Okay, probably there’s an obvious answer to this, but I’m unable to come up with it. The other night, one of my players circled up Aneas, an NPC he’d circled up before, with an Exp5 in Propaganda. Once he had Aneas there, he decided to play chess with him to get a test on his Strategy Games skill. We did a vs. test to see who won and I gave Aneas an Exp5 in Strategy Games. My reasoning was that affiliations give you people who have across-the-board Exponents, so maybe it should be the same for individual NPC’s?
On a related note, I was thinking about how to work DoW’s with NPC’s. What are their skills and exponents? Short of burning the NPC up, or using the pre-made guys in the back of the brick, what’s the procedure here, generally?
I’ve tended to handle social conflicts with unburned NPCs as versus tests, rather than DoWs. The NPC gets an attribute that ‘makes sense’ based on the NPCs age and station–that is, a rough swag based on the mental and physical pools from the lifepaths table.
What I’ve done when facing an unexpected DoW (no NPC burned up) is to give the NPC a main duelling skill (Persuasion or whatever) within an exponent or two of the PC, a Will score again based on the NPC’s age (maybe adding one or two if the NPC’s notional lifepaths could have added Mental points), and then ‘FORK’ in skills as they come up in the DOW dialogue. In other words, if the NPC winds up saying something like, “I know all the smuggling routes in this sector…” then he must have Smuggling. If she says, “you don’t know the people like I do…” then she must have Human-wise. This process is a little easier in BE than in BW I’d expect, since players can only fork in one -wise and one skill.
Mel
i think the stock answer is the NPC has the target exponent in the primary skill intended for the circles test (in this case Exp 5 Propaganda) all the rest of the skills are one or two exponents lower. usually, they have one other skill from the target lifepath. p. 626. if they circles the guy a second time, let them circles the guy for a different skill maybe. that’ll give them that exp 4 strategy games skill.