Yesterday I witnessed someone influence city npc's with these types, and that got me thinking. The npc's might be weak to this but you're essentially screwing over others if you use paranoia on quest npc's and weakening npc's that protect the city doesn't seem like the brightest idea to me either. Furthermore how do you explain doing this in character if you are considered to be loyal to your city? Also, as Mag does not hold villages itself but Serenwilde does, what about using these in their villages? I know I wouldn't be amused if someone did that in villages held by Mag, pact or no pact, and I can foresee that you might even get an enemy status for this.

So yeah, looking for some thoughts on this, do you do this or not and why?

Guards can only be influenced with empower or weaken. It's a coded limitation.

I would be saying that it probably shouldn't happen though depending on your org you could explain it away, like "oh it was just a bit of light teasing. Look how weak it is, not even worthy to serve the empire"

If it's guards they wouldn't have an excuse for it really, but the other random mobs that you might have in an org could actually require this influencing... if the mobs don't do anything... well that's weird enough, but then it wouldn't matter.

Also the actual person doing it would be a factor, a newbish person might not know the importance of the mob and could just be influencing with whatever is easiest. Older people don't have the excuse.

You actually have to influence some of the Hallifax mobs with weakening as part of a city quest, but otherwise using weakening and paranoia on city mobs would probably be frowned upon.

For villages, I can see it being acceptable to religious governments who want to increase village feelings by influencing in th village.

Do guards count for religious influence?

If you mean village feelings, only villagers do.

Consider this. Have you never ever said anything bad about anyone that you've had even a most tenuous connection to? Paranoia and weaken is essentially that, and showing more consideration to a mob than fellow citymates is quite peculiar. Most influencing can be considered odd to begin with, since how often do you usually go up to a complete stranger and tell them how awesome/terrible/screwed/beautiful/rich they are?

Avoiding Paranoia in quest mobs is a good thing, but beyond that, it stretches the suspension of disbelief a bit methinks.