Interaction

Certain skills, called interaction skills (mostly the Persuasion skill), are aimed at dealing with others through social interaction. Interaction skills allow you to influence the attitudes of others and get them to cooperate with you in one way or another. Since interaction skills are intended for dealing with others socially, they have certain requirements.
First, you must be able to interact with the subjects of the skill. The subjects must be aware of you and able to understand you. If you don't speak the same language, or they can't hear you for some reason, that's the same as working without the proper tools, 2 penalties on your skill check. Interaction skills work best on intelligent subjects, ones with an Intelligence score of -5 or better. You can use them on creatures with Int -5, but with 3 penalties; they're just too dumb to get the subtleties of your point. You can’t use interaction skills at all on subjects lacking one or more mental ability scores. (Try convincing a rock to be your friend, or to be afraid of you.) The Immunity FX can also render some characters immune to interaction skills.
You can use interaction skills on groups of subjects at once, but only to achieve the same result for all. So you can attempt to use deceive or cow a crowd, for example, but you can’t try to convince some individuals of one thing and the rest of another, or to intimidate some people and not others. The GM decides if a particular use of an interaction skill is effective against a group, and may apply modifiers depending on the situation. The general rules for interaction still apply: everyone in the group must be able to hear and understand you, for example, or you suffer 2 penalties on your skill check against them. Mindless subjects are unaffected.
See also:
* How Skills Work
* Persuasion
* Streetwise
Category:Rulebook
Category:Glossary