Influence System

Summary

Influence represents an amount of social capital as well as the access to a professional network that such a reputation creates. Influence provides a toolset to perform actions that can be assumed to happen off-screen and without you, the player (or character) having to worry about how, exactly, to do it: ask and ye shall recieve from your network, and it's their job to see to the job being done correctly. This is opposed to doing actions yourself or giving instructions to Allies/Contacts/Retainers.

Influence is broken into different spheres in order to bring some MUSH-friendly nuance to the very simple tabletop system. The sphere separation exists largely to determine the scope of what your influence is intended to do. Each sphere has Specialties, which make actions pertinent to your Specialty particularly potent.

In short, a given Influence action consists of a player making a request to describe what they want done, paying for that Influence action in Downtime, and then making either one or more dice rolls. The storyteller will conduct the Influence action, deciding its consequences and other effects and updating the game appropriately (such as by running scenes or +bbpost news stories that are a direct result of the action).

The Influence Stat

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).

Influence means you know people who know people. Although dots of Contacts, Allies and Retainers come with NPCs who have sheets, dots of Influence does not allocate NPCs with sheets. Instead, for each dot of Influence represents a larger, more valuable, extended network of people with increasingly valuable contacts. You know some of them, but not all of them, since your instructions are carried out to people who know other people.

That said, storyteller(s) might flesh out NPCs who represent the manifestation of your Influence. This is for narrative purposes. It's more fun and immersive to read something like, "Your mousy intern calls you in a panic to alert you about the files and what horrible fate this could mean for the company!" instead of "Yeah, uh, so, ... someone is attacking your Influence for 3 dots."

Influence Spheres And Specialties

Each dot of Influence belongs to a Sphere. You can see the spheres with +inf/list. Many of these Spheres have categories which are more narrow expressions of that sphere: use "+inf/list <sphere name>" to see those. For example, Transportation Influence has "Public Transportation" within it (as well as "rail transportation" and "air transportation").

You can perform any Influence action that is relevant to the overarching sphere, so for example, if you have Securities And Investment (a subset of Financial Influence) you can get up to practically any sort of wealth-keeping and money-manipulation hijinx but your dice will be far more effective if you make it directly relevant to your sphere. If your Influence is explicitly suited to performing the action instead of generally related to it, you can reduce the difficulty of an Influence roll by your rating in that Influence.

Example: Jim has 3 in "Securities And Investment" and Bob has 3 in "Banking And Credit." These are both Financial Influence. Both people can perform stock market manipulation and other financial hijinx. When Jim pulls stock market manipulation, however, he enjoys a -3 difficulty. Bob has to take the full difficulty. When Bob pulls some shenanigans to get a loan he doesn't deserve, however, it is his turn to enjoy that -3 difficulty.

Influence Niches

When you take an Influence rating, you are asked to nominate a Niche. A Niche bears no mechanical benefit, and is instead simply flavor text, a descriptor of the social circle that your Influence is most strongly associated with. This way, when Storytellers work with you to carry out your bidding, they have some creative foundation with which to work. Players detecting use of Influence can also use this Niche as a sort of breadcrumb clue.

For example, if someone were to take Criminal Influence: Drug Trafficking, perhaps they pick the Sinaloa Cartel as their Niche. Whenever the Storyteller orchestrates the results of their influence move, they might drop rumors and/or news articles talking about the Sinaloa Cartel.

A Niche is completely free-form. You can make it your own ICly owned company, an IRL entity, or the IC investments of another person. Some of the Specialty descriptions specify what sort of Niches they're looking for. For example, Police Influence expects a jurisdiction, like 'SFPD'.

Using Influence

Influence Actions

To use your Influence, send in a +Request describing your goal, (e.g. "I want to hire a top-notch investigator"), the influence that you want to use, and whether you want the influence action to be concealed. The storyteller will then instruct you to use the +job/influence command. It will roll dice and spend downtime for you.

The dice pool is 3 x your relevant Influence and the difficulty is determined by the storyteller. The Downtime cost is equal to half of the Difficulty, rounded down. For example: an Influence action that is Difficulty 7 costs 3 Downtime.

The Downtime expenditure represents off-screen acts of you maintaining social capital to 'pay' for the action in deed (writing checks, recommendation letters, dinner dates, favors, etc.) plus staying up to date with the project's progress. The roll represents the process of locating, through your extended network, people who are qualified and willing to do the job.

If a roll's difficulty is reduced to 4 or lower, then no roll is required: you will be assumed to get 2 successes per dot of influence. If you would prefer, you can roll to try to get more successes, but you will be required to stick with the result if you go that route.

Success: Your influence action will start and complete within an amount of time determined by the Storyteller. If the action does not target or contest someone else in some way, then it can be carried out as immediately as appropriate. If the action does target or contest someone else, then the staffer processing the Influence action needs to first determine if the target(s) can detect the action, give the target(s) a reasonable amount of time to respond, and then they can complete the action. A "reasonable amount of time to respond" is whatever happens first: 7 days, or the target(s) responding. The amount of time that an Influence action takes essentially depends on how long doing that thing would take in real life. If you are pulling a line of credit, this should be a very short turnaround. If you're applying for something, then you may need to wait for the real-world wait time for that application process.

If an appropriate completion time is not easy to determine, the action will take an amount of weeks equal to half of the difficulty of the initial influence roll. Actions with nonconcrete goals (e.g. "patrol this area") will be performed for a number of weeks equal to the number of successes rolled.

Failure: You don't contact anybody willing/able to do it. You will be permitted to roll again in 7 days. 3 failures in a row constitutes a botch.

Botch: The action gets performed but mitigating circumstances out of anybody's control sweep in and ruin things at the storyteller's discretion. The storyteller will roll 1 d10 vs 6 (essentially flipping a coin) and you will lose a dot of Influence if the roll fails.

Discovering & Investigating Actions

When an influence action is ongoing, storytellers will notify the parties who are ICly equipped to intercept your influence action (those who have similar Influence). Staff may also determine that the action in question is gossip-worthy or news-worthy and publicize the action with IC news posts. In these cases, the person behind the Influence is not revealed. Rather, the actions underway are reported or speculated on. Scandals and incidences of violence or tragedy (real or orchestrated) are examples of the types of actions Staff may publicize while the action is awaiting completion.

When an influence action is complete, any observable effects caused by whatever has been done will be reported on by journalists or sent through the rumor mill where appropriate. If an action is not newsworthy (for example, all you did was check someone's line of credit), then it's not going to be broadcasted anywhere. If an action is newsworthy, then it will be reported on. When this report happens, the consequences and effects are getting reported on instead of you or your involvement as the Influence wielder.

If you catch wind of an IC event, be it in progress or post-completion, you may use your Influence to investigate the happenings or you may attempt to investigate things by your onesies with other methods. If whatever you're investigating happens to be an Influence action, then the amount of successes you need to get in whatever roll you perform is 1/2 of the original Influence roll's successes, rounded up.

When you beat the amount of successes that the concealing party rolled you will discover the identity of the wielder of the influence behind the action. You may also discover additional information where contextually available such as the true nature behind goings-on that prompted the investigation.

Example: Jimmy has a rating of 3 in Securities & Investment. He wants to do some insider trading, so he does, and he rolls 9 dice (because an Influence roll dice pool is [Influence Rating x 3].) He gets 6 successes with which to do his Influence action. Timmy catches wind of some potential insider trading and looks into it. He doesn't know it, but the ST knows that he's lookng into Jimmy's influence action. Jimmy can turn his own Influence towards the task or he can go gumshoe it himself with an Intelligence + Investigation roll. In either case, since Jimmy got 6 successes, Timmy needs to beat half of that in order to find out all the juicy details. Therefore, Timmy needs to get 4 successes on his roll.

Hiding Actions

The Influence system assumes that you want to hide an Influence action 100% of the time. When your Influence action is rolled, the 'stealth' of the Influence action (that is, how many successes someone has to beat to get the details) is equal to half of the successes on your Influence roll. You do not have to designate your action as somehow clandestine.

Sphere List

Academic Influence

• Earth Sciences
• Chemistry And Biomedical
• Archaeology
• Computer Science
• Engineering Research
• Life Sciences
• Physics Research

Criminal Influence

• Arms Trafficking
• Financial Crime
• Cybercrime
• Drug Trafficking
• Human Trafficking

Financial Influence

• Banking And Credit
• Real Estate And Leasing
• Securities And Investment

Government Influence

• Health Regulation
• Business Regulation
• Administration
• Financial Regulation
• Urban Planning

High Society Influence

• Performing Arts
• Fine Art
• Museums And Archives
• Hospitality

Industrial Influence

• Manufacturing
• Construction
• Retail
• Utilities

Legal Influence

• Criminal Law
• Real Estate Law
• Business Law
• International And Immigration Law

Media Influence

• Social Media
• Music And Radio
• Movies And TV
• Print Publishing
• Tech

Medical Influence

• Diagnostic Laboratories
• Ambulatory Healthcare
• Hospitals

Occult Influence

• Folk Religion
• Conspiracy Theorists
• The Catholic Church

Police Influence

• General Crimes
• Special Victims Unit
• Major Crimes
• Police Administration

Political Influence

• Business Groups
• Ideological Groups
• Special Interest Groups

Transportation Influence

• Air Transportation
• Rail Transportation
• Water Transportation
• Road Transportation