Deception Skill

[brendon]

I would like to see a skill implemented in PS called Deception. I believe that such a skill could open up a whole new realm on RP’ing within PS. However certain aspects of it would need to be looked at so that it doesn’t cause too much havoc and take things out of balance.


At a very simple level the deceive skill would allow a player choose to change the way others view them. This could affect the evaluation: “… would be impossible to defeat”. You could nominate that another player is unable to examine you: “… you cant tell any information about player…”, or you could nominate to deceive them by saying you are more difficult to beat than you are or much easier to beat than you are. (Assuming the skill check was successful).

This could also play a part in NPC dialogue. If for example, a NPC requires that they think you strong enough for a task or whatever, you could possibly deceive them for a stat and pass the check.

This could also be used in trading. For example, you could enter what you want the other players to “think” you are trading, but when the trade is accepted they don’t get what they thought they would expect. This sort of thing could be bad for dynamics though and would need to be though about how to achieve this. You may want to allow the cheated player to duel the other player without them being able to reject the duel and if won be able to get their stuff back… Whatever. Different levels would determine how you achieve things. For example you may have to trade a SS with the other player, but you can change its description to look like a Silver Weave SS.

Another thing that could be achieved with such a skill is name aliases. I.e. you could change who people think you are when you enter a particular area, or even hide the guild you are a part of or change it so others “think” you are part of a particular guild. Maybe even change your physical appearance with very high levels.

At the highest level of skill I would imagine that you could impersonate another character.

Opposing to the deceive skill you would have another skill like “observation” or “true seeing” or something like that. Maybe even a spell that can help with it too. This would allow you to see through the deception, or see that it is a deception but not what nature the deception is etc.

This sort of skill would be I imagine quite difficult to implement, but the Role Play that could be achieved with it would be great I think.

[Siteri Kidachi]

Couldn't that just be another effect of charisma? I know charisma already makes you look stronger than you really are...

[Ithorius]

aye, it does?...

*considers leveling charisma... alot*

I thought basic strength did that, oh well... and in conclusion of this post I agree this is basicly what charisma covers...

[RayvenD]

the description of how strong someone else is isn't that accurate anyway. i've dueled someone who apparently 'would tak eno effort to defeat' and they killed me in 1 hit, so i dunno, seems like this idea may not catch on.

[brendon]

I didn't know about the affect of charisma for examining other characters. Thanks for the information. However that was not the entire subject of the post. It would be good to choose to show your strength as very high or very low, where as currently it is fixed based on your stats.

I would agree also that charisma would play a large role in the  deception skill. For example sword uses str to help in determining damage. I would think that deception + char would also work together in a similar fashion to determine how well you can deceive others.

What about the other ideas like name aliasing and impersonation? These would be a lot more fun to play with...

I currently play a true good character that would not make use of this sort of skill. However having characters that are unlawful or evil that do make use of this skill would mean that my character would need to up the true seeing likeskill in order to successfully help others that may be being deceived.

This sort of thing could allow "thieves" to hide from people in that they use an alternate name. People could live double lives pretending to be good but really are not. The trick would be to be careful not to get discovered.

Anyhow, it is just a suggestion. Thanks for the game that PS is and that it is very RP focused. That really does place it in a different league from other MMORPG's.

Brendon.

[neko kyouran]

General impersonation of others is flawed.  As much as it would help the more "evil" players, it would also open the game up to easy ooc grieving.  Anyone could then simply impersonate anyone they wanted.  Say I wanted to play impersonate the Karyuu.  I highly doubt she'd appreiate someone else runnig around under her name, cuasing all sorts of problems.  Sure the older people might figure it out that it really wasn't her, but what about all the others that don't know.  They think it really was her, and thus she'd be spending all of her in game time clearing up stuff and regaining trust to everyone every time she was online.  A game is supposed to be fun, not a chore.  The minute you deprive others of that fun, you are a griefer, which is a bad thing to be.

So with your impersonate idea, not other players, but perhaps it could allow for you to pick a random name or something that another player isn't already named.  But even with that, people could simply put you on thier buddy list and when you change your name, it changes on the buddy list, so they would still know.  But then again, the buddy list is ooc, so that the player would know, but the character would not.  Asumming we are all the best at being able to diferenciate between the character and player (  ), this wouldn't be a problem.