Diplomacy Class Overhaul

Okay everyone. Time to talk about the elephant in the room, diplomats are a horrible class right now that have skills primarily focused on a very niche segment of the game (popular support) and not much else. Here are some ideas I’ve had. I recognize there will be a fair amount of pushback on some of these, but to be honest, nobody ever even tries to come up with ideas for Diplomats that I’ve seen, so I figured I would give it a shot, all of these ideas are subject to further refinement.

Diplomats represent those characters with highly developed social skills who specialize in influencing and persuading others. I view them as being the “faces” of a criminal crew, the merchants, and so forth. Many of the galaxy’s most powerful figures could probably be classified as diplomats.

Specific Examples: Leia Organa, Padme Amidala, Chancellor Palpatine, Prince Xizor, Jabba the Hutt, Bail Organa
Example Professions: Politicians, Negotiators, Salesmen, Diplomats, Merchants, Holostars, Business Executives, Swindlers, News Anchors, and any other profession that relies on effectively communicating with others

Skills

Advanced Disguise
“I am Queen Amidala.”
-Padme, Queen’s Handmaiden

The Diplomat has become so skilled at social manipulation, feigning emotion, and compartmentalizing their true feelings that they’re able to disguise themselves as someone completely different, assuming an alternate identity. Take this skill away from smugglers next timeline, in the movies we have Leia disguised as Boushh, Sidious/Palpatine, Padme/Amidala, etc. On the other hand, we have Han (smuggler) doing a crappy job disguising himself as a stormtrooper.

ReadPerson
“Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” 
-Princess Leia
The diplomat’s experience in reading people allows them to discern inconsistent behaviors, tells, and giveaways to perceive when someone is trying to deceive them. Provides the same benefits as TrueExamine.

Wealth
[Describing Princess Leia] “…She’s rich.”
-Luke Skywalker
Through family business, shrewd investments, or independent wealth, this skill confers a chance to earn 6x the normal interest rate on your bank account.

Negotiate
50,000. No Less.
-Princess Leia (Disguised as Boushh)
The Diplomat is a gifted negotiator, and is able to make 5-25% more off of sold items (including cargo) as well as getting a 5-25% discount on purchases, even on player-owned vendors.

Linguistics
Through careful study of linguistic patterns and body language, it is possible for you to learn languages by listening as someone else speaks it.
– chance to gain skill in a language whenever you hear it

EscapeJail
“I’m Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue you!”
“You’re who?”
-Luke and Leia

Whether it’s diplomatic immunity, old friends, or contacts in the opposing government, the character has developed enough connections to get out of jail. Costs a variable amount of money depending on charisma and has a week-long cooldown.

Also, it should be noted, more ideas for skills would be great. I recognize that none of these alone makes the diplomat a particularly compelling class to play. I just wanted to open this up for discussion and brainstorming.

anything to give the diplomat class a reason to exist. as it stands it’s like doctor in that there’s almost no reason to actually roll a doctor because it’s not that hard to pick a much more useful class/race combo that gets enough diplo levels to pick up all the useful skills, so adding stuff like this to spice up the class would be excellent.

A few notes:

Advanced_disguise:  There is some good reasoning by this and I’d be totally down with this being more of a synergistic skill for the more diplomatic of smugglers, or even leadership smugglers etc. It would create a lot more dynamic builds, which I’m a fan of.

ReadPerson: I don’t like the idea of just making a carbon copy of true_examine for diplomats. This could be a watered down version of true_examine though, it could just tell you if the person is disguised or not, not what their actual race is.

Wealth: A question more than a note, this is intended to be a passive that would have a failure/success rate every time you hit interest?

Negotiate: I would be interested in seeing this as a feat that is an upgraded version of salesman, or retuning salesman to this level. Salesman is pretty pitiful how it is currently.

Linguistics: Is this intended to exceed the language cap?

EscapeJail: I don’t like this for reasons you and I have discussed previously. This is something that should be accomplished through roleplay. If I knew that there was someone who was going to use this skill 100%, I’d be more inclined to just perm them outright than let them sit in jail. That’s just what my reaction would be.

Thanks!

I was thinking wealth would be a passive skill with a chance of success based on your percentage. The lower percentage indicates that your side business/investment is just getting off the ground and isn’t providing consistent ROI yet. Or perhaps just make it a feat so it always works.

Good call on read person. Also, right now when someone greets as a different name, I heard the name shows up as a different color. Maybe eliminate that except for diplomats with this skill, along with an echo “You get the feeling that this person is lying about their identity.”

Linguistics – Honestly this is a half-baked idea. Maybe combine the communicator feats into one feat and rename it “Linguist”, then it’s a solid feat purchase, I think.

EscapeJail – I would argue that you killing someone because you think they’re just going to escape from jail actually makes things a lot more interesting because it would force some characters to have to justify it ICly, especially if they’re in the Republic and the criminal was supposed to be tried. I dunno though, you could be right. I just view it as a great way for diplomats to work the system “I SURRENDER, DON’T SHOOT! (suckers…)”

I don’t like escape jail because it is already easy enough to escape/get broken out as is.

I would love for there to be a reason for high diplo in the sales from Engineering clans/crime clans selling spice 😉 For example, Vendor discount for diplomat mains/people with a certain salesman feat. Including Clanvendor. Not sure I like the idea of selling for more, simply because it’s already pretty easy to amass credits. Though if people want more, perhaps rolling high diplo and using a feat is okay balance.

Anyways my main response to this is that I really, really would love to see bonuses to diplo mains/leader diplos that want to be salespeople for a clan. I am unsure how the player to player aspect of this will work, but I just want to encourage other people to think about it too.

“Good call on read person. Also, right now when someone greets as a different name, I heard the name shows up as a different color. Maybe eliminate that except for diplomats with this skill, along with an echo “You get the feeling that this person is lying about their identity.”

It displays the same as an unset publictitle. I purposely don’t set my publictitle on most of my characters to mess with people who make this assumption. You can’t tell if someone is disguised or greeting as a different name by this alone.

I like the linguist perk.  To extend on the idea, everytime you hear a language, you have a chance to gain a percent.  That percent is meant that you will only understand the language, not speak it.   I think wealth could be more of a passive perk.  Then you could have a set percentage of a chance everytime interest rolls around.  I agree with the remarks for advanced disguise, readperson, and escapejail.  All in all, I am a fan of the majority of the ideas, and you make a fine argument with your in-movie examples.

While I would love to have more tools at a diplomat’s disposal, I think you’re overlooking something about Advanced Disguise.

You reference Han having a hard time disguising himself as an Imperial Stormtrooper. He may have botched his disguise in A New Hope, but think about what he was doing in Return of the Jedi. Han disguised both as an Imperial shuttle pilot and an Imperial AT-ST- pilot, both times quite successfully. Perhaps if both Diplomacy and Smuggling had access to those, that would be fine. Though I’m sure some will say “Nu-uh! Then they’ll both feel the same!”.

How does that subvert the suggestion? Anyone can change their text color and hail someone from inside a vehicle or ship. Passing physical inspection is way different.

It subverts removing it from smugglers. Han didn’t just get by an inspection point in the shuttle, he was convincing enough as an Imperial pilot to gain clearance to the Death Star shield generator. Sure, faking as one of the ground troops was probably easier, I’ll give you that.

If you do take away advanced disguise from smugglers, let them fake transponder so someone looking up their ship gets false information.

Cronlan:

It’s interesting you bring this up, because I had another version of the Diplomat I was working on that was geared towards being a merchant. I don’t have these ideas nearly as polished, but I’ll throw them out there, because I do believe there could be some possibilities

Diplomat as a Merchant (Perhaps rename to Merchant)

Most of these ideas revolve around turning the purchase and placement of vendors into merchant skills, with higher levels providing increasingly sophisticated vendor functionality. Although anyone with a few merchant levels can set up a basic shop, high level merchants represent those characters who have extensive training in managing all aspects of a business, like being able to:

remotely stock a merchant from far away (using couriers and your warehouse, along with upgrademerchant see below)

remotely check your vendor from any location – shows the credits on hand, stock levels, etc if the appropriate upgrade is installed at a storefront

transfer stock from one store to another remotely

Allow higher level merchants to own and operate an increasing number of storefronts

Allow merchants to upgradevendor which is costly but allows the Vendor to hold onto more credits, carry more inventory, offer more items, save on taxes (representing specialized knowledge of planetary tax codes), enable them to be remotely stocked (receiving yard) and inventory checked (inventory management system), perhaps provide increased security, etcetera.

I don’t know how all of this would interact with clanvendors, in fact it was the introduction of clanvendors that made me back off of these ideas because I realize that there would probably be some people complaining about making vendors merchant-class specific, even though I think it would be fantastic.

Other Merchant skills ideas:

Warehouse and Fetch – the merchant maintains a big warehouse/secret stash (basically a locker that can be accessed from any location). using the ‘warehouse’ command without any arguments shows the contents of the warehouse (like a locker), using warehouse <item> hires a courier to take the item away and stash it in your warehouse. Using the ‘fetch’ command hires a courier to grab something from the warehouse and bring it to you. The idea here is that it allows a merchant to stock up on a variety of merchandise so that the next time someone is asking for a translator or a jetpack on public comms, they can capitalize on the opportunity.

Fence – The merchant is able to pawn off items without being in a pawnshop. Perhaps for less credits. Basically he calls on one of his business contacts who serves as a fence. Maybe make it so that the fence skill is influenced by the aforementioned negotiate skill, wherein the better you get at negotiating, the more you can make off of common goods.

Appraise – approximates the credit value of an item if it were to be fenced

POSSIBLE ROLES OF MERCHANTS IN LOTJ

They could act as distributors for Engineering firms, buying products in bulk from the Engineers and stocking their vendors.

Engineers could still go direct to the customer if they want to, but without a lot of merchant levels, their businesses will struggle to keep up with high level merchants in terms of efficiency and ease of access. I would argue that in most cases, we should probably steer clear of having characters running around with high merchant levels AND high engineering levels. One represents the brains and technical mindedness, the other represents social skills and street smarts, although they can be found in the same person occasionally, there is a very good reason why most big companies have sales departments separate from engineering and manufacturing.

I could see a number of merchants going to war against each other for control of prime commercial real estate. You could expect to see Merchants reach similar amounts of wealth as engineers. Because of their ability to store and retrieve items remotely, as well as cash in on pretty much any item at any time via fence, they would probably wind up gaining IC contacts pretty quickly due to their utility in providing inventory on demand.

One other idea I just had RE: Merchant Skills

CommercialAccount

Represents a significant upgrade to your bank account which allows other characters to transfer credits directly from their bank account into yours. Also earns a higher interest rate than a standard bank account.

This could be added kind of like a side set for diplomacy.  Much like Leadership has a secondary skill set, Diplo can have secondary skill sets.

For the sake of bouncing ideas off the wall I feel like these finance-related commands would be best suited as merging with science.

Fun LOTJ Fact: What eventually became known as the science class began as ‘industry’ and focused around player vendors