In 2:nd ed you had to specialize in different situations you wanted your character to be savvy in.
Because my games are less combat oriented and rely heavily on social situations, the change they made in 3:d ed, making it a general skill, simply will not do. I didn´t want to force my players to spend more skill points just to be good in this area. I wanted to encurage being proficient in many areas of etiquette. But I still wanted a corporate suit to be clueless in the streets. My solution was to keep the etiquette skill as it is, but adding an unlimited amount of specializations that limit your skill in different situations. You get twice your base skill to devide between your choice of specializations. The maximum value is your basic skill. You can later raise your specializations with karma as with any specializations. At this time the basic skill no longer limit your specializations.

Another method I´ve been thinking about is making the "specializations" knowledge skills. That way it would be sort of (but not really) like the centering skill. You have your etiquette skill, that tells you how generally good you are at handeling people. But if your knowledge of the situation your in is lower than your etiquette, that will limit how well you do. The knowledge skills could be named something other than etiquette, and maybe they could have some kind of other use as well. They could be named "smarts" for example. Street smarts, corp smarts, matrix smarts. Remember that Etiquette: streets would be no more, so the name isn´t so bad I think.

What do you think of this? What modifier should there be for defaulting to the base skill?

I don´t like making things more complicated. But this is actually one of the most important areas of my game so I think its worth it.

Cool idéa. How does the limitation work in your system? Does the knowledge skill simply indicate the maximum of dice they can use? Or do they get to use their full value in the areas where they have some knowledge?

We still use the 2nd edition in this case. You have etiquette (military), etquette (corp), etiquette (mafia) etc.
That works just fine and so far no one's complaining about all the skills.

It´s very good. I had some thoughts about why it would be bad, but I dismissed them. It solves the problem of etiquette being a universal knowledge of everything, and it´s an easy way of making all kinds of knowledge skills usefull in the game. Genius!

>edit< Sorry, still talking about Fortune´s method.

Grinder: So you simply let your players pay up and shut up? I guess you didn´t need to shut them up sence they never complained. Mine would though. Maybe re-introducing the Firearms skill would be the thing...

The way we do Etiquette is to allow folks to "break" the rule that a specialization cannot exceed twice the general skill rating (if there is such a rule... if not, then it's a house rule). We also allow General skill/Specialization trade offs greater than 1. I.E. if a person puts 3 points into Etiquette, then they can have Etiquette 1/Street 5. The players in my group have all (with the exception of "the new kid") played SR2 extensively, and so they usually specialize with their Etiquette skill anyway because it "feels right".

Do you allow multiple specializations of the etiquette skill?

I mean from character creation. Not using karma.

Well Grinder, thats the reason my players would complain. They´ve allready taken a hit with the split up Firearms skill. Etiquette was a pain in the butt for them in the days of 2:nd ed. Most characters would have only 2 or 3 in a couple of etiquette skills. If I would introduce that back in the game, while still keeping the Firearms skill splitt up, they wouldn´t know what to do.

As i said, i'm not the GM, so i have to suffer under this split up too. All of the players (including me) agreed and so it's fine.
We're playing a more low power style, so it fits well. Most characters now have two or three etiquette skills at 3 or 4 and so far this had been enough to get through the world. Knowledge skills can be used to support the use of etiquette.

In the game most karma had been spend for initiation, attributes and weapon skills. In the current campaign, which now lasts for 60 karma total earned per character.

In my older campaigns (both player and GM), the karma had been spend on non-combat skills too, but we had a lot more karma to spend then.

Thanks for the tips, chummers. All good ways of doing it.

It strikes me that no one so far has supported the canon way of doing etiquette. Is there no one out there who likes what they did to the skill in 3:d ed?

I like to switch Etiquette skills to knowledge skills, after breaking them down into the specialties (Street, Matrix, Corp, Yak, etc etc).

OTOH, I don't use Background skills, so that frees up some points for them. (There are a couple I have to use, like Talismongering, etc, but I can only think of that 1 skill that would be effected).

EDIT: I also combat certain combat skills back under a "parent" skill, such as Pistols, SMGs, Shotguns back under "Firearms", leaving heavy weapons as Heavy Weapons, and rifles and assault rifles under "Rifles".

Kind of do the same thing with Armed Combat, which includes Swords, Knives, Clubs...basically everything that is small enough to be one-handed, which I lump under Pole Arms/Staffs. Whips are still seperate.

Makes perfect sense to me. I´m stealing it right away!

Yeah. Knowledge skills are never used for active tests by themselves. No need to blur the lines.

Had a similar issue come up in my last group. The GM's house ruled separate Etiquette skills ala 2nd edition, but had them classified as knowledge skills and increased the knowledge skill multiplyer to Int x7 to accomodate for it.

I prefer using the knowledge skills because it is easier for the GM to make tests as well as help expanding the PC in game.

I think it would work well for both athletics and ettiquette to give people proficiencies, one for each skill level.

So If I have ettiquitte 3 I could have specific knowlege of say street, mafia, and magical ettiquette. For all others I get a +2 modifier.

If I have athletics 4 i could choose running, climbing, swimming, and jumping, but if I tried to use athletics for lifting I get a +2 modifier.

Anyway mourning the skill web, as always.

It is odd how your gritty and harcore street punk has to have a corp, magical, matrix etq of 5 if he wants to get street at 7. On a side not and just to play the DA, while they did break up the guns skills, one great thing about going to third was knowledge and languages skills. I had an SR2 character who was a linguist junky and to get the starting languages I wanted I had to cut some very basic active skill that he would have had.

Hm, I kinda like that idea too, Rev.

Between Fortune and Rev, I have to say I like Fortune's idea better. Rev's idea, while good in certain ways, leads to the rather odd mechanic of a character raising Ettiquite from, say, 5 to 6 and all of a sudden learning how to talk in a new environment like they've lived there their whole life.

Fortune's idea is great because it ties Ettiquite to a more detailed part of the character background. In fact I think it could easily be expanded to apply to all social skills in the same way. So for any social skill used, the player considers the situation and decides which particular knowledge skill to use. The level of this knowledge skill sets a cap on the numer of dice you can throw from that particular skill, be it Ettiquite, Negotiations, Intimidate, etc.

Well, in most games I play you have to specialize your etiquette. There are bonuses penaties base on what you specialize it in.

The best thing about my way is that it is a very simple system fitting easily into the existing rules, it is easily retroactively applied to existing charachters and they can be played with or without it. The cost for that is some lack of expressiveness.

I like the SR3 version of Etiquette, but only because I've been involved in this argument when it related to SUT.

Just for background, some people on Shadowland had a discussion about the relative merits of the Small Unit Tactics skill, which is a must-have skill expecially since it provides extra Initiative or CP dice (we adopted the Optional Rule from CC as a site-wide rule). The thing is, as it's written there is absolutely no correlation between actual tactical knowledge and circumstances, and getting the benefits from a SUT test. All of the TN modifiers deal with communications between teammates. SUT becomes a skill of effective information-sharing, and not about using actual tactics. The actual knowledge of tactical skills is your Knowledge Skills, be they SWAT Tactics, Bodyguarding, (Military Unit) Tactics, etc.

But Crimson, you might ask, SUT has BattleTac Systems, Vehicle Tactics, and Matrix Tactics Specializations. How does that work? Well... We at Shadowland figured that out, too, through judicious use of reading all of the references to SUT and BattleTac throughout the SR3 books and extrapolation of certain inferences based on reason and logic. It's not like we pull our house rules out of our collective asses. But I am not going to share rules which are already published in SL's Shadowrun Datastore.

Anyway...

Etiquette in SR3 works on the same principle. In SR2Comp there used to be an Edge called "At Ease" which provided a TN mod to Social Tests with unfamiliar people or places, signifying that the character was comfortable with themselves, and presented themselves to strangers in a way that put them, well, at ease. Effectively, SR3 Etiquette is not so much how to act and behave around subsets of people--that's what the Knowledge SKills are for--but how to differentiate between what you say and do, how you present yourself to different people. Etiquette won't tell you what the most recent events in the Mafia are, but that's what Mafia Politics, etc. is for in SR3.

In this light, the fact that there are Etiquette specializations seems more like a holdover from rules that existed since 1989 than for any particular reason actually related to someone's ability to find the right people and talk to them the right way. But, OTOH, it does emphasize a character's expertise in finding the specific people in their field when they have an Etiquette Specialization.

I still use etiquette tests to get information out of contacts and when doing legwork. So maybe that´s the old 2:nd ed way of looking at it. When you do that, you want there to be a challange of sorts, in having the right skills for the job. Knowing the right people. Knowing the field. Knowing the lingo. I will use Fortune´s method for etiquette because the skill is so frequently and varyingly used in my game. I want a more complex system that takes into account the characters other resources. When it comes to other social skills I wont be adopting the system because they are used in more specific situations and not as frequently.

If you use etiquette like I do there´s a problem if all characters get automaticly savvy in every situation. I want it to be harder to fit into every situation. But if a player choses to be a good negotiator, I don´t think it´s a problem to allow him to negotiate with both the johnsson and the street punk drug-dealer.

Well, capping the usuable dice to a Knowledge Skill or 1/2 Etiquette might work. It's not a bad idea, but ... We'd have to see.