First off, thanks to everyone that helped out with ideas for the Chopper, Brainer, and Hocus. This week I’d like to discuss ideas on how a PLAYER can make the most out of the SKINNER playbook. What are some moves that you just love to use? What are some goals that Skinners should go for? What can a Skinner do in game that really gets the most out of the playbook?
Talk about how your Arresting Skinner move works when you buy it. Because if it is magic it can do a lot more things than if it is just fascinating expression.
The first thing that is not so apparent to people right off the bat, is that you ARE the most beautiful person in the fiction. Think about what that means, everyone is going to want you, probably. You have a lot of social power that leads to some personality types for players not really liking the playbook. So, I would discuss how the Skinner impacts the fiction with everyone and that they’re OK with that much attention. It’s a small thing but some people don’t think about how significant the Skinner is on the fiction and what it implies about all the other playbooks when it’s introduced.
Skinners are tough to play, that’s a fact. The act of being beautiful is difficult to portray, hard to think of as a weapon. Plus, the Skinner has no holding or gang, so they don’t have a known place in the world, so they lack pre-assumed drama.
Last time (years back) someone played a Skinner in my group, I gave them a free move that was something like:
My Perfect Flower
Choose a job: paramour, hooker, herald, diplomat…
Choose a patron/s: __
You share +1 Hx with your patron. When you do your job for your patron, take 1-barter. When you ask your patron to do something, they’ll do it in return for a free service. Your patron will protect you, to some degree, because you are their thing, or so they think.
Just to give them a place in the world. It worked out good, but I’m not saying the playbook needs it.
As for goals, the Skinner wants beauty. Which is interesting, beauty isn’t good or evil, it’s just opinion, which can lead to a Skinner thinking about things in a manner the rest of the survive-fuck-kill playbooks are.
For the Skinner is it better to be free in the waste or under a tyrant that lets you keep your museum of preserved pre-apocalypse motorbikes?
Skinner, Skinner, Skinner…
You’ve got me thinking about her. What, mechanically, is the Skinner anyway?
She’s a hypnotist, right? She forces people to do what she wants, and like it.
But she starts out without a gang, augury, any of that extra stuff.
So maybe the end goal of the Skinner is to rival another player, take what they’ve got, or something like it, with her abilities, she’s destinied to own people, to move away from performing and instead pull the strings. Yeah, that’s the playbook’s standard arc I think.
Goal 1: Seduce/manipulate a Gunlugger and/or Battlebabe into being your best friends/bodyguards
Goal 2: Wear all of their clothes on top of your clothes in layers, the more hats the better (this should not be difficult if you enthralled a battlebabe; he doesn’t need the clothing, anyway)
Goal 3: Use “arresting skinner” to lay waste to entire armies, forced to watch helpless as you remove your stacks of cowboy hats and triple-layered wool socks, and build a new empire of beauty from the carnage your buddyguards have wrought