Confidence will be a skill modifier based on how successful a Thief has been lately and how confident they are feeling about themself.
While a Thief's confidence can go negative, it will never drop a Thief below their base skill ranks. If a Thief does have negative Confidence, they will only lose the bonus he/she receives in urban areas. Even at the worst negative Confidence, there still will be areas you have a slightly positive skill bonus in.
Confidence will drift towards neutral over time.
Succeeding in actions that use Confidence will improve your confidence, failing at those same actions will lower your confidence. How much you gain or lose is dependent upon how difficult the action is. A very hard action that you succeed in will raise your confidence a large amount, while failing at the very hard action will not lower your confidence very much (although it will lower it some small amount). On the flip side, succeeding at an easy contest will not improve your confidence very much, while failing at an extremely easy contest is going to impact your confidence a good amount.
When Confidence initially goes live, it will begin effecting all skills that are already effected by Thief Bonus. However, only actions that are under the core stealth system will change your confidence. So HIDE and SNEAK will change your confidence and use your confidence. DISARM, PICK, STALK will not change your confidence but will benefit from a positive confidence or suffer from negative confidence. As other actions are added to core stealth, and Lockpicking is rewritten, they will be fully integrated with Confidence.
Confidence will not be awarded in stealth contests with other players. Confidence will only be awarded in actions you initiate. Failing to see someone hide, for instance, will not change your confidence. Having you gain or lose confidence for passive actions could cause some confusion with your confidence appearing to rise and fall for no reason.
Confidence is set up to be fairly easy to be modified. The general functions are not likely to be changed, but based on how quickly you folks are gaining/losing confidence and whether the drift-to-neutral appears to be where we would like it are still what we need to evaluate. Other things that we can't really see from GM testing may need to be checked as well.
Some Q&A from the meeting:
Q: Will we be able to check our confidence?
A: (This is something I want to clear up as it looks like some miscommunicated info did come out.) It's something I would like to see, and I see both a reason and way to do so. It is not definite and I don't want to hold up getting confidence released because we're trying to add another feature.
Q: Could we use contacts to check our confidence?
A: Since your confidence is internal to you, contacts really wouldn't be the thing to use.
Q: So confidence and reputation are two sides of the same coin?
A: Answer I gave at the Con was "Yes, because they are part of the same system." After thinking about it, it would be more accurate to include Urban Bonus with those, since all three of them are part of the same system.
Q: Is there a limit to how far negative/positive our confidence can go?
A: Yes.
Q: Is it like Reputation in that we can go below that limit and although the effects don't get worse, you still need to get out of the hole you're in?
A: No. Once you reach the upper or lower limit, you can't go any farther, and the upper and lower limits are at the maximum ability of the system to effect you.
Other questions were asked, but I've tried to include them in the notes up at the top, or else I've forgotten them. (Sorry!) Any other questions, please ask, and if I can give that information out, I will.
GameMaster Risek