underside dev diary #11: statless in seattle, pt. 6

so, off the bat, some bookkeeping: after a very busy march i am back in full force for april. i also have good news for people who bought commissions, which is that--and i apologize for the long turnaround--those are all very close to done and you should expect to see them sent out over the next week or two. if you commissioned one of the five games, please drop me an email at ineedherarmageddon@gmail.com so i know where to send it to!

very grateful to everyone who has kept supporting this patreon, having this extra source of income makes it a lot easier to spend time on my silly little games what i make and writing what i do and blog what i have. divine karmic justice will now be meted out in the form of regular content returning! and today, it's about underside's social skills:

similar to combat skills, a big priority here was avoiding the 'party face' problem -- in d&d and similar games, any challenge based on talking to people, whether it's diplomacy, threats, social engineering, hustling, etc, will always default to the player with the highset charisma talking while the 8 CHA wizard and barbarian twiddle their thumbs. the social mechanics and standoffs are a pretty hefty chunk of underside and it feels pretty important to not lock anyone out of that.

fortunately, this dovetails nicely with approaches: if your character is an Aggressive ultraviolent henchman type without a gram of suaveness in their crocodilian body, they'll get those approach dice whenever they act aggressively in a social situation, making Menace and Brush Off perfect skills for them to take to make themselves a useful (if specialized) player in standoffs and social situations.

speaking of Brush Off--in underside, Infamy gives social consequences a mechanical weight to match the narrative weight of getting embarassed or shown-up in a status-obsessed world of people who got the ability to breathe fire and immediately starting fretting about personal branding, so two skills revolve around evading, minimizing, or dealing with them. this essentially lets you set up a character as a 'social tank', a scapegoat who can take the fall for the rest of the team and end up unscathed after doing (or taking the blame for) things that would turn anyone else into a persona non grata.

i'd also like to talk a little about one of my personal pet topics, verbs and how they shape the world and story of the game--notice that the skill that other games often call 'persuasion' or 'diplomacy' is 'manipulate'. as far as underside's mechanics are concerned, if you're making a genuine, heartfelt appeal to someone you care about to help you, you're manipulating them. it's a bleak and hypercynical worldview that matches the bleak and hypercynical worlds this system should help you bring to life.

once again, thank y'all for your patience in waiting for underside itself to come out, and see you next week for a look at the eclectic leftovers i've groupd into 'miscellaneous skills'!