Game in the Brain

As promised my
thoughts on leadership… if you would care to hear them. 

Leadership
Definition (read at your peril).

Leadership is part
of the concept of reciprocity, where one party takens on the greater
burden of responsibility in return is given authority by those who
follow. So a leader has the ability to command as long as those who
follow feel that their own concers and interests are aligned with the
leader.

Ideally leaders
cut throught situations where the group faces a prisoners and
volunteers dillemma, these are occassions where rational self
interest can burden a group instead of benefit it. Leaders are needed
when coordination and discipline are needed to achieve goals that
cannot be otherwise achieved individually.

As to how leaders
achieve the goals thrust upon her by her followers depends on her
tools and approach. Still there is a skill to being a leader, apart
from understanding her role and responsibility, there are techniques
that take practice and situations to she learns to see and react to
appropriately.

Lets go to
the Game Use.

Leadership is
handling those who follow you. Leadership does not act like an Aura
effect, its not something that works purely through the “projection”
of a stature or a management perception. Its more of a mechanism for
the maintenance of credibility and perservation of loyalty.

As said before,
Leadership is not an aura effect. The leaders doesn’t just posture
and radiate some kind of infectious affliction that causes people to
act irrationally contrary to their self interest (for that use some
other skill). Because it is a mechanism of maintaining one’s
credibility and authority, it can only process a finite amount of
individuals.

A leader, can
maintain her credibility to a number of individuals equal to her
leadership score. Normally, a person without a leadership skill can
maintain IQ-5 or an average person can hold the confidence of 5
people at default. Default level of individuals, assume the character
has not spent any point in the skill, are not chosen by the player
but are those individuals who would most likely listen to this
character. These typically be family and friends, and in odd
situations not family and friends but only one’s own professional
colegues or peers. The GM gets to choose, and sometimes it may not be
obvious to the player or the character who’se loyalty they begin the
game with.

When a character
spends cp, then she can command the loyalty (by making herself more
credible) to inviduals she is choosing. This assumes the character
tries to exercise her leadership among these people. With one cp, a
character gains 4 people more loyal to her (from default of IQ-5 to
IQ-1 at 1cp) . Every additional level means the character can work to
maintain one other person.

Leadership is like
building a rapport, there is some capital to be spent (time, effort,
compassion, empathy, and sometimes material resouces) when
cultivating an individual. A character is free to realocate who she
cultivates. As a character gets better as a leader, she can cultivate
more people at any one time.

A character with
Leadership IQ+2 [8cp] can cultivate 6 people with the same amount of
time an IQ-1 [1] cultivates 4 people.

A character can
choose to stop maintaining the loyaty of an individual. Where this
relationship goes depends on circumstance. If the character wants to
maintain this, then she will have to allocate some time and resources
to maintain these.

The time the
leader uses to maintain the loyalty of indivuals in game terms does
not count in the time allocation. Consider the time used by the
leader to cultivate her followers a “free” number of hours, this
does not affect her task sheet. Of course. Ideally the leader is
frequently exposed to these individuals, at least a few hours in a
week.

Effects of
Loyalty (or relationships).

To keep things
simple, the GM can keep a loyalty score based on B518 loyalty of
hirelings (which uses the reaction table in B560). Players can give
their own Loyalty score to the GM as part of roleplaying and to hint
at the party dynamics. The GM can impose, the way she imposes a
player to role-play a situation, that the player role-play the
effects of the other PC’s leadership.

Every session the
GM can ask the players how events of the session affect their Loyalty
Score sheet (a list of the other players and how they feel about
them).

Among Players,
Loyalty and Leadership is very interesting thing to role-play and
watch. Its where a lot of drama can be found and a lot of intersting
decisions make for a very engaging story.

Among NPCs,
Leadership is a handy tool to survive or to thrive in a situation by
allowing the player to have sentient assets help her in overcoming
the challenge. Of course these are not merely material assets to be
discarded, these are sentient assets.

Leaders aren’t
always Awesome.

A character can be
loyal to a leader out of respect (the most basic requirement). Other
characters can admire, be enamored, trust, faith in the leader.
Leaders aren’t always necessarily awesome in the eyes of
those who follow her commands. 

Sacrificing
Credibility or Political Capital.

Leaders who damage
their credibility can incur a lasting penalty to their leadership
score. Credibility is hard to recover, because once trust is broken
it sets a precedent that cannot be easily ignored or overlooked.

Betreyals are very
damaging to the character, despite how skilled she is as a leader.
Such an act can make such huge investments of social/political
capital worthless in a blink of an eye. The more a leader has
invested in people, the more he or she stands to gain (or to lose) if
this betreyal is discovered. 

Other ways of
getting people to do what you want them to do.

Note that now and
then, in order to maintain the effect, let us call the leader as the
“Tyrant”, has to beat up the person or persons randomly to
put them in a perpetual state of confusion and paranoia. Unlike
leadership, there is a long drawn out contest of wills in this
situation.

One cannot be a
Tyrant and maintain her credibility as a leader without segregating
the two spheres of people.

Other than fear,
Lies and Confusion is a ways of creating and maintaining loyalty.
I would imagine Fast Talk would be used for
this tool. Again like Intimdation, the spheres cannot mix (if done so
credibility is put to question). Similar to intimidation there is a
long drawn out contest of wits, instead of wills, in this situation.
If we were to follow the study of the book The wisdom of
crowds for every other additional individual, (since skill
just increases the amount of people to be tricked without increasing
the amount of time to maintain status quo), there is a +1 bonus for
everyone to their IQ roll to see through the deceptions/or the
fudginess of the argument.

Some note
the Game Definition and the Real World Definition. 

Game definition
can be twisted and has loop holes to begging to exploited. If taken
as dogma, then it can be argued either way because it is after all an
simple and imperfect definition created for the purposes of a pushing
her