Charisma

Charisma deals with social pressure and social conflict; people using words and body language to get what they want or help society flow more smoothly.

The key aspects of charisma skills are attitude and social pressure.

Mood is how a character is feeling. It can be positive, negative, or neutral. Positive mood means the character is feeling determined and strong, easily able to avoid manipulation or frustration. You would associate this with feelings of contentment, joy, peace, and determination. Neutral means the character is reasonably satisfied, but cannot handle too much more frustration. This would be associated with feelings of apathy, resignation, ambivalence, and so on. Negative moods mean the character cannot take much more frustration and is at wits' end. These indicate feelings of depression, rage, or other moods that mean the person is about to make a stupid decision.

Your non-champion followers will have a mood determined by the culture rating of the town they come from. NPC's usually have an attitude of positive, but there are many reasons why their attitude would be lessened initially.

Every time a social skill succeeds against a target, the target has social pressure to deal with. The target can comply with the social skill or reduce its attitude by 1 from the mental exhaustion of ignoring the request. For example, if a decieve roll succeeds against your follower, you follower can believe the lie or have its attitude lowered from positive to neutral or from neutral to negative. If the follower's attitude was already negative, if it refuses to comply with the social skill it has a mental breakdown and spends the rest of the scene in shock, crying, flying into a blind rage, passing out, or in some other way being useless to itself and its allies. At the beginning of the next scene its attitude bumps back up to negative. By the time you reduce an enemy's attitude to negative it usually complies with your request. For instance, an intimidate roll against an enemy in combat will remove it from the fight. Targets in a negative attitude can usually be convinced to kill themselves, join your side, switch religions, or more, just by one more success of a social skill against them. Their willpower is sapped. However, when attempting anything with this serious of ramifications, the target gets their level as a bonus to resist when finally reduced to negative.

In general, the lower an NPC's attitude is, the more likely it will comply with whatever you ask or request. As a player, it gives you some freedom in how your characters react to social skills, with the ability to say "no" when the dice tell you your opponent succeeded.

Deceive
Deceive is your lying skill, used firstly to convince people that what you say is the truth. This can mean being convincing when you actually are telling the truth, but it could also be when you're flat out lying as well. Deceit covers camouflage and disguise as well, plus hiding things and counterfeiting. It's a skill all figuring out what people expect and then presenting lies in accordance with that.

Modifiers for deceive are mainly how much the target wants to believe what you say and secondarily how good or scant the evidence you have to back up your claim.

Seeing through camouflage, disguise, or physical concealment requires a roll of perceive, not empathy, in most cases.

Empathy
Empathy is all about understanding those around you. Think of it as getting a sense of those around you. Perceive is for noticing physical details. Empathy is for spotting useful personality traits, seeing through lies, and staring into someone's soul to guage the real individual. Roll empathy to pick up on a number of details about a person, usually equal to successes rolled. The longer you study the person, the more in depth information is revealed.

Empathy also acts as the social equivalent of medicine. It may only be attempted once per scene on any character, and the empathizer must roll successes higher than the number of times he has already used empathy this session.

Negotiate
This is the art of the bargain, be it getting a good price at the bazaar or a diplomatic peace treaty. For negotiation, something must be offered in exchange for something else. This could be goods for goods, favors for favors, personal gratitude for information, or something else entirely. The more advantageous the bargain is to the person you're proposing it to, the more likely it will conclude successfully.

Intimidate
Intimidate is the quickest and cheapest social skill, one that bypasses many of the social graces and often several laws to get its effect. In some instances it can land you in a heap of trouble. In others it allows you influence enemies who are beyond acts of kindness or negotiation. While most social skills take a penalty in combat, intimidate takes no such penalty. Its bonuses and penalties usually revolve around how likely the target is to fear what you are threatening, be if physical harm, shame, torture, or public humiliation.

Leadership
Leadership is the act of developing and inspiring those under your command. To use leadership on another character, that character has to respect your authority to some degree and do what you say more often than not.

If another character succeeds at using a social skill against a character that follows your leadership to influence that character to do something that works against your interests, you can roll charisma + leadership to overrule that and negate the social pressure caused. For example, if you ordered another follower not to let anyone into your tent no matter what, your follower can roll your charisma plus your champion's leadership to resist EVEN IF YOUR CHAMPION IS NOT THERE.

Preach
Preach obviously covers religious teaching, proselytization, and religious speech in general. It is handy for converting random NPC's to follow you as an archon. It also covers knowledge of religion, specifically of your archon, but of religious matters in general.

Determination
Determination is the ability to resist influence by others and continue on the path you set for yourself. It is used to resist all social skills except deceive, which turns your own determination against you. A determined character has strong willpower and is not easily swayed.

Perform
This is your basic public performance skill. For public speaking you pick what skill you're rolling, and roll it to determine how successful it is. For example, roll preach to speak to an individual. Then roll perform to spread the effect to a congregation. Successes determine how large of an audience can be affected as in the chart below: If you fail to reach a high enough perform roll, the crowd is unaffected by your social skill. You aren't able to play to the crowd or get your message across, or you're shouted down or get stage fright.

You can roll perform on its own for playing instruments, playacting, or other performance, with successes determining both how well you perform and how many people you affect.

Tame
Taming is used for social interactions with animals, sometimes supported by other social skills such as using intimidate to scare away an animal. Tame can support other social skills when used on great animals. Tame is also used to ride or care for animals.