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- Washington, USA
Yes, I think social attacks need to be able to directly compel behavior. I think Ben Kenobi should be able to convince the inspector at a security checkpoint to let his group move along because these aren't the droids they're looking for, with just one swing of a Presence excellency. A Zenith with sufficient investment in Performance should be able to start or end a riot almost as easy as flipping a switch. Of course, pushing that emotional avalanche back uphill faces the significant complication of making one's message clear over the ambient noise and chaos, but that's what the spell Commanding Presence of Fire, a Pectoral of Resplendent Speeches, or even Phantom-Conjuring Performance are meant for.
Yes, that's a terrifying level of power, and yes it makes murdering someone rather than letting them get a word in edgewise seem like a tempting option under certain circumstances. Thus, the Usurpation, the Wyld Hunt, and the Fifth Diligent Practice, complete with amnesty for deluded cultists who just couldn't help themselves in the face of such crushing persuasion.
That doesn't mean prior mental state is inconsequential. Per the 2.5 errata (which, lest you put more words in my mouth, I consider the relevant portions of to be a significant, but not unsurpassable, improvement over corebook mechanics), if you're only just barely beating someone's MDVs, bonuses or penalties from intimacies and emotional priming are as tactically significant as high ground or cover in a physical conflict, the defender's own actions are actually more important (MDV modifiers for attacks or miscellaneous actions are -2 where physical action defaults to -1 , without as much access to penalty-negating charmtech) and the de facto cap is one, maybe two willpower per scene. Any non-extra who hasn't been spiritually mutilated can usually manage that much, and if you're asking them to do something which would clearly require suppressing virtues or missing out on Motivation progress, it's probably not even a hard decision. That means when you're dealing with peer opponents, social influence usually needs to stick to things that legitimately seem like a good idea, or at least not blatantly disastrous in some way that would cost more than a scene or two to fix.
Those "immunity topics" can be fairly broad - there's no hard cap to how many different oaths a high-Temperance character can consider themselves bound by, how many plans or allies Conviction can refuse to abandon, how many romantic prospects or imperiled innocents Compassion can seek to protect, or the scope of insults and indignities Valor can take offense at. The way that works, by 2.5 RAW, when someone's deeply committed to a moral stance, you can't just bypass it by emotionally bludgeoning them down to zero. They need to either have already suppressed the relevant virtue in that same scene, or still retain enough willpower with which to do so.
If you want to mechanically deny someone any OOC choice in the matter, with NMI, that means you need to score at least three threshold successes per point of willpower they have remaining, while their MDV is at +2 thanks to going against a virtue. Overstep, go directly against Motivation? Auto-resisted no matter how few they have left, and now they're in cornered-rat virtue-compulsion mode. If they've got exactly one willpower left, and you're trying to talk them into something repugnant, they can spend it on boosting MDV to be right back at "get behind me, Satan." Also, so far as I can recall there's no established way to obtain exact IC knowledge of how many willpower someone has remaining, short of something like Will-Feasting Onslaught failing because the tank's completely empty, so it's virtually impossible to ever be truly certain you've finally crushed the spark of heroic defiance - that's how the primordial war got started, after all - and if you're routinely throwing UMI at exalts who still have the Great Curse, it's theoretically possible for them to accumulate unlimited quantities of temporary willpower beyond the usual cap through repeated limit breaks.
There's not even any straightforward mundane way to figure out what someone's exact Motivation and Virtues are! The misleadingly-named Read Motivation action only reveals intimacies, and even then only once they've become contextually relevant. Try to push somebody around without getting to know them first, there's meant to be a non-negligible chance of unwittingly tripping over some principle you didn't realize they'd take so seriously. The point of having four relatively fixed Virtues, though, rather than 3e's potentially infinite range of Major or Defining connections and principles, is that it means you're not starting from a pure Postmodern social-constructionist blank slate: when building a psychological profile of Cynis Denovah Avaku, observations of his Compassion (and relative lack of Conviction) in unrelated contexts may suffice to draw useful conclusions as to how he'll feel about murdering a young Anathema, without needing to thoroughly research his positions on children and/or homicide specifically.
Interpreting principled disagreement as trolling isn't a very healthy attitude, if you ask me. Sounds like you might be so low on willpower/high on spite, Conviction 3+ won't let you seriously consider possible alternatives to a committed cause.
