Trailer screenshot, captioned by Me. Licencing information: http://bit.ly/1AdP5Vl or just click on the image. And yes, there is a hidden inference in this choice of illustration, but I’m not going to state it in public. It might be actionable.

I was reading reports concerning the credibility problem of Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott (at least, he was PM as this article was being written – I also read many reports of challengers circling for his position) (see update below), when a Vagrant Thought wandered through my head: “He was credible enough to be elected despite many fearing what his government might do in office, but right now he could say the sky was blue and not be believed.”

That was followed by memories of just how convincing an image that he presented, pre-election, despite his nickname from prior years in opposition (“The Mad Monk”), and the further recollection of how a previous Prime Minister from his party had gotten himself re-elected on the basis of a Big Lie (the “Children Overboard” scandal) – despite not having as smooth and charismatic a style as Mr Abbott had presented in the immediate run-up to the election – and how that Prime Minister had turned out not to be as bad as feared by non-Conservatives in many respects, while the current Prime Minister has utterly failed to connect with anyone except the hardest core of the party faithful.

A little context, Part 1: Children Overboard

In the early afternoon of 6 October 2001, a southbound wooden hulled “Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel” designated SIEV 4, carrying 223 asylum seekers and believed to be operated by people smugglers, was intercepted by HMAS Adelaide 100 nautical miles (190 km) north of Christmas Island. The vessel subsequently sank. Although writs for the 2001 federal election were not issued until two days after the incident, the government had been in “re-election mode” for some time, and struggling somewhat in the polls, which suggested a narrow defeat for the incumbent Liberal-National Coalition. Initial reports claimed that the asylum seekers on-board had thrown their children overboard, either in hopes that they would be rescued by the Australian Naval vessel, the legal equivalent of making “landfall” and creating a legal claim to refugee status. These reports were widely reported, and were the dominant subject of public discussion the next morning. The day after the incident, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock announced that passengers of SIEV 4 had threatened to throw children overboard. This claim was later repeated by other senior government ministers including Defence Minister Peter Reith and Prime Minister John Howard. Photographs quickly emerged which purported to show children in the water, but these were later determined to have been taken after SIEV 4 sank. (Much of this paragraph is quoted directly from the Wikipedia page previously linked to).

Many Australians had long exhibited a sense of paranoia toward asylum seekers, characterizing them generically as “boat people” even though that label was supposedly reserved for a specific group of such refugees, displaced by the Vietnam War.

My immediate reaction to the reports of children being thrown overboard was that if it was true, it was tragic that people could be reduced to such desperation, and rather than tighten border controls, we needed to be more supportive and helpful. But the allegations were somehow not regarded in that way, and the asylum seekers were demonized for using their children as pawns, deliberately endangering them in order to secure “an easy life” in Australia to which they were not entitled. The story immediately provoked a media frenzy.

Within 24 hours of the first reports of the Children Overboard story, I heard a radio interview with the Captain of the HMAS Adelaide, in which he confirmed that the stories were completely false, and that he had reported the same to the Government. It astonished me that both the Government and Media in general continued to trumpet the allegations and that the public seemed to accept them without question. And yet, they did, and this was later considered to be a decisive factor in the re-election of the Coalition Government despite initially trailing in the Polls by a substantial margin (see Australian Federal Election 2001 at Wikipedia). I still believe that it was the failure of the then-Opposition Leader Kim Beazley to effectively denounce the lie that enabled it to become one of the watershed issues of the Election.

So effective was the Big Lie that despite the truth subsequently emerging, you will still hear the occasional anti-immigration zealot referring to it obliquely in debates, and it still enhances their credibility with audiences who are predisposed to the policy these zealots advocate.

A little context, Part 2: The dissipation of credibility

Charting the collapse in the credibility of the Abbott government is rather more involved. And, ironically, a significant proportion of also comes from Immigration Policy. The balance accrues from the undermining of popular policies established by previous Governments and a series of public relations gaffes of spectacular magnitude. But from day one, the government clamped down solidly on hard news relating to the implementation and impact of its “Turn Back The Boats” policy, all information being disseminated from the weekly press briefings of the Government Minister responsible, provided without means of verification.

To a cynical audience, this meant that the claims of success were dismissed as Government propaganda. Getting caught out in a couple of mis-statements and more outright gaffes didn’t help. As a result, the one area in which it was possible that the new Government had delivered on its promises (whether people agreed with those policies or not) felt to the public like a lie. In every other area prior to its first budget, there had been one bungle after another.

Into this rather poisonous atmosphere came the 2014 Federal Budget containing a string of broken election promises and harsh measures, all justified by claims of a “budget emergency,” a “debt crisis,” and a “debt-and-deficit disaster”. These were immediately unconvincing, and in short order, the internet was exploding with refutations – this one, from Melbourne newspaper The Age, is fairly typical. It didn’t help that the government had been in power for about 9 months, and this was the first the public had heard about the existence of this emergency.

If you don’t buy the justification for a repressive budget, every statement issued in support of that repressive budget just taints the speaker with the same odor of having been caught out in an inept “big lie”. And the Government was very vocal in parroting the justification in the days that followed. With every sound bite, the credibility of the entire Government collapsed. And the gaffes didn’t stop.

Opposition blocked all the centerpiece budgetary measures of the budget, and changing economic conditions necessitated a “mini-budget” in December – following which some sites were able to claim that every pre-election promise made by the soon-to-be-elected Government had now been broken in whole or in part (a slight exaggeration). The result is the situation I described at the start of this article.

An Update

Matters came to a head in Early February following the disastrous defeat of the Coalition in the Queensland State Election (they experienced the second-largest swing against a sitting government in Australian History) and the Prime Minister’s personal decision to grant Prince Phillip an Australian honor, sparking outrage. The honor has since become known colloquially as “Abbott’s Knightmare”. On 6 February 2015 Liberal backbencher Luke Simpkins announced that he would move a motion, at a meeting of the party room, for a spill of the federal Liberal Party’s leadership positions. Simpkins stated that such a motion would give Liberal members of parliament and senators the opportunity to either endorse the Prime Minister or “seek a new direction.” This meeting was scheduled to take place on February 10, but Prime Minister Abbott brought it forward a day, a move widely condemned by the public as attempting to deny opposition the time to shore up numbers opposing him, and producing a further dip in public opinion polls. It has since emerged that Mr Abbott begged for a further 6 months to improve the situation, and to take other conciliatory measures such as consulting colleagues more closely in future. Despite this appeal, almost 40% of his party signalling no confidence in his leadership in the spill motion, and public opinion of the Abbott Government has further deteriorated since, as shown by the latest polls.

Remember that vagrant thought? “He was credible enough to be elected despite many fearing what his government might do in office, but right now he could say the sky was blue and not be believed.”

Oratory In An RPG

All this is relevant to RPGs and how the GM handles Oratory. This is a skill or ability in most RPGs. I most frequently work from the definition offered in the Hero System as a starting point:

This Interaction skill represents the ability to speak to an audience and to deliver a convincing presentation. A good Orator knows how to modulate his voice, use body language, and speak to listeners so they’re receptive to his message. He also knows if he is losing his audience and can extemporize well before a crowd. Oratory does not help characters argue – it’s only useful when the audience isn’t talking back.

Characters who want to be able to lie convincingly or argue effectively should buy Persuasion.

…

A successful Oratory roll indicates the speaker has held the attention of the audience and convinced them to think about what he was saying. If the roll is made by four or more [on 3d6 – Mike], the orator has swayed the crowd to his line of reasoning (a skilled Orator can be very convincing). A failed roll usually indicates the listeners simply ignore the speaker’s message, but for spectacular failures, it may indicate that they start throwing things or attacking the speaker.

The missing part of the above rules quotation discusses modifiers to the roll, up to +3 for a receptive audience or -3 to a skeptical or hostile audience or if the speaker is heckled. And that’s both vitally important to achieving that “success by four” litmus test – and, as shown by the two political narratives offered at the top of this article, inadequate.

In fact, I have identified five factors, including Receptiveness, that should be taken into account in any Oratory situation, regardless of the game mechanics being used. The exact means of integrating these factors is up to the GM, and a well-designed system may already do some or all of the work for you.

Receptiveness

Some crowds aren’t interested in listening. This can be as simple as being too drunk to take in the message to a social disconnect resulting from the speaker’s accent to an antipathy toward the organization that the speaker represents. In addition to being a modifier in and of itself, this should amplify the effects of all other factors because they all get filtered through this constraint on communications.

On the other hand, some crowds are very interested in listening. And some won’t care what the speaker says, the mere fact that the speaker is who he is can be enough to get the crowd cheering his every word.

Delivery

This is what was described above as “how to modulate his voice, use body language, and speak to listeners so they’re receptive to his message”, or rather, how well the character is able to perform these things.

Content

The message itself is important, in particular whether it is aimed too intellectually high or low for the audience, how well they understand the arguments, how well they are able to connect cause and effect and inference on their own, and how much the speaker has to lead them. Speaking to a mixed audience is even harder than speaking to a more discrete assembly. In theory, of course, every gathering will have at least one thing in common, and if the speaker can frame his point with that commonality, this problem can be negated to some extent. Ultimately, then, this modifier is about targeting the audience and modifying the message content to reach the audience.

Credibility

The credibility of the speaker, as perceived by the audience, makes a huge difference. It doesn’t matter what the speaker’s real qualifications are, only what credibility the crowd assigns to those qualifications.

Context

If the crowd trust the credibility of the speaker, and he communicates with them at something approaching their level, in a manner that is effective at communication with this specific audience, they will tend to accept what they are told even if they don’t like the message. Every one of those factors that does not line up makes it less likely; and if all of them are opposed, the audience wouldn’t believe the speaker if he told them the sky was blue.

There is one factor not mentioned in the preceding paragraph: context. And yet, context is an on-off switch for everything else; for example, if there is a context of high interest rates, high inflation, and rising pay, telling a union that they have to accept a pay cut is not going to go down well no matter who says it or how clearly they say it. The arguments in favor will simply never get through the context filter.

The converse is not entirely true; telling an audience what they expect to hear enhances the credibility of the message, but does nothing except prevent context from filtering the other flags.

Into Game Mechanics – the simple solution

It’s not necessary to actually alter the game mechanics of whatever game system you happen to be using. All you have to do is be aware of the many factors that influence the reception of a message and stream those together in deciding in a modifier, or whatever the controllable variable is within the game system you are using. Assess the many different factors and combine them into an overall trend towards positive or negative reception.

Into Game Mechanics – a more complex solution

For a more useful solution, ignore delivery and content and even context to get one number, and then allow for these additional factors to get a second result. For the first result, assume that any die rolls produce an average result, and have the person speaking actually make whatever the roll is that’s involved for the second.

The first result is how the crowd will react when the speaker starts talking, and the second is how they will react when he’s had his say. The transition from one to another will be approximately a very bent straight line – the early part of the speech may be about laying groundwork for the persuasive line of argument, and won’t change minds very much, leading to a very sudden change in acceptance toward the end (or to a total rejection, of course).

Into Game Mechanics – the most complex solution

The final technique that I have to offer is more about interpretation of results than processes for determining those results. Most game systems like to boil things down to a simple “yes or no” – yes, the speech is effective, or no, it isn’t. But there’s a whole range of possible reactions to a speech that fall between these extremes.

A far greater degree of sophistication is possible by thinking about the audience as a single individual, with a personality. By treating the situation as a roleplaying encounter between the speaker and the “audience-person”, with the die rolls indicating how well the interaction goes, you can then determine the exact reaction between the two participants in exactly the same way as you might any other encounter.

Conclusion

A lot of people are scared of public speaking. Oratory doesn’t have to be frightening to a GM, though; it’s really fairly simple when you boil it down.

If all goes according to plan, the New Start series will resume next week. If it doesn’t, I have a standalone article on standby…