Pen & Paper Arcanum

One of the people I'm working with really pushed to separate the two. I'm hoping to coax him into doing the write up for it, but the main difference lay in what the other party knows.

Performance covers acting, lying and also actual performances of music and song. His main argument was that the other party was either unaware of, or was creating an identity for, the performer. A character dressed in the stolen clothing of a city guardsman would use Perform to impersonate one of the town's guards for instance.

Persuasion on the other hand involves very clear knowledge of who you are working with and is thus less a matter of smoothing over problems and instead pushing for your point. Debate, negotiation and arguments could all fall under Persuasion rather than Perform. The character is less skilled at articulating and winning people over, but can push what he or she believes until you finally have to give in. A character who was a town guardsman but whose uniform was stolen would use persuade to avoid losing his job due to incompetency, for instance.

 

Indeed.

When making tabletop role games I prefer to go with skills that are more general and group things just as much as neccesary, like armed melee and unarmed melee, but not as general as simply melee, or as fine grained as to divide by types of weapon. Of course, this isn't the cas with computer RPGs, were I use the finest grain as possible.

 

I strongly agree with ZippoLag about having broad skills be of greater use in a Tabletop RPG than a a more specific set. However when it comes to conversation skills, I think it's important to not only emphasize that there are multiple ways to convince someone of something but also to allow for a mechanical split from someone who is very persuasive and someone who is simply a natural liar.

The second part of the logic is that the greater the number of social skills, the more likely players are to use them. I think that by presenting more social skills, it makes them seem like a better option worth investing in and allows the player to feel as though they have skills for the situation and it isn't simply a catch-all. I'm also hoping that in practice the two skills will allow players some very different options with how they approach social situations, particularly given that one is tied to Charisma and the other is tied to Willpower. The Skill Trainings and descriptions of how the skills are used should also help shed light on the ways in which they are different skills.

Otherwise though, I've tried to paint skills with a very broad brush. Things like Melee or Archery cover everything within their respective fields, while the ability to Disarm Traps and Pick Locks have been rolled together into Jury-Rig. I hope that both answers the question and sheds some light on the split!