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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2999738" data-attributes="member: 5171">I believe I noted that. I'm asking what, in your mind, is the actual functional difference between FX and non-FX. This is, to me, like saying that a fireball spell should do different fire damage from a fire-grenade. Fire is fire. Damage is damage. If you take fire damage, it doesn't matter where it came from, unless you have an item that protects against normal fire but not magical fire (or vice versa).If someone is manipulating you, someone is manipulating you, regardless of whether they're casting a spell, activating a subharmonic neural destabilizer, or using cunning manipulation and rhetorical devices.This is a core area in which I freely acknowledge that I don't agree with the rules as written.I think PCs should be vulnerable to having their attitudes changed. Not to be explicitly controlled, but to be manipulated.Yes, it requires players to be able to roleplay someone getting affected by someone else in a way they might not enjoy. No argument.There are two reasons I believe this, both of them subjective as all heck:1) As I wrote above, I don't believe that "I know how to swing a sword better than that" is a valid reason to toss out a poor attack roll. Similarly, I don't believe that "I can tell that NPC is trying to trick me" is a valid reason to toss out a poor Sense Motive check. If I build a PC with a low Wisdom, I accept that there are times when I'm going to have to suck it up and do stupid things. To do otherwise screws over the players who actually bothered to put points into Wisdom.2) There are a bunch of different villain-types out there. One of those villain types is the evil manipulator villain. If the brutish villain can hit the PCs and the nimble ninja villain can hide from the PCs, having the evil manipulator villain not be able to psychologically mess with the PCs is effectively taking him out of the game. Sure, he can still affect NPCs, and there are a few class abilities that do actually force Will saves (some of the Charismatic talents in d20 modern, as I recall without looking), but you're taking away the most obvious of his powers -- the fact that he's got a +26 Bluff check. I don't say that Hide doesn't work on the PCs. If my players can roleplay, I don't see why they shouldn't roleplay the fact that Bluff works on them.Both of these reasons are important to me, but need not be important to all GMs. I don't think it's a pre-requisite for good GMing. You can run fun campaigns without having either of those elements. But that's not the way I prefer to GM.(And to be clear: What I'm suggesting are House Rules. They're the House Rules I use if I'm trying to make Will saves important in a non-FX game. I rarely if ever use them in FX games, and I treat them as I'd treat the Horror, Vehicles, or Cybernetics rules-modules from Grim Tales: they are things to put in to give you the campaign flavor you want. If what you want is a campaign where Will saves don't matter and PCs are never at risk of being manipulated by a bad guy unless he has "Dazzle" or "Taunt", regardless of the fact that they have a Wisdom of 8, no ranks in Sense Motive, and a Will save of +2 at 10th level...  you go. That's fine.)</blockquote>

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