Unfamiliar replaced with Mind Trick

We were talking on OOC about how unfamiliar is kind of a silly undefined skill, waving your hand and making people forget their best friend of two years (for example).

A nice replacement for it would be mind trick, which is what seems like was originally intended with the whole ‘these are not the droids you’re looking for’ quick hand wave thing. It would basically be a force power cast alongside a simple statement against a players attributes/force levels. If it succeeds, the target has to play along with that statement.

This would naturally need to be regulated and be accompanied by a similar RP enforcement message like unfamiliar has.

Quick edit: There’d probably also need to be a cooldown so you couldn’t just repeatedly wave at people if you failed.

Example, feel ‘mind trick’ stormtrooper These are not the droids you’re looking for.

Obi-wan looks compellingly towards you and says, “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” You feel a strong urge that they are right about this.

And then the RP message <please play along yadayada unless it’s a gross misuse contact imms>

or if it fails.

Obi-wan looks compellingly towards you and says, “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” You’re not really sure what they’re talking about.

And there’d also have to be some immune races like Toydarian, hutt, defel if we follow canon. BAM!

Definitely better than that POS Unfamiliar. Just don’t give people a choice on wether or not they are weak minded, make it coded, and not entirely related on stats. Someone mentioned a hidden invisible one being worth 50% of the roll there…as well as the strength of the forcer. Could be a lot more awesome than idiotic “BAM” You forgot the dude you’ve hunted for 40 in game years at the drop of a hat.

As someone who has been on both sides of bullshit unfamiliar uses, I would much rather see something like this than seeing what I saw in Era 2, or doing what I did in Era 1.

Fix unfamiliar if it’s broken but having another thing for immortals to regulate is a step in the wrong direction.

Unfamiliar is broken in that its purpose is contradictory and its consequence undefined. The help file states that you forget a person’s dub. The skill, when used on you, gives you a firm warning that you forget everything you ever knew about the person, and if you do not RP accordingly, you will “end up in hot water with the staff” or something very similar to those words.

Unfamiliar is a skill which requires case by case allowances especially for instances where the person performing action is a well known figure across the entire game, but it currently does not do so. This is what needs to be fixed.

Modifying the skill so it is instead more like Altrez specified is a step in the right direction. It lets the idea of a Jedi mind trick actually be put to use in an adaptable way. If this idea is not implemented, then I suggest the skill be removed entirely. There are too many nuances to be adapted for that it requires and currently does not allow for.

At the very least, better define the extent of what it does. “You forget you saw this person here since your RP with them began”, “you forget that they mentioned they had an assassin who is going to kill the Chancellor tomorrow at 5 PM”, instead of “you forget everything about them. ever.” which frankly makes no sense, especially if they are a person you have RPed with for a considerable amount of time and have a history with them, or as earlier said, they are a well known public figure whose existence it does not make sense to entirely forget about.

You know, I could sit in a jail in full nudity as a Jedi and just ‘feel unfamiliar’ on everyone that enters the jail until nobody knows who the hell I am anymore and they are forced to just release me.

But really, Unfamiliar is one of the worst skills there is the moment someone decides to (ab)use it. I even look down on the sheer usage for it, and never ever actually used it.

Having a skill like Altrez suggested replace it would be a fast improvement. But, I would suggest sone slight additions to it.
While there are cases where there is an instant-fail to the skill, like using it on someone that has a strong ‘mind’ or on an immune race, those that are affected by it should be put on a secret timer, which could range as little as 60 seconds for those who ‘barely failed to resist’ to as much as a full hour for those who ‘stood not the slightest of chance’ Once this timer runs out, another message appears: “It suddenly dawns on you that you have somehow been tricked!”

If the force user that used mind trick is still in the same room when it dawns on the other, they should get a confirmation message aswell: ‘You sense your trick no longer affects -person-‘ This confirmation is for anti-cheating purposes only, as the other person could decide to just act like it passed after 2 minutes, while his secret timer still lasts 30 more minutes, and without a confirmation message it would be impossible for the force user to know if what the other did was legit, or not, without IMM support.

Slight edit: when a Jedi or another Jedi uses ‘Force revive’ on said person, the mind-clearing effect should immediately make them realise the trick.

In the end though, RP enforcement should be the same as with unfamiliar, except for a few cases.

– If a force user tricks you with a message such as ‘You feel you want to shoot yourself in the head’ you have all the right to ignore it and report it to an IMM.

-If a force user tricks you into blatantly breaking spyapp, such as ‘You want to steal and give me a navchart to hoth’ or ‘You want to kill your boss’, then ofcourse, you also have the full right to ignore it.

Because you cannot expect new players to know this, it should be listed in the RP enforcement message a player gets after it is used on them.

And I would also agree with Baxtalo, if Unfamiliar is not replaced with mind trick, just remove unfamiliar in its full extent.

Whilst I’m in favour of renaming the skill to Mind Trick and wiring in some form of resistance for the races canonically immune, I don’t believe it should operate different from how it does at the moment.

It’s already illegal to use it in any sort of combat capacity (see help unfamiliar) and there really isn’t any sort of widespread misuse to prompt a change.