The point of my post though, is the basic combat system is point and swing. However, you get various manuevers, techniques, talents and weapon modifiers and situational modifiers to the roll.

Take DC Heroes for example. They have several different styles of character inteaction that allows a character to use different attributes for different styles of intimidation, charm and so forth. There is charming by tricking your opponent, which is INT, there is charming by using your charm which is FEL, there is charming by convincing your opponent which faces his WP. There is intellectual intimidation as well and physical intimidation.

And yes, they do overlap from time to time. Charm, blather, barted, inquiry, interrogation. But so do scatter, semi auto, full auto, dual shot, two weapon weilding and so forth.

So the skeleton of a more involved system is there, it is the same skeleton as combat. Roll against skill, succeed or not. But results of combat are more defined. I dont want 100% defined results for interaction, but players react better and more positive to taking those kind of skills if they know that they have an actual affect, other then an arbitrary GM response.

And it wouldnt take pages after pages of rules to cover this. 2-4 tops. And remember, as you said, the combat rules had how many pages of errata?

Peacekeeper_b said:

And in DH you have three skills that use three different attributes - charm, interrogation and intimidation.  In effect, skill bloat - multiple skills that do the same thing.  At least combat skills actually do different things and several of those you listed are weapon attributes, which is a different matter.

Peacekeeper_b said:

I might be misunderstanding but isn't that, getting player & GM input into the success of the skill use, what you were arguing against earlier where the character is better at the skill than the player is?  The problem with interactions, in all games, is that you have character input which is objective and player input which is subjective.  You can only make rules for the former and the latter can get pretty problematic.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Which is more a result of poor proofreading.  2-4 pages on interaction would be a waste of space imo.

That is your opinion and you are welcome to it and I like hearing it. But I will still disagree.

And yes, you misunderstood me. Naturally I dont want rules to control 100% what interaction has as I do want my players to be able to role play and play there characters as they wish without rules getting too much in the way. But I want them to feel there is a purpose to spending 250 points for +5 fellowship and 100 points for inquiry instead of, well if we meddle enough the GM will lead us along anyway.

And i agree that they do seem to overlap, the same way as having 33 different autoguns with an average variant of 1 to damage being the only real difference. Why do they have 33 autoguns? for flavor. Same as I want to see some guidelines for investigation and interaction techniques and methods. Variety, flavor, something different. If you argument is against overlap, then as I said above, that is a bigger flaw in combat then anything. Weapons all do the same thing, just slightly different in how and why. Do I want less weapons and equipment...HELL TO THE FELLIN NO! But I like my players to have options.

Case in point. The game this weekend, a player tried to intimidate a ganger and failed. The second player started to make generalized threats of what the inquisition can do to him, his gang, his family, his soul and various apsects of his body. He described in detail (very well I might add) what could happen in a tnterrogation room. He went to roll his Intimidation but only has a strength of 28. I ruled that that was more of a bluff/threat based on knowledge and fear not strength and let him base it on his Fellowship instead. Now yes, I can easily do that on my own, and dont need rules for it in the book, but Im just saying it would be nice to see that kind of thought that went into combat go into investigating and interaction.

If my player says he wants to be a sarcastic jerk with a quick wit then I expect him to try to play that as best as he can. I also want to encourage him to take skills that allow him to emulate that and not feel that he wasted them when he could have taken "Super Hyukin Shot" talents.

I do understand your points and I do agree to an extent. I think in the end when I write up my own house rules for these subjects you will be pleasantly surprised at how much they dont interfer with the game. Heck I used them for years in DC Heroes.

The additional notes at the end of the Inquisitor's Handbook have some great rules to add usefulness to non-combat skills. Multiple uses for Charm, Scrutiny, Intimidate, Command etc...

Like how passing a Scholastic Lore (Judgment) skill test will give the PC a bonus of +10 to their next Intimidate and/or Interrogation test. Which is pretty neat, I must say.

Luckily, none of my friends are super anal-retentive rule nazis, and will allow such things as using Fellowship or Intelligence for an Intimidation skill test for particularly well described scenes. That kind of thing just makes sense!