AttilaTheGeek
2014-07-14, 11:28 AM
I have a question about how a mechanic I'm considering implementing would affect roleplay, and I'm wondering where I should put it.
I'm considering designing my own RPG, and I'm wondering to what extent social rolls should be a part of conversational gameplay. On one hand, having lots of different social rolls would allow the rules to more accurately reflect a character who is good at some but not all aspects of conversation (e.g, being good at noticing lies but bad at telling them could be represented by a high Sense Motive and low Bluff), but having many different social rolls can cause conversations to collapse into just rolling with little or no actual in-character speech. On the other hand, having few or no social rolls causes a character's social proficiency to be almost entirely dependent on the player's acting, for better or for worse.
Would a thread with an OP like this belong in the Roleplaying General forum because it discusses roleplaying in a system-independent way, or would it be better suited to the Homebrew forum because it deals with the creation of new rules? My idea was to make a thread like this in Roleplaying General, use feedback there to decide the extent to which I wanted to implement social rolls, and then post another thread in Homebrew about how to best execute my ideas, but I wanted to check here first to see what would be most appropriate.
I'm considering designing my own RPG, and I'm wondering to what extent social rolls should be a part of conversational gameplay. On one hand, having lots of different social rolls would allow the rules to more accurately reflect a character who is good at some but not all aspects of conversation (e.g, being good at noticing lies but bad at telling them could be represented by a high Sense Motive and low Bluff), but having many different social rolls can cause conversations to collapse into just rolling with little or no actual in-character speech. On the other hand, having few or no social rolls causes a character's social proficiency to be almost entirely dependent on the player's acting, for better or for worse.
Would a thread with an OP like this belong in the Roleplaying General forum because it discusses roleplaying in a system-independent way, or would it be better suited to the Homebrew forum because it deals with the creation of new rules? My idea was to make a thread like this in Roleplaying General, use feedback there to decide the extent to which I wanted to implement social rolls, and then post another thread in Homebrew about how to best execute my ideas, but I wanted to check here first to see what would be most appropriate.