Re: your mail

[John Hogg <johnhogg@laf.cioe.com>]

If there's a skill that covers your end result, use that, and say it looks
like "I move the lantern closer to him, and spend an hour or two staring
into his soul ... slowly grinding the information out of him in a contest
of wills."

Just because you're not breaking fingers doesn't mean your below example
did not include recovering information via coercion (spelling).

You're still attempting to use a power position to extract information
from an unwilling target ... you're just not using physical force.

On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Benjamin Austin wrote:

> 
> While we're talking about some skills, I've got a character that has, on
> occassion, the need to extract information from people without having to
> hurt them.  Call it... an interogation.  Now, the torture skill does
> permit this not-so-free exchange of knowledge but there is no skill to
> allow a player to gather the information from an NPC or PC without that
> physical harm.  
> 
> Now, I'm not looking for a way around me just not being able to think
> of the right questions.  Rather, I'm looking for a skill that reflects the
> tatics used in an interogation.  Some of those tatics involve "mind games"
> or other attempts to get the person to trip up and devulge some
> information.  Other tatics employ the use of discomfort (which, in
> fairness, can be viewed as causing "pain") like the denial of
> water, the abundance of heat in a room, etc.
> 
> It has been suggested to me that I simply use the torture skill which has
> the same end result; just uses a different path.  Is this
> something that will generally be accepted by other GMs?  Would the  
> resistance check be harder to not harm the target or to simply imply pain?
> Or, is an interogation that much different than torture that it should be
> a separate skill in and of its own?
> 
> BJ
> 
> 
>