Since exploit with abusing money for gaining trust is removed what are currrenly most important factors that influence and one can use to maximise recrutiment chances?
NPC’s initial opinion of you. The opinion is formed the moment the NPC spawns, not seen.
Opinion has 4 elements: trust, fear, anger and value. Trust is always good, fear is good unless you overdo it and NPCs start to flee, anger and value only really change due to dialogue options.
If a NPC distrusts you a lot, you can’t get positive reactions, only fear and hostility. If a NPC doesn’t fear you at all, aggressive NPCs will start hostile and neutral ones will tell you to GTFO or mug you.
[ul][li]Good (wielded) weapon makes you scary. Guns make you scarier and also non-trustworthy. Being unarmed (actually unarmed, not wielding a punch dagger) makes you trustworthy and non-scary.[/li]
[li]Drugs (effects, painkiller, depressants) make you non-scary and non-trustworthy. Except big positive stim, which makes you scary and non-trustworthy.[/li]
[li]Being pretty makes you trustworthy AND scary. Being ugly makes you neither. Being deformed makes you non-trustworthy but scary. Sapiovore and terrifying make you scary. Other traits don’t have an effect here (not even ones that say they do, like Smelly).[/li]
[li]Less than 50% on a body part makes you non-scary. Per body part.[/li]
[li]Being scary makes you non-trustworthy.[/li][/ul]
Most of those effects aren’t scaled. So, being drunk makes you look like a sucker, but being wasted and puking your guts out is only as bad as being drunk.
Then there are the rolls to convince someone. Those depend on whether you’re trying to persuade or scare them. You can scare someone into being your friend, but first you need to be non-scary enough for them to be neutral. And if you’re not scary enough, you will get mugger and “GTFO my territory” NPCs, which you will then need to convince an extra time just so that they agree to talk.
Voice mutations (and the CBM) can be useful here, since they don’t affect opinion, only rolls. So you can drop your weapon (when asked to, don’t do it before that) to show friendliness, then roar at the NPC to be your slave.
You want to recruit the NPC with “we’re friends” option if it’s not worse than the others, because it makes them instantly like you a bit more. Intimidation is the worst - it will make them hate you, preventing learning from them for a while.
Intimidation rolls in general suck. You want to be strong (only maximum, natural strength counts), wield a gun and be deformed.
Persuasion rolls scale with speaking, intelligence, perception, prettiness, elf eyes, butterfly wings and fluffy tail, not being deformed or sapiovore and voice (all the voice mutations here will SUCK).
tl;dr Be pretty and a bit scary, but not too scary.
sweet. no wonder my pretty, steel spear wielding, drunkard player has so much luck with ‘lets be friends’ and with a gun its ‘ill protect you’.
a lot of options to put it away too.
When told to put it away, it’s better to drop - it makes NPCs fear less.
When told to drop with no option to put away, that’s mugger or GTFO kind of NPC.
How much speaking skill is importan to success?
Not as much as it sounds. If I understand correctly and the bonuses are linear, it’s (speaking*3+intelligence+perception)%.
For comparison, elf eyes are +20 and snarling voice is -60.
That’s for persuasion, lies and intimidation are different.
Mind if I copy some of your npc effects to the wiki coolthulhu? (That makes it “Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike”).
But reformat it a bit, it’s not very wiki-like.
This thread explains a lot of traits I thought were redundant