He did make threats. He threatened that he would NOT stand for being cheated, and while not mentioning exact consequences, it was certainly implied.
Not really, asserting to someone that I don't want to be ripped off isn't implying anything other than they might not be getting to rip me off.
Where's the implied threat or coersion?
To follow that through you caould say every shopkeeper is using intimidate any time they offer you a price, because if you dont take it, you might not get the item.
Honestly, I really have the feeling that some people here are so deadset on the typical paladinesque PC that they completely ignore the fact that the OP was expecting and accepting possible consequences of his intimidate attempt after the friendly attitude has worn off.
So lets change the setting to make it more clear: The Drow fighter I mentioned earlier is chaotic evil, and a worshipper of Lolth.
Can she intimidate a merchant into giving her a good price on her goods, or can she not? Don't bother listing consequences. I know there are some.
If she can't, I'd like you to explain how protection rackets would ever work in Pathfinder.
What's wrong with the answer Depends on the merchant.
I'm assuming that this Drow fighter has got herself pimped out in standard issue spider themed armor and is basically wearing a badass suit. So she walks in to the merchant and is lowballed on the price for her grot and then she attempts to intimidate him/her.
Now, we could go for the standard assumption that this is a regular shopkeeper who is worldly enough to know how much bad news the Drow are, so when the badass Drow fighter babe waltzes into his shop, he's got some serious cojones to start lowballing her to begin with unless he's just doing this by rote and all she needs to do to Intimidate him is raise an eyebrow and maybe sneer.
Of course, the merchant could also be the old retired badass Drow fighter who runs the gift shop at the local Drow temple. Is she going to be impressed by a younger Drow, based on the fearsome reputation of the Drow? Or is she not really not going to care, being exactly the same as the customer except older and more seasoned.
Then we have the third merchant, let's say the callow and sheltered young son of some Katapeshi merchant who has been asked to mind the shop one day while his father is out. In walks this badass Drow. The lad behind the counter has never heard of Drow, so assumes she's a Mwangi elf with a spider fetish. He's wrong, but as such, the fearsome Drow reputation doesn't help.
It's going to depend on a lot of factors.
Seems to me that you're saying that the intimidate skill is completely pointless, since the outcome will be completely determined by what the GM decides is the impression a NPC has of the intimidating character, no matter the result of the check.
The other side of the coin is that a high intimidate is a auto win for short term social situations.
Mr. Fishy agrees that a better system is needed.The Demoralize effect is fine a shakened condition, DC=HD+wis mod.
Intimidate outside of combat needs more factors, DC +1 per ally of target, +2 advantage[armed against an unarmed target], -2 disadvantage[threatening an armed target unarmed]
A few modifers and the skill is easier to play and more structured.
Owner - D20 Hobbies
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He did make threats. He threatened that he would NOT stand for being cheated, and while not mentioning exact consequences, it was certainly implied.
Would the merchant treat him fairly, then?
This is what it comes down to:
1) If he makes the check as an Intimidate, then he makes threats and he gets the town guard call, gets jailed, and gets hung the next day. Burns a whole lot of play time the other players sit around twiddling their thumbs. In short, no fun for anyone but the soon to be hung player who got his Intimidate. Yay!2) If he makes the check as a Diplomacy, then all goes well, he gets a fair price if it is possible, he doesn't sell if not. Everyone is happy. No one is hung. No player time is wasted.
How can this be a question which is the best check for this situation?
He said those exact words while casually resting his hand on a swordhandle? Or merely looming dangerously close and high over the merchant. Stepping into someone's personal space is VERY quickly interpreted as threatening.
Yet each example there held the implied threat of violence and harm to the person being intimidated.
There's pretty much no way out of this box, its about frigthening people into doing what you want via the delivery of not just a threat, but one they honestly believe you can/will carry out, that will cause them harm.
Not to mention the actual acts of violence being demonstrated which could give a rather hefty circumstance modifier. Like the dragon eating the village.
Yet the RAW doesn't have such powers, so to apply anything else would be an individual act of DM Fiat, which is ironically what has prompted this thread.
It's not nitpicking, you provided an example to illustrate your case, yet the example was all about implied danger/threat of physical harm.
The problem is, that RAW, the Initmidate feat is broken - yet when DM'd apply their own modifiers we get long posts on forums decrying said action as fiat.
You can intimidate a merchant, but the word for it is robbery/mugging, and players shouldn't be surprised when thry go to a cell.
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Owner - D20 Hobbies
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1. nonviolent threats ... Like the boss threatening to fire you, or the fellow merchant threatening with mercantile repercussions.
2. Finally, its RAW. You can dislike it
3. The OP expected consequences. Nobody denies consequences. NOONE. Why does everyone keep pretending otherwise?
1) Not possible, ever. I can't be intimidated without threat of violence. I suspect most are the same.
2) We differ on the meaning of the RAW, so saying "it's RAW deal with it" is pointless, because we both can say that.
3) The OP explicitly demanded no consequences when he said he made no direct threats in the Intimidate. No threats of violence means he demanded a Diplomacy yet he rolled an Intimidate.
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1) Not possible, ever. I can't be intimidated without threat of violence. I suspect most are the same.
So... "Do as I say, or I'll tell your wife what you've been up to with that pretty little assistant of yours," is diplomacy?
What about, "You want to cheat me? It would be so unfortunate if my friends in the trade guild revoked your license over such a small thing..."
So... "Do as I say, or I'll tell your wife what you've been up to with that pretty little assistant of yours," is diplomacy?What about, "You want to cheat me? It would be so unfortunate if my friends in the trade guild revoked your license over such a small thing..."
Without violence yes, fear is still the motivator being used, fear of a disrupted relationship or loss of income are both fears.
Blackmail is intimidate without violence.
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I wasn't going to respond to this thread, but SIWOTI has gotten the better of me…
First, I'd like to say that, given only the information presented by the OP, I feel that his use of Intimidate against the shopkeeper should have succeeded in netting a better price for the offered goods. I'd also like to admit up front that, though I have read most of this thread, I haven't read all of it - my apologies if some of what I say has already been covered by others.
That being said, if the OP threatened the shopkeeper and then immediately turned his back on him, then I think that, even in a fearful, even terrified, state, it is reasonable for the shopkeeper to press a panic button; especially if it is literally a panic button as we think of them today - a switch which throws a silent alarm and calls the police. This is a well documented reaction to fear, though it is not necessarily within the intimidated person's rational self-interest.
There are lot's of other issues - a lot more information - which we really need to give informed commentary in this case. We don't know, for instance, precisely what was said at the table.
Did the OP simply say "I want to scare the piss out of him to get a better price" then proceed to roll a 40 on his intimidate check? If so, we can assume that the shopkeeper was very badly cowed; we may very well assume that he had reached a point in his fear that he was no longer making rationally self interested decisions. While the RAW of Intimidate does not explore the implications of intimidation, I feel that, at a certain point it is reasonable to assume that a sufficiently Intimidated person has become panicked (note the lack of capitalization - I intend to use the english word panicked, vice the PFRPG game term; I will do my best to capitalize game terms and leave common definitions uncapitalized). People who are experiencing panic do shockingly stupid things, up to and including hitting an alarm while faced with an overwhelming threat.
Conversely, the OP may have said "I want to 'lean' on him a little and convince him to give me a better price." In this case, I would say that it is completely reasonable for the shopkeeper to grudgingly give in to the demands, raise the price, and refuse to do business with the OP in the future. It is my personal opinion that this scenario would be more in line with the use of threats such as "Hey man, we both know that you're being unfair, do you want me spreading word around that region that you're trying to screw people over?" In this scenario, the fact that the OP got a 40 on his check merely implies that he used this tactic exceedingly well, not that he accidentally scared the bejeesus out of a person that he was merely trying to lean on a little.
I'd like to thank Lorekeeper from the first page of this thread, who pointed out that one should be able to limit the ramifications of exceptional success in social situations in the same way that they would in physical situations. Upon reading his post I immediately realized I had been doing it wrong all of these years - a paradigm shift when being presented with new information is always fun.
We also do not know who this merchant is. With the information given by the OP, I feel safe assuming - as have many other posters, I imagine - that the merchant is a "typical merchant." Ie: Not necessarily overly fit, unarmed or unskilled in the arms he has, and not experienced in steeling himself against threats. However, given input from the DM, we may find that this *particular* merchant is actually an Aldori Dueling Master who spent 20 years of his life waging war in the Worldwound. Far-fetched? I'll grant that. But it is not the most far-fetched thing ever to happen in a fantasy role-playing world. Perhaps, in this instance, the OP merely barked up the wrong tree; against a different merchant - one who hadn't spent two decades staring death in the face - the OP's tactics would have been a phenomenal success.
Now, on to SIWOTI.
Repeatedly throughout this thread people have made several claims which I believe to be spurious.
First, it has been stated that RAW supports a notion that Intimidate does not necessarily require threatening the target. I feel that this is hogwash. The game makes assumptions about the use of language - it does not, and should not be expected to - define every word used within the text. Intimidation is, and has been since the 17th century, related to causing fear in the another. To cause another person to feel fear is definitively to threaten them. The threat need not be of bodily harm, or even of bodily harm to a third party; we are social creatures - promising to bring harm to a person's social standing is a threat, even if they will never be touched. Intimidation is coercive and threatening. You are forcing a person to do your will by making them afraid of the consequences of failure to do your will.
Second, people have repeatedly intimated that an Intimidated individual should behave in a rationally self interested manner. I question this as well. A fearful person - one who has been Intimidated - may not act in a rational manner. Indeed they will become more irrational as they become more afraid. This is a well documented section of neuroscience. Why run away from someone with a gun? Can you outrun a bullet? Of course not. But you aren't thinking clearly. It's the nature of fear. As you become more afraid, you will find yourself unable to perform even simple tasks. "Just put the money in the bag!" It's hard to, when your hands are shaking, when you're questing what's going to happen to you. Obviously, these examples are of immediate physical threats - people may act more rationally when the fear is less immediate, but they will still not be running at peak performance.
Third, people have said that Intimidate cannot exist without threat of violence. I suppose if you torture your use of language and define violence as including such things as character assassination or blackmail, then I agree. However, normally "violence" implies the use of physical force, and physical force is not a prerequisite in threatening a person. You can threaten a person financially and socially just as easily as you can physically, and people, on a whole, respond in a very similar way. They become fearful, their hands sweat, they try desperately to think their way out of their situation, their mouths go dry, their amygdala goes into overdrive. They may not be physically running, but their body is still in fight or flight mode. Granted, some of the posters who have argued that they never feel fear without a physical threat may be correct, but that is a hallmark of psychopathy - as I've said twice before, our nature as social creatures makes threats to our status within our in-groups just as dangerous to us as corporeal threats.
I understand that these points are not supported by RAW. However, the OP implied that they run a very RP heavy game. Do people react as normal humans should in his RP heavy campaign? If so, then I think that going "beyond the RAW" is both expected and necessary. By RAW there are only 5 states of human interaction - Hostile, Unfriendly, Indifferent, Friendly, and Helpful. In an RP rich environment, especially one played with a modicum of realism, do you expect all interactions to fit neatly within these 5 boxes? RAW reductionism is fine, if that's your playstyle, but I don't understand how it can address play in a realistic social setting. I'm not trying to be obtuse with this last point, I honestly don't understand how to address it.
Anyhow, that's enough for a string of TL;DR.
;)
RAW plainly states how Intimidate affects NPCs and what it is capable of.
Indeed it does. And it also says: "After the Intimidate expires, the target treats you as unfriendly and may report you to local authorities."
So when people cheeseball their way through Intimidate and say "No no no! I'm not intimidating that way!" ... well, yeah, y'are. Whether you like it or not.
The NPC may or may not report you to local authorities - at his/her discretion. Using Intimidate gives them the legitimate reason to do so.
NO ONE has said there are no consequences to intimidation checks, successful or otherwise, including the OP.
EVERYONE agrees there are negative consequences to intimidation checks.
The problem is the OP received the consequences of a failed result, or the consequences that come when the successful intimidate check wears off without ever receiving the benefits of the successful check.
Oh. I thought it was vice-versa. I thought "EVERYONE" (virtually - I'm not one for overdramatic absolutes) agreed that the OP got a bit borked with the ruling that the NPC wasn't affected at all.
And the OP certainly disagreed that there would be any reason to call the guards (the "no no no, I'm not intimidating like that" defense). So I'm not sure your "NO ONE" statement applies, either.
Furthermore, neither does RAW state that every time an intimidate check wears off does the victim call the town guards. It is a possible outcome.
And I never said differently. In fact, I clearly said: "The NPC may or may not report you to local authorities - at his/her discretion." Why would you think otherwise?
So when people cheeseball their way through Intimidate and say "No no no! I'm not intimidating that way!" ... well, yeah, y'are. Whether you like it or not.
Yeah I'm just seeing so much gouda, I agree completely.
I am also seeing a million and one explanations to handwave away the simple mechanics of Intimidating someone, as opposed to them simply being intimidates.
Like the basketball reference above, there's a major difference between finding something intimidating (adjective) and being intimidating (verb).
The act of Intimidating someone (per the verb) is what the mechanics are representing, as opposed to merely being intimidating (adjective) which is what people are trying to cheeseball it as.
If the mechanics were trying to simply suggest people were intimidated by your presence then it wuld be a permanent passive effect, yet it clearly isn't as it clearly represents the active threatening of a person...
I'm going to lock this thread, as at this point the original rules question has either been answered or is unanswerable. If this topic needs more discussion, please create a new thread in Pathfinder RPG General Discussion.