying a large portion of players to use certain character concepts. Not cool.

Oh, and just to double up on what Mr. Rat said, social skills do not make you into an NPC. They don't say things like I will now make you do whatever I want whenever I want. There are times you can convince of some things, but push it too much and it could bite back.

Can a Face negotiate you to pay for his/her meal? Yes. Does that mean you always will? No. In fact the more he/she tries, the harder it would be. That's where I assign modifiers. What's that you say? The Face is a girl and your character is a feminazi and refuses to demean women by paying for their meals? That's +4TN or Threshold 3 or 4 then. That doesn't mean that someone is not capable of convincing you that it's, just this time. It makes it difficult not impossible.

If your character is completely unassailable in their convictions, immune to getting fast talked or convinced of things that he/she doesn't agree with, I better see some stats to back that up. Otherwise you face the consequences, just like someone who says they are a master of unarmed combat, when their skill is only 4.

New Edge: Hardcore Cynic (2 pts/Lvl)

The character alway assumes the worst about people, and is constantly on guard against being fooled into something. Any character attempting to con, fast-talk, or otherwise socially manipulate this character suffers a +1 Tgt# penalty per level of this edge.


I'd allow it.

Who said they do happen in three seconds, aside from SUT/Leadership, and even then specifically in a combat situation?

If you're referring to the original example (the Leadership roll to get a lower-ranked soldier to follow an order), I think it'd be dependent on context.

Combat turns are 3 seconds long, and even with multiple passes, you've only got so many free "speak" actions you can take. Any message you relay during that time is going to have to be very short, very succinct, and not something which requires interpretation in the context of the situation.

That is to say, if in the middle of a firefight, a player was to yell to one of the security guards on the far side "Give me all your cash then go kill your family," even letting the word-per-turn limit slide, that's not even going to get a Negotiation/Leadership/Intimidation/whatever test. There's lead zipping all over, the guard isn't even inclined to LISTEN to you (I interpret "hostile" as being slightly more open to communication than "returning fire"), and what you're proposing is patently ridiculous.

On the other hand, if the character leading a squad yells at one of his teammates "Fire your weapon, corporal!", then you're in the kind of environment where a Leadership test makes sense. Maybe the corporal is a closet pacifist, maybe he knows one of the people downrange from Real Life, maybe "downrange" is a bunch of innocent people, or maybe he's just scared to stick his head out and start shooting back. However, the leader of the squad is using his skill to accomplish his task (namely, using Leadership to effectively manage his squad in a firefight) and the results of the test in that situation would indicate the pressure placed on the corporal to act.

SR3's degrees of success or SR4's net hit system could reflect the degree influence this has on the character. With no successes/hits, he might just keep his head down and scream as the bullets whiz past. One success/net hit might have him firing a few rounds in the right direction, not really trying to hit anything but still technically participating. Two or more, and you're starting to get into the range where the character might actually follow the order properly.

THIS IS STILL ROLEPLAYING. The leader is using the strength of his personality to get the corporal to do something he doesn't want to, for whatever reason, and that happens in life. People feel boxed in, they feel like they have no choice or no option to refuse, and they do what they're told. Convincing the character that he wasn't in a position to refuse the order is what the test accomplished in-system, and while I wouldn't force my players to do something like this every time they have a disagreement, it is one way to resolve PC to PC interaction (in much the same way that two PCs getting into a fistfight can be solved).

Hell, the possibilities for roleplaying after an action like this are immense. The corporal might lose faith in his leader, depending on what he was ordered to do... any future orders would be questioned. The corporal might gain a deep-seated hatred that his leader compelled him to do something he objected to strongly. He might just go AWOL. Or, he might stand up to his leader and refuse, and later on the two characters would have to sort things out. This is the stuff that high drama is made of, and that might not come about through freestyle RP alone... if characters aren't made to bend their morals, when would they get to complain about how bent they're becoming?

But let's go back to our security guard for a second. You know, the one we want to kill his family and give over his money. That's not the kind of thing you can order someone to do on the short term... and the system has a mechanism for this. Let's say our security guard meets a guy. This guy talks to him, he's inflential, he's charming, they start hanging out. It turns out this guy has a strong belief in something (like, say, the UFO behind the comet) and after a while, our security guard starts to buy into it. After a while, he's joining the cult, he's giving over his money, and he's feeding his family the Koolaid. How's that done in-system? How about an extended Con check with a longish interval and a stupid number of hits required? The penalties are heavy, glitches slow you down, you're going to be testing regularly, and if you critical glitch (that is, the convert stops for a minute and says "Wait a sec, he wants me to give him his money, kill my family so they can get to the UFO and be happy, and he's not coming along WHY?"), you botch the whole deal up (and probably make an enemy in the process.

Yeah, having that kind of thing happen as a simple chain of die rolls is lame-ass GMing, but that's why you work storytelling into it. The cultist makes friends with the character first. He talks about the UFO as a hypothetical for a while. He never gets around to talking about the whole "you die and go there" until he's sure his convert is in the bag. And all along, the convert character gets chances to resist this heinous course of action he's being led along.

I see how this works, systemically, and don't have much of a problem with it being applied. If a player feels like his character might be getting wise to what's going on or developing enough of a backbone to resist, he might put some Karma into getting higher Con or more Willpower. If the character's friends see him doing something dumb like joining a comet cult, they might try and talk him out of it (giving the cultist higher mods, maybe, and taking away some of his progress on the extended test). Maybe the convert doesn't like the kinds of things the cultist is making him do, and leaves town. And yeah, it's way cooler if this kind of thing just happens without any fussing around with dice influencing people, but if this charming cultist is part of the plot you've got in mind, why not let him ply his skills on other characters, PC or no?

Bravo sir! Bra-VO

I especially like:

So what if your GM couldn't convince a marathon runner in a desert to take a glass of water?

Would any and all storylines relevant to any sort of social intrigue be completely out the window?

The GM, obviously, isn't playing to his strengths, and he and the players need to work out the degree to which he can work in social rolls, etc, without seriously detracting from everyone's good time. If the players really don't want the GM using some of the die rolling tools he's provided with, then he should either work out a different mechanic or not run that idea with that group.

And what about those of us (most of us) with no military, criminal or any of that sort of skill set?

The entire Shadowrun game system isn't to our strengths. We don't know the correct method for placing demolitions, we don't know in what way you need to make the mana flow to cast a spell, or what is required to banish a spirit. We don't know how to program Black Hammer or generate a fake passcode.

These are all things that are abstracted by the rules, so that even if you don't know how to do it, your character can.

When you specifically say social skills don't apply to that, you are not allowing a person to play a character different from them, just like if you try and make a person describe the exact placement and chemical makeup of a bomb instead of rolling the skill. That is roleplaying too. Why not just roleplay out the making and placing of the bomb next time instead of rolling. If you know how to do it, you should be able to.

...

Someone does get it. I'll be damned.

And what do you mean "finally"? That was one of the earlier arguments raised by the pro-dice-rolling faction, and it's a flawed one.

First off, the character with the face skills can use them, just like the guy with pistols or stealth can. Social skills can augment a shaky story when you are trying to bamboozle your way past a guard, convince that gang that attacking your group wouldn't be worth it, get the Johnson to offer you more pay, and a million other things. I've played faces, and I've never felt like I was being hobbled by not being able to override how the other PCs acted, using my social skills. In fact, I don't think I've even tried - I've roleplayed it, but I've never gotten out the dice and said "I'm trying to fast-talk the others into going along with my plan."

Secondly, it's a spurious comparison, because those other skills don't involve the GM taking control of your character from you. In other words, if you have pisols: 6, you just say you shoot someone. The GM doesn't take over and say "Okay, you decide not to take the shot against the mage on the roof, because you know it's too difficult. Instead, you take an aim action and then shoot at the nearest security guard." Now, if your character has a relatively high active skill and/or an appropriate knowledge skill, the GM might suggest things that the character would know or consider. But the ultimate choice is still up to the player. That's how it should be when social skills are used on a PC.