Assisting other players
Teamwork makes the dream work!

I'm sure there are other situations and skills/stats that assistance would be applicable to, these were just off the top examples.

This is actually a great idea that I’ve seen elsewhere too. Even a fresh immy is useful as a bodyguard if you understand the mechanics.

Otherwise you're gonna be looking at already tough characters hiring 4 immies for that extra pool of ht against their enemies.

Then it doesn't become a matter of armor or stats or tactics, it becomes a matter of "spend chy to buy extra endurance"

And, just to put it out there, those plot hooks and older characters using immy/midbies even in combat still happen even now and it's not just bring me a sandwich. I'm just generally against the idea of this mechanic being hire someone for extra stats.

Which it hopefully won't be since we all seem to be on board with it having stat skill checks.

A bodyguard archetype would be cool, as there are a lot of non-combat characters that need to be deployed into sketchy situations for various reasons.

More prepping areas and looking for hotspots vs. just shooting the fuck out of someone. That kind of thing.

Very similar stuff though I guess.

You are right. Wild that it needs to be said, but there it is. Add it to the list of all the other shit that shouldn't need to be said, but that gets said anyway.

Now, with that out of the way...

The real challenge with "charisma" is how do setup a system so that those who do not have it OOCly, can still utilize it ICly. That is a huge rabbit hole to go down, so let's not.

As it relates to bodyguarding, it might make sense to utilize some combination of Charisma and Perception to represent not only how many people a character can "lead" but also how many they can direct, or keep track of in combat. Not at all unlike how with increased Perception, a character can "watch" more people.

@Grizz,

You are right. Money trumps Charisma in many circumstances. Even assholes with enough money can get people to do things for them. Look at Epstein. And Trump.

I think the discussion here is how to mitigate the always ephemeral "game balance" issues such that legacy characters with oodles of chyen don't stream roll the rest of the game by financing an army of "bodyguards" to make them virtually untouchable.

That is why I suggested Charisma as a placeholder for Leadership.

Well, if that’s how they want to spend the money they earned, more power to them. I think the balance is the economy. Bodyguards ain’t free and if you’re selling yourself for free then that is on you.

Also, That would probably be a fringe case anyways. If you had experience managing bumbling solo’s you would understand that having 3 doofuses willing to bodyguard you on at the same time that you can afford is no easy task in its own right.

I think the concern isn't hiring semi-competent, bumbling solos who are going to charge a fair amount. The concern would be giving ten immies a grand each and having a wall of human shields.

All of this is just conjecture though, given that the OP is just a suggestion and nowhere near being coded into reality.

Combat skills are somewhat unique in the sense that multiple players can 'pool' their skills together to become something stronger than the most UE invested individual character among them.

It might be interesting if non-combat skills could do this as well with an @assist command or something similar, where two players (or more?) could cooperate on non-combat skill checks by pooling their skills together, with some percentage of the lower skilled player's skill being added to the higher player's skill, when the check is made, while they remained together.

Things this could enable:

+ Teaching characters (and players) to drive and fly, or one character helping another drive in poor weather, with less risk of crashing for the learner.

+ Two (or more?) characters working together on a tech job (like taking down super tough cameras, or cracking advanced tech) that neither of them alone could manage.

+ Art collaboration that would be more valuable and more showy than a single artist working alone.

+ Giving high UE specialists a reason to work with lower-skilled characters on jobs to make their work even better.

I strong believe that there needs to be a new "teaching" skill, or something similar. Being able to do something well, and being able to teach someone how to do something well are two different things.

I've run into this a couple places IRL.

The first is training martial arts. I have seen some amazing martial artists who were so naturally gifted, that they simply did not understand how good they were. Because of that, they did not have the empathy / understanding of how to effectively coach / teach less naturally capable students around those student's struggles.

Often times it were the students who struggled the most to develop competency with the art who ended up being the best teachers.

The second is in managing technical people. It's almost a cliche when there are very competent technical people who suck at managing and mentoring other technical people. This is something I ran into personally when I moved into management. I had to pick up a whole bunch of communications skills to effectively manage people whose level of aptitude to pick up new technologies wasn't equal to my own. It's not that they were dumb, or that I was smart. Different people have different ways of acquiring knowledge and skills. A good teacher has to understand those differences, and not everyone is naturally a good teacher.

Given the difficulty of creating and integrating new skills into the MOO, it might make sense to develop some formulas.

For example, an "average" character can only contribute 25% of their skill level to a collective effort.

But a good teacher, perhaps defined as someone with a high Intelligence, or high Charisma, or a mixture of both, could contribute > 25%.

Obviously it's a complicated thing with many contributing factors, which is only known with access to the code behind it, but it makes a lot of sense to me that some comparable balancing that exists between combat characters also applies, at least to some degree, to non-combat characters.

I think skill pooling for tasks opens up a whole universe of cool interactions and cooperative RP with skills and jobs that are now mostly lone-wolf affairs.

In fact I'd say that only the highest UE skilled person being the one that matters really disincentivizes cooperation and learning. If I am an expert fixer, there's not really any functional benefit for me to show someone else how to do it.

It's often fun RP if you're into that (although a lot of people aren't into sharing their skill-based info), and fosters good long-term networking, but at the end of the day it's RP and when the rubber hits the road it's better for you to just do all those skill rolls yourself.

Having an actual coded benefit would greatly encourage player cooperation I think. Very high UE characters could cooperate to become extremely powerful, but that is already true of very powerful combat characters, so I don't think it's necessarily a third rail that can't be touched.