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Intimidate as Mechanics.
An Intimidate check can influence others through hostile actions, overt threats, and deadly persuasion in combat encounters or as part of a skill challenge. An Intimidate check is made against a target’s Will defense or a level-appropriate DC. The target’s general attitude toward you and other conditional modifiers (such as what you might be seeking to accomplish or what you’re asking for) might apply to the DC by DM’s discretion.
In combat, you can make a check of Intimidate vs. Will to force a bloodied foe to surrender as a standard action. The target must be able to see and hear you. If you can’t speak a language your target understands, you take a –5 penalty to your check. There are also additional modifiers to the enemy’s Will based on its attitude towards you (+5 if Unfriendly, +10 if openly Hostile). If you attempt to intimidate multiple enemies at once, make a separate Intimidate check against each enemy’s Will defense.
Let’s first talk about the math of the Intimidate check for a moment, eh? Per the most recent updates, a monster’s Will Defense is equal to it’s level + 12. Now tag another +10 on top of that (since it’s reasonable to assume that most things you’re swinging a sword at are Hostile) and you’re looking at a static, normalized (level-independent) DC of 22. A PC’s Intimidate bonus, though, only scales every other level and, unlike weapon or armor, usually gets no enhancement bonuses. This means a character trained in Intimidate and packing an 18 CHA as a to-hit stat at level 1 has a normalized Intimidate bonus of +8 (5 + 4 -1), requiring a roll of 14 to succeed. That’s a 35% chance of success and probably not a bad choice to save yourself the time and resources of actually defeating the foe. However, by level 10 that same character has only a normalized +5 (5 + 5 + 5-10) Intimidate bonus meaning you now need a 17 or better; a pathetic 20% chance. As you increase in level, the problem gets worse – at level 20, your normalized bonus is an abyssmal +1 (5 + 6 + 10 – 20) essentially making the action impossible without help or a natural 20. If you have backgrounds that increase your Intimidate check, that can stave off the drop for a couple more levels but doesn’t ultimately solve the “problem” of making the Intimidate check a uniformly viable option at all levels. You’re still going to ‘lose’ about -3 to the required roll per Tier. The basic math behind it is screwy and is a textbook case for why skills and combat stats don’t mix, generally speaking. Sure, there are ways to CharOp for Intimidate; a Social Outcast Drow Star Pact Warlock with the proper equipment can throw down a normalized +13 for most of his adventuring life without thinking, for example. On the other hand, you can also rack up enough Aid Another attempts and floating bonuses to get around it but either way it’s not something a character is just going to be able to pull off most of the time without some forethought.
Now consider what happens if you’re not a talky-focused character – say a Minotaur Fighter with a 10 CHA and no training. You’re already starting with a normalized -1 bonus and it only gets worse from there. Despite the fact that you’re a giant 7′ slab of beef (literally!) wielding a fullblade, that wimpy little caster over there is simply not going to give up. HUNH?? This brings up an important point about Intimidate – it is CHA based, thus making it a speech skill. That seems obvious, but think about it again. Intimidate – as written – is the ability to talk your enemy into surrendering. This is a move for strong personality types like the Bard and Warlock. If you want your Fighter to be physically imposing enough to cow his (or her) enemies, you’ll need to use a different skill. Allow me to suggest Athletics (throwing things or people around, acts of strength) or Endurance (staring the enemy down) as alternate skills to let the more physical classes produce the same effect. You will still have to contend with the scaling issues, but you’re way more ahead of the game than you were before.
***SIDE QUEST*** While only partially relevant, I’d like to clear something up for the 4E folks out there who miss disarming. Intimidate is where your disarm mechanic went. Don’t believe me? When you disarm a foe, what happens? Either the enemy goes after the weapon and picks it up (or just draws a new one) and you’re back where you started OR (s)he is out the fight and you get their weapon. It’s essentially a binary state. So if you have a power that either pushes or slides, there’s half of your disarm. Intimidating a bloodied foe is the other half. ***END SIDE QUEST XP: +100***
The final aspect to what on first glance looks like a relatively simple mechanic here is “how often should a forced surrender be occurring my game?” Is it common to have enemies ‘defeated’ like this? Just how bloodthirsty IS the campaign setting? Removing an enemy from play at Bloodied is going to severely cut down on the resources required for the PCs to complete an encounter, thus extending the “workday.” Conversely, you may be running encounters where enemies are either too dumb to retreat or have legitimately good reason to fight to the death. A campaign can be made to seem a lot more ‘civilized’ if a notable quantity of enemies can be made to surrender rather than be killed.
Intimidate as Platform
Who are the folks trained in Intimidate and why?
Intimidate is the fine art of instilling fear, confusion, submission and maybe even guilt in your target. Unlike many of the skills we’ve just covered the last few weeks, Intimidate is not usually something you are taught to do. Your character might be a Bully who learned to be Intimidating on his or her own. You could be Scary-Looking or wield Blasphemous, Unnatural Powers that augment whatever speaking ability you might possess. It may also be that your character has simply Had It Up to Here with some phenomena or person(s) and is going to vent that frustration.
Some organizations, however, do in fact teach Intimidation. Organized Crime, Military (yes.. again), Competitive Business, even some Team Sports have distinct and teachable methods of intimidation or at least psychological warfare. Any profession in which a character needs to be able to diminish or step on somebody else to get ahead, that profession probably has members trained in Intimidate.
As a speech-based skill, it’s worth noting that not all Intimidation is “I’m gonna kick your @$$.” If a character is going to explain to someone else just how much trouble they’re in due to whatever situation, that also counts as Intimidation. Therefore your Hellfire Evangelists and Strict Teachers need Intimidate to put the fear of god (maybe literally!) into their audience. Don’t leave out the possibility that your character is a Penitent Transgressor who’s gotten really good at explaining his or her life story, the horrible decisions that led down a dark path and why the fledgling necromancer you just caught should put away the blood vials and go get a real job before he gets eaten by his own zombies.
Intimidate as Sense
Like Endurance is a blockage of sensory input or internal signals, Intimidation is the forcing of such things onto another character. As such, it leaves little room for perception.. but only while the Intimidation is occurring. Normally you would expect to use Insight to tell how any given NPC feels about you or what their intentions towards you are. The very nature of Insight, though, is that it is vague. It’s all feelings and hunches and such most of the time. Insight might tell you “this NPC likes us,” but how much? Conversely, you might learn that an NPC is lying to you, but why? Where Insight is merely observation, Intimidate is a probe. A successful Intimidation check forces an NPC to take action and that action is likely to be far more readily interpreted than what you picked up from Insight.
For example, imagine running into a group of nomadic Elves in a forest somewhere. Your group’s Cleric turns on the Insight and gets the impression that the Elves are wary of you. So what does that mean? Maybe the nomads themselves don’t even know yet. A character trained in Intimidation doesn’t wait around for answers to just show up. The best way to get something done is to do it yourself. Thus the Barbarian steps forward and tells the nomads that “a mated pair of owlbears has been seen around here recently so if you don’t get a move on, expect your tribesmen’s bones to get coughed up in a really big pellet somewhere.” Convinced of the threat, what do the Elves do? Do they ask your for help? Do they think you brought the owlbears here? Do they assure you they will attend to the matter and move on? By spurring the NPCs to action against a threat, the party has found out just how hostile or trusting ‘wary’ is, exactly.
Now to be sure, there is something of an ‘uncertainty principle’ involved. Sort of like how, according to Heisenberg, the position of a particle can’t be known if its velocity is known, spurring on NPCs to action via Intimidate biases the reaction somewhat. In the example above, the Elves’ reaction to the owlbears now colors their reaction to the PCs. That initial impression or ‘position’ is lost in the ‘velocity’ of their action. Still, when a social encounter has come to a standstill, Intimidate is your #1 choice for getting things moving again – just don’t always expect to know which direction that is. Intimidate is sensing not by observation, but by provocation.
Intimidate as Social Skill
Intimidate has something of a reputation for being a situational skill, not always useful or beneficial in a social encounter. Though I have no way to prove this, I would be willing to guess it has to do with many of the early skill challenges that WotC put out in which Intimidation was an automatic failure. Most if not all of these challenges assumed that an Intimidate check symbolized the PCs threatening to do violence to the target which, as we’ve seen here, is only the base use of the skill. Were that the case, then yes, Intimidating the Duke is probably a really terrible idea and will get you thrown in a cell somewhere if not killed on sight. Then again, if the orc army is approaching and the Duke isn’t taking it seriously, what skill should you use? Diplomacy is the ability to “spin” information or ingratiate yourself (positive feelings) with the target. That could work, but it seems less than optimal. Bluff is about not giving away body language cues (neutral feelings) while talking and you sure as heck WANT to use every method available to you to convince the Duke of trouble so that really doesn’t seem right either. That leaves us with Intimidate as the clear skill of choice in this situation. Also recall that Intimidation doesn’t need to be in-your-face or boisterous. You could say “If you don’t organize help now, that whole town is going to die!” in a tone that is pleading, grim, or coldly calculating just as easily as walking up to the guy and poking your finger into his chest. They’re all provoking action and trying to instill negative feelings in the target, thus they are all Intimidation checks.
Hope you enjoyed that breakdown of Intimidate! Next week: Insight.
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Ryven Cedrylle was introduced to 2nd edition D&D by his father at age 8 and has been hooked ever since. When not out somewhere with his nerd-loving wife, he spends an inordinate amount of time staring at small objects - primarily beakers, stars, books about religion and virtual gaming miniatures. Follow him on Twitter for previews of upcoming material and random nuggets of wit!
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I’d like to point out that it actually does kind of make sense that it gets harder and harder to intimidate a monster of equal level to you as you reach higher levels. A very high-level monster… level 10 or 20, would be very confident in its abilities and powers. Even against someone of equal level, it has the experience and self-assurance to assume that it can still win the fight. The higher the level of the monster, the stronger its inner confidence should be, and thus the more challenging it would be to intimidate it by any means. On the other hand, a level 1 monster might not be so confident in its abilities, and thus a level 1 player with a strong show of force or confidence in his or herself would have a better chance of intimidating someone.
However, as you level up your ability to intimidate less-powerful creatures does increase greatly. The point being, it’s easier to intimidate someone when you actually are a dangerous threat to them.
Intimidate really bothers me, as written. Partially it’s the reasons you’ve demonstrated, and partially it’s that so many DMs auto-fail you for rolling intimidate in a skill challenge. I recognize that menacing someone you’re trying to work with isn’t the -best- business strategy, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work in the short term.
Personally, I remove the hostile penalty altogether. There might be very specific monsters who are so paranoid that they won’t stand down when presented with a clear show of force, but I think they’d be the exception. I also provide players with a modifier to their roll based on the health of the target: a target at full health grants them a =5 penalty (he’s not scared of you, you haven’t hurt him). One hurt but not bloodied is a base roll; and then the bonus increases by 5 at bloodied and 5 more at under a quarter hp.
To keep that from letting high-intimidate PCs just end every fight, though, I treat the skill as closer to a bluff; it gets a hesitation and CA out of a target if you barely beat their will, but larger and more significant bonuses the higher the net roll is.
Basically, I hate to see any skill under served (which is why I enjoy this series so much) and felt that Intimidate needed an overhaul.
I don’t see why all Charisma skills must be speech-based. Diplomacy surely is, but Intimidate needn’t be, any more than Bluff must be. Even if you’re intimidating with a show of strength, a big part of it is knowing how to communicate that that show of strength is a threat, and that’s Charisma.
@Wolfie – While I see your point, does it really make sense either to have an Epic level monster – say an Ancient Blue Dragon – fighting to the death out of pride? Level has nothing to do with confidence. Level is raw power and those with power seek to keep that power. It seems far more reasonable to me that a Beholder Tyrant who’s getting his proverbial (but not anatomical?) butt handed to him would stop and try to bargain with the PCs for his life. Even if she’s too prideful to actually surrender, she still might feign submission until a more opportune time to resume hostility. Nothing says the enemy has to give up forever; after the next short rest (read: “end of the current scene”) it might be on again in a more advantageous position. Since the PCs’ power is roughly evenly matched to the enemies’ throughout the span of levels, it seems to me that the chance for surrender ought to be relatively static as well.
@Powers. Intimidate is sort of a weird case. You would think that all heroes with enough skill to slaughter hundreds of terrible monsters over a short period of time would be capable of being intimidating. Giant weapons, feats of strength and magic, specials effects galore ought to do the trick, right? Do the police have to do anything beyond stand there at a large gathering of people most of the time to make their point? We’re naturally intimidated by things more powerful than us. It’s instinct. Yet by the rules, it takes until Paragon Tier for a character with an average force of personality (10 Charisma) to have even a 50-50 shot of Intimidating a Lv 1 kobold! Said character would never miss just trying to hit that same kobold! This is why the Intimidate Skill must be assumed to be speech-based by the game system. Don’t confuse Intimidation with intimidation. They’re two separate things. Intimidate represents more specialized training and ability than most characters have. Does it need to be this way? That’s a whole different argument. For now, it just is.
Charisma is perfect its how you handle yourself in public. The dread pirate roberts can intimidate the prince even though he can hardly move. The tough warrior hold an axe is going to mess up his cool one liner because of the lack of charisma. The minotaur with the full blade could say he’s hung like a cow as part of his intimidate only for it to backfire and cause laughter. Want to be good at endurance take con. Intimidate take charisma
Has anyone ever had a monster use the “intimidate to surrender” tactic against a PC?
I’d like to point out other possible uses for intimidate: commanding or personal authority (as in commanding NPCs or even allies into doing what you want). The game has already established this premise (i.e. warlords and leader classes tend to have high CHA as a default statistic, representing their ability to command or lead). As such, intimidate can be used in a more “positive” manner amongst everyday situations and members of society (i.e. it could be used to get a group of allies to make a heroic stand against an overwhelming force even though they know they are outmatched and certain to get obliterated and might otherwise run, or to get an unruly underling to listen to orders, or to get others to recognize the PC as their leader, or to assert command of a delicate situation, or to take decisive command of a situation in which others are arguing with one another or they are uncertain of what to do next). In other words, it can be a default “go to” skill whenever a PC is trying to cajole or otherwise command others into doing what they want (especially when that situation consists of a time of crisis), or to get them to follow commands. As such, it does not necessarily need to be accomplished by threats or physical violence; it may simply be a firm voice, a sense of confidence, or exuding heroism or bravery, or exuding a firm sense of authority or entitlement. Your article nearly alludes to this point in your “intimidate as a platform” section (where you state it might be useful for military personnel), but I think the rest of the article falls short on this point. Military officers and police, for instance, often use “intimidate” in this manner, to get their soldiers or citizenry to follow their orders or the law; in fact, they are often looked up to by those “beneath” them as decision-makers or protectors, especially by the unskilled or weak or by those who recognize a greater authority. In other words, their “orders” or sense of “law” is a welcome skill set by those who look up to them and is considered more positive in nature (that is, if he is a good, trusted leader) and is not always something that is always forced on others.
@Mike – you bring up several valid points and I certainly would not argue with a DM allowing or calling for the use of Intimidate in that sort of commanding fashion. However, my opposition to your point is based primarily in the mathematics of the skills and the D&D genre. Intimidate is one of the most trainable skills in the game – an incredible 16 of the 25 classes get access to it off the bat making it by far the most readily accessible social skill. When I imagine the standard D&D adventurer falling back on the lowest common denominator for social situations, I don’t picture inspiring leaders. I picture drunken rabble-rousers who are a sort of necessary evil in the world. So it may be that my take on the skill is colored by my fundamental assumptions about the standard D&D world, but that’s how I got where I got. When the book version of these posts is released, I will be expanding on the skills even more and will revisit your comments for ideas. Thanks for reading!
I suggested reworking the “intimidate to end combat” penalty just a little. Instead of +5/+10 for “unfriendly/hostile,” I suggest +5 for “random encounter” type combat and +10 there’s an agenda. The little band of goblins you met at a crossroad might be willing to lay down arms and parlay much more readily than the goblin assassins sent by the local chieftain just to kill the PCs. That doesn’t solve the problem entirely, but it deals with the bizarre situation that basically *everybody* is getting the same +10 bonus to defense by virtue of being engaged in combat.