As I'm about to start playing Blood Lords, a campaign notable for its political interactions, I'm looking for some good examples of the Coerce activity in action, either as theoretical thought exercises or as historical anecdotes from your own games (particularly with boosters like Quick Corcion, Group Coercion, Lasting Coercion, and similar augments).
What sort of situations might such abilities and activities be ideal?
Coercion tends to be the best "Drop your weapons and surrender!" option to end a fight prematurely.
Not many other cases where it's that easy to use, because it's inherently hostile.
Might be able to RP it by using Coerce when dialogue threatens to become violence, with your "Hey, are you about to make this disagreement into a real problem? Because I promise, me and my friends are great problem solvers." style line.
Doesn't actually work if the AP scripts that dialogue to become a fight, but that type of interruption can be crow-barred into a fair amount of social situations.
Coercion tends to be the best "Drop your weapons and surrender!" option to end a fight prematurely.
Not many other cases where it's that easy to use, because it's inherently hostile.
Might be able to RP it by using Coerce when dialogue threatens to become violence, with your "Hey, are you about to make this disagreement into a real problem? Because I promise, me and my friends are great problem solvers." style line.
Doesn't actually work if the AP scripts that dialogue to become a fight, but that type of interruption can be crow-barred into a fair amount of social situations.
Per Quick Coercion you can't use it during combat, much less use it to end a combat.
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Per Quick Coercion you can't use it during combat, much less use it to end a combat.Coercion tends to be the best "Drop your weapons and surrender!" option to end a fight prematurely.
Not many other cases where it's that easy to use, because it's inherently hostile.
Might be able to RP it by using Coerce when dialogue threatens to become violence, with your "Hey, are you about to make this disagreement into a real problem? Because I promise, me and my friends are great problem solvers." style line.
Doesn't actually work if the AP scripts that dialogue to become a fight, but that type of interruption can be crow-barred into a fair amount of social situations.
Wait what.
Am I blind, or is that restriction not in base Coerce at all?
That's a new level of rules wtf for the skill feat to alter the rules of the base skill.
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Oh, damn it all, figured it out.
Coerce has the Exploration tag, so that's why it's invalid to use it in combat. Ugh.
That "make a CHA check to get them to surrender/stop fighting" is such a natural player desire, that it's just frustrating for the rather fitting option to be non-functional.
Glad no one noticed that tag when it came up at the table.
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What sort of situations might such abilities and activities be ideal?
One great use, if your GM likes their bad guys to talk before combat, is to extract one enemy from the fight through coercion. With Quick Coercion, it's fast enough that other enemies only realize it when it's too late. And one less enemy in the fight makes a fight trivial.
But that's extremely GM dependent (and enemies dependent).I also use it with my Oracle to bully people through prophecies: "I see... I see... I see awful things that befall on you if you insist on opposing the law!"
But once again, GM dependent. Some consider that using Coercion and Intimidation to get your way necessarily raises opposition when others understand that there are situations where Intimidation makes sense (if you are a police officer you won't use Diplomacy and still people won't necessarily hate you for doing your job).
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They probably didn't want to allow encounters to be shut off prematurally this way.
Besides encounters that spell out that enemies will act intelligently and automatically surrender if low HP / low in numbers, directly applying fear to end an encounter early seems like something that should be carefully controlled by the GM, where it could work if they signal that the enemy is hesitating given X reasons, but might otherwise never work depending on the motivations of the enemies, how badass they're supposed to be, etc.
I do agree it would have been cool to at least have some guidance and rules-leniency on this, though.
To build on this,
It would be terribly overpowered if you could use one skill action in combat to end an enemy’s involvement in the encounter, much less 4 or more enemies at once. This was discussed in another thread somewhere, but something like “end an encounter through intimidation” is better handled as something like a victory point subsystem similar to a hazard where the enemy/enemies have a morale threshold that has to be depleted, but that would be a huge pain if it was expected to work against every enemy, and would need to, on average, be as difficult as ending the encounter through combat.To the OP, almost anything that diplomacy can accomplish can be (temporarily) resolved through coercion by focusing on the consequences for not doing such behavior.
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Batman uses Coerce 'in play' all the time. That's the best example I can think of.
To build on this,
It would be terribly overpowered if you could use one skill action in combat to end an enemy’s involvement in the encounter, much less 4 or more enemies at once. This was discussed in another thread somewhere, but something like “end an encounter through intimidation” is better handled as something like a victory point subsystem similar to a hazard where the enemy/enemies have a morale threshold that has to be depleted, but that would be a huge pain if it was expected to work against every enemy, and would need to, on average, be as difficult as ending the encounter through combat.To the OP, almost anything that diplomacy can accomplish can be (temporarily) resolved through coercion by focusing on the consequences for not doing such behavior.
Yeah, I definitely agree that it would be a mistake to write down a rule / check that on-paper included a function to end combat or something like that.
That said, the books do a pretty god job at usually having paragraph blurbs describing (suggesting) moments for the GM to improvise mechanics (something that has been super rare to see in-play, most of the time GMs look for a written solution (such as remembering Coerce, but forgetting it's Exploration-only)).
As game devs they can't make that "end combat" into a real player button, but the books sometimes advise the reader-GM on what's the existing ttrpg norm for those exact scenarios, where things like ending combat with player-initiated words is very much expected to be a narrative possibility the GM may want advice on resolving.
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Intimidation as a skill is perhaps the least complete / should have been a subset of Diplomacy, IMO. That would have left more room for a few things to fill up another lacking skill, Performance, and it would stopped CHA from being split three four(!) different ways.
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As far as what to do with what exists, if I were playing such a PC, I honestly would ask the GM if I could use Intimidation without using Coerce by default.
I think it was a big mistake to include the automatic unfriendly change, and even though it's written as a "might" instruction, the notion that the NPC can take off-screen actions to get back at the PC (even on success), just further makes Coerce a horrible idea to ever use.
Nothing else in the system has such bad consequences for it's normal use like that.
So, my advice is to not use "Coerce" that much, and instead use Intimidation whenever it's possible (such as using it to Aid when the other party CHA character attempts to be diplomatic).
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something like “end an encounter through intimidation” is better handled as something like a victory point subsystem
Pretty much every challenge that isn't combat is best handled by some version of a Victory Point system.
I have even run combat as a Victory Point system because the combat was a bar room brawl type of thing and the characters involved were all explicitly forbidden from killing each other.
something like “end an encounter through intimidation” is better handled as something like a victory point subsystemPretty much every challenge that isn't combat is best handled by some version of a Victory Point system.
I have even run combat as a Victory Point system because the combat was a bar room brawl type of thing and the characters involved were all explicitly forbidden from killing each other.
Victory Point systems can also be used to adapt kid-friendly media combats to Pathfinder, i.e. "Friendship is magic. Really." I suppose it's the non-lethal aspect that stands out there, and perhaps the "no hard feelings" ramifications.
As for Batman, he does use Coerce often to end combat...with peons who shouldn't be fighting Batman (and where it'd be boring to focus on such trivial obstacles). But even in brawls vs. multiple opponents he's seldom Coercing them until none are left. He sure is Demoralizing them though, and likely would have a skill feat similar to Scare to Death that simply ends them as a threat if weak-minded. Arguably (and supported by the Arkham games) Batman in PF2 would also operate on a Victory Point system.
Then there's his reputation, like that video meme of a goon guard who finds Batman in a side room. Batman puts his finger to his lips and the goon tells his friend the room's clear because of self-preservation/IQ.
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I allow coercion to prevent fights. Coercion works with 1 round of interaction. Normally a round only occurs in encounter play with initiative which some might see as just combat. I don't think that is how it works.
You can have a talk rolling initiative without initiating combat. This is where the opportunity to use something like Diplomacy or Coercion occurs using encounter mode. You will still roll initiative then engage a social encounter allowing the use of social skills to resolve an encounter.
If combat occurs, then you may roll initiative again initiating combat with a different roll like Perception, though if a player was using intimidate in a social encounter, you may allow them to roll intimidate for initiative as well if combat does occur.
I've had plenty of players use coercion to end encounters before they become combat. I initiate them as social encounters in encounter mode.
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For me you have the potential to intimidate your way out of a fight before it truly begins. If you are squaring up with each other, I'd give you a chance to either threaten your way out of it or be diplomatic before initiative kicks off and people start swinging. Circumstances can matter a lot here of course, but I don't see it a lot different than something like Animal Empathy pointing out that its likely animals will give you time to make your case.
If you are actually in combat that is another story. I normally have a mental tally of when/if enemies are likely to flee, be that when they take so much damage, or if they are being driven by a one of their allies and the rest don't care so much about the cause. I could see myself letting a PC shout 'Run' and raising that bar slightly with a coercion check, particularly when they have done something to sway the fight in their favor.
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I allow coercion to prevent fights. Coercion works with 1 round of interaction. Normally a round only occurs in encounter play with initiative which some might see as just combat. I don't think that is how it works.
The Coerce action is tagged Exploration, so without the Quick Coercion skill feat, it's not really intended to be used in encounter mode whether combat is going on or not, which makes sense considering that by default it takes a full minute of conversation, which is kind of awkward to play out in encounter mode.
That said, I don't see why it would be necessary to drop into encounter mode for a PC who didn't have Quick Coercion to try to prevent a fight with Coerce.
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I allow coercion to prevent fights. Coercion works with 1 round of interaction. Normally a round only occurs in encounter play with initiative which some might see as just combat. I don't think that is how it works.The Coerce action is tagged Exploration, so without the Quick Coercion skill feat, it's not really intended to be used in encounter mode whether combat is going on or not, which makes sense considering that by default it takes a full minute of conversation, which is kind of awkward to play out in encounter mode.
That said, I don't see why it would be necessary to drop into encounter mode for a PC who didn't have Quick Coercion to try to prevent a fight with Coerce.
It isn't. But some folks apparently get very OCD about this stuff.
I don't really think about exploration, downtime, or encounter myself. These designations artificial and added for newer games to understand different ways to adjudicate the game.
The above is how I would do a social encounter if initiative was necessary. Doing something in one round in exploration mode is another one of those rules that can confuse people who are a bit too interested in following the RAW.
You can run social encounters like you would encounter mode without difficulty.