Perhaps it is a hang-up I have from SR1 days where Street Etiquette, Corporate Ettiquette, Law Enforcement Ettiquette etc. were all separate skills, but I just don't like SR4's all-encompassing Etiquette skill. Why should the street savvy ganger know how to behave at a cocktail party, or the smooth-talking Corp Johnson know how to street jive with barrens kids? It doesn't make sense to me for a lot of character backgrounds ...

At which point, maybe they should only have a single rank in the skill then...
To be fair, though, I did like the various Etiquette skills of previous editions. They enabled you to tune exactly where your strengths were. You could still do that with a low Skill, a Specialty and a few Knowledge skills to back it up, but... *shrug*

Yeah, I figure then people just spend minimal points on it and take a specialization.

Etiquette can still have specializations. Plus, between situational modifiers and applicable knowledge skills, a face will face more, or less, difficulty depending on the circumstances. Having separate etiquette skills would be too much, in my opinion, mainly because it already takes knowing five social skills to be a face.

Since we're getting into mechanics minutia I'd wanted to get back to this.

The first thing that occured to me was that I could see how that could happen. Actually, I've had some meetings get close to that. And since every other meet happens in a bar you're already half way there!

The trick is getting the J to let their guard down and have a drink or two. Which might be too much for me, but I'm not a smokin hot female face giving him a phermone high.

Although that's the kind of situation where I'd probably give a monkey paw warning depending on exactly how much advanatage you take of the fellow.

Hmmm although phrasing it that way it's more "charismatic tactics" than any actual charisma. Maybe that could be developed in players. I dunno.

Though to a degree it's the multipart aspect to a con (or negotiation) in this case that's the trickiest but enables the sort of stuff you might see on TV.

"I want to steal his pants." "What do you want his pants for?" "I don't want them, I just want to see if I can steal them."

Real life meetings got close to that? Do tell

Nah. A Mr. Johnson by definition can't let his guard down. But my actual point is that the number of *hits* doesn't cause that.