I made a lot of progress on the combat system this week, but I’ll talk about that in more detail next week. This week, I’m going to zoom out and walk you through the character sheet I just finished putting together for this year’s con games. Since a blank character sheet would be boring and not particularly instructive, I statted out that little guy from the show with the dragons. You can view a copy of the character sheet (as a well as a blank one) on my Patreon page. Feel free to download it and print out a copy so you can follow along. Also feel free to become a patron. And while you’ve got your credit card out, you should go ahead and patronize Leighton, Josh, Jeffrey, James, and Juan. It’s way more efficient to do it all at once. 

Got the sheet? Great. Up at the top, you’ll see the familiar section with the character’s name, Role, Hero Factor, and default Hero Die. In the latest version of the rules, Role doesn’t have any set game function. The GM can give a small bonus if he really thinks the Role requires one, but it’s mostly just a character concept that you use as a starting point for buying the weightier stats. For Tyrion I chose “The Power Behind the Throne,” which sums up his role pretty well throughout most of the series (this is TV Tyrion, because I don’t have time for books that need five metaphors, 13 adjectives, a couple of adverbs, and a simile to inform me that blood is red).

Hero Factor is used in a lot of places, but is kind of like level. I gave Tyrion a 6, which seems about right for a central character in GOT. More epic than Ellen Ripley, but not quite into Beowulf territory. A character’s default roll is d12 + Hero Die, so Tyrion rolls d12+d6 whenever he’s rolling to do something he doesn’t have a specific stat for. For reference, that puts him roughly in the GURPS roll range with a slightly less bell-shaped curve. 

The next big box is Basic Abilities, which are sort of like Attributes. Most rolls will use one of these to determine the die that the character gets in addition to his free d12. For Tyrion, 3 of his Basic Abilities have a 0 rating, so they default to his Hero Die of d6. His Brains of 3 (the maximum for a HF 6 character) lets him roll 2d12 for smarts rolls and his Presence of 1 gives him d12+d8 for social rolls. Using the Qik Start rules, I could have put 2 more points into Basic Abilities (probably Fighting and another point to Presence), but I decided to save them for Resources. 

The “Raises” box after each Basic Ability (and in several other sections of the character sheet) are for banked raises. In the current system, the margin (winner’s roll minus loser’s roll) of a successful roll is broken down into Effect (1s digit) and Raises (10s digit). Effect determines how well you succeeded on the core task attempted. You can use Raises to make the roll cooler (some unnecessary acrobatics as you leap across the rooftops), get bonus effects (like disarming an opponent in combat), put them toward multi-roll or scene-long goals (like forcing a monster into position to spring the trap you prepared or convincing someone to do you a favor), or you can save them in a few different ways. One way to save them is a Call of Cthulhu style way of raising stats. You put a tick mark in the raise box for the stat and when save enough up you can roll to see if the stat increases. A small variation is that you can also spend the raises you’ve banked to a stat to get extra raises on a specific roll. 

The rules for Resources are still mostly in my head, but Clout, Stuff, and Cash (which I still kind of want to call “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”) measure the character’s access to people, gear, and treasure. The GM sets the baseline and characters can use points to raise them and gain points by lowering them. For my theoretical GOT game, I decided to make the default equal to the default Hero Factor of 6. Tyrion’s line of work requires a network of lackeys, informants, and useful idiots, so I spent two of his Basic Ability points to give him a d10 in Clout. 

The basic idea behind Resources is that whenever the player wants to call upon a resource that hasn’t been introduced naturally in the story, he rolls to see if the resource is available (with the Resource Die replacing the Hero/Ability Die). The grayed-out dX boxes are there because the player can only use each die (up to his Resource Die--that’s why the higher ones are Xed out) once per episode. I’m also planning on including an optional system where you get to choose “established” resources based on your die that you can call upon without rolling (but you still have to spend a die). There’s a spot for Raises there, but I might come up with another name because I think Resources need something that works like Raises but are awarded by the GM rather than earned with good rolls. So if you pulled off a big heist, you’d get some Raise-like points for Cash, for example. Like I said, the Resource rules aren’t entirely worked out yet. 

The next box contains our old favorites, Who Would Play Him/Her In The Movie?, Tag Line, and Trivia (which is basically the expanded version of Dumb Fact). For a con game, I’d stick an appropriate photo of the WWPHITM actor on the right side of the Trivia part of the box, but we all know who Peter Dinklage is and I was trying to put this one together quickly. 

Moving down on the left-hand section, we’ve got Trademarks & Game Specific Traits. The current rule for Trademarks is that you get +1 for any roll that passes the smell test as belonging to your Trademark. You also get to roll a d20 for your Free Die for a number of specific Edges equal to your Hero Factor (listed in the next section). Tyrion’s Trademark could either be his skill at playing politics or his intelligence, but I decided that his Brain stat took care of the smarts and went with the politicking. 

In an actual GOT game this box would probably include a spot for which House you’re a member of or loyal to, possibly with gameable details, but I didn’t want to tie this version of Tyrion down to a specific part of the show’s timeline (or figure out the details). 

Next are Edges, which give the character a roll bonus. Tyrion gets 6 free +1 Edges related to his Trademark, which are marked with a check mark in the “™” column so the player knows to roll a d20 instead of a d12 for them. I raised a few of these to +2 and used the remaining Edge points for Perception (because The Imp notices things) and Axe (to make up for the 0 Fighting stat a little bit). So if Tyrion’s swinging an Axe at someone, he rolls d12 (free die) + d6 (Fighting die) +1 (Axes Edge). If he’s trying to figure out what Littlefinger planning, he rolls d20 (free die upgraded for Trademark) + d12 (Brains die) + 2 (Sense Motivations). 

The next box is for Limitations (the artist previously known as Drawbacks). The Imp doesn’t have any. “Dwarf” could probably be a Limitation, but in the show Tyrion’s size is more often framed as a social disadvantage than a physical one, so I decided it worked better as a Complication. 

Under the Character Info box is a section for Complications, which are essentially Limitations that affect the story more than the game mechanics. There are some mechanics attached (the GM can impose a penalty to rolls and the player can earn Acclaim for good role-playing), but they’re primarily meant to make the story more interesting. 

Special Effects is where you’d include rules for things like magical powers or super-science, but Tyrion is a normal dude so it’s blank. Continuity is for mechanics changes that occur as the game unfolds (and either disappear or get turned into stats at the end of the season). Since this is the character sheet for Tyrion at the beginning of Season X, it’s blank. If he finds a magic sword or gets a limb chopped off, the player would note the details here. 

Down at the bottom are boxes for some currency-type stats: Acclaim (Yum Yums), Fu, Plot Points, and Character Points. Acclaim is equal to Hero Factor, Fu is equal to Hero Factor + Fighting + ½ Stunts + ½ Brains, so Tyrion has a 7, and Tyrion has a zero for Plot Points (because they’re earned during the game) and Character Points (because I spent them all) at the moment. 

Finally, there’s a wound tracker at the bottom (each box on the bottom row is a wound) and a Fu tracker along the sides. I’ll get into what Fu is next week (it solves a whole bunch of the combat system issues I talked about last week), but the important thing about it in terms of character sheet design is that during a combat scene it can and probably will change frequently. Since a box for tick marks or crossed out numbers would mean a lot of writing and erasing, I decided to go the tracker route so you can just mark your current place with a counter or paperclip. Once I’d decided to go that route for Fu, it made sense to do the same for wounds. 

Next week: The Power of Fu

Those of you who have been following along with the super-crappy but functional basic rules draft I’m working on know that I recently added the very broad strokes of the combat section. (If you haven’t seen the latest draft but would like to, check out my Patreon or join the Playtest Group on Facebook). There’s a damage system there, but it’s very much a starting point where I got some general ideas down on paper. Right now it’s more complicated that I’d like, even without playtesting I’ve realized that there’s a much faster death spiral than it needs, and there are a few things I couldn’t figure out how to make fit in an elegant way. Hopefully by next week it will be cleaner. For this week, I’m going to talk about some of the problems I’ve been running into with the combat system. 

Advantage Ball

I first saw this term on the TV Tropes website, and it’s basically a scene defined by the advantage swinging back and forth between one side and the other. Nearly all combat scenes are games of Advantage Ball, but it can also apply to any scenes where two characters or sides are in competition. In order to keep the Scene exciting, there have to be times when the heroes seem about to win but have the tables turned on them at the last second as well as scenes where the heroes seem doomed and then make an amazing comeback. 

The basic die mechanics of a game model Advantage Ball pretty well if both combatants or sides are evenly matched, but if the PCs are outclassed it feels like GM fiat and if the bad guys are outclassed it just becomes a pointless slog through their hit points. A version of Advantage Ball that supplements the basic dice math is super-easy to model in a one-on-one fight, but once a third character gets involved it turns into vague story-gamey shit where the individual character’s contributions get muted, denying players the simple joy of rolling a die and knowing they’ve killed something.

Let The Medic Sort It Out Vs. Dramatic Injuries

One problem with coming up with a satisfying combat system is that movies have contradictory rules, and it’s hard to come up with a system that allows both options. For example, in most fight scenes the wounds the characters take are vaguely defined during the battle. You might see The Rock get stabbed in the arm, kneed in the stomach, smacked in the kneecap, and punched in the face, but there’s usually no sense of which injuries are superficial and which ones are serious. If the hero does have a serious wound (and it’s usually just one per movie or episode), it doesn’t really affect him until after the fight (I’m fine writing that off to adrenaline). 

On the other hand (especially in subsequent fights after the hero has received his serious wound), lots of movies feature “go for the leg” moments where the villains take advantage of a character’s injury or weakness to grab the advantage ball for themselves. Heroes sometimes do the same to villains (especially named ones), but it can usually be handled more abstractly because the bad guys are going down before the fight’s over anyway. 

Instant Kills Vs. Plot Armor Vs. Secret Mortal Wounds 

The most memorable deaths in movies and TV shows are often instant kills, especially if you weren’t expecting them (I’m thinking of something pointy). BUT you don’t want PCs dropping like flies, because even George R.R. Martin doesn’t treat his characters like planks in the Theseus’s ship that many RPG parties resemble. ALSO there’s a long tradition of characters kicking ass during the fight only to drop dead at the end of battle or reveal after the fight that they’ve sustained a mortal wound that will kill them at a dramatically appropriate time or allow them to sacrifice themselves for the others sometime in the very near future. 

Combat Stunts Vs. Mechanical Overhead

There needs to be a way to make cool attacks have meaningful and logical mechanical effects without coming up with specific rules for every kind of cool thing a character can do. I want a flying spinning kick from the rafters with a somersault thrown in for good measure to have more effect than “I punch him,” but I don’t want to look up modifiers or special rules. Bennies can help encourage players to spice up their combat descriptions, but concrete bonuses and special effects seem to be far more effective. 

Cosmetic Damage Vs. Stakes 

Except for the previously mentioned dramatic injuries, most damage in fiction doesn’t really bother the character once the fight is over. Even though Bruce Willis is bruised and bloody and limping by the end of the movie, when the final fight rolls around he’s basically at full strength again. In the previous version of the combat system I went way too far in the “pain don’t hurt” direction: Stamina (hit points) basically measured when the fight was over. After the fight, the character healed all the way back up. I blame the airport fight in Captain America: Civil War. Playtesting revealed that RPG combat without any real consequences makes the fight scenes seem meaningless. It also gives the PCs no reason to use caution. If combat doesn’t weaken the PCs, there’s less incentive to avoid unnecessary battles (important for GMs like me who get bored with combat after a few rounds) and come up with clever plans. Fight Scenes need to have lasting effects that influence the character’s decisions without penalizing the characters so badly that their best strategy for defeating the big bad is bleeding on him until he drowns. Hopefully without forcing someone to play the Cleric. 

Knockouts

As any Raymond Chandler (or James Bond) fan can tell you, sometimes the best way to move the plot along is to knock the hero out so the bad guys can take him somewhere more interesting. This is less common in stories with groups of protagonists, but in fights with multiple heroes, knocking one of them out  for a few rounds is often a very useful tactic for keeping the advantage ball changing hands. In most games, characters only lose consciousness when they’re Mostly Dead, but there should also be Dukes of Hazzard knockout rules. 

Healing

For a while I was thinking that in addition to the post-combat patch-up (another term I stole from TV Tropes), characters should get a certain amount of healing every scene. The more I think about it, though, the more I think healing needs to take place at the speed of plot. In some cases (like the airport scene in Civil War) it does make perfect sense for characters to be more-or-less fully healed when the next scene starts. In a lot of movies and (especially) TV shows, the scene changes are enough of a shift to justify off-screen downtime for healing. But we also need dungeon crawl rules for things like Die Hard or The Raid where all the scenes follow one another closely over a short span of time without giving the heroes much time to rest and heal up.  

Basically, I just need to come up with rules that can support all of these contradictory goals in a way where each goal is only possible (or more accurately, most possible; we still want to leave room for fight scenes to break the rules in interesting ways) in the right dramatic circumstances. And make it so easy that I don’t completely hate running combat. That’s a reasonable goal, right? 

Last week I was still working on trying to figure out how to account for more or less specialized skills without making things too complicated, and had decided to possibly go with a defined list of “Big Skills” with a relatively low maximum bonus supplemented by more specific (narrower than Big Skills) but higher bonus player-defined skills that could be further narrowed down with a Shadowrun-style specialization. 

As I started working through The Big List of Standard RPG Skills to group things together, I kept running into problems with making things fit the scheme. To answer the “can you do that without a Hail Mary roll?” question (rocket surgery and stuff), it made sense for the Big Skills to have a set upper limit with a general White Wolf-style “what this number means” table somewhere (+1 Amateur…+5 Noted Authority or whatever). That works for something like Guns (+1 Barney Fife, +5 Chow Yun Fat in a John Woo movie) or Nature Lover (+1 You’ve been camping, +5 Tarzan), but it broke down for things like “Science” or “Academics” where “pick a specialization” was the logical set-up (unless you’re Tyrion Lannister, +5 at Knowing Things is probably too broad, and useless for the Hail Mary rolls thing). Aside from the trouble of trying to break down which sub-skills made sense as Big Skills (is Earth Sciences or Humanities ok or do you need to drill down to Geology and Sociology?), a specialization scheme would lock out a bunch of small skills (if History is a Big Skill, you have to specialize if you want to take it as a small skill), or at least lead to confusion between them, especially since they’re both defined by bonuses that are identical in the system math (though characters with a related Big Skill and small skill could stack bonuses for both). 

As I kept thinking about different Big Skills, I noticed that the most obvious groups resembled the Trademarks from the mechanic I’d thrown away. For those who don’t remember, Trademarks were kind of like Gimmicks: things like Daredevil or Vampire Slayer or Natural Athlete or whatever. When a Trademark applied, you rolled a d20 Free Die instead of a d12. The two main problems with Trademarks were that they were very broadly defined (coming very close to effectively being a “roll a d20 for all ‘class skills’” kind of thing) and they were very vague and subjective. Some Trademarks had slightly different rules, which, combined with the broadness of many of the Trademarks, made if feel like the list needed to be more or less “complete.” They were rules that the game gave you, not rules you created as needed. The broadness also contributed to a relatively short list of blah Gimmicks instead of a longer list of more interesting and appealing combinations and made certain Trademarks (like the combat ones) way more useful than others in a typical game.

One of the problems with the old Trademarks is that I went at them from a very “Gimmick” kind of mindset. I set them all up as essentially character traits or special abilities rather than skill sets. There was one, however, that I’d set up for the “Your Trademark is your job” type characters: A Very Particular Set of Skills. For that one, you chose a theme (like “Covert Ops” or “Beach Bum”) and then picked a number of specific skills equal to Hero Factor (Stealth, Lockpicking, and Surveillance or Surfing, SCUBA diving, and Driftwood Art). You only got the Trademark bonus of those specific skills. 

I realized that setting all of the Big Skill groups up similar to the Very Particular Set of Skills Trademark just might work, so now I’ve got several Trademarks (Nature Lover, Burglar, Scholar, etc), each with a list of skills (of the same “broadness level” of the normal Edges/Skills that players can choose a la carte). The Trademark gives you a +1 bonus for any roll that fits the Trademark theme, but you also pick a number of specific skills equal to Hero Factor. For those, you roll the d20 (in light of this addition, I’m rolling back the “d20 is the default roll for your action” thing), or one die type higher if your die is limited due to injury or whatever (so if you’re hurt and can’t roll higher than a d10, you roll a d12 for Trademark Skills). You can also buy your Trademark skills as regular skills to increase your bonus above +1.

I think this scheme will have a number of advantages:

• You get a “Job” type bonus for a big range of subjective rolls, but it’s a small bonus. The big bonus is well-defined and only applies to a set number of specific skills. A Hero Factor 4 Warrior rolls a d20 for 4 weapons or fighting styles, but just gets a +1 for other weapons. Likewise, a Hero 4 Scholar is still a polymath (expertise/d20 in 4 academic fields), but isn’t a super-genius with 9 PhDs (until you get to the Super Hero Hero Factor range, where it makes perfect sense).
• Biology or History are normal skills that you can take as Trademarks Skills if you’ve got the appropriate Trademark. They’re not a Trademark on their own, so they don’t prevent characters without the Scholar/Scientist Trademark from taking them. There’s still a little wonkiness in that you can take them as both a Trademark Skill (+1 bonus and d20) and a regular skill (which adds to the bonus), but it’s not nearly as wonky as some other possibilities. 
• The Hail Mary question can be answered by “Is it a Trademark Skill?” (and if not, maybe, “Is the Bonus +X or higher?”).  
• The skill list for the Trademarks give a ton of good examples of what sorts standard skills are acceptable (and can be extrapolated into specializations). 
• The Trademarks can be defined in a number of ways: natural talent (Athletics), skill set (Wheelman), interests (Nature Lover), or whatever and the GM can “balance” them with the mix of allowed skills. “Warrior” allows you to take any fighting skill, but is basically just fighting. You could also create a “Knight” skill with a more limited selection of combat skills but additions like Court Etiquette, Horsemanship, and Heraldry. 
• Since there are so many options, the sample Trademarks list feels more incomplete and since it’s basically just a themed list of skills, players and GMs are practically given an engraved invitation to build their own Trademarks tailored to specific settings and characters: Bounty Hunter, Ninja, Hufflepuff, Pin Pal, whatever. 
• Trademarks can easily be used for things like factions, cultures, character classes, and even races (though some may require additional Special Effects). The ease of creating custom Trademarks allows characters who need more mechanical definition for things like backstory or social standing a way to do it without requiring backstory, social class, or whatever to be a stat that every character has to define. 

I could change my mind completely before next week, but after writing up a very brief list of Trademarks, I think it’s going to work. The new Trademarks seem like a nice synthesis of a lot of old ideas that fell apart somewhere along the line, and I feel like the customization options invite game-specific Trademarks that provide strong points of contact between the rules and setting without increasing complexity. I realize I’ve said this before, but I think I might have finally cracked the case. 

I’ve been working on the core doc for the new version of the rules. It’s going slowly, in part because I’m still trying to find out exactly how to find the balance between structure and open-endedness, particularly for the skill system. Part of this is because I still haven’t quite internalized how things work, part of it is because I want to simplify implementation, and partially because there are still a few problems I need to work out to make sure everything fits together correctly. I think I’m getting closer, though.

As I talked about a few weeks ago, we’re starting out with five broad core abilities that work kind of like attributes but cover specific kinds of rolls characters make in typical RPGs. I’m currently calling these “Basic Abilities” and there are five of them: Fighting, Stunts (formerly Thrilling Heroics), Presence (previously Persuasion), Brains, and Know-How. The name changes are for clarity, theme, and practicality.* 

The first goblin that kept me from getting the skill section written in a timely fashion was “balance” thing about broad and narrow skills. A while back I’d decided to go with having three broad categories based on how broad a skill (broad/average/narrow) and giving them different costs. One problem was trying to come up with solid rules of thumb for categorizing a skill. For example, which of the following fits the broad/average/narrow pattern: Academics/Humanities/History, Humanities/History/American History, or History/American History/Civil War History? Would “Law Enforcement/Police Training/Firearms” be acceptable? If so, the guy who set up his character on the assumption that the correct grouping was “Guns/Handguns/Revolvers” is getting screwed. The other (bigger) problem that kept coming back to me is the idea that even with definite rules of thumb and examples a that keep everything at the right broadness/narrowness, every skill that isn’t explicitly defined into its category still has to be vetted at best, debated at worst. On top of that, you’d have to keep track of what category each skill fell into for character improvement, which would be a pain. 

Another goblin was the “non-default/training required” kind of skills. For a long time, I thought I could solve that with a simple rule like “If your non-doctor character wants to do brain surgery, you don’t get a free dice (Brain surgery is very hard, with a DN of 15 for even simple operations).” And that would in make the system math effectively rule out success in the extreme cases like amateur brain surgery or trying to hack into the alien computer based on that Visual Basic class you took in high school.  The problem is that things that require a stupid level of training aren’t the only things that are almost impossible to do without training. Forget the alien computer; the chances of a person with limited computer knowledge hacking into any computer (in anything more complex than the “I hacked Ed when he forgot to sign out of Facebook” sense) would be all but impossible, especially under the conditions under which a hacking roll would be made in a typical RPG situation. Another example is carrying on a conversation in a foreign language. Without at least some training, you can’t do it (and with enough training, you probably don’t even need to roll). So basically, you need some way of deciding whether a character has enough knowledge and training to even attempt certain kinds of rolls, which the abstract Basic Abilities do not tell us. 

One path I went down was the idea of Backgrounds, which would be very broad “skills” framed as statements about the character’s background. Things like “Has a History Degree from State U” or “Grew up on a Farm” or “Lived in Germany for 3 years when his father was stationed there when he was a teenager.” These would be broad and subjective, but would allow the GM a baseline for ruling out certain rolls (“Did you learn how to rebuild an engine at Harvard Law, during your summers at Martha’s Vineyard, or while you interned at National Review?”). To keep them from being secret super-skills, they would also have little or no game effect beyond the “can you roll for it?” question--maybe +1 or +2 and the number of them would be limited (possibly by Hero Factor, possibly by character age). It was kind of a neat system, and I could see it working in a certain kind of game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for this game, because it completely undermines the Basic Abilities, which are the abstract sum total of the things not on your character sheet. Computer Programming and Foreign Languages are Brains, rebuilding an Engine is Know-How. Adding another kind of trait that kind of does the same thing is sloppy. 

The Backgrounds idea was also part of a thought about getting around unlikable Broad/Average/Narrow categories by making them different kinds of traits, which would at least mean more interesting names. So Backgrounds were the Very Broad traits that were vague and subjective and could apply to a lot of different types of activity. Skills would have to all revolve around a certain type of activity (so Law Enforcement, which includes a broad range of skills, is out, but it still doesn’t help with the “Academics vs. Humanities vs. History” question). Then there’d be something else, but I never really got there because I was just coming up with more complicated ways to come up with schemes that still had the same problems. 

My current thinking is that I’m going to need the top level of skills to be a set or mostly-set skill list. This solves the “broad/narrow” problem by defining “narrow” (the player-generated) skills as “narrower than the defined ones” and can solve the “can you do this?” problem by including a White Wolf-style explanation of what various skill levels mean (“Computers +1 means you’re an amateur; you can’t hack GlobalCorp). This would ideally be a fairly short list of broad skill categories that could potentially pair with most or all of the Basic Abilities (Computers + Fighting for activating the deflector shields, Computers + Stunts for drone piloting, Computers + Presence for internet trolling, Computers + Brains for writing a program, and Computers + Know-How for installing a hard drive) and would have a definite maximum rating. The main level of Skills would be anything narrower, but players would have the option of doing a Shadowrun-style specialization for any skill at this level. So you could have a skill in “Drone Piloting +2 (Camera Work)” or “Computer Programming +3 (C++) or whatever. 

It’s very likely that I’m overthinking this. After all, for QAGS we just said “make some shit up” and we’ve written like 50 games for it. Actually, QAGS is the reason I’m overthinking it. QAGS is great if you completely ignore what the rules say and do what Leighton and I meant for you to do, but it’s very broken when it’s run by a GM who hasn’t had our shining example and just runs the game as written. The good news is that if I ever decide to get into the “every precious game has its own precious little system” school of game design, I’ve got dozens of little systems that might be great somewhere else but don’t quite work here. 

*While I love the Firefly reference, “Thrilling Heroics” has a little too much flavor. In addition to standing out in the list of less exciting words, it’s not as readily apparent that Thrilling Heroics would be the Basic Skill to use for a pick-up basketball game or a dance-off. “Stunts” fits the movie/TV theme a bit better and is a little clearer since you can think of it as “anything that in a movie production would likely require a stunt person/body double/person with actual talent who can pass for the actor.” This would also make a lot of sex scenes stunts, but in game system terms that actually kind of works. Persuasion had a few strikes against it. The big one is that it’s also too loaded toward a certain interpretation; most people aren’t going to intuitively connect it with unfriendly persuasion like intimidation or non-interpersonal persuasion like performance or command. Also, “Persuasion” is a very handy name for a broad skill in influencing people (which will be important later). Presence is more versatile, and fits the movie-making theme (since most of the kinds of scenes where you’d roll Presence work or don’t based on the actor’s screen presence). [Back]