AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic - Intimidation

It's annoying when yo ask someone for a social roll and they refuse - the try intimidating you, and you're borderline I think it's fair to ask for an intimidation roll.

I'm personally willing to accept that:

You have the right by Amain rules and guidlines to ignore any dice roll.

So I can toss intimidate all I like and just get to leave it to you if you wish to RP that it can work. Even if I roll 20 and +103590720957 points, you can just...shrug it off.

Of course, its a willingness to RP that builds up events. Everyone has their own willing give and take. I know I've ignored some dice rolls in the past simply because I feel my character feels so strongly as to be unwaivering against any odds. And others because they seemed rediculous on their timing of use or lack of RP feeling to justify.

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It's annoying when yo ask someone for a social roll and they refuse - the try intimidating you, and you're borderline I think it's fair to ask for an intimidation roll

."That's kinda scary, but you need to show me a black box with 73 written on the side"

Do you have a rulebook as to what specific threat adds to the roll they need to make? Like...the threat of breaking a leg is DC20, but breaking a leg till the bone pops out is DC25? A bulging muscle is DC30, but a veiny bulgy muscle is DC36?

Or is it a binary thing? More than X is scary, less is not, and if so, what is X? If you make it up on the fly, then why bother with the diebag at all?

I can see this argument working well for Persuade and Bluff - if someone's got 6CHA and -2 skills then they are playing inappropriately to their character sheet if they're too slick, and you can call BS, but resisting Intimidate is an evaluation of their willingness or ability to carry out their threat, depending on how you interpret the skill.

The former is a matter of willpower, not charisma, and the latter is purely objective to a veteran fighter.

Intimidate is in my Humbledore the most nonsensical of the social skills.

The PHB only has how to change NPC reactions for intimidate. But to me saying that you're very intimidating witout intimidate is like saying you're stealthy without hide. *Shrugs* That's just my opinion though.
That said, just rolling isn't enough to do it for e .. the roll supports the RP, not the other way around.

Yurell wrote:

It's annoying when yo ask someone for a social roll and they refuse - the try intimidating you, and you're borderline I think it's fair to ask for an intimidation roll.

On the other hand, I find it annoying when people insist on doing social rolls when there's no need to. I don't need a string of numbers and modifiers on my screen to know how my character is going to react to something.

That's why I don't do social rolls, at all.

I generally only do it when I'm asked, or if I have something I need to do I ask if they mind. OOC communication is the key to avoid annoyance.

Roll away all you like (you being anyone), it won't change how I react in the least. If you roll intimidate but don't RP the part, I don't care if you roll 20 and have a 127 modifier, I'll laugh at you, ICly AND OOCly.

The other way around works aswell. You do a great job of intimidating my character through written words, and I won't care at all if you have -3 Intimidate. Roleplay before rollplay, simple as that to me.

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But to me saying that you're very intimidating witout intimidate is like saying you're stealthy without hide*Shrugs* That's just my opinion though.
That said, just rolling isn't enough to do it for me .. the roll supports the RP, not the other way around.

What does 'intimidating' mean to you? Answer the questions in the previous post about the DC of the rolls, purdy please.

I'll fill you in on what it is to me, so you know where I'm coming from.

There's nothing subjective about a person's fighting prowess. If you see someone flatten a bundle of epic monsters or PCs that you yourself would not dare to face, and they barely take a scratch, it's simply daft to have your character disrespect them because they roll from Initimidate -1.

My take on the skill is therefore that it is persuasion of willpower, not ability. The only other way the skill could work in that way is if every character's objective strength was measured, presumably by a commitee of DM's, and they were forcibly stopped from levelling until their Intimidate score was in line with their prowess. "Sorry mister Wizard, you can't take that level since that'll make you too scary in PvP and your Intimidate doesn't reflect it. Come along, we're a roleplay server, so take a Rogue level and skill dump"

Even if the aforementioned man-monster is correctly RPing low CHA and his threats are bumbling and incompetent, the plain fact is he can squish you in his sleep. Zero willpower required on his part to do it, so how persuasive does he need to be? Not very, methinkles.

If their RP is overly stylish, then it's irrelevant if you call BS on it and treat it as bumbling, since that's the same situation as above.

Now we move on to the situation where you haven't seen the other guy fight. That brings up the local reality of the fantasy world of Amia, where childsized barefooted people can Devcrit dragons but ten foot trolls are some of the weakest creatures you'll meet. Our perception of what looks scary on Earth is not valid there, so I'm curious to what your rulebook of scary things looks like as far as covering emotes and descriptions, should it cover evaluation of ability.

The last thing is the evaluation of willpower in an unknown character. That kinda needs more information on your rulebook to see your take on it, but mine is that it doesn't really matter since all my characters know that you get crazy little wimps that will definitely launch suicidal attacks, and incredibly dangerous people that can barely stammer out 'stop or I'll have to kill you, I suppose. Sorry." So really the dicebag was irrelevant all along.

Aren't all those Circumstance Modifiers though?

Edit: And like I said, I only use rolls when my character is really o the border after their RP - otherwise if they're being intimidate, they're intimidated if they're not they're not and the rolls be damned.

You have yet to answer the question, though.

And on that note: Where do you pull the numbers for those circumstance modifiers, what kind of a situation would be devoid of circumstance modifiers, and what would the base DC be?

AS for the numbers, I guess you could pull them from the DCs in the PHB. Although I generally judge it when I'm close to being intimidated but I'm just on the edge - my character could go either way, so I'd just estimate DC depending on how out of character they're trying to force my character to be.

To me, intimidation is them using their willpower to bludgeon you into doing something, based on your fears - big guy has more chance than a little girl, for example.

Yurell wrote:

To me, intimidation is them using their willpower to bludgeon you into doing something, based on your fears - big guy has more chance than a little girl, for example.

Even if they had equal skill checks? That's a big fat contradiction; you attribute intimidation to things such as physical appearance, unrelated to the skill level, yet you still insist that the skill itself has significance.

IronAngel wrote:

Yurell wrote:

To me, intimidation is them using their willpower to bludgeon you into doing something, based on your fears - big guy has more chance than a little girl, for example.

Even if they had equal skill checks? That's a big fat contradiction; you attribute intimidation to things such as physical appearance, unrelated to the skill level, yet you still insist that the skill itself has significance.

Hence a Circumstance Modifier. The skill is stance, knowing what to say, ho to say it, body language etc. Your size and physical attributes are Circumstance Modifiers - an orc is intimidating to a halfling, but not a frost giant, for example.

But if that is true, then the skill points mean very little; a little girl can say whatever she wants to a frost giant, but the frost giant has such a gigantic circumstance bonus on his side that the girl's Epic Focus in Intimidate won't be enough to change the situation.

It seems to me that intimidation, as you present it, is almost completely determined by these "circumstance modifiers", making the skill quite irrelevant. Which leads to my take on it: better just not pay attention to the skill at all, if the option is to start calculating circumstance modifiers whose sum far exceeds the skill check itself.

IronAngel wrote:

But if that is true, then the skill points mean very little; a little girl can say whatever she wants to a frost giant, but the frost giant has such a gigantic circumstance bonus on his side that the girl's Epic Focus in Intimidate won't be enough to change the situation.

It seems to me that intimidation, as you present it, is almost completely determined by these "circumstance modifiers", making the skill quite irrelevant. Which leads to my take on it: better just not pay attention to the skill at all, if the option is to start calculating circumstance modifiers whose sum far exceeds the skill check itself.

You are quite right - the circumstance modifiers make basically all the difference. Since this is true, the skill can only help when my char is on the very edge. Of course, I don't expect others to use this system, and I am extremely rarely that on-edge that it has required a roll (twice as far as I can remember)

Intimidation - How to react

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