In a number of other threads, people have commented on balance issues with persuasion. I thought it would be fun and helpful to discuss this and some of the ideas I have to balance it.
Observations on the current state of persuasion & recruitment through issues:
- The number of people you can recruit during one expedition appears unlimited.
- You get a bump to persuasion skill with every attempt, successful or not, no matter who you recruit.
- It seems like you get to a point where you cannot fail a persuasion check, but you also cannot further influence someone in your favor until your juice goes up. (I'm not sure if this keys on juice, heart, int, charisma, something else, or some combo, but I certainly only see breakthroughs with these folks when I increase my persuader's liberal ranking thru gaining juice.) This means you can get a stack of uncommitted prospects who come back every day and give you a persuasion bump every time.
- You can extract a significant stream of cash out of recruitment, with no danger.
To deal with the unlimited issue, I'd make it a matter of time constraint. You only get time to handle a certain number of meetings per day, so you have to make them count. Perhaps a semi-random range, something like 4-12 per day per person? Another idea would be to give you a clock with, say, 3 hours, and let you decide how much time to spend with each person who shows up - ignore, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour. When combined with the decision to spend money or not, this would allow you to focus your efforts on the desirable recruits. People who get blown off or for whom you run out of time, don't come back tomorrow.
Getting a bump every time also seems excessive. I'd suggest two possibilities here as well. One would be to make Persuasion like Security - after a while, simple door locks don't give any bump. Well, after a while, persuading Hippies shouldn't give any bump either. Easy marks should not challenging enough to gain skill, you have to try to persuade more resistant targets to keep advancing. The other possibility would be to have Persuasion only get bumped when you succeed in shifting someone's opinion of the LCS. This might make it really hard when you have no or low persuasion, so you could combine it with the first, say that you stop getting skill from neutral results at 1/3 to 1/2 of the cap for getting skill from a success. This would let you bootstrap low persuasion characters, but they wouldn't be able to max persuasion on a mob of Hippies and Crack Heads.
The third problem is that people who never get to "do something" but never get a failed persuasion roll, stick around until your persuader deliberately gets rid of them by hitting C or D, or until persuader is arrested/hospitalized/in hiding/away. This is too easy. There needs to be a "boredom/frustration" counter, where after a certain amount of tries, if you didn't get them all the way to "do something" or "fight for the Cause" they go away. Also, we could make it so that even the best persuader has a chance of failure no matter what, so that everyone who does not become recruitable will eventually be offended and leave.
The last problem I see is that a high Int, high Cha persuader can make a fortune just talking to people, risk-free. You roam around a safe area recruiting all non-conservatives, just hold down "B" after each "W" for a few days, then rake in the till. I see a couple of counters to this, as well. First, make persuasion a little less safe. There should be spies and infiltrators, just like in dating (maybe there are, already, but if so I haven't run into one yet.) Perhaps you should have critical failures, where someone doesn't just think you're insane and leave, but actually attempts violence, tries to rob you, tears up your books and props - costs you money and potentially injury. Another thing would be to make the recruit's financial resources run on an even sharper curve - easy marks don't have $150, or even $50 - your average hippie, teen, or crackhead only has $5 or $10 to spare.
If we wanted to get more ambitious, we could play some games with space or location. If you want a free location, make it harder to make a good impression when you're meeting in a homeless shelter - seriously, it's dirty, crowded, cheap, and full of homeless people, some of whom are crazy. This wouldn't bother easy recruits much, such as Hippies, Students, Teens, Crack Heads, Gang Members... but it would make a bad impression on the more desirable types, like Musicians, Artists, Teachers, Lawyers, Landlords, etc.
So you spend a few bucks to get a table at the local Latte bar - but now, you've got to buy a steady flow of drinks, or the Conservative manager throws you out. Make it a $5 minimum for each conversation and it adds up fast.
Ok, so now you have a safe house - what about investing in a meeting space? You can set up a simple meeting room at first, and work your way up to an impressive office with nice furniture, perfect for converting Liberal Judges and such.
Last thought for a long post - if you had a meeting hall, maybe you could give speeches or otherwise do a batch persuasion on a whole bunch of people at once?
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Topic: Persuasion Balance Ideas (Read 1892 times)