Players have indicated that once they have captured an adversary they would like to not have to torture them to get information. I’d like the same thing. So this is a mechanical system to force an adversary to talk that can be fairly adjudicated without the need of enhanced methods.

If two (or more) characters are in a battle of wills, how is victory determined? At present the only mechanism available is a simple die roll which is arbitrarily simplistic, lacks tension and doesn’t serve the story.

Setup

Each side in a social conflict chooses a representative to argue their side of the conflict. The representative won’t change during the social conflict.

Each representative has a damage track with a number of boxes equal to their Spirit attribute.

Setting Stakes

When a social conflict is initiated the GM and the players come to an agreement on the results are if each side wins the conflict. Once the stakes are set the representative engage in a number of exchanges. If stakes seem unbalanced, one side or the other may have a bonus to their “attack” rolls.

Exchanges

During each exchange, the player controlling each representative makes a brief statement describing their tact and major points during this exchange. Depending on their methods they will make a skill check using either persuasion or deceive targeting one of the other representatives in this social conflict. The difficulty of the the skill check is equal the that target’s persuasion, deceive or calm, depending on the defensive tact taken. The skill used in the attack or defense is dependent on the character’s tact not a choice of the higher skill. If you choose to use deceive it means you are being deceptive or in some other way underhanded.

If the attack is successful, a box on the damage track is checked off. If the last two sides run out of damage track in the same exchange, both damage tracks get extended by the representative’s soul value. The stakes can be escalated at this point if both parties agree.

Nephilim

Any character can attempt to use a nephilim to influence the outcome of an exchange. An Amplify, Diminish, Empath or Metabolism nephilim can provide a bonus to attack.

Using an Amplify nephilim augments your own or an allies skill for an attack. To use this nephilim the character must make an invoke familiar check with a bonus equal to the quanta spent with a difficulty equal to the AV of the skill being augmented. If this is successful it adds the quanta spent on this augmentation to the attack roll.

Using any of the other nephilim to augment an attack the character must make an invoke familiar check with a difficulty equal to the calm AV of the target. If successful this use of a nephilim reduces the target’s AV by the quanta spent for the purpose of defending against an attack.

Amplify, Diminish and Empath nephilim’s can provide a bonus to defense.

Using an Amplify nephilim augments your own or an allies skill for an defense. To use this nephilim the character must make an invoke familiar check with a bonus equal to the quanta spent with a difficulty equal to the AV of the skill being augmented. If this is successful it adds the quanta spent on this augmentation to the augmented skill for the purpose of defending against an attack.

Using any of the other nephilim reduce the target’s effective attack AV. The character must make an invoke familiar check with a difficulty equal to the calm AV of the target. If successful this use of a nephilim decreases the target’s AV by the quanta spent for the purposes of attack for this exchange.

A metabolism nephilim can defensively counter the effects of an attacking metabolism nephilim. If a metabolism attack isn’t ongoing, metabolism provides no benefit. The character must make an invoke familiar check with a difficulty equal to the invoke familiar AV of his opponent. If successful reduce the bonus provided by the opponent’s metabolism nephilim by the quanta spent.

Quanta

Normally each exchange takes about 1 minute. This means that each exchange a character uses quanta, his available quanta drops by 1. Equivalently each exchange the character doesn’t spend quanta, his available quanta increases by one, (up to a maximum of the character’s starting quanta.).

A character can’t spend more quanta in an exchange than he has available or his nephilim’s power level whichever is lowest.

Timing

There may be more involved social conflicts where each exchange lasts longer than a minute. The only change this causes is that nephilims can not affect those conflicts due to quanta constraints.