Question: Someone just forced you to do something with a social power! Do you roll your Virtues to resist taking that action? Do you roll your Virtues to determine how much willpower you have to spend to take that action?
The second!
If someone forces you to take an action, you're taking that action. It sucks, but it's true. If you could have avoided doing it, you already would have with your resistance roll. Now that you're doing it, you have to deal with the consequences, and that includes the effects of that action on your Virtue.
When you're forced into an action by a social power, you'll roll your Virtues just as if you had taken that action on purpose. That means that you have to roll your Valor if someone Overt Orders you into stabbing a small child, and you have to roll your Loyalty if someone uses Filibuster to prevent you from going to rescue your friends, and so on and so forth. Your Virtue is just as outraged by what you're doing as it would be at any other time; it doesn't care if someone else made you contravene your Order, just that you are contravening it and that shit isn't okay. (Incidentally, this is true any time you go against one of your Virtues, no matter what forces you to do it - not just social powers but also being physically tied down, making a decision for the greater good that still feels super wrong to one of your Virtues, being blackmailed or anything else.)
After that, you deal with the Virtue as normal; you roll it, check to see if you Extremitied, and if you didn't spend the appropriate amount of Willpower to deal with your rampagingly angry personal ethics.
There are a few powers that explicitly state that you can attempt to resist acting against your Virtues under their influence, like Instant Hypnosis, but if a power doesn't say you get a shot at resisting on the basis of your Virtues, you don't. Most heroic people who are forced into nastiness by their enemies (or backstabbing friends) have to just deal with the matter and suffer the resulting emotional meltdown, and your Scion is no different.
"Wits + Integrity against a difficulty of the Scion's Legend rating." So instant hypnosis is one of those 'only good at hero' knacks?
ReplyDeleteNot really, although it does become more situational. The extra Wits + Integrity clause is only invoked if the thing you've sent someone to do with Instant Hypnosis goes against a Virtue they have or is deeply personally upsetting to them - if whatever you sent them to do doesn't do that (and you're under no onus to tell them why they're doing things, so a lot of it is up to whether they can even tell what's going on), they don't get the extra roll and all goes according to plan. It becomes much, much harder to influence someone into stabbing her husband, but you can still easily maneuver her into planting evidence in someone's room, saying something incredibly stupid in a political negotiation, or whatever else you feel like.
DeleteIt's not common, but it's also possible that some targets actually can't roll Wits + Integrity successfully against you thanks to their Fatebonds. A negative Fatebond or two to either can make their lives very hard, especially at god-level.
I don't know. It seems incredibly easy to rationalize at least one of your virtues somehow applying. Or even make the claim that any kind of social power is deeply personally upsetting from a free will perspective. But mostly the former.
DeleteObviously, the second doesn't apply - most of the time, you shouldn't even be aware a power's been used on you with Instant Hypnosis anyway. :)
DeleteRationalizing that something applies to your Virtue is always subject to Storyteller approval. If you come up with a really thin, sketchy reason that a given action annoys your Harmony so you should get to roll, your Storyteller should tell you no, just as they should also tell you no if you don't have a good reason to channel your Virtues on a given roll.
So players who are bad at thinking up reasons are effected a lot more than players who are good at thinking up reasons?
DeleteNot at all. If a player struggles with a reason to do something that seems reasonable to us, we're always happy as Storytellers to give them a little nudge, the same as we don't mind helping with stunts or ideas for what to do if a person happens to be stuck. On the flip side, we don't care how crafty a player is at trying to come up with some shenanigans reason for something if it isn't actually reasonable; we're going to say no. Inventing a sudden impassioned backstory that you never had before won't fly with us, nor will trying to weasel-word your way into something that you clearly shouldn't be able to do. Players are always naturally at different levels of being able to think on their feet (even varying from game to game if they're more tired one session than another), but they're not playing in a vacuum. This is all ST judgment call stuff that is always in effect for all players, especially for matters of Virtues and Nature, and every game has to do it to some degree.
DeleteBut, talking about it is making me wonder about this mechanic, which I hadn't looked at for a while. We usually don't use Legend rating for anything other than PSPs (and Judgment, which is an exception), so I wonder if this is an old relic system from an earlier incarnation of the knack. We still wouldn't be changing the player's need for a real reason to get the second resist, but I'm not sure if this is the best roll/difficulty.