(no subject)

So Patrick and I got into a rather heated debate about the relative merit of having skills in RPGs that explicitly allow a character to seduce another. (The skill in question for our argument was Socialize in New World of Darkness, but any skill that allows these sorts of rolls can probably be substituted with ease.)

He falls on the side of the argument that says yes, rolling for just any old seduction attempt is stupid and rather pointless, but that he thinks that the roll itself is acceptable. His specific example was, "if I have an NPC like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, and the player knows that hey, this is a situation they don't want their character going into, I want a way to fairly resolve Black Widow Seductress vs. Hapless PC." He compares it to rolling Interrogation; the player may not want their character to give up important information, but that doesn't mean that the cops/Yakuza/Mafia/government/whoever won't be able to get it out of them.

I personally feel really uncomfortable with that idea. To me, even with nWoD's modifiers, it opens up (for example) the possibility of Casanova seducing a nun, or 'converting' a person from their sexuality through seduction (even if only for a night), or otherwise telling me what my PC feels or wants. ('Your character is in a bar drinking because he just lost his wife... but you failed your roll, so bam! He has sex with a random woman that seduced him!')

Now obviously I don't expect the last situation to happen in any game that I play in - I trust Pat more than that - but the point still remains that I really don't want to be told, "You find X really attractive/you want to get a drink with X/X convinces you to come back to his place/you want to sleep with X."

On the other hand, in Aberrant, Mega-Charisma and Mega-Manipulation literally meant jack shit to the PCs. You could blow a Willpower to just ignore social 'attacks', and it meant that NPCs with massive social stats could be, basically, hated, despite having Mega-Charisma 3+ (*cough*Imago*cough*).

I don't know where to find the equilibrium that I'll be happy with, short of saying that people should react to NPCs in accordance with their relative attributes. Thoughts?

(no subject)

Furry Happy Monsters, REM & The Muppets

Via jaltok


Further pimpage: I feel an intense need to tell you all about Pandora. Much like Gnoosic, it analyzes the songs/artists you put in, suggests new musicians or songs to you... and then creates a "radio" for you that plays that style of music. You can give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to any number of songs, or put them on the backburner if you don't feel like listening. I'm using it to discover more angry music for Leah (put in Phobia and Cannibal Corpse, come out with stuff that's very appropriate for Troll Thrash Metal!), as well as expand my personal horizons from my current big 5 (Green Day, The Offspring, October Project, Barenaked Ladies, and Evanescence). Plus, you can e-mail your 'station' to a friend.

I'm getting some very neat new songs. And, of course, "If I Had $1,000,000".