Status as Pulling Rank

Social Engineering brought up some interesting points regarding Status that might be pertinent to Psi-Wars.  Action doesn't deal with status, but Action operates in a meritocratic world with a flat society, where major political figures might make a point of getting a photoshoot at McDonalds to show that they are "one of the people," while Star Wars features princesses, counts and knights.  We can make the case that Star Wars, itself, is largely meritocratic, but given the presence, already, of princesses and aristocracy in Psi-Wars, why not play out what it would look like?

My primary problem with Status in Psi-Wars is that I don't know what it would do.  Status, by itself, just sits there like a reaction modifier lump that often doesn't even act as a reaction modifier: a street punk might not care that you're a princess.  My solution thus far was to grant people a "Title" perk, which allowed them to gain a +1 from people who care about such things.

But if we want to embrace the full scope of status and what it offers, it might be worth thinking about what it offers and how we can represent that in Psi-Wars.  What I'd like to do is make it as "concrete" as Pulling Rank, making it a sort of a specific "Social Rank."  Let's see if that works!

Designing Organizations

Building Organizations

The two books together give us plenty of ideas as to how we might build an organization.  We need to simplify, though.  In a Psi-Wars scenario, PCs are largely concerned about the following:

• How much rank is there (How large is the organization?)
• How much does it cost as a Patron or an Enemy?
• How much BAD does it typically apply
• What sort of minions will I face/can it supply me?
• How much wealth does it have?
• What is required to join?
• What cool tricks will it teach me?
• What sorts of benefits can it offer should I pull rank?

The first five all essentially boil down to the same thing: How big is the organization?  I'd like to combine BAD, contact skills, difficulty of getting in, difficulty of persuading people away, the cost of the Patron/Enemy and how many ranks you have all into one single thing.  If you know one, you know the rest.

Patron cost and rank already have an obvious relation.  If I leave the cost of rank at 5/level, then Rank 4 means something else in a 10 point organization than in a 30 point organization.  That means if the highest rank for one organization is rank 6, and for another is rank 10, we might expect both to command equal levels of power in their organizations.  That is, maximum rank is maximum rank and offers the same chance of success.  Page 6 of Social Engineering: Pulling Rank has a handy table for us.  A 10-point patron's rank 6 is roughly on par with a 20-point patron's rank 8, and a 30-point patron's rank 10. Action has the 15-point patron as its standard, judging from Pulling Rank difficulties.  This suggests that the Psi-Wars standard is a little larger than the Pulling Rank standard, but it will do.

What does size get you here?  Well, if we use "Complements of the Boss" then a "small" organization is worth +1 on complementary rolls, a standard organization is worth +2, and a large organization is worth +3.  Furthermore, when it comes to Muscle or Cavalry (page 19 of Pulling Rank), small organizations send 5 guys, medium 10, and large 15.  Maximum funding is also determined by organization size. Beyond that and it becomes mostly a matter of GM discretion.

How do be fold BAD into organization size?  Well, it becomes immediately obvious that this might not be the best idea.  The Nahudi warriors are likely a small organization full of skill-18 warriors, while the Empire is a vast organization full of skill-12 soldiers.  It does seem to make sense that different groups have different BAD levels, and things like loyalty, difficulties breaking in and minion strength might be tied together for ease of play, but that just means that organizations should simply have a "BAD" rating.

Pulling Rank ties maximum available wealth to Patron cost, as does Boardroom and Curia, and Boardroom and Curia ties BAD (at least for infiltration) to wealth level.  This might be a good indication of BAD.  We might expect Struggling Organizations to be BAD 0, Average to be BAD 2, Comfortable to be BAD 5 and Wealthy to be BAD 8, but obviously these can be shifted around (the Nehudi are probably not very wealthy, but have some fairly BAD warriors).

The rest of the elements that players care about from an organization largely come from what type of organization it is.  Boardroom and Curia has plenty, but we need to pare them down to size.  For that, I'd like to turn to GURPS Space.

Pulling Rank in Psi-Wars

The next step in looking at our Social Engineering rules is to take a deeper look at Organizations.  This would be the bit where I would first try to argue against Organizations, but I cannot. First, Pulling Rank is right there in GURPS Action.  It's a fundamental element of how Action plays (and, in fact, largely spawned later works on the topic).  I'd need a really good, Star Wars-backed reason to remove it, only Star Wars itself is largely about organizations.  One might describe Star Wars as a battle between the heroic Rebellion (an organization) and the sinister Empire (an organization) while plucky heroes seek the last remnants of the Jedi Order (an organization) for help.  Unlike your typical murder-hobo game, and rather like most modern action thrillers, the characters' actions largely take place in a larger context of a conflict between organizations, and often involves interacting with organizations (like the Hutt Cartel, or the Galactic Senate).

Thus, Psi-Wars is necessarily a game that features organizations as one of its foundations.  This is convenient for us, though, because you may have noticed that organizations serve as natural containers for things like martial arts, cultural distancing mechanisms. military doctrines, and opposing minions.  We might say things like "The empire fights differently than the rebel alliance,"  or "The Order of True Communion offers a different understanding of Communion than the Oracular Monks".  In all these cases, we were already talking about organizations.  Now, we can talk about them in more detail.

As I look into this in more detail, I'll be primarily using three books: GURPS Action 1, and its section on Pulling Rank, then GURPS Social Engineering: Pulling Rank, for an even deeper look at that, and then Boardroom and Curia, for a look at building organizations from the ground up.  Finally, I'll be using GURPS Space for some thoughts on what sorts of organizations to populate my setting with.

Psi-Wars Linguistics

Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English.-Korben Dallas, the Fifth Element

In a campaign, language diversity has two main functions. It provides an obstacle; when explorers encounter a new race, they may not be able to communicate. It also is a source of color; a nonhuman, or a human from a different culture, may have an accent, or a strange way of phrasing things.
-Bill Stoddard, GURPS Fantasy, page 66 

Nobody gives a damn that the alien is speaking twi'lek, except for description. The times where language mattered in Star Wars can be limited to one time in the entire series. C3PO wasted his points on buying 6 million forms of communication.
-Raoul Roulaux, Gentleman Gamer

Raoul is largely right about Star Wars and language.  Where Star Trek or Game of Thrones have internally consistent and largely speakable languages, Star Wars has a series of funny sounds that only sounds like an alien language.  The point of language in Star Wars is like all the other distancing mechanisms in Star Wars: to provide the window dressing of space opera. We expect aliens to speak alien (it would be "unrealistic" for them to speak English), so they jabber on in alien-sounding gibberish.

That doesn't mean we have to do the same in Psi-Wars, of course.  Language serves a purpose, as Bill Stoddard points out.  Moreover, Psi-Wars is based on Action, and Action definitely features language (though often in largely the same way that Star Wars does: It's important that the Middle Eastern terrorist shout things that sound Arabic, to be "realistic" but it's not that important that he's speaking comprehensible Arabic).  Finally, the reasons Star Wars has funny languages remain important.  We still need aliens to sound alien, we still need exotic things to sound exotic, and we still need to give the impression of a sweeping galaxy.

Socially Engineering Psi-Wars: Distancing Mechanisms

The GM’s most important trick in this kind of campaign
is distancing mechanisms: situations, customs, or objects that
are alien and perplexing, both to the PCs and to the players.
It’s best if they aren’t just random weirdness. Not only is it
“playing fair” to come up with logical reasons, working out
the implications of a premise can suggest additional weird
elements, deepening the effect. A campaign of this sort is a
riddle for the players; when they start anticipating the consequences of their characters’ actions, they’ve answered the riddle. At that point – and not before – it’s appropriate for them to buy Cultural Familiarity, freeing their characters of skill
penalties for not knowing how things work.
-Bill Stoddard, GURPS Social Engineering

 This singular paragraph will be the core of most of what I'm doing during this iteration, so let me parse what Mr. Stoddard is talking about.

An alien race, or a strange setting, should feel alien or strange, and that means not everything should work the way it does in our ordinary world.  The whole point of science fiction and fantasy is to visit and explore new and unusual worlds.  They might have a sense of familiarity, but to have a sense of authenticity, something should be alien about them. There should be some element (a mechanism) that helps separate (distance) this "exotic world" from the "ordinary world" that players are more familiar with.

Ideally, these mechanics should logically flow from the nature of the world the players find themselves in. In Dune for example, the natives, the Fremen, have completely blue eyes, obsess over water and worship the sand worms.  This makes sense, though, because the planet is a desert and spice, which causes blue eyes, is one of the few sources of nutrients on the planet.  Once someone understands the logic that underlies the culture of the Fremen makes perfect, internally consistent sense.

These distancing mechanisms represent the hurdle to socializing with another culture.  That is, they are the crux of why you have a -3 for socializing with someone with whom you do not share Cultural Familiarity.  Once you understand the logic of the culture, you have bridged the "distance" and you may purchase Cultural Familiarity.

Psi-Wars and Social Engineering 2: Social Engineering Analyzed

Just as I did with GURPS Action 2, it's worth going over each page of Social Engineering to see if there's anything that leaps out at me as useful, and taking some notes as I go.  I've summarized my notes below, for the tl;dr crowd.

Summary

Understanding our alien worlds require us to create distancing mechanics, unique things that define aliens as other.

We need a reference society, the human-focused “Galactic Core” culture.

We need to better define Rank, including how many levels of it we have, what it grants us, and how it interacts with organizations

We should consider revisiting Status, perhaps even returning it to Psi-Wars.

If we wish to include Social Regard or Social Stigma, it might be worth defining what they are and how one gets them.

Social Engineering contains some rules on how aliens might work differently, though most “Communion-compatible” aliens are essentially human in their psychology, with only cultural differences separating them from humans.

The rules for diplomacy and perhaps some elements of administrative or legislative politics are fairly central to a hypothetical Diplomat template, though they need to be matched with working Action traits (in the same way that the Officer takes Mass Combat traits and makes them useful in a generic
Action game)

Check out the distraction mechanics.

Psi-Wars and GURPS Social Engineering

For my next trick, I'd like to look at GURPS Social Engineering and its associated products, like Pulling Rank.

Normally, this would be the part where I argue against its inclusion, because each new element we add has a cost.  We need to write it all out, work out the details, fold it into our game design, and then our players need to learn it. And, in fact, GURPS Action already has a lot of social rules, so why bother with Social Engineering?

Because Social Engineering is a very different book than books like Mass Combat.  It more closely resembles GURPS Martial Arts or Thaumatology in that it's a list of ideas that we can take or leave as we wish.  In fact, GURPS Action already uses some material from Social Engineering (Pulling Rank is derived and simplified from it, for sure).

Moreover, GURPS Action's social rules don't cover enough.  It assumes Earth at TL 8, while we're tackling a galaxy far far away at TL 11^.  We need to think about aliens and strange customs and the impact of galaxy-spanning organizations on the interactions between individuals.  We don't necessarily need to incorporate ever element from GURPS Social Engineer, but we should, at least, consider them, and get an idea of what might need to change, and what is fine as it is.