A lot of my assassin problems have been occurring in rounds where ive taken the goop pet instead of the snake, so im often stuck in the lower half of the wheel. I feel like even when I'm trying to be really nice, I'll still run into a ton of assassins after a bit??
My last run i heavily focused on rhetoric+etiquette and still ran into a bunch of problems. I've been improving from starting out pretty negative in most planets to closer to neutral by figuring out those events you mentioned tho! It might change later on, but it seems like in at least some cases you can still pick decent choices even without passing skill checks? I feel like theres been a couple skill checks where the unlocked option read as worse even tbh.
Thank you for the advice!! Definitely should help -v-