Influence

Overview

• Found In: M20 page 316, V20 page 114-115, but heavily HR'ed.
• Available To: All characters.
• In Character Generation: Purchased as a standard Background.
• After Character Generation: Acquired various ways, explained below.
• Purchasable When Becoming: No
• Limitations: A rating of 5 is the maximum, but one can have contacts/allies/retainers with influence.

Influence gives you pull within mortal communities, such as across industries, political realms, and so on. A character can have up to 5 dots of influence and allocate them to various spheres of influence, which are further explained below, and further in the Influence System pages. A character can (and should) also command Influence through Retainers and/or Allies and contacts.

In Character Generation

Influence is a standard Background bought with Background dots, Freebies, and Starting XP.

Each dot of Influence belongs to a Sphere. A sphere is an overarching influence archetype, like "Police" or "Law". There is a standard list of Spheres.

Each Sphere has Specialties. A specialty is a sub-set of that sphere. For example, Criminal influence is a Sphere, like "Drug Trafficking" is a Specialty. The list of specialties is standard and pre-defined.

Lastly, when you pick influence Specialties, you pick a Niche. This is a free-form description of the sorts of people that your character's network is composed of. Someone who takes 'Drug Trafficking' might pick a particular gang, for example, or even just a particular drug.

When allocating dots of Influence, you can invest all of your dots into one Influence type or you can diversify (like 2 dots in Drug Trafficking, 2 dots in Arms Trafficking).

Please see our Influence System page for a detailed rundown of the spheres and the specialties within them.

After Character Generation

Rolling And Downtime

Building social capital is expressed and abstracted through a series of dice rolls. The dice pool is the greater of your Charisma or Manipulation plus your Politics (and your Presence, Dominate or Mind, if you have it). The target number of successes depends on the influence level you desire:

• From 0 to 1: 5 successes
• From 1 to 2: 15 successes
• From 2 to 3: 25 successes
• From 3 to 4: 35 successes
• From 4 to 5: 40 successes

The difficulty is [5 + Desired Level - Resources]. The minimum is 4. This system makes gaining influence difficult for poor and/or socially weak characters. This is on purpose.

Each roll represents a week's worth of networking IC and while you are in the act of raising Influence your Downtime pool is reduced by 4 points. You can roll so long as you have Downtime left over to spend. Each roll will represent 7 days. Failures mean you make no progress. Botching a roll reduces your accumulated successes by 5.

Once the acquired rolls have been accumulated, you can buy the level of Influence at [current rating x 3] like a standard background.

Supplementing With Scenes

In order to reward actual on-screen RP, we will lower the difficulty to 4 and waive downtime costs if, while acquiring influence, you can point to a staff-run scene (or a PRP-run scene) in which you did some networking with the target sphere. This must be an on-screen event where you met NPCs associated with the Influence you are targeting, and you rolled social dice against them. For example, you went to a gala and socialized with the glitterati, you performed a drug deal and spoke persuasively with your contacts, et cetera.

Please keep in mind that when pointing out scenes, the caliber of NPCs you RP with will need to be taken into account and be compatible with the desired level of Influence. For influence, hanging out with a bunch of smack-heads would work for Criminal Influence 1, but it won't carry you to high levels. ST discretion is at play here. With an Influence rating of 3, the NPCs would need to be some sort of managerial position. Influence level 4 regards those who serve people with local prominence. Influence level 5 requires five contacts of obvious prominence.

Converting Contacts

You can convert your dots of Minor Contacts into dots of Influence at an exchange rate of 2 dots of contacts for 1 dot of Influence, rounded up. This costs no additional XP as the Contacts were already paid for.