Influence

From SCMage

Influence is a combination of allies, contacts, and status. It’s what you use to control, use, and be informed about a specific area of society.

How do I get influence?

As influence is an amalgam of all of the above, you can get influence in several ways. If you are a part of a section of society (ie, you would have some sort of status there normally), you can use your role in that section as influence. Getting higher positions in that section of society then allows you to control more and know more, and so you would end up with more influence. If you know someone, it works similarly - knowing more powerful people means you have more influence. Knowing more people in that area in general also allows you to have more influence. Working on meeting people or improving your own standing in an area is a way to boost your influence in that area.

But there’s a catch. Each domain of influence has a cap. There’s only so much Transportation influence in an area (for example), because there’s only so many truckers, shippers, and truck depots in town. In fact there’s not a whole lot in the area, so the overall cap for something like Transportation is low. In other areas, like Politics, there are tons of influence in the area as Lansing is the state capitol and there are plenty of politicians to bribe. In each domain, there are only a certain number of dots available.

Total dots? Why not X numbers of 5-dots, Y of 4-dots, Z of 3-dots available and so on? Well, for one it’s a little simpler for us to track. But influence is also not as powerful when it is spread among many people. If four of us each know one professor at the university, for example, we’d have much less power than if one person knew all four and could use them to all lobby the university in a combined effort.

What happens when someone hits a cap?

You look around in your area of influence and realize that there’s no one left for you to talk to. Everyone is already reporting or being controlled by someone else. You can’t buy more dots in that area.

But I really want to be the King of High Society!!

Well, there are ways of changing the cap. The first way is to expand and enlarge that area of influence. High Society is capped? Well, why don’t you work on building a new Theatre in town, or bring in some celebrities, or funnel more money to the arts in town? (Some of those might take a while to have an impact, though.) Church influence capped for you and you aren’t the Pope yet? Well, start building churches, convert more heathens, show your church-leader that Lansing is a holy place. As long as you can justify that your preferred area of influence now has a bigger impact in society, you can probably justify increasing the cap on that influence.

The other way is... more tricky. Sometimes easier, sometimes not. It involves knocking down other peoples’ influences. Because if they don’t have their influence, it’s free for you to snatch up!

How do I knock down other people’s influences?

Well, first you have to figure out *who* else has influence in your chosen domain. Figure out who is the power (ie, where the influence dots are) and who owns the power (ie, who holds those influence dots), and you can start working on removing that power and moving it to yourself.

Finding those people who are the influence is usually pretty simple. Picking out members of an organization is a good way of finding out the low levels of influence. The leaders of an organization are those with higher levels of influence. Spending a downtime action using your influence allows you to find a person in that organization with the amount of influence you want.

Finding out who is *behind* those influence-people is harder. Those people usually don’t want to be known. Spending downtime actions equal to double the total influence the person you are targeting will allow you to slowly, slowly ferret out who is behind something. You may not know how much total influence that person has though - you may be trying to get to influence lvl 3 but they may already have 4, so it will take 8 influence actions to figure out who it is... though you don’t know that to begin with. It just goes as long as it takes as long as you are willing to keep devoting the time. They can defend against these attacks as well - if they spend their downtime actions simply defending their influence from intrusion, they can lead you off-track. Their downtime actions spent on defense subtract from actions trying to infiltrate. Or they can simply spend their downtime seeing if anyone is attempting to look at them. If they spend more influence downtimes investigating than you spend infiltrating, they can figure out that something is going on (although not necessarily who).

And sometimes finding who is holding the influence doesn’t do you a whole lot of good. You end up just finding someone’s retainer - someone who is controlling that person’s influence for them. Going from retainer to the person behind the retainer takes the same amount of time as finding the retainer itself - they’ve done a lot of work to hide themselves.

Retainers?

Sure. If you have a 3-dot influence, you could buy a 3-dot retainer to control it for you. This is important for people who don’t want to have any actual contact with society, like those with Occultation. (This is not relevant to most players.)

Wow, that seems like a lot of work! Once I find them, what can I do?

Once you’ve identified who you want to take down, you can start removing the bases of their influence. Embroil their politician in a scandal, so his influence goes down. Get their professor fired and replaced with one you are more friendly with. Have their church rezoned and demolished, then put up a new one. (If you just left the church demolished, those influence points would be gone and the cap lowered, since there is less total influence in the city then.) Kill their underworld goons. Sweep their street contacts into rehab and off the streets. Etc, etc. Once you’ve knocked someone else down, you can then build up your own influence in their place.

Do I really have to find out who owns the influence first?

Of course not! If you want to ruin someone’s day by putting out propaganda that their music star is really a pedophile, and so the other person loses high society influence that way, you don’t really have to know who is behind that influence. You could take over an occult group without really knowing who their previous secret master was. However, that person is going to know that something just happened to *their* influence, and they’re probably going to want it back. You don’t know who that person is. It could be another player. A friend! Or an enemy. You don’t know! But they’re probably not going to be happy, that’s for sure!

Oh no, I’ve been attacked! My influence has gone down, have I lost experience for it?

No, I think that would be too harsh. You don’t lose the experience permanently. Instead, you have “virtual dots” in that influence that will re-appear without cost whenever you get that level of influence back. Lets say you had Health 3, but after being demoted from Head Doctor to Janitor by some shady individual you ended up with Health 1. If you ever moved back to Health 2, you’d get that dot back without paying for it. Same for Health 3. But you couldn’t use those dots in other areas of influence. Basically, it’s easier to rebuild networks and influences than it is to start from scratch somewhere new.