Allies and Contacts in the influence system

[The Marquis]

Allies and Contacts Are Superior To Influence

This is a brief summary of my current understanding of how allies and contacts interact with the influence system. Please let me know what/if I am misunderstanding.

1) They are not a security risk
A trace action performed on an Ally action yields only the “subgroup” that ally belongs to, and does not allow the tracer to discover who manipulates them. E.g “it’s a member of Perkins, Perkins Perkins.” No alt ID needed.

2) They are not vulnerable
A trace on their action does not allow you to find out their identity and eliminate or corrupt them.

3) Their action is instant
Their action occurs immediately, allowing them to be used reflexively at game, as influences used to.

4) They are easier to get
They do not have to pass the gauntlet of successful grows which limit influences. There is no restriction in the “slots” at the upper numbers (4 and 5) like influences.


Their drawbacks :

1) They can only do “use” actions
This means they can’t boost to create a level-6 action. What else might they do? Tracing allies/contacts is useless, and they can’t be attacked. That leaves watch and block/prevent.

2) Contacts require favors, and Allies are bought at greater XP than influence
The greater influence cost is mitigated by their inability to be attacked. It’s more, but more secure. Contacts require something in return.


SO it appears to me that you should only have influences if:
- You want to watch other actions going on
- You want to block influence actions, but not ally/contact actions because you would move too slowly to block instantaneously-active ally/contact actions.
- You want to do level-6 actions

[David Price]

They also can't be boosted themselves. With Presence/Dominate/Resources, influence can be a remarkable return on investment, but still require more planning.

[Shah-Khohr of Ventrue]

And if multiple people buy the same Ally, they only get one action and everyone gets screwed.

Kevin already posted something similar to this in the Rant board, chief.

[The Marquis]

May 30, 2013 12:23:41 GMT -8 Shah-Khohr of Ventrue said:

And if multiple people buy the same Ally, they only get one action and everyone gets screwed.

Kevin already posted something similar to this in the Rant board, chief.

That's a drawback I didn't know about - it makes it a little more like the "slots" in Influence, I guess.

I don't usually check the Rant board, so I'll have to go check that out, Sport.

[Sethron]

Another Drawback:

- Allies and Contacts REQUIRE scenes, and therefore are more dangerous. Even giving them an Alt-ID, you have the risk of someone telepathically taking your face from them, or asking the floor you walked on who you are.

This kind of outweighs the "security" you get from not being able to be traced.

Sure, influence won't find you, but a person in game can directly.

[Skir]

Another downside is that if you have a Streetgang doing things that people don't like, they can just be killed with Celerity. This is what is happening with the Crucible. The Crucible is simply a Street Ally group and behaves like one, but every time someone decides they don't like them (frequently) and deals a significant blow to them, everyone who invested in them loses one or more dots, or the group may be annihilated completely and everyone loses out.


There is no way to celerity down Influences. Influences are the safe, reliable way, Allies are the rollercoaster high risk high reward.

Furthermore, as Seth mentioned, you ALWAYS require a scene to call upon a contact or ally. When your police chief buddy is asked to kill a suspicious investigation for the fifth time in a row, he might be like "Okay, man, what are you involved in? Are you in the mob? You need to come clean." Your Police influence won't do that. Your Underworld influence won't try to burn down your Haven if they think you screwed them over.

Allies are real people, and they have all the dangers that come with real people. In my mind they are the much riskier option. Really the only thing they have going for them is the speed.

[The Marquis]

I don't understand "killing" a faction. Are you suggesting that the way to attack someone's ally is to just slaughter large numbers of the members of that faction? That does not seem like a drawback which I expect to play a major role in the influence system, because it is

1) A potential threat to the masquerade.
2) Damaging to everyone who is using the faction, such as your own ally in that faction. And what is the story reason that it doesn't damage influences in that faction?
3) A narrow vision of story. The only way I can find the rat is to kill everyone? If I want to deny a particular rival access to a faction, my only recourse is to obliterate it? Only to have another, system-equivalent faction take its place with another name. "There's a lawyer pulling in favors! Who cares which one, murder every member of Perkins and Perkins!"

On requiring a scene: Seth describes a player learning the identity by doing some direct action with the Ally. How did this person find the ally that you've been speaking with? There does not seem to be a system for finding the particular individual who is the "ally," but instead it's the entire group. So they just Telepathy any member of that group whatsoever? If that's the case, then a trace on an ally-created action should yield the faction, and then any member of that faction should be able to tell me who the kindred who used them is. Is that right? And even then, I have no way of stopping that kindred from controlling the faction?

Is the ally the individual, the police chief buddy who thinks you're in the mob, or the group, "Seattle Police Department? From my understanding it doesn't seem risky to me that eventually, after 5 major actions, you might have to dominate/presence/bribe/intimidate your untraceable instantaneous influence-replacing ally. It isn't open to attack from another player, so unless you're just abusing it, I don't understand the riskiness.

I guess I've strayed from clarification a little to editorializing, sorry about that.

[Styx]

I have to agree with Eric here, the 'drawbacks' to having allies as opposed to Influences appear to be miniscule. The influence system as a whole is made pretty much obsolete by the advent of the allies/contacts system, which is fine (i guess) if the intent was to make the Influence system unnecessary. As it is I decided against ever trying to play the influence game because it wasn't worth it, And not being able to track down a particular ally or contact seems to aid the idea that there are untouchable npc's, which is an unpleasant thought.

[Hephaestus]

So, the weakness of Allies as compared to Influences is that Influences can only be attacked by other Influences, and are by default much less traceable, as compared to Allies.

When you have mortal Allies on your sheet you are thought to have a relationship with the faction as a whole, not just individuals. At the point of Ally they think of you as one of their own. If the Ally takes some action that another player dislikes they are just a scene and some telepathy/dominate/bribes/blackmail/whatever from discovering that it was you that put them up to it. Then they can also take actions, again through scenes with Disciplines or cleverness or whatever else, that could turn the Ally faction as a whole against you. If that happens, then that Ally could be bumped down to a Contact or even taken off your sheet entirely.

Ally Factions can be destroyed in a number of ways, killing enough of the membership is only one of them, and the one that's currently happening in game. If, for example, you wanted to remove the Perkins Perkins and Perkins Law Ally Faction, you could just run their law firm out of business, no Masquerade breach necessary.

There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this. If you are invested in a competing Faction (each Influence has 3 such Factions) and your enemies are invested in another then tearing down their Ally doesn't hurt you at all. You can also supplant an Ally Faction with your own invented group once you've removed the competition. This is a great way to get Ally 5 as well as keep a tight leash on what other Kindred can make use of your Ally Faction.


A good way to think of the distinction between Influence and Allies is that Influence is an abstracted system that is good for big, far reaching actions. Allies are the non abstracted, nitty-gritty, anything goes version of that, that has smaller, faster actions and is more vulnerable on your sheet.

[Skir]

I will talk about this subject tonight at the pre-game class.

[Styx]

But again, If "a" lawyer at perkins and perkins is doing something to rile up my character, Why should I need to kill/discredit/blackmail/remove the entire law firm? Is the idea that, much like a clan of vampires such as the tremere or the giovanni, if you take on one of them you HAVE to take on the entire 'family' ?

[Hephaestus]

I'm not certain I understand. If one particular lawyer has peeved you in some manner, you can do what you'd like to them. But removing just that one lawyer won't remove the faction from power, nor with it damage another player's hold on their allies so much that they would lose the Ally group.

[Kevin K]

Bottom line: Allies isn't a particular person, it's a hold over a particular group. And hence to attack that, you have to destroy the group itself, or the character's standing with that group.

Which is probably the source of a lot of pain: that's different than the usual expectation of Allies (I can't have 'Brujah of New York' as an Ally), and as far as it goes a 100% overlap with the idea of Influences.

That leads to interactions between the other system, which leads to confusion, which leads to anger, which leads to rant board posts.

[The Marquis]

After speaking with Sean at game, I have a better sense of how these systems interact.

The heart of the misunderstanding is that the factions (the sub-groups of an influence sphere) are doing actions themselves. So if you trace one of these “self-created” actions, there won’t really be a single person behind the scenes, but instead it will be a “we all thought it would be a good idea” situation. I had this happen, and misinterpreted it as meaning that you could never find an ally behind an action.

That is an exception. In general:

If an ally is used to create an influence action, and that action is traced, then a followup scene or investigation may be executed in order to figure out who was driving that action. Then that person is vulnerable to another character smacking them down. This means that the allies/contacts actually are vulnerable after all.

It’s a more immediate and story-driven vulnerability, requiring direction action rather than an influence attack, but that suits the idea of allies/contacts being more immediate and story-driven in general.

To be clear, this means you don’t have to burn an entire faction to reduce somebody’s influence on them. You can figure out, through scenes, investigations, or however is story-appropriate, how that faction is being manipulated, and put a stop to it.

An example: You are the badass holder of Street Influence at Level 5. Your rival has a street ally.

You see some action involving street gangs messing up the mall! The trace would yield “it’s those darn Los Locos gang that was seen dance-fighting and scaring those shoppers!” You talk to some los locos people, and they say “well we were just kicking asses into outer space like normal, and richie’s roommate convinced a bunch of us that we should mess up the mall.

Your rival is “richie’s roommate” . So you can go investigate to find out who the roommate is, or you can trash-talk him so people will think twice about listening to him, or whatever. You can take direct actions to mess up your rival’s Ally rating.

[Thornstar]

Combining the rant thread with this one, all clarifications aside, Rob's point of:

May 29, 2013 15:02:48 GMT -8 Shah-Khohr of Ventrue said:

Its already got enough moving parts, and I really really hate the Ally aspect of the whole thing.

Makes me finally come out and ask:

So do you want to put out a petition to get a change made? I'd sign on right next to you, and I'm sure a ton of other people. While it might be a bit more understandable as a system now, I haven't heard any player championing it in response to the many voices I've heard that fall somewhere between "Casual dislike" and "Despise!"

Whether the result of that would end with a possible re-write by this staff, or just serve as an indicator of pleased vs displeased for the next one, is it time to pass that paper around?

[Shah-Khohr of Ventrue]

I'm not sure its at petition level of broken right this moment, but I can see it from where I'm standing. The issues with Allies / Contacts, as I see them, are thusly:

1) Mortals and Vampires are not equal.

2) XP has a base value.

3) Trying to create a system for Allies and Contact (mortal) to be on par with Allies and Contacts (Vampire) has created a secondary influence system.

4) Creating the above has basically just made Allies and Contacts (Vampire) function as they detail in the book.

A proposed change to fix this is as follows:

Allies (Mortal) work as they do in the book. It's just one guy. He can do whatever Allies can based on level of placement. Because he is mortal, he is half cost. Contacts (Mortal) either go away entirely or have no XP cost as several of the other systems this staff has put into place have. You RP a good scene, the Staff gives you level 3 Contact (Mortal, Police). Bravo. He isn't good for a whole lot, but he was free so what the hell.

Allies and Contacts (Vampire) continue on exactly as house ruled.

There is no short cut to influence. There is no obnoxious secondary system to influence. There is just Influence and those that don't play that game. Period.

I understand and empathize with Staff's debacle of making the XP investment of an Ally (Mortal) and Ally (vampire) the same. They cost the same so they should give the same (theoretically). But, the Influence system is already a huge XP sink and complicated enough (says I). I'd rather it was just Influence. Allies can do something else, limited or not, and have their own dice to do it in.

[Ascanio Giovanni]

If enough of you truly dislike this system as presented in our platform you may initiate a petition requiring 10 signatures to bring it up for a full game vote. That's absolutely your right and we would honour the results without animosity. We have no intention to force systems the game genuinely doesn't want down your throats. We do appreciate those of you who have attended the pre-game school sessions and approached us to try to understand this new system better, and would certainly hope that anyone who would sign such a petition has at least gone through that effort to know what they are attempting to revoke. Any of us at game or by email would be happy to continue to answer any questions you might have about this system if there are pieces anyone still does not find clear and we encourage all of you to continue to ask them. Should a petition bring this system back up for vote and that vote to revoke it pass, we will remove it wholesale and go back to the drawing board on how to handle this aspect of the game. Do remember though that under our platform should the vote fail, the system will remain in place and no one who was signatory to the original petition may be signatories to any future petitions on the same topic, although should it come up again they may of course all vote in the full game vote.

We always appreciate those who in addition to talking about the problems as they see it are proposing solutions as well. Rob has presented an idea that may be worth discussion. We would encourage others who may dislike the current system to also present alternatives or tweaks that they feel may make the system better. We are ready to listen and if a player brings us what we feel is a genuinely better idea, we may alter or change the perceived problems without need for recourse to the petition.

At the end of the day, discussion like what I see in this thread is a good thing and we encourage it to continue. It is good to see that some of you speaking out on a subject clearly appear to be making every effort to understand it first. Educated discourse on some of these more complex and cumbersome systems is the answer to us all getting the best game we can.