Now I doubt I'm not the only one here, but it seems to me like the rules and tables on dealing with the social aspect of SR are really lacking in... well just about everything. At the table I play we don't really roll or do anything of that nature so I'm not sure if it makes my social character gimped or not. It just seems to me that right now as is the social rule set and table to go with it are like hacking at this point (just a whole bunch of icky goo that as a GM you just don't want to get your hands on.) Also at the same time it feels like hacking, because if people use the table and whatnot in the BBB the social monkey basically can take up a lot of the spot light (in the way that a hacker can.) I just find it annoying that it's either all for one, or just one when dealing with some situations in SR at times....

Has anyone made a more interesting system that might actually work and not be a complete headache at the same time? I would be interested to hear any table decisions that work well as our group had no end of discussion and problems with the social tree in SR. Please someone tell me I'm not insane. Is there a more complete table on Dumpshock that we as a whole could, for the most part, agree on?

Should you be able to convince an enemy to kill themselves just on the fact that you can throw 16 dice at them when they only have 1-3? Should there be thresholds that you need to obtain for certain social situations (in the same way that you use an extended test to search for hardware on the streets?) I just find the social level of SR at least in 4th ed is just this huge can of worms that most people would rather tip toe around.

a) That's the number one problem with Shadowrun. It is based around the idea of a team where each person has a particular role without a lot of overlap. The mage is the one taking up the spotlight for anything astral, the sammie is the one hogging the spotlight for anything combat, the face for social, the hacker for matrix... And the entire system is built around that. It's possible to start out as a badass, but only in one major skill area. By design, a team should consist of multiple specialists, that's going to be the most effective way to do it. And that is also going to fracture gameplay a bit. It's just something built into the system.

b) Tables are fine, but it's just as easy to make up modifiers on the fly for things that aren't on there. I'd rather not generate a 5 page table with pre-set modifiers that I need to flip through. I'd rather just make fuzzy logic judgment calls.

c) Can you convince someone to kill themselves? That's up to the GM. If there's a compelling reason for them to do it, why not? It might apply even more than the -5 "result is disastrous for the target" though, depending on the circumstances. But there's no question whether you can do that in combat -- you can't. There's no "I roll leadership and yell "Kill yourself!" at the guard who's shooting at me!" You would need significant time to convince someone to do something like that. Two words can never force someone to do something like kill themselves, no matter how powerfully magnetic your personality is.

One thing i don't like is how Interrogation is a specialization of Intimidation.

I dunno, to me, i don't think you have to be scaring someone to interrogate them. Journalists know how to interrogate people without necessarily intimidating them. You can intimidate someone into talking, sure, but you don't HAVE to do it that way. I admit i sort of liked it better as it's own skill like SR3.

Interrogation should be a specialization for most social skills.

Intimidation - Tied to the chair and slapped around
Con - Word play / Confusion to get them to say things they are not supposed to
Etiquette - Journalist

Perhaps even Negotiation... But this is less of talking and more of striking deals for information

Whoa, and i like it even more than Interrogation being a normal skill. Consider this yoinked.

I don't know why they don't list these as already ok specializations for those skills.

Yes. Social skills are potentially very powerful but for really difficult tasks, it should take a long time (i.e. days to years). So a pornomancer can't just walk up to some random guy and say "Kill yourself" and expect it to work. And if I had a player try it, I would just rule that it fails automatically.

So how would one of my players talk an NPC until killing themselves? Maybe like this:

1. Find someone who is a little down on his luck. Maybe he lost his job. Maybe his wife left him. Talk to him, pretend to be his friend, all the way lamenting on how much his life sucks and how hopeless it is. Slowly, get him to start drinking. Keep on pretending to be supportive, all the while slowly chipping away at his self confidence. Months go by. The guy is sliding down hill rapidly but you're there, pretending to be his friend, all the while encouraging his addictions and crushing his hopes. Eventually, you bring up the idea of 'ending it all' and who knows, maybe the poor guy might actually shoot himself.

2. Pick a religion or a political cause. Find a person. Tell him about your shiny new god or your awesome political beliefs. Gradually charm him and convince him how great your god/cause are. Bring him into your organization. Get him involved. Time goes by. Tell him that desperate times call for desperate measures. That your god/cause requires that you take up arms. Use violence. Get him to help you. Draw him in further. Tell him about the glories of martyrdom. About Paradise. Then convince him to strap on a suicide vest and to go out and kill people. Happens every single day.

For a 28 dice pornomancer, I don't think it would take weeks or months. But at least a long conversation. And the person would have lots of opportunities to change their mind, especially if someone else interevened and tried to stop them, which seems likely.

I'm not sure I quite agree with that. First of all, this is a magical ability (we are talking about Commanding Voice right?). Second, who's to say how strong some random Joe's will to live is? Hell, even nowadays, it doesn't take that long to destroy someone's ambitions, hopes, and dreams. We are very weak, and most of us are very prone to suggestion.

I see Commanding Voice like "the Voice" in Dune. It just bypasses your conscious thought and plays to your hidden vulnerabilities. That said, if you want people to be resistant to it, give them a will to live (add edge to their resist pool).

For rolling etiquette for every net hit you score over their net hits it raises how much they like you by one rank. So if someone is hostile towards you and you start off with say 15 dice now you have 10 dice vs. their 1-5. You score 6 hits when they get 2. Should it be that quick of a change towards their demeanor and if not then why?

Is it too powerful, or is it not powerful enough. If you tell a player to roll their social dice and then tell them the minuses my first GM saw it as tipping his hand a little too much. Telling the social monkey to take a minus 10 dice in the first situational meet with someone might be a little too telling about the person's demeanor.

All I'm saying is that I feel the social skills are a problem as they are completely open to interpretation, because of how incomplete they are as a rule. Too many problems, with nothing given good explanation. If a porno mancer walks into a bar and rolls etiquette everyone just loves him/her, but what about an adept with only like 15 dice instaid of 30?

I don't know I just feel like everything related to social skills are just way too vague. Both GM's I have had have used the power of handwavium on social skills as it would just take too long to make table rules for it. To me it feels like a messed up system when you really open the BBB and give a hard stare at the rules.

I was talking to someone today and they had a great quote. "People's egos are so fragile. It doesn't take much to break them."

The other problem is that for social skills to actually do anything at low to mid dice pools (5-9 dice), you give the pornomancer awesome mind control powers.

Using human scale dice pools 3 or 4 nets hits is a massive success. For the pornomancer, 4 nets hits is Tuesday.

From way back in 2005, no less:

Another good page or two on social skill tests would be great. It's one thing to say "well, of course an unarmed guy tied to a chair can't intimidate four armed trolls, use common sense" but common sense also dictates that if you're trying to decide which spell to cast at a vampire that you're actually having a psychotic break with reality and should take your Clozaril.

Plus, there's always the possibility that you could convincingly claim that you have a Spirit Pact, or Highly Influential Friends, or a High Yield Cortex Bomb, or that you make a lucky guess ("say, did your little sister turn eight yet?") that intimidates the hell out of one of them.

Christopher Walken was, pretty well able to, intimidate a group, that outnumbered him, while duct taped, to a chair, in Suicide Kings? Wasn't he! And, everyone knows, if, anyone is, an Intimidation-based Social, Adept, in real life? It's...Christopher. Walken!

I loved that movie. If there were a DVD with a commentary track of Christopher Walken and Jay-Mohr-as-Christopher-Walken, that would be the best disc ever.

"You have a drink with the guy and next thing you know he's best man at your wedding!" ha.

But you know, it wouldn't be fun as just "Christopher Walken rolls a godawful number of dice for an Intimidate test". He finds out all this information from them (like Psychology in some other systems, maybe Con or Negotiate?) and plays them off against each other and, well, you know, it's a whole story. A single Opposed Test would be like saying "okay, you sneak into the facility and grab the dingus, roll again to get out" or "okay, you pwn Zurich-Orbital's b0x".

EDIT: Also, I ... like your orthographical Walken impression.

I think too many GMs forget that social skills are not magic. In the meet with the Johnson, the Johnson has a hard limit, and won't pay the runners over that hard limit. It doesn't matter if you're rolling 28 negotiation dice, you still won't get him past that hard limit. So if you can't even do that, what makes you think your face can talk a stranger into killing themselves in five minutes? Stuff you can do is - convince a gate guard you're the janitorial crew, convince the secretary that you're the corporate VIP's best bud from college here to see him, convince the local gang that even though you're all kind of beat up at the moment, messing with your crew would still be a bad idea. Stuff you can't do - turn the straight gate guard gay for your character, convince the humanis leader that elves are really cool, etc.

Social dice pools can run extremely high, so don't be afraid to use thresholds and extended tests. And some things should not even merit a roll - just like 26 dice in pistols won't let you ricochet the bullet around the corner, and 16 dice in piloting won't let you drive your Westwind on the ceiling, some things shouldn't be even possible with social skills alone.

I agree that social skills are much too vague. Considering that they can be used on PCs, and that social skill dice pools can reach incredibly high levels, the lack of detail is very negligent. Allowed to do too much by the GM, social skills can break the game - almost as badly as first edition Exalted.

The trick to it is to write a completely normal post, and then go back and erase all your punctuation and whatnot, and add new punctuation and whatnot completely at random. He once said on Conan O'Brien (I don't know if it was jokingly or not) that ignoring all the "little lines and dots and things" was how he read scripts.

No, I actually wasn't referring to Commanding Voice. I agree with you that Commanding Voice is different.

Yes Glyph social skills are not magic, but then again if we really wanted to just punt SR4 social skills in the trash can just build a mage with memory wipe, mind control, and mind probe. Wow makes every social monkey obsolete. Woopie...

One potential difficulty that I'd look into with the Mr. Scary example (certainly the example) is that, as each troll is rolling 9 dice, the chance of one of them rolling an unusually high number of successes isn't all that far off. Its not 13 vs. 9 its 13 vs. 9 and 9.

Not that fast talking (or in your example, exceptionally scary) people shouldn't get to do stuff like this, though the key is not to dictate the results of a successful test (as the player).

Mr. Scary MIGHT scare the trolls into going for extra help... or he MIGHT scare them into hitting him with narcojet.. just in case. Maybe only one troll leaves for back up.

The key is that to get a response that is usable you'll have to do more than just roll a single opposed test and hope the GM's idea of what the NPC's do when scared is the same as yours. And no, I don't let my players dictate their social results flat out like that.

This is where the roleplaying portion of the game comes up strongest. If the player is about as intimidating as Mickey Mouse, it doesn't matter, whatever he said was scary. But what did he say? Pretend it IS scary and what would you do if someone scared you by saying 'that'? Maybe the trolls start trying to double check his bonds, wrap extra tape around him. On the downside, they didn't go away, on the plus side they got closer to him, maybe put away their guns...

Too much is situational and interactive to just break it down to a single opposed dice check and say 'this guy is just wrong' off this one example.

Well usually when dealing with a group you can just pick one member and add a bonus (or 1 or 2 dice) for each additional member. That's assuming you don't love rolling huge handfuls of dice, though (and if you did, you would probably stick with SR3, right?).

We weren't talking about commanding voice, but I don't think I agree with your take on it. It doesn't convince people to do things, it forces them to do them automatically. That's why the person will only obey each command for one round only. Commanding voice can tell someone "Hands up!" "Freeze!" "Drop your pants!" "Punch your sister!" etc. It can't convince someone to change their mind about something. It couldn't "destroy someone's ambitions." If you used commanding voice to make someone kill themselves, it would be a simple matter of saying "Shoot yourself." But more likely than not, the GM would use their discretion under commanding voice to say that if you try to kill someone with it, there just stand there dumbfounded for one round. Otherwise commanding voice would be the ultimate social skill. It would allow you to not only force people to obey your commands, it would let you instantly kill anyone you wanted with a stupidly one-sided roll of your 28 dice vs. their 4.

I think you're right that it works like the Voice though. It's the same basic idea, but the actual mechanics of it make it a lot less powerful.

Mental manipulation spells are useful in a number of different circumstances, but they are no substitute for social skills. For most of them, the target is aware of being controlled or influenced, and alter memory wears off over time. There are also times, such as meets with the Johnson, where you are almost certain to be dealing with people who are using active countermeasures against magic. Using such spells too indiscriminately is likely to eventually result in the demise of the character - shadowrunners live and die by their contacts, and there is no surer way to alienate them.

Social situations are messy period, I think the social rules reflect this.

As to Mr Scary, while I do agree that in some situations someone could pull it off it would also be well within the GM's reasonable discretion to add an additional penalty for being restrained. It is presumably a lot harder to be intimidated by someone who is bound to a chair or something. There are just so many modifiers possible that a list of common ones wouldn't be entirely practical.

The problem rests in the vast difference in ability available to pornomancers (compared to normal guys) and the fact that dice pools scale linearly in power.

Assuming you have a guy with 6 dice to resist social-fu, and you put him up against a very good, but still human scale, brainwasher (12 dice).

So the brainwasher can expect 2 hits on any give roll.

We'll let the brain washer make tests in the following time scale (just pulling some rules outta my butt)
1 hour x2
8 hours x2
1 day x2
1 week x2
1 month x2

So you can make two hour long tests, but the next test you make takes 8 hours.

So in roughly 11 weeks of brainwashing, our guy would have around 20 net hits on the brainwashee.

Along comes the 24 dice pornomancer, he can expect 6 net hits on the brainwashee per roll.

So he arrives at about the same level (18 net hits) of brain washing in roughly 2 days

Well yeah, based on those rules you just pulled out of your butt, someone with magically enhanced abilities could do the thing he's awesome at much, much faster than a regular guy could, although not as quickly as someone with some personafix software or psychotropic ice.

The point was, that if you make the rules such that human scale social skills are 'useful' you allow the pornomancer what amount to awesome mind control powers.

Using the Mr. Scary example from above, 1 net hit on intimidation has to be 'rather scary' or the guy with an intimidation pool of 9 will almost never get to accomplish anything with it, and he's pretty scary by human standards. Say, 'now would be a good time to run' or giving, say, a -2 dice pool penalty for the first few rounds of a fight, or something.

4 nets hits on an intimidation test has got to be basically pants pissing fear, since we can 'see' someone who is really intimidating, but still human (~12 dice), achieving this.

This basically means that mister scary can still scare you while he is tied to a chair.

Using the common sense answer of, "how can he be that scary, he's tied to a chair surrounded by armed men?" breaks down, because Mr. Scary left the paltry limits of maximum human scaryness behind long ago.

Yes bringing the hurt stick someone who is over abusing a power is a very good idea, but say... using Joe office worker as a human bomb, he just really can't throw the dice to crack a powerful mind control spell. Maybe you just use him as a puppet to gain all the information you need, and nothing says WTF like then after he is done doing all the leg work to off him and grind him into paste and sell him at the local stuffer shack. Mind probe makes interrogation obsolete. Mind control can make negotiation or leadership obsolete. It takes such a long time for people to regain their memory of having their memories altered. If you are a strong enough mage working your foo on a 2-3 dice wage slave you are practically good for at least a year. There is so much more you can do, that you just can't do with the social skill pool.

Bringing the stick to the situation is totally GM's decision, but a character could easily just pull a Jedi mind trick more easily then it would take the social adept to fast talk his way through the situation. Takes less legwork, and allows you to go so much farther. Yes there are times where you just won't do it (such as a meet with a Johnson,) so fine there are like 3 situations where you might need the social monkey. All I'm saying is the Social skills could use a good amount of clarification, and could use some fleshing out or else it's almost like a broken lose end in SR. Where most mage's with mind control can just have someone shoot themselves in the face until they die throwing less dice then an adept social skilled to the hilt? Is that even fair at that point?

Kind of, because Counterspelling shouldn't be that rare. Plus spellcasting can be sort of obvious, if there are others around, whereas a social adep talking is just someone talking. So way more subtle.

For speed and power, though, a Spirit of Man (or some of the other critters) has the Influence power, which is like the spell except (a) instantaneous and (b) drain-free. Now that's scary.