I'm a little confused as to why the Incite Rebellion talent for the Agitator keys off of Coercion. There's nothing in the skill to indicate that it's used to sway crowds, even when you're trying to make them fear something. It's an intimidation skill.

Leadership, on the other hand, specifically talks about this. In fact, the second bullet point says "[w]hen acting in a public venue, a character may use Leadership to sway a crowd to take action, most commonly of a political nature." That seems like exactly what Incite Rebellion is trying to do.

In fact, the description of Leadership seems to play very much into what an Agitator does. I'm confused as to why Agitators have Coercion as a specialization skill but not Leadership.

I think Coercion is used as the talent is not so much about directing a group of people (which is what Leadership is for), but rather getting them so fired up that the affected individuals simply lash out at whatever target the Agitator has pointed them towards.

It's not Martin Luther King Jr or Gandhi's approach of "peaceful civil disobedience" (which could be done with Leadership or Charm) but rather deliberately inciting a riot, turning groups of people into angry mobs.

The Leadership description just says it's used to sway a crowd to take action, generally of a political nature--it doesn't say that it's only for creating positive emotions. "Burn down the Imperial recruiting office" is an action, and one of a political nature.

Besides, Coercion isn't about stirring people up, it's about intimidating/strongarming them.

Coercion is the skill for the installation of fear in others. Usually this takes the form of fear of the one speaking like intimidating someone into believing you can rip there arms out of socket or that you are capable of violence. Leadership is the skill that revolves around providing morale and hope in your charges, getting people to follow you willingly. You could coerce someone into fighting for you, but they'd resent you after the effect of the check wore off.

So coercion makes more sense to me to whip a crowd into an angry state.

I recognize that interpreting those skills in that fashion would resolve the issue I've raised, but those definitions don't appear in either Age of Rebellion or in the dictionary.

In AoR, Coercion is defined as "attempts to instill obedience in a target through the use of threats or acts of physical intimidation". That's not what this talent does. You're not threatening the crowd or attacking them, you're rabble-rousing.

Similarly, Leadership, as I've described before, explicitly calls out that Leadership is used "to sway a crowd to take action, most commonly of a political nature." No where in the skill description does it talk about how it's only used to inspire them to noble deeds.

In both the dictionary and AoR, Coercion is personal intimidation, blackmail, and arm-twisting. Leadership is convincing a group of people to take a specific action or viewpoint. Nowhere in AoR does it say that Coercion is the skill for instilling fear in people; it's intimidating an individual into obedience.

I honestly think you're overthinking the definitions.

Quite a few talents in EotE allow a skill to do something that it normally couldn't do. For instance, Inspiring Rhetoric series of talents allow the character to use Leadership to enable allies to recover Strain and gain boost dice on their action, something that Leadership in and of itself can't do.

Incite Rebellion allows the Agitator to use their Coercion skill in a new way, much as Scathing Tirade allows them to use Coercion to inflict direct Strain damage on a target, again something that Coercion by itself can't do.

Yeah, maybe I am. I still think skill-wise Leadership is a better fit than Coercion, and I'm not clear why Agitators have Coercion and not Leadership anyway, unless it's a meta-game decision to make them more different from Ambassadors and the like. Just curious what the devs were thinking.

I love that Talent, though. In my mind that's the core of what an Agitator does.

To me, Coercion sounds more like something that would show up in a "Suppress Uprising" Talent than in one intended to get people riled up.

Remember Yoda's statement when considering coercion:

"Fear leads to anger."

Might I suggest that we beef up this particular talent? It seems a rather weak talent to me in its present form. Perhaps we could make this one ranked or perhaps have an Improved and/or Supreme version in order to affect more humanoids and/or be more effective? Say a character is leading a rally or some other large grouping of individuals, it would be pure awesome if he could influence masses to oppose another faction akin to the ill fated young boys of Les Miserables.

Yeah, for a "once per session" talent, it probably could use a little boosting. Perhaps allow it to affect one additional person for each additional success on the roll? Advantages could be spent as normal to provide boost dice to specific individuals, so I don't think the talent needs to add any extra effect for Advantages.

Given that it's a Row 5 talent, they'd have to do some major overhauling of the Agitator spec tree to make room from Improved/superior versions of the talent.