Intimidation is also used to resist Intimidation. For that reason alone no Face, and few runners, can do without it. A "leader" without Intimidation will back down when talking to the punk on the corner.

It's clearly used to influence people, so if that group is called Influence, it should be in there.

I'm thinking about maybe Etiquette as a group of Knowledge skills; Corporate Etiquette, Japanese Etiquette, Street Etiquette and so forth. Because the other social skills are far more generic while royal dinner etiquette won't mean so much in the Barrens.

Etiquette is a behavioral social skill, not a knowledge skill.

I see the various Influence skills as cooperative, whereas Intimidate tends to be antagonistic.

Having them be separate makes sense to me.

Just because you are good at working well with others doesn't mean you are good at bullying them.



-k

I think most of the social skills are antagonistic; Con opposed by Con to lie, Negotiation opposed by Negotiation to agree on a price, Leadership opposed by Leadership to take charge, Intimidation opposed by Intimidation to get the upper hand. Etiquette is the odd one out.

Yeah, but the Influence skills generally get their results by getting the target to agree to your wants via some sort of positive, even if it's a lie.

Intimidate more or less is getting the job done with a threat.

Carrot vs stick.

Just because you are a smooth talker doesn't mean you're intimidating. And vice versa.



-k

Completely disagree, of course. Esp. with the emphasized text.

At my table...and I can't imagine this is only me...Intimidation comes up often and Leadership comes up rarely or never. I really don't understand why Leadership is in the Influence group and Intimidation isn't.

As has been said, really the most likely reason is game balance, a group of 3 skill is nice and one of 4 is serious bargain, so that fourth skill being one of not so high use is a balancing factor.

Karma: As intimidation is a charisma linked skill, being a 15 charisma pornomancer does actually make you pretty intimidating too(even if your defaulting on the skill)

I could not agree with you more!
I would much rather include Intimidation in the Influence Skill Group and exclude Etiquette.
It is a big stretch to use Etiquette to persuade others to act or not act as you want them to. It is more accommodating with Disguise, or to get people to fist "take you seriously" before applying any of the Influence skills (including Intimidation).

For example:
A character with good Leadership must also have good Etiquette in military protocol, if he wants others to take his orders seriously.
“All you guys go over there!” verses “Alfa squad, move out!”
A character that has high Intimidation must also have sufficient Etiquette in street gangs, if he wants others to believe he really means business.
“Would you like to take a chance on you life?” verses “I’ll pop your head, bitch!”

I'd go for that. Everyone needs Etiquette anyway, so they can just all get it singly.

To get back to to the question:
First: A skill group with 5 skill would be a bit too good.
Second: Influence gives you the skills you need to be a face. Intimidation is not the classic face skill. Actually this skill might be a bit off for some concepts.

Y'know, Leadership gets a lot of dirty looks, but I'm rather fond of it. I know it doesn't have a lot of explicit use, but with a little creativity it's very handy - for example, if you wanted a Lone Star officer to think you were on his side, you could roll Con to make them think you're the real thing, or you could roll Leadership to take charge of the situation with sheer force of personality.

I dunno if I've ever seen Leadership used, actually. What's it intended to do? Intimidation without the threat?

Having been looking over the pregens again I've just noticed the sample Face does have Intimidation but doesn't have Leadership.

Well, the pre-gens are generally fairly bad. Face would be much better off getting the Influence group at 4 than buying 3 of the skills separately.

I think it's partly an illustration of the "2 skills at 5" thing.

True, but it seems like an absurd waste for 1 extra DP. Like I said, the pregens just aren't particularly good. It isn't even that they aren't perfectly tweeked, it is that they are lacking very very basic optimization.

I'm not disputing that at all, had a long conversation with one of my players as to why he shouldn't play the pregen weapon specialist. My comment was more having picked 4 skills, Intimidation was the one they picked over Leadership.

That's true, but my point is that the characters are sub-optimal, and so their choices aren't always the best. And then again, skill groups are often sub-optimal too. So, as other people have said, they could have put leadership in there instead of intimidation specifically because they wanted to exclude a skill that you would want.

I'm sure plenty of people would love a skill group that is Gun, Gun, Melee, Dodge but it isn't out there, because the skill groups are a compromise. You get more skills for less points, but they aren't always exactly the skills you want.

Similarly a magic group of Summon, Bind, Cast, Counterspell would be awesome, but it doesn't exist because it would be too good. People don't really want ritual spellcasting or banishing, but if it comes at half price as part of a group... well, maybe it might be nice to have.

In the Influence group, no one would ever get Leadership if it wasn't in that group, so it is just a nice freebe.

If I ever recreate my old SR2 merc, she'd take it, but maybe I'm an exception.

Then again, in that case, it may be more about flavour than usefulness.

Based on background, my PC has Leadership 1 and Etiquette 1. I'm still waiting for the day I get to leverage those skills....

Okay, I shouldn't say never take it, but generally won't. Just like you wouldn't never take swimming if it wasn't in athletics, you just would exceedingly rarely take it.

Can't argue with that one

People swim in SR, i thought it was like GTA where puddle = death ?

Given all the armor, weapons, gear, low str characters, and general disinterest in the swimming skill, that is how it usually ends.

The problem with swimming skills seems to me that you need to take a lot of levels in it to be good. Unless you spend significantly, you can't really rely on it. At which point players say Screw It, and don't take it. Then the GM can throw a tantrum and drown the party, but what does that prove?

Yes and no. Swimming is that it's a strength based skill which probably means the people that are most likely to be the most adept are going to be melee combatants that could very well have the levels of cyberization (cyberlimbs / bone lacing) to start stacking penalties to negate their bonuses. However, durations have a base that is determined by your body score. An 8 dice pool for swimming is respectable, you'll probably be able to get around 50 meters over about 6 turns if you sprint. Otherwise you could go for about 10-12 minutes.

I think the irony of the Swimming skill is that those that have the physicality (Str/Bod) for Swimming and Running also probably have a higher chance of having bone lacing or cyberlimbs installed which penalizes them.

I will admit, I'm on the verge of increasing my swimming dice pool by 7 or 8 points to 15-16 without aids, but it's all for my climbing skill..... seriously. I've had too many crappy moments climbing with 10 dice that I want to get my pool up quite a bit.

Back to leadership, I am quite fond of the leader kind of characters and what I like about them, more than their ability to boss around NPC's (which usually I am more comfortable to role-play rather than roll-play), is the idea that they help the team work synergically. So, as a GM, I implemented a house rule: leadership can work as a generic "help" skill when two or more characters work together. The third helps them do a better job with leadership adding their successes as dice to the one with the best pool.

It makes it immensely useful, and yes prone to abuse. GM's be warned if you are using it on a table that does that kind of blatant abuse. Otherwise enjoy and see how your players find new uses for old skills (always makes me smile).

Well, if you're looking to tone the abusability down, but keep some of the flavor, how about instead of adding it as a third set of dice, allowing a character w/ leadership to assist another in a teamwork test, even if they dont have the skill needed for the test.

I.E. Micky the mechanic is repairing the teams GMC Bulldog. Larry the leader doesnt know frag about vehicles, but his pop used to own a mechanic shop and put him in charge (leadership!), so he gives Micky a "hand" by "stuporvising" the project.

I think I wasn't clear then. That is /exactly/ my house rule.
Thanks Aku.

New Specialization for the Leadership skill...

Leadership (Stuporvising)

O got confused because I said third. For some reason I'm under the implication that teamwork only lets 2 work on a task...

My restrict it to only 1 leadership addition?

Any number of characters can assist. In teamwork, each assisting character adds +1 die per hit to the pool of the character performing the test with the maximum bonus being equal to the main character's skill.

Let's say a character has a Longarms skill of 5 and agility of 7 and is currently after a mark. He has a spotter with a longarms skill of 3 and agility 5 with him looking downrange to assist the sniper. The spotter rolls his longarms check and gets the average of 2 hit. The sniper then rolls 5 longarms + 7 agility + 2 teamwork + misc bonuses.

Let's say the sniper has 4 spotters from various locations relaying information back to him and they all have the same agility and skill and roll the average. The sniper would get a 8 die pool bonus except that his skill is only 5 so he gets a 5 die bonus.

If you want leadership to work in teamwork checks, then it pretty much has to work one of three ways. Either it raises the cap for the die bonus, it allows a character to make a leadership check in place of the skill check to assist, or since the character has experience in leading people allows them to make teamwork checks in situations where they wouldn't normally apply.

For the third case, let's say you have a character with a high infiltration skill and the leadership skill. While normally the leader would be infiltrating, there's a special skill that's needed that he doesn't have. So a character with that skill, but a much lower infiltration skill gets the job. The leader, utilizing the other character's sensory input, keep watch on the situation and provide coaching on stealth techniques while the other character is infiltrating.

Edit: The last option may be a reason to make Instruction a more viable skill for players.

Well, any *reasonable* number can assist on skills that can reasonably benefit from teamwork. Like… not sniping. And certainly not using their Agility on sniping teamwork.

Meh. I do think it reasonable that a spotter can assist a sniper. Especially when you consider that sniper rifles can be classified as crewed weapons. Now, four spotters is PROBABLY not a viable solution.

Really can't, in SR4. Either the sniper can see the target, or he can't, and there are separate rules for info-guided shooting. And I can't imagine a 'crewed weapon' that *could* benefit from a teamwork test in firing, so that doesn't help much. Now, a TacNet could enjoy the benefit of spotters.

Yeah for some to be able to help in sniping with teamwork test using their agility he would pretty much be firing the weapon with the main guy and that way lies the madness.
But allowing someone to use their leadership to assist the sniper might be a valid move.

I would allow someone to use their Logic+longarms skill, or perhaps their Intuition+longarms.
If they're acting as 'Spotters'. But agility+longarms seems weird.

If you have ever been working on a project or task, and had someone that knows little to nothing about the intricacies/details of your work standing over you to "supervise”, then you’d most likely agree that it’s more a distraction. On an extremely rare occasion the supervisor might be of some help, but it’s never anything significant.

The extra person needs to have expertise or physically assisting to be of any use!

I'd allow it to work for the first and third uses, but the player has to call which of the two he'll be using.
The first use was one I hadn't thought of, but works very nicely with my other houserules (maximum number of hits is skillx2), so a character with leadership would be a very relevant addition to the team.
The third use is already covered in the discussion.



This makes the hacker, for example, a character that, with leadership,can have a very interesting concept: The geeky computer guy who runs the tactical elements or Operations, in the old "La Femme Nikita" series anyone?

Also, mages from the Astral communicating with mindlink spells...

Why do you think i called it "stuporvisoring"?

I have the exact opposite experience. I'll take a good manager with no skills in my tasks over a bad manager with skills in my tasks every time. Don't get me wrong if they are both a good manager and an expert in the field it is the best thing, but a talented manager helps you get stuff done. This isn't about writing code or holding a wrench, this is about removing distractions, making sure you have what you need, delegating some of your responsibilities to someone else so you can focus on the primary task etc.

The listed Leadership Specializations: Gut Check, Morale, Persuasion, Strategy, Tactics.

Examples:
Gut Check – If a character needs to make a Composure test, add the hits from a Leadership test made by the same character or a teammate.

Morale – If a character needs to make a Willpower test, compare this with the hits from a Leadership test made by the same character or a teammate. Take the higher result.

Persuasion – This would be an opposed test.

Strategy – If a character with Leadership needs to manage or coordinate an overall plan (logistics, setting-up drop-off & extraction points, allocating resources, setting mission priorities, etc.) then each hit on the Leadership test adds about +10% efficiency or success to the overall plan. The plan still needs to be clearly specified by the players and the details of the bonuses need to be worked out with the GM.
For instants, after a the players all agree on a plan to rescue a NPC being held captive by gangers, the “leader” of the group makes a Leadership test and gets 3 successes (~30% success bonus). The GM could give some advise, like “did you remember to plan your escape rout through the barrows?”

Tactics – If a character with Leadership needs to direct a team during a particular operation (assaulting a building, sneaking into a building, infiltrating a restricted area, high-jacking a shipment, etc.) then each hit on the Leadership test negates one Glitch that might occur by any member of the team, or each 3 hits negates a Critical Glitch.

No arguments. But, this is higher level managing where your boss has other recourses to coordinate with. With regards to a teammate standing next to you when you want to fix something, he’ll be of little help regardless of his administrative qualities

Given how abstract everything in SR is I can see it working out though. For a more concrete example the team is holed up in an old building in the middle of a desert and their transport is broken down. A pack of go gangers is out looking for them and it is only a matter of time before they are found. With a appropriate leadership skill the leader gets people on lookout and scrounging up supplies which helps the mechanic focus on his task instead of always looking over his shoulder for the go gang or trying to find scrap metal on his own. Personally I'd use it more the removal of penalties than the adding of bonus dice through team work if I were to make a house rule about the skill but it does not seem that far fetched to me.

Well, the house rule was effective in my game, that's why I offered it up in here, and to beat the dead horse of house rules discussions with a Panther Assault Cannon -because the horse is already dead from the full-auto of said assault cannon that left it without any ammo-, you may implement it with any variations suited to your game.

Now, the idea to remove penalties is good. Another use for a skill, I like giving the players yet more options.



Love this. Kudos.

I'm pretty concerned about the Strategy and Tactics examples, actually. The first three seem to match what the book says, but those two look like new and weird bolt-ons.

In the context of a typical Shadowrun Team, I basically regarded the concept of a good Strategist as the guy who can plan ahead and anticipate all possible situations.
The good Tactician is the guy that best insures nothing goes wrong during a Run.

Leadership as a tactician would not be a 'charisma' skill.

Perhaps it means 'Leadership in combat' ("Run left!") and Leadership in planning ("No, shut up. You're the point man on this.")?

According to the core rules Tactician is a specialization of Leadership, which is a Charisma based test.
i.e. - making sure nothing goes wrong during a mission could involve encouraging your teammates to stay focused and to do their best.