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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5735026" data-attributes="member: 3820">It's sort of like the ability to read the GM. For example, if you know your GM has a strong emotional and intellectual hatred for slavery as an institution, you figure you can get away with murdering some slavers due to the GM not wanting to really punish that kind of behavior. Or the GM has a soft spot for the "prostitute with a heart of gold" character archetype, so you cultivate a few Streetwise contacts among the ladies of the night. It's a social skill, and one that's directly useful. And like charisma, it can be used for good (helping the entire group) or evil (wrangling preferential treatment at your fellow players' expense). I have a lot of direct experience with this one, because my most devoted player is the woman I married. She can read me like a book, and often tells me she deliberately shuts up during sessions to avoid spoiling the rest of the party's surprise. (On the plus side, it means I become a better GM just because I have to learn new ways to surprise her.) Mostly she uses her power for good because she's very sensitive to the idea of preferential treatment. She really doesn't like the idea of acting on her ability to read me and then having other players assume that I was "humoring her guess". You see this skill a lot in groups that have played together for a long time. To me, when you marry this with genre awareness you have the benchmark of a truly skilled player: the kind of player that can do equally well in an epic swashbuckler and a gritty resource-crawl, because he or she can recognize what tactics will match up with what the GM's looking for in each case.</blockquote>

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