From Shyft's earlier essay:
Compulsion - Make you Do something/change your behavior
Emotion - Make you feel something
Illusion - Make you Believe Something
Servitude - Make you Loyal to something
At the recommendation of
@Shyft, I retooled all the Intimacies for everyone so that they'd both make more sense overall, and so that they'd have the proper Mental Influence tags associated with them. Hopefully this will also make things easier to understand when we start using the Twins to start fiddling around with Intimacies with their various social-related charms. Expounding upon these tags:
- [Servitude] generally means placing/valuing someone more highly than yourself; in Creation, LOVE is classified as Servitude because of that. For these effects, it means that the character will generally either obey or value the stated individual/group above their own feelings or thoughts by default.
- [Illusion] stands for what you believe - no matter if it's true or not - so you can basically think of things with [Illusion] tags as "This is the opinion/belief of the character" and the character will act on these ideas/thoughts.
- [Emotion|_X_] means that the character typically feels X emotion for the reason stated in parenthesis about the named character/group/occurrence.
- [Compulsion] is a nearly-reflexive reaction to the stated trigger, for the reason explained in parenthesis.
Building on Grom's post here!
So, The PCs have a
ton of intimacies, so I'm only going to pick out a handful at a time for the sake of this post. As well as Motivations.
A social attack at its core
must explain it's intention. This is part of Step 1 of Social Attacks. you have to tell everyone what you want alongside your stunt if any- "I want to compel an action, instill a belief, secure loyalty or inspire a feeling."
If the social attack is successful, (the roll exceeds MDV), the defender may choose to accept the influence as described in step 1, or spend reflexively willpower to resist it. Below are some key points, detailed more fully on page 173 onward in 2nd edition core.
Extras
never spend Willpower except to defend their Motivation.
Non-extras and heroic characters spend their willpower to defend their Traits (such as Intimacies).
No matter what, a character
must spend willpower to resist a social attack, if accepting it would conflict with their Motivation.
If a character cannot spend WP to resist, they follow through with the action as if they had accepted.
Enduring Order Administrator's Motivation is t 'Win the Endbringer War'. This means that if a social attack had the intent of "I want Taylor to hide in a bunker instead of fighting", Taylor would look at that and go "Hahaha no conflicts with my motivation- spending a willpower!
We'll step away from Motivation to touch on intimacies again. Before magic, Intimacies take [Conviction] scenes of effort to fully instill or erode. Characters can even perform unrolled social actions on themselves to add or remove these. 'Damaged' intimacies still count for the purposes of other effects, but intimacies under construction do not.
Now, the corebook stresses that individuals will spend willpower to have existing loyalties eroded, but
not resist new ones, unless they conflict with ideals they already have.
Let's take Taylor's first intimacy: Being a Hero (It Is My Duty, To Be A Hero Above All) [Illusion] ●●●●
This is an Illusion- a worldly belief, ideal, opinion or goal. Illusions are not about
perception or holograms, they're about what you
think or know. This is why Mental Invisibility Technique has the Illusion keyword, because it makes the witness believe the Solar isn't there. Memory in context of Creation is an Illusion, because it's what you
think happened, not what
actually happened.
In general, Taylor here is going to actively resist any social influence that tells her not to be a hero, to not hold to her
ideal of a hero. (amusingly she does not have an intimacy that defines what a hero is, so in borgstromantic terms, she falls back on her Virtues to define that).
Morals, btw, are totally Illusion-keyworded.
This Intimacy means Taylor will dig in her heels when told to do unscrupulous things, like say
Cauldron methods. She also will be more inclined to speak and act in a heroic manner in her daily life,
and to attempt to instill this intimacy or one like it in other people. She won't preach it- that's a characterization question,but it
does influence her behavior.
The converse of this is also true- actions taken by other characters which support or reinforce this intimacy are unlikely to be resisted. So like, if Legend starts tutoring her on Heroic Behavior, she's going to just go with it. Because
heroism.
The short version is, any Intimacy is something you get up off your ass for or have a deep, meaningful response to.
Next Intimacy! First Prayer of Perfection (She Put Her Faith In Me) [Servitude] ●●●●
Servitude describes
loyalty, likely to a Person (like a knight to his lord), or a cause/group such as Greenpeace or the PRT. As mentioned, in terms of Creation,
Love is servitude effect, because the cynical view of love, metaphysically, is that someone is
always serving the needs of someone else.
Now
the people in love are perfectly fine and treat it just as we see it, usually, but the
gods see it as the cynical power exchange.
A Servitude effect is essentially 'I will take action on the subject's behalf. I will anticipate their needs or take action to support their efforts. I may do this without being told'.
For Taylor, this basically means that if Prayer needs something she can provide, Taylor
will provide it- though she has complete control over how much effort she puts into the task at hand. Loyalty encourages
action, it doesn't demand specific quality of loyalty.
Generally speaking though, loyal characters will not betray each other or knowingly act against their interests. This intimacy means Taylor will resist influence that would hurt Prayer or Prayer's goals. You know how the Ally background works? This is kind of like that, where Taylor doesn't just care about Prayer herself, but she cares about the things Prayer does.
Next Intimacy! Endbringers (Why Haven't They Killed Me Yet) [Emotion|Fear] ●●●●
Emotion is a strange one. Mechanically it is
very underwhelming, but one should never underistimate the power of how feelings affect judgement. In terms of dice, acting in line with a standing Emotion is +1 dice towards, while acting out of line is the opposite. Alchies 2e has some stealth errata.
Emotions are the least specific of the keywords. They essentially bias a character towards certain flavors of actions instead of specific goals. What does the character act like when angry, when afraid?
The point of Taylor having this intimacy largely exists to remind us that when the Endbringers show up, Taylor is afraid and should be rolling Valor.
The other thing is that Emotions are hooks for
other characters to ping off of. If Taylor is afraid, other characters should invoke her fear either to support her, or take advantage of it for their own ends. The same applies for you the players. This is especially relevant with the twins, who can quickly 'massage' a group into the right emotional state before really attempting anything.
Amusingly, Taylor doesn't have an Compulsion intimacies, so I'll have to go to PRAYER for the next example!
My Hair (It Must Be Treasured) [Compulsion] ●●○
So this is a Compulsion effect. Essentially it means that whenever the conditions for it emerge, the character
must take the described action, within the bounds of their character. This particular compulsion is fairly harmless, a funny quirk! Prayer will, when relevant, play with her
wonderful hair as part of her idle demeanor.
Most of the time in play, Compulsions are more like standing orders or cultural proscriptions on behavior. "Be good, Don't Do That" kind of thing. Sometimes they're Jedi-mind-trick alikes, such as Hypnotic Tongue Technique.
In terms of social resistance, any influence that would make Prayer not play with her hair is likely to be denied, while hair-play encouraging actions like offers for brushing, compliments and so on will be invited.
Intimacies for NPCs
So here's an important point. These keywords exist as spot-checks and mnemonic devices to ensure that NPCs behave consistently. If you thePCs instill intimacies, you can expect the subjects to
stay the course. These are how you
program your minions. And I use the word program deliberately- it's kinda callous yes, but Creation's a callous place.
- Compulsions are the best social programing tool, because they can be very broad-ranging or very specific behavioral modifications. Compulsions include "I will never harm another human." or "I will eat healthy."
- Servitude is the next best, in that you have a character who will act in what they think is your best interest- and they might be more fallible than you. This loyalty also means they'll be willing to let you do more to/with them than not.
- Illusions are like political ideologies- they encourage you to do things or act in a certain way, but they don't guide you at all. They're ideal for managing cultures over individuals or units.
- Emotions are the least useful for managing NPCs, because emotions make people predictably unpredictable. An angry mob is not going to mob in any way that makes sense without leadership.
Conviction and Willpower
This is more just general roleplaying advice,and something that became increasingly defunct as Paranoia Combat became pervasive.
A character with a Virtue at 3+ is
notably driven. As in, they are willing to act on on their personal morals and broad, generally defined mores. Remember how Intimacies make you get up off your ass? So do Virtues- and Virutes are arguably stronger, as they have a -2/+2 variance to your MDV.
Remember, Virtue 2 is mortal average, and Virtue 4 is quite exceptional. Virtue 5 is astonishingly rare.
Let's take Taylor's Conviction 4. This puts her clearly in the top ranks. What this means, is that Taylor is
incredibly difficult to sway from her chosen course of aciton- she commits the equivalent of lifetime dedication to nearly
everything she does. Mortals with Conviction 1 tend to waffle, shying away from difficult things when they talk themselves out of their plans and goals.
Willpower, detailed on page 115, has a nice scale that describes personality types. Unfortuntaley, paranoia combat inflates everyone to WP10 very quickly. Most mortals are WP 4 as per 2e chargen rules (not the errata rules), and Exalts MUST be Willpower 5 minimum. (1 dot in each virtue free, 5 to divide, meaning one Virtue must be at least 3+).
WP 4 means you're slightly hesitant and uncertain.
WP 5 means you're diffident and a little shy.
At 6, you're sure, self-confident. I'd put most modern, well-adjusted adults at WP 6 for the record. Creation-mortals have much less to be sure about in their live.
Seven is where you start seeing
Heroism. Eight and Nine are stuff of legends, and WP 10... Well, WP10 is hardcore. Canon Taylor was starting to tick up there near the end.
So, Willpower is important because it determines how many scenes it takes to break you by talking. It's your 'buffer' before social influence overwhelms you.
Why is Mental Influence 'Brainwashing'?
In the 2nd edition corebook, it explains that trying to erode a strong, well-anchored belief (Conviction 3+), takes several scenes of concerted effort, and to deny the subject the ability to regain or spend Willpower. The issue with social actions, is that you are not guaranteed to have access to the subject at all times, as to prevent them from renewing the faith in their ideal or otherwise allowing you to continue to influence them.
Ergo, torture!
More seriously, the game simply states that the
most assured way to influence someone is lock them in a room, keep them awake and keep social-attacking them until they cave. Unnatural Mental Influence is seen as such because it
skips this step and is faster.
Hmm. That about covers it for now! Enjoy!
