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Man_Over_Game
2019-12-27, 12:16 PM
I've played a lot of DnD, but it seems that one thing it's always flopped on is its support of social and skill mechanics.

In its most recent edition, the advice for the DM is effectively "Make up a DC between 10 and 25", and have the player roll once to determine a Success or Failure. They tried to keep things open-ended...by not giving you any guidance. And it just feels disappointing whenever it comes up.



I'm interested in finding out more about systems that utilized good skill and social systems. Things that encouraged reaction and decision-making from the players. Something that is structured enough to clearly show how the players can define their success and failures, but also loose enough to not inhibit the roleplaying aspects of the game.


Does anyone know of a skill or social system that they're impressed by?

JoeJ
2019-12-27, 01:44 PM
I haven't played it yet, but from reading the rules it looks like the system in Firefly (Cortex Plus system) would be really useful as well as fun to play. The conflict system handles all forms of conflict (including physical combat). It uses opposed rolls, with the loser suffering various penalties until they are "taken out," which ends their ability to contribute meaningfully to the rest of the scene. Depending on the method employed, that could mean anything from being mortally embarrassed to being unable to think of a counter to your argument to bleeding on the floor. And opposing sides don't have to be using the same methods; you can, for example, talk somebody down while they're trying to stab you.

SimonMoon6
2019-12-27, 02:03 PM
One of my biggest disappointments about the D&D social skills system is that the difficulty of using diplomacy does not increase with the threat level of the opponent. So, once you get to high levels, your Diplomacy skill becomes more and more powerful (imagine if monsters didn't gain hit points as you gained extra damage-dealing capabilities). Intimidate increases the difficulty though they can only resist with their HD and Wisdom really, while Bluff can be opposed by Sense Motive skill (which means some enemies will be great at resisting and others will be absolutely pathetic).

To balance this, Diplomacy doesn't really do much, it just makes the enemies like you more (and it can't be used on PCs, meaning you have a way to tell the difference between PCs and NPCs within the game).

Obviously, what is needed is a way for Diplomacy (and the other skills) to have a defense be something that will typically increase as opponents increase in power level (like saving throws do), while also spelling out more what can and can't be done.

I like the system in Mayfair's DC Heroes RPG. In that game, there are three social skills to use: Persuasion, Intimidation, and Interrogation. If you're trying to get someone to tell you information, you use interrogation. If you are trying to scare someone, use Intimidation. If you want someone to do something for you, use Persuasion. You don't need to try to make someone friendlier (no need for D&D's silly Diplomacy skill). And in this system, you use your skills (or Charisma statistics (there are three)) to attack your opponent's Charisma statistics (as if in normal combat since all actions use the same action resolution system).

Persuasion has added modifiers (based on how well the target likes you.)

And if you still think it's too easy for the Batman to persuade the Joker to just surrender, you can use the generic modifiers built into the game system, depending on whether or not you think this would be a "Herculean" effort (a whopping +7 modifier) or something a bit less severe.

Azuresun
2019-12-27, 02:19 PM
Social systems tend to run into two problems. One is that it can make roleplaying feel more stilted and unnatural, especially if it's highly detailed ("hold on, hold on, let me get the dice and determine his Persuasion Resistance...."), and another is the "stop playing my character" situation. If this can be used against PC's, it's often going to disconnect players to hear "Okay, he got a natural 20, you've been persauded to abandon your quest of vengeance."

One innovation I did like was Exalted 3e's Intimacy system, where to persuade someone beyond "inspire a certain emotion", you need to know what they care about, and the degree to which you can influence someone will depend on the strength of the Intimacy you're playing on. So if you find out someone has a strong intimacy of "I love my family.", you could trick them into believing the governor is going to conscript their sons, and persuade them to join your rebel army.

Man_Over_Game
2019-12-27, 04:04 PM
Social systems tend to run into two problems. One is that it can make roleplaying feel more stilted and unnatural, especially if it's highly detailed ("hold on, hold on, let me get the dice and determine his Persuasion Resistance...."), and another is the "stop playing my character" situation. If this can be used against PC's, it's often going to disconnect players to hear "Okay, he got a natural 20, you've been persauded to abandon your quest of vengeance."

Out of curiosity, how would people feel about these concepts?:


Roll Diplomacy first, then Role your Roll. Roleplay your form of success or failure, before it happens.


Persuading someone influences their actions, but doesn't define them. Person A gives up an advantage (a resource, stats, experience, whatever) to attempt to persuade Person B:

Person A "Succeeds", but Person B refuses: Person B gets penalized greater than Person A's loss.
Any other scenario: No change.




I've heard of something akin to Bullet #2 in a TTRPG. I think it was "A Song of Ice and Fire", but I'm not 100% sure that was the name that was recommended to me as having something similar t o that.

Telok
2019-12-27, 04:25 PM
The White Wolf systems of 20 years ago were decent they're dice pool & count successes. I'n not up on the current versions.

Shadowrun (all versions) work ok, that system's issues stem more from combat, magic, and tech. But it's skills and socials work fine at the base level.

CoC/BRP works, percentile roll under, can have +/- mods or x2 or x0.5 multipliers.

Most supers systems deal with it decently. Because you need to at least intimidate mooks and drive cars.

Paranioa works. The edition I have is skill from 4 to 19, roll 1d20 equal or under skill and higher than any opposition. Includes boot licking and chutzpah as social skills. Gives result spreads similar to D&D 5e but with better defined skills and effects.

Anonymouswizard
2019-12-27, 05:33 PM
First off, I want to say that there's nothing wrong with D&D 5e'd skill system. It's just that with all the focus on combat, combat special abilities, and so on, to the point where incredibly world changing noncombat abilities are 'ribbons' that aren't considered a proper thing to get at that level, the entire presence of a skill system seems like an after thought. The game needed stats or skills, not both.

Anyway, onto skill systems. I am going to ignore social systems, because a) other people are covering them, and b) they never really work that well. I think the best I've seen is nWoD2e/CofD, where you have to do things to get NPCs to be willing to do something for you, represented by 'doors'.

Anyway, a good skill system should be a key element of the characters, either in the GURPS way of 'if you try to go anywhere without your skills you'll fail fast' or having them be a key aspect of the character in and of themselves. One I like is Paleomythic, a recently released game where the base number of dice you roll for a test is how many Traits you currently have (although those are closer to stats). In Paleomythic you have Traits, Flaws (negative Traits), and Talents (think feats), which when put together describe your character.

Honestly, D&D's problems with the skill system only started after it was added in Oriental Adventures, the game worked perfectly fine without it back then and it stopped the wizard from just bypassing the skill you'd invested points in with a spell. But that partially stems from D&D's magic being a hot mess, in D&D hacks with reworked or absent spellcasting skill proficency can be far more important .

Heck, I want to go back to Paleomythic, because I think it's a pretty good game. Depending on which Talents you have you can have various kinds of magic from a small chance to avoid injury, to a small number of rerolls per in-game day, cast a small number of spells by spending hours doing rituals (hope you weren't needed to forage today), to divination via thrown objects, to inflicting dread, to reanimating corpses, to summoning spirits via painting, to cursing people with your magic stick, to summoning and controlling ghosts, to gaining the abilities of the dead. It's all thematic, and in the right games other Talents might be considered magic, like the power to tame beasts, and notably the talent of 'has followers' is grouped in with several of the explicitly magical talents. The magical abilities use the exact same rules as other special abilities except for a couple of talents which tend towards the more impractical (hello hours long rituals!*). But this is a bit more of a discussion on what makes a good magic system.

Anyway, for a good skill system, skills should be important to a character, and that character should be able to focus on areas other than combat without being a detriment to the group under RAW. You should also consider both breadth and depth of success when rolling, but unless you're playing ORE that's probably a GMing thing over a system thing.

* I mean, other players can be doing things like foraging for food and crafting items while you're doing them, but don't expect to be pulling out a solution at the drop of a hat unless it can wait for a day.

Quertus
2019-12-27, 09:04 PM
Out of curiosity, how would people feel about these concepts?:


Roll Diplomacy first, then Role your Roll. Roleplay your form of success or failure, before it happens.


Persuading someone influences their actions, but doesn't define them. Person A gives up an advantage (a resource, stats, experience, whatever) to attempt to persuade Person B:

Person A "Succeeds", but Person B refuses: Person B gets penalized greater than Person A's loss.
Any other scenario: No change.




I've heard of something akin to Bullet #2 in a TTRPG. I think it was "A Song of Ice and Fire", but I'm not 100% sure that was the name that was recommended to me as having something similar t o that.

I was avoiding replying to this thread, but… personally, I would totally hate it.

From my "Why the Hate for Win Buttons" thread, the answer that really resonated with me, that my senile mind still remembers is, "because it removes a minigame that people were looking forward to".

But it's even worse here. There's hidden information at work. Suppose you try to offer a vegetarian a steak dinner. It's not going to have the effect you expect, and you may not know why. To flip that, you cannot roleplay why your role failed if you lack the knowledge to understand why it failed in the first place.

As far as I am concerned, the only system that can even pretend to handle social interactions at the level I desire is the human brain. Everything else I've tried to use is trash, as far as I'm concerned. They in no way map with sufficient fidelity for my taste to any remotely reasonable interactions. See also "I need to take a 20 on character creation to produce a personality that i will enjoy running". I'm… picky.

SimonMoon6
2019-12-27, 09:26 PM
Social systems tend to run into two problems. One is that it can make roleplaying feel more stilted and unnatural, especially if it's highly detailed ("hold on, hold on, let me get the dice and determine his Persuasion Resistance...."), and another is the "stop playing my character" situation. If this can be used against PC's, it's often going to disconnect players to hear "Okay, he got a natural 20, you've been persauded to abandon your quest of vengeance."

And yet, it's perfectly okay if a magical spell does the exact same thing. Because mundanes can't have nice things.

Obviously, any competent social system would have massive penalties to a roll that tries to make someone do something that is very much not in character. Even some magical spells in D&D give bonuses to saves (and maybe an additional saving throw) if the spellcaster tries to make someone do something against their belief system. If that's NOT incorporated into a social skill system, then yeah, the social skill system is an absolute failure.

And honestly, I feel like social skills should be *exactly* as complicated or not-complicated as a given combat system. There are similar risks and rewards. In the same way that you probably wouldn't succeed in a combat against a dragon with a single attack with a sword, you probably should have a social skill system that doesn't hang everything on a single die roll, so that you don't persuade the dragon to give up with a single line of dialogue. On the other hand, in a game system where combats can be quick and easy, then the social skill system should be equally quick and easy. Yeah, you have to look up stats and stuff, but that seems to break the immersion no more than when you have to look up armor class and stuff. "Why is it so complicated? All I want to do is kill the dragon. Just tell me if I killed him already. Why are you making me wait? Come on, come on, come on. I said I was swinging my sword, that means I killed him right?" People aren't really that impatient with combat, so why are they with social skills? It's like people feel like social skills aren't "real" role-playing, only combat is. But that's just... Dumb & Dumb.

Arbane
2019-12-28, 04:12 AM
I like the way Legends of the Wulin handles social effects: You try to discover/create a passion your mark has, then intensify it or modify it. Mechanically, a strong social influence can give someone penalties OR BONUSES to act in a certain way - if an NPC seduces a PC (for example), the player might want to play along for the extra dice bonuses they get for it!

Azuresun
2019-12-28, 04:43 AM
And yet, it's perfectly okay if a magical spell does the exact same thing. Because mundanes can't have nice things.

Yes--at least in the minds of players. Being Charmed is a magical effect--it hasn't altered who you are and what you think, it's overriden it temporarily, with clear conditions for how you can break out of it. Telling someone "your opinions have been authentically changed, this is what you now believe" is a good way to sever attachment to a character, more than "the incubus has cast a spell on you, your mind has been temporarily warped so that you regard him as a friend".



Obviously, any competent social system would have massive penalties to a roll that tries to make someone do something that is very much not in character. Even some magical spells in D&D give bonuses to saves (and maybe an additional saving throw) if the spellcaster tries to make someone do something against their belief system. If that's NOT incorporated into a social skill system, then yeah, the social skill system is an absolute failure.

And honestly, I feel like social skills should be *exactly* as complicated or not-complicated as a given combat system. There are similar risks and rewards. In the same way that you probably wouldn't succeed in a combat against a dragon with a single attack with a sword, you probably should have a social skill system that doesn't hang everything on a single die roll, so that you don't persuade the dragon to give up with a single line of dialogue. On the other hand, in a game system where combats can be quick and easy, then the social skill system should be equally quick and easy. Yeah, you have to look up stats and stuff, but that seems to break the immersion no more than when you have to look up armor class and stuff. "Why is it so complicated? All I want to do is kill the dragon. Just tell me if I killed him already. Why are you making me wait? Come on, come on, come on. I said I was swinging my sword, that means I killed him right?" People aren't really that impatient with combat, so why are they with social skills? It's like people feel like social skills aren't "real" role-playing, only combat is. But that's just... Dumb & Dumb.

I think the difference is familiarity. Few of us have fought for our lives, fewer still have fought for our lives against a dragon. So detailed rules for fantasy combat are acceptable, and give us a framework for how this is meant to go. But all of us know (or think we do) how we talk to and interact with each other, so odd abstractions, perverse incentives and broken results become far more jarring. Especially since many of us underestimate how easy we are to persuade or manipulate.

(Going back to Exalted, the 2e system was badly imbalanced in favour of an "attacker" who'd made even a basic investment into "persuasion" and once they'd "persuaded" you, you could only avoid it by spending willpower. So the optimal way of getting someone to grant a request for you was to bombard them with requests you know they'd never agree to to sap their willpower, and then make the actual request once they were too psychologically broken to say no to you.)

And just as importantly, combat is something obviously dangerous, where you expect to win or lose. But when every conversation with an NPC becomes a possible means of "attack", the optimal strategy is not to interact with NPC's, or to stuff wax in your ears as soon as the dice come out. And that's before you get into the utter minefield of PC's using social skills on other PC's. That's why I think the best mechanics are ones that give players a bribe for letting themselves be persuaded. I remember Weapons of the Gods had "conditions" that gave you an advantage and disadvantage when one was imposed on you--so if Snake Tongue Yu taunts you into a towering rage, you fight better, but become worse at non-violent tasks while affected.


(Edit: I found a thread (http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/57826-why-don-t-2ed-2-5-social-combat-work) on the 2e Exalted system, and how hilariously a detailed social system can go wrong.)

Altair_the_Vexed
2019-12-28, 05:01 AM
Out of curiosity, how would people feel about these concepts?:


Roll Diplomacy first, then Role your Roll. Roleplay your form of success or failure, before it happens.


Persuading someone influences their actions, but doesn't define them. Person A gives up an advantage (a resource, stats, experience, whatever) to attempt to persuade Person B:

Person A "Succeeds", but Person B refuses: Person B gets penalized greater than Person A's loss.
Any other scenario: No change.




I've heard of something akin to Bullet #2 in a TTRPG. I think it was "A Song of Ice and Fire", but I'm not 100% sure that was the name that was recommended to me as having something similar t o that.

Roll, then role-play is a system I've tried to use in the past, with varied results. As you can see from Quertus's reply, some people hate it. I posted it as an idea here once before, and got a few people being so vehemently against it that it got pretty ugly fast - really turned into one of those "you're having fun wrong" arguments.

In my experiences, even a group that wants to use the system will find it hard to implement.
If it's going to work at your table, it works when you have players who are third person role-players - the type who say "Marodock tries to persuade the prince," or even "I try to persuade the prince," - rather than "But your Highness, the people need your aid so deparately! It is your royal duty to give aid!" as if they actually were Marodock, their PC (i.e. spekaing in first person style).

Most people are a bit of a mix of styles. Sometimes you're immersed in the character and you speak whole conversations that way. Sometimes you're a little less engaged, or you're shy of "acting out" scenes even with your mates.

But asking for a die roll before making your in-character speech is a little tough to remember. It breaks the flow of a conversation. It's natual to talk together in a flow, we do it all the time.
We want to get in there with our actions, and characters' speech at a table where talking effectively is the medium - that's the fastest way to act in the game. When you say "But your Highness..." your chartacter is immediately acting and the GM can respond straight away, whereas when you say "I try to stab the prince in the kidneys," you have to resolve the action with die rolls, and there's a necessary delay between your spoken act and the result.

The middle ground that I try to work on is that once I see that someone is starting a diplomacy-style attempt to persuade an NPC, I quietly roll their check for them (or even just remember how good or bad that PC's Charisma stat (or equivalent) is), and then have the NPC react accordingly - interrupting them with a dismissive gesture if it's bad, or asking them kindly to explain further if it's going well. So I use the NPC's reaction to what the PC is saying as the result of the check.

The PC may be making good points, but there might be something about the NPC that makes them less receptive. I've had a lot of training in communication in my job as a technical trainer and public speaker - there's a hell of a lot of ways you can fail that have very little to do with the things you are saying, and far more to do with how you're saying it, or the mood of the audience, or your accent grating on the predjudices of the audience, or whatever. In the UK, the strong Midlands accent (you might know it from Peaky Blinders) is generally seen by people from the rest of the country as "dumb" - not a good accent to deliver technical training (this is pretty much where I live, by the way - for public speaking, I try to use a neutral standardised English accent).

So as blunt and ungarnished as it is, the D&D 5e system of "guess a DC wing it from there" isn't a very bad system, because it allows flexibility - but yeah, it could totally do with having some guidance notes around it.

gkathellar
2019-12-28, 08:04 AM
I won't comment on social systems in particular - enough ink has been spilled there already - but skill systems in general tend to work better when the game is built around their use from the ground up in order to emphasize a degree of player agency.

5E suffers because most of its rules are about miniatures combat, which means (a) skill use isn't the primary medium of interaction with game world, and (b) the game's core mechanic uses a binary success/failure metric that is well-suited to tactical gameplay and poorly suited to narrative gameplay.

Compare that with a game like Blades in the Dark, where everything is mediated by skills, the entire core mechanic is focused on adjudicating the mix of positive and negative consequences that arise out of player skill use, and the game has built-in rules for tracking progress towards desired and undesired outcomes.

That doesn't mean binary success/failure rules can't be improved upon with best practices, though. "Roll, then roleplay," has been mentioned, and as has been mentioned, some people hate it - but if you and your players have strong improv skills and prefer a more collective style of storytelling, it can work very well. "Fail forward," or assuming that most failures on skill rolls still advance the story, often by treating them as successes with undesired consequences, is extremely well-suited to the d20 roll's intrinsic unpredictability. (Note that you probably shouldn't use both of these concepts simultaneously.)

Quertus
2019-12-28, 08:41 AM
And yet, it's perfectly okay if a magical spell does the exact same thing. Because mundanes can't have nice things.


Yes--at least in the minds of players. Being Charmed is a magical effect--it hasn't altered who you are and what you think, it's overriden it temporarily, with clear conditions for how you can break out of it. Telling someone "your opinions have been authentically changed, this is what you now believe" is a good way to sever attachment to a character, more than "the incubus has cast a spell on you, your mind has been temporarily warped so that you regard him as a friend".

Yup. 100% agreed. When, IRL, through purely muggle means, I succeed in walking up to someone, and telling them, "you like tasty food. Your friend would be really yummy - you should kill and eat them", and having it succeed, we can talk about muggles having the nice things that magic does.


I think the difference is familiarity. Few of us have fought for our lives, fewer still have fought for our lives against a dragon. So detailed rules for fantasy combat are acceptable, and give us a framework for how this is meant to go. But all of us know (or think we do) how we talk to and interact with each other, so odd abstractions, perverse incentives and broken results become far more jarring. Especially since many of us underestimate how easy we are to persuade or manipulate.

This certainly figures into it. I mean, some people find the combat simulator insufficiently detailed for their taste (and, on occasion, have the experience to back it up). Heck, even "I swing from the chandeliers" represents people wanting the system to do things it doesn't handle well, in many cases.


And just as importantly, combat is something obviously dangerous, where you expect to win or lose. But when every conversation with an NPC becomes a possible means of "attack", the optimal strategy is not to interact with NPC's, or to stuff wax in your ears as soon as the dice come out. And that's before you get into the utter minefield of PC's using social skills on other PC's. That's why I think the best mechanics are ones that give players a bribe for letting themselves be persuaded. I remember Weapons of the Gods had "conditions" that gave you an advantage and disadvantage when one was imposed on you--so if Snake Tongue Yu taunts you into a towering rage, you fight better, but become worse at non-violent tasks while affected.

So, social skills are used to affect your… mood? Which is handled much like changing your combat stance? Hmmm… I'd be willing to try that.


(Edit: I found a thread (http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/exalted/57826-why-don-t-2ed-2-5-social-combat-work) on the 2e Exalted system, and how hilariously a detailed social system can go wrong.)

(Added to my ”to read" pile…)


Roll, then role-play is a system I've tried to use in the past, with varied results. As you can see from Quertus's reply, some people hate it. I posted it as an idea here once before, and got a few people being so vehemently against it that it got pretty ugly fast - really turned into one of those "you're having fun wrong" arguments.

In my experiences, even a group that wants to use the system will find it hard to implement.
If it's going to work at your table, it works when you have players who are third person role-players - the type who say "Marodock tries to persuade the prince," or even "I try to persuade the prince," - rather than "But your Highness, the people need your aid so deparately! It is your royal duty to give aid!" as if they actually were Marodock, their PC (i.e. spekaing in first person style).

Most people are a bit of a mix of styles. Sometimes you're immersed in the character and you speak whole conversations that way. Sometimes you're a little less engaged, or you're shy of "acting out" scenes even with your mates.

But asking for a die roll before making your in-character speech is a little tough to remember. It breaks the flow of a conversation. It's natual to talk together in a flow, we do it all the time.
We want to get in there with our actions, and characters' speech at a table where talking effectively is the medium - that's the fastest way to act in the game. When you say "But your Highness..." your chartacter is immediately acting and the GM can respond straight away, whereas when you say "I try to stab the prince in the kidneys," you have to resolve the action with die rolls, and there's a necessary delay between your spoken act and the result.

I'll do both 1st and 3rd person style. And, as a GM, I'll generally accept both, but occasionally ask for more details from high-level 3rd person descriptions.

It's complicated, but… which I use depends on many more factors, including my mood, how much spotlight time the action will take, and how jarring either form might be.

I've honestly never evaluated social systems in the context of only one style.


The middle ground that I try to work on is that once I see that someone is starting a diplomacy-style attempt to persuade an NPC, I quietly roll their check for them (or even just remember how good or bad that PC's Charisma stat (or equivalent) is), and then have the NPC react accordingly - interrupting them with a dismissive gesture if it's bad, or asking them kindly to explain further if it's going well. So I use the NPC's reaction to what the PC is saying as the result of the check.

The PC may be making good points, but there might be something about the NPC that makes them less receptive. I've had a lot of training in communication in my job as a technical trainer and public speaker - there's a hell of a lot of ways you can fail that have very little to do with the things you are saying, and far more to do with how you're saying it, or the mood of the audience, or your accent grating on the predjudices of the audience, or whatever. In the UK, the strong Midlands accent (you might know it from Peaky Blinders) is generally seen by people from the rest of the country as "dumb" - not a good accent to deliver technical training (this is pretty much where I live, by the way - for public speaking, I try to use a neutral standardised English accent).


So as blunt and ungarnished as it is, the D&D 5e system of "guess a DC wing it from there" isn't a very bad system, because it allows flexibility - but yeah, it could totally do with having some guidance notes around it.

I believe 2e D&D is best social system. You just roll for how receptive the NPC is. I then use that to color how they evaluate your words: if they weren't receptive / didn't like you, they'd hear your accent, then tune you out; if they liked you, but found your accent really grating, they'd ask for a quick summation, and try to make a decision that would get you to stop talking (agreeing with you, agreeing to investigate, handing you off to a specialist & saying "if you can convince them, then you have my blessing", etc).

Morty
2019-12-28, 09:46 AM
One innovation I did like was Exalted 3e's Intimacy system, where to persuade someone beyond "inspire a certain emotion", you need to know what they care about, and the degree to which you can influence someone will depend on the strength of the Intimacy you're playing on. So if you find out someone has a strong intimacy of "I love my family.", you could trick them into believing the governor is going to conscript their sons, and persuade them to join your rebel army.

Exalted 3E's social interaction system might be the best I've ever run into, specifically because it's built to prevent convincing people of something insane because you rolled well. It's also not adversarial or built like combat, which is a common pitfall.

Friv
2019-12-28, 12:27 PM
In general, my preferred social interaction systems do three things:

1. They give a couple widgets for persuading people based on leveraging things those people care about, rather than just being "very persuasive." These widgets are usually very slim for most NPCs, and more robust for major NPCs or players.

2. They give incentives if used on players, rather than creating absolutes - you get XP for following along with a manipulation, or you get a small bonus to actions if you're persuaded and a penalty if you act against the persuasion, but if you really want to do a thing you can still do it.

3. They don't try to model social interaction as full-scale combat with HP and armor and tactics and whatnot.

Jakinbandw
2019-12-28, 12:46 PM
Yup. 100% agreed. When, IRL, through purely muggle means, I succeed in walking up to someone, and telling them, "you like tasty food. Your friend would be really yummy - you should kill and eat them", and having it succeed, we can talk about muggles having the nice things that magic does.

So I suppose you can reload and shoot a crossbow 9 times in 6 seconds while crossing a room at the same time as a bunch of people are trying to stab you while wearing full plate IRL purely through muggle means. Characters in DnD are far superior to characters IRL. Monks can run across water using any form of magic for example.

Dimers
2019-12-28, 04:19 PM
Roll Diplomacy first, then Role your Roll. Roleplay your form of success or failure, before it happens.
Persuading someone influences their actions, but doesn't define them. Person A gives up an advantage (a resource, stats, experience, whatever) to attempt to persuade Person B:

Person A "Succeeds", but Person B refuses: Person B gets penalized greater than Person A's loss.
Any other scenario: No change.



I'm strongly in favor of roll-before-role -- it plays by the rules, it makes the action align with the result, and it allows other skills to affect the social skill's success. It probably works better in PbP than live and it does have other flaws. To me, the biggest problem is that a player isn't going to know all the NPC's relevant secret motivations, so sometimes they can't play it out appropriately.

I also favor the second item in your list, but only theoretically; I haven't personally played in a game where it was used, but it looks like it should work well.

gkathellar
2019-12-28, 04:28 PM
So I suppose you can reload and shoot a crossbow 9 times in 6 seconds while crossing a room at the same time as a bunch of people are trying to stab you while wearing full plate IRL purely through muggle means. Characters in DnD are far superior to characters IRL. Monks can run across water using any form of magic for example.

Sure, but what actually matters is that an RPG is emotionally convincing, and persuasion that works like mind control comes across as distinctly surreal for a lot of people. This is especially true when there's an expectation that we'll play out social interactions down to the individual words said, and we happen to know that we weren't actually that convincing. Social interaction isn't like action movie shenanigans - it's too familiar, it's verbal rather than visual, and we tend to duplicate it in game exactly rather than through layers of abstraction.

Xuc Xac
2019-12-28, 06:32 PM
Yup. 100% agreed. When, IRL, through purely muggle means, I succeed in walking up to someone, and telling them, "you like tasty food. Your friend would be really yummy - you should kill and eat them", and having it succeed, we can talk about muggles having the nice things that magic does.


That's a strawman argument. Muggles have gone from the Earth to the moon in real life, but a jump spell won't get you there in D&D. That doesn't mean wizards "can't have nice things".

Mechalich
2019-12-28, 09:10 PM
Part of the problem with social systems are issues of time scale.

Combat tends to be relatively quick, whether in real life or fantasy, lasting a few minutes at most. Consequently its not a particularly big stretch to place effectively all combat-related abilities on a uniform timescale.

Social interaction, by contrast, is much more malleable in terms of how long things take, and persuasion effects need to be modeled over both the very short term, ex. 'how to I get this guard to move so my buddies can sneak past.' to the extremely long term, ex. 'I will trap the heir in a web of corruption so he becomes forced to obey my every command.' And you also have a whole bunch of scales in between, often even for the same activity. A seduction, for example, could unfold over anything from hours to months, even though a character might be taking the same in-game 'actions' in each case.

Systems that have greater flexibility about time scale seem to handle social conflicts better because they can work within the inherent malleability of actual interpersonal interactions. Games with mind control, by contrast, tend to work against this because regardless of efficacy, mind control always seems to be unreasonably fast.

jjordan
2019-12-28, 10:23 PM
Part of the problem with social systems are issues of time scale.

Combat tends to be relatively quick, whether in real life or fantasy, lasting a few minutes at most. Consequently its not a particularly big stretch to place effectively all combat-related abilities on a uniform timescale.

Social interaction, by contrast, is much more malleable in terms of how long things take, and persuasion effects need to be modeled over both the very short term, ex. 'how to I get this guard to move so my buddies can sneak past.' to the extremely long term, ex. 'I will trap the heir in a web of corruption so he becomes forced to obey my every command.' And you also have a whole bunch of scales in between, often even for the same activity. A seduction, for example, could unfold over anything from hours to months, even though a character might be taking the same in-game 'actions' in each case.

Systems that have greater flexibility about time scale seem to handle social conflicts better because they can work within the inherent malleability of actual interpersonal interactions. Games with mind control, by contrast, tend to work against this because regardless of efficacy, mind control always seems to be unreasonably fast.
I've been pondering this for a while. I regret I've got nothing concrete to add but I'll toss in my unorganized thoughts. I liked the idea of a player being able to devote more time to a social task and thereby increase their chances of success. I've toyed with various ways to represent this mechanically.

-Player declares their plan and how long they plan to take to accomplish it. DM assigns a DC to the task and the player starts working to accomplish their plan. E.G. Ingratiate themself with the local master of the tanner's guild. DM decides the plan is good (actually demonstrates some knowledge of the NPC) and determines that because the player is devoting a week to this effort this reduces the difficulty of the task. I feel this is pretty much in keeping with the RAW.
-Alternately the DM could set a DC of something like 50 for the task. Which would be impossible with a single roll. But the DM is going to let the player roll once each day for the seven days of the week and take the sum total. Which works out pretty well because, on average, the player ought to be able to roll about a 70 over the seven days. This format allows for setbacks along the way (Player rolled a natural 1 on Wednesday? What happened and how are they going to respond?) and for contested scenarios (a rival is attempting to prevent the character from accomplishing his task).

KineticDiplomat
2019-12-28, 11:46 PM
Burning Empires.

1) Essentially it has a “social conflict” system that plays out as a combination of player skill and character ability. You pre-select moves in sequences of threes and reveal them as you go. So you might decide if you were, say, defending against an accusation in court to play “obfuscate, point, ad hominem” while your opponent (the NPC) played “point, pander (to the crowd), ad hominem.” Certain plays are stronger versus others, and have different effects on the outcome when won.

2) Each social conflict starts as a wager. Basically “If I win, the accuser is shames in front of the King and my request for support against the Great Enemy gains royal support”, to which the GM might reply “ok, but if you lose then you will be banished from court and might be open to accusations of treason”. Which means you aren’t rolling for each line, but the overall flow of your attempt to persuade/seduce/con/whatever is more than one random “roll higher than 11”.

gkathellar
2019-12-29, 08:05 AM
Part of the problem with social systems are issues of time scale.

Combat tends to be relatively quick, whether in real life or fantasy, lasting a few minutes at most. Consequently its not a particularly big stretch to place effectively all combat-related abilities on a uniform timescale.

Social interaction, by contrast, is much more malleable in terms of how long things take, and persuasion effects need to be modeled over both the very short term, ex. 'how to I get this guard to move so my buddies can sneak past.' to the extremely long term, ex. 'I will trap the heir in a web of corruption so he becomes forced to obey my every command.' And you also have a whole bunch of scales in between, often even for the same activity. A seduction, for example, could unfold over anything from hours to months, even though a character might be taking the same in-game 'actions' in each case.

Systems that have greater flexibility about time scale seem to handle social conflicts better because they can work within the inherent malleability of actual interpersonal interactions. Games with mind control, by contrast, tend to work against this because regardless of efficacy, mind control always seems to be unreasonably fast.

Excellent point.

Grod_The_Giant
2019-12-29, 11:52 AM
Exalted 3E's social interaction system might be the best I've ever run into, specifically because it's built to prevent convincing people of something insane because you rolled well. It's also not adversarial or built like combat, which is a common pitfall.
Agreed. I mean, it's overcomplicated in places (because it's Exalted), but it hits a really good balance of being fluid enough to work with standard roleplay, structured enough that it doesn't feel cheap, and multi-layered enough that it doesn't turn into mind control.

In "brief,"

Social combat revolves around Intimacies—the things that matter to your character. It’s hard to convince anyone of anything without appealing to something that they value.

When you’re trying to resist a social action, Intimacies can both help and hurt. An Intimacy gives a bonus to your social Defense (Resolve) if the influence violates it, but it also inflicts a penalty if the influence backs it up. For example, a character with the Intimacy “Loyal Subject” would gain a bonus when you try to persuade them to look the other way when you rob their ruler, but a penalty if you want to persuade them to inform on their treacherous neighbor. If multiple Intimacies apply, only take the highest bonus… but if one would provide a bonus and the other a penalty, your Resolve is affected by both.

Intimacies come in three different levels. You can add or remove Minor Intimacies, or strengthen or weaken existing Intimacies, at the end of a scene with the GM’s agreement.

Minor Intimacies are firm beliefs, but don’t have a tremendous impact on your day-to-day life. They provide a +2 bonus or inflict a -1 penalty.
Major Intimacies are major aspects of your personal belief system, shaping almost everything in your life to a greater or lesser degree. They provide a +3 bonus or inflict a -2 penalty.
Defining Intimacies are the most important people and principles to you—the points on which you will not compromise, and which you’ll die to uphold. They provide a +4 bonus or inflict a -3 penalty.


If you’re trying not to be Influenced, your first line of defense is your social defense, Resolve (One half your [Wits + Integrity + Specialties], rounded up). If your attacker’s roll doesn’t beat your Resolve, it’s going to fail.

Instill
An Instill action inflicts the target with a new Minor Intimacy… or more. If you can draw on existing Intimacies, you can push them much farther.

A Minor Intimacy allows you to strengthen another Minor to Major, or weaken a Major Intimacy to Minor.
A Major Intimacy allows you to strengthen another Major to Defining, or weaken a Defining Intimacy to Major.

A target can resist an Instill action by spending a point of Willpower. If you fail to Instill your target, you can’t try again without accumulating new and greater evidence to support your position.

Persuade
The whole point of social combat, ultimately, is to persuade someone to do something for you. When you try to Persuade someone, you have to draw on one of your target’s existing Intimacies; the stronger the Intimacy, the more they’ll risk.

Minor Intimacies will let you persuade people to do somewhat inconvenient or mildly dangerous errands, so long as they’re not too disruptive. You could get someone to deliver a package to a shady location across town, let you enter a performance without a ticket, and so on.
Major Intimacies will let you persuade people to change their lives or risk life and limb, though they won’t risk certain ruin. You could persuade a a farmer to join your army, or a guard to release a violent prisoner.
Defining Intimacies will let you persuade people to do pretty much anything, even if it means almost certain death—play your cards right, and you can get a mortal soldier to fight a rearguard action against an army of demons.

If you can’t find an Intimacy to work off, you can always try using a gift (Bargaining). Bargaining works just like Persuade, but instead of appealing to an Intimacy of sufficient strength, you have to provide a bribe of sufficient magnitude. Negative Intimacies can be used too (Threatening)-- if someone has a Major Intimacy of fear towards you, that's just as effective at getting them to follow your orders as an equally-strong Intimacy of love.

A target can attempt to resist a Persuade action by spending Willpower, but it’s harder—you also have to point to a second Intimacy of equal or greater strength that supports your refusal. One you haven’t already applied to your Resolve; after all, the attacker already overcame that particular objection. This is known as a Decision Point.

If you want to Persuade someone to stop doing something they’ve already been Persuaded to do, it’s harder. You have to spend a point of Willpower before making the attempt, and the target gets a +3 bonus too their Resolve. If you succeed, they enter a Decision Point. They may cite an Intimacy supporting their current course of action to refuse the influence for no cost, or pay a point of Willpower and point to an Intimacy that supports your persuasion.

If you fail to Persuade your target, you can’t try again without pointing to a different Intimacy, or strengthening the previously-used one, for the rest of the story arc.

Inspiration
Inspiration doesn’t exactly ask someone to do something, and it doesn’t exactly create or strengthen Intimacies, but it has elements of both. A successful roll—usually Performance—can create emotions in your target or targets, but they choose how that manifests. You can’t force a specific action, but you can sort of subtly encourage them to act on their existing Intimacies. On the plus side, you don’t take a penalty for trying to Inspire multiple people at once.

A target can resist an Inspire action by spending a point of Willpower. If you fail to Inspire your targets, you can’t try again until the next scene.

Man_Over_Game
2019-12-29, 03:36 PM
I'm strongly in favor of roll-before-role -- it plays by the rules, it makes the action align with the result, and it allows other skills to affect the social skill's success. It probably works better in PbP than live and it does have other flaws. To me, the biggest problem is that a player isn't going to know all the NPC's relevant secret motivations, so sometimes they can't play it out appropriately.

I have a hard time understanding that part.

Most systems have your roll-for-success and your threshold-for-success as two separate things.

That is, you can roll well...and still fail. Your good roll (speech) may be independent from the difficulty to succeed (NPC secrets).

You say you rolled a 20 and I say you still fail, and now all the players look at me suspiciously. But if you rolled a 20, roled a good speech, and I say you fail, the players might think it was something specific that was said in that speech, and so focus on the interaction between the speech-giver and the recipient. The 20 is still the defining factor for the conversation, so the player knows how confident their character is, and know the character has reasons to pry.

Otherwise, players are just investigating into random stuff because of "hunches" based off of meta information

Why doesn't Roll Before Role work?

GentlemanVoodoo
2019-12-29, 05:16 PM
The best game systems I have played to handle what your talking about would be either any White Wolf game and Fantasy Flight's take on Legend of the 5 Rings.

farothel
2019-12-29, 05:34 PM
The main reason I prefer to have a social system is because some players are better at social interaction and their characters aren't necesseraly.

One systems I like is the new 7th Sea system with risks and rewards. It basically works the same for combat and social and I think that's what you need. A system that works the same no matter what you are trying to do, fight the guards or talk your way past them (time lines might differ of course, but that's okay). Wolsung also has a system that works in a similar way.

Dimers
2019-12-30, 11:11 AM
You say you rolled a 20 and I say you still fail, and now all the players look at me suspiciously. But if you rolled a 20, roled a good speech, and I say you fail, the players might think it was something specific that was said in that speech, and so focus on the interaction between the speech-giver and the recipient. The 20 is still the defining factor for the conversation, so the player knows how confident their character is, and know the character has reasons to pry.

When I said my piece above, I was assuming the DM announces Pass/Fail before the player RPs. If I understand what you're saying, what you advocate is:

player rolls
player uses that raw number to RP what they think is a good or bad attempt
DM applies modifiers for the combination of the PC's roleplayed tactic and the NPC's motivation
DM announces whether it worked

Right? The way physical skills work -- and in most D&D, the way social skills currently work -- the DM can say "You succeed" or "You fail" BEFORE any flavortext arrives. That's what people expect. I think what you're describing is better, but I guarantee some people will misunderstand how it's supposed to operate. (Me, for instance. :smallwink:) It also asks for a little more trust between DM and player, because for all the player knows, the DM could be making up problems on the spot just to make the roll fail.

farothel
2019-12-30, 03:48 PM
you can turn it around. Player says what the character has to say, then rolls and the GM can assign penalties or bonusses depending on circumstances (as usual), but also on what the player said.
It's like we do with L5R, where we get a free raise on our poetry roll if we can make a haiku on the spot. It's a small bonus, but it can help.

And the players have to know up front that there are things they can't do with social rolls, no matter how skilled they are. The same goes in combat. If you're a party of lvl 1 characters, you're not going to win from an ancient red dragon, no matter how many 20s you roll. That's also something the players should realise.

Quertus
2019-12-30, 04:39 PM
Abstract Social Skills and Hidden Information

Imagine a Fighter making tactical movement across a battlefield, carefully considering movement rates, reach, line of sight, etc, as he maneuvers into position to attack a fire elemental using his 2e-style golf cart of weapons. Now, imagine that, unbeknownst to this Fighter, there are landmines and/or hidden treasures buried on this battlefield, such that their exact movement and positioning matter even more than they know.

So, regardless of how clever their plan, they may hit a landmine, suffer a setback, and be forced to reevaluate their plan. Of course, a savvy character (perhaps one who has encountered landmines before, or whose player has noticed the "find traps" skill, and asked, "what does this do?"), might well have realized that landmines and/or hidden treasures were a possibility, and plan accordingly. A wise character might start to take or avoid paths others have already taken (to avoid landmines, or hit treasures, respectively), and a particularly Wiley character might try to take or avoid paths others were likely to be about to take (to clear mines for allies, find treasures before enemies do, maximize the chance of the party finding the treasure, attempt to influence which paths others take, or (if they have some "trap avoidance" skill) to (falsely) convince enemies of the safety of a given path.

Imagine a player who really enjoyed this complex tactical minigame. Now imagine someone asking, "can we just resolve this with dice rolls?".

Obviously, it won't scratch the same itch. But can we? Well, we could give each battlefield landmine and treasure ratings, and cross reference those with movement rates to produce a probability of encounter roll. Then, we could add "well-worn paths" and "virgin territory" maneuvers to affect those probabilities. And utilize "move carefully" maneuver and "find traps/treasures" skills to allow characters the chance to notice things as they move.

At which point, we've added in a bunch of extra rules to abstract things that were handled automatically by our concrete system, but we can do it.

Except that we forgot the "trick enemy onto landmine" and "manipulate the movement of others" maneuvers.

And that's the thing. At best, an abstract system will reasonably handle the types of interactions it was explicitly designed to handle. Anything outside that, it will likely handle nonsensically, or not at all.

Want to push someone onto a landmine? This abstract system has to go through additional steps to maybe handle reasonably what the concrete map with hidden landmines handles automatically.

And, if we're still using the map for tactical movement for those other considerations (LoS, reach, etc), the interaction between the concrete and abstract systems might produce unrealistic results.

-----

As I already lost this post once, I'll address the rest later.
.

Knaight
2019-12-30, 04:39 PM
Termination Shock comes to mind. It uses a Physical/Social/Intellectual hit point structure, but for social skill use the default is more soft power than direct harm - social skills offer an option between taking some damage or doing what is asked. It also requires some sort of bond or leverage.

Vorpal Glaive
2019-12-30, 06:34 PM
Hillfolk (Dramasystem) is a simple rpg game designed to focus on the socio-emotional aspects of relationships.

I just got it and it's amazing.

Thinker
2019-12-31, 11:02 AM
Abstract Social Skills and Hidden Information

Imagine a Fighter making tactical movement across a battlefield, carefully considering movement rates, reach, line of sight, etc, as he maneuvers into position to attack a fire elemental using his 2e-style golf cart of weapons. Now, imagine that, unbeknownst to this Fighter, there are landmines and/or hidden treasures buried on this battlefield, such that their exact movement and positioning matter even more than they know.

So, regardless of how clever their plan, they may hit a landmine, suffer a setback, and be forced to reevaluate their plan. Of course, a savvy character (perhaps one who has encountered landmines before, or whose player has noticed the "find traps" skill, and asked, "what does this do?"), might well have realized that landmines and/or hidden treasures were a possibility, and plan accordingly. A wise character might start to take or avoid paths others have already taken (to avoid landmines, or hit treasures, respectively), and a particularly Wiley character might try to take or avoid paths others were likely to be about to take (to clear mines for allies, find treasures before enemies do, maximize the chance of the party finding the treasure, attempt to influence which paths others take, or (if they have some "trap avoidance" skill) to (falsely) convince enemies of the safety of a given path.

Imagine a player who really enjoyed this complex tactical minigame. Now imagine someone asking, "can we just resolve this with dice rolls?".

Obviously, it won't scratch the same itch. But can we? Well, we could give each battlefield landmine and treasure ratings, and cross reference those with movement rates to produce a probability of encounter roll. Then, we could add "well-worn paths" and "virgin territory" maneuvers to affect those probabilities. And utilize "move carefully" maneuver and "find traps/treasures" skills to allow characters the chance to notice things as they move.

At which point, we've added in a bunch of extra rules to abstract things that were handled automatically by our concrete system, but we can do it.

Except that we forgot the "trick enemy onto landmine" and "manipulate the movement of others" maneuvers.

And that's the thing. At best, an abstract system will reasonably handle the types of interactions it was explicitly designed to handle. Anything outside that, it will likely handle nonsensically, or not at all.

Want to push someone onto a landmine? This abstract system has to go through additional steps to maybe handle reasonably what the concrete map with hidden landmines handles automatically.

And, if we're still using the map for tactical movement for those other considerations (LoS, reach, etc), the interaction between the concrete and abstract systems might produce unrealistic results.

-----

As I already lost this post once, I'll address the rest later.
.

There are many of games that support highly-detailed, tactical combat just as there are many games that support abstract combat. The existence of games with battle mats, specific positioning, cover, reach, difficult terrain, flanking rules, etc. does nothing to prevent the creation of games that use fuzzy positioning, abstract cover, and narrative tactical advantage. Both types of games are popular and the existence of one does nothing to extinguish the creation of another.

This discussion is not centered on whether or not abstract rules for social mechanics should exist - there are plenty of good reasons for why it should. The main ones are that without robust rules, outcomes are based almost entirely on GM fiat, which requires a great deal of trust; player skill and character skill are not always in-tune (for example, the 20-charisma bard being played by a shy person); and rules encourage gameplay within that space - if there are few rules for social interaction compared to combat, players believe that the game is primarily a combat-engine and are more reluctant to roleplay.

Whether you would enjoy rules and gameplay that rely on a social system is irrelevant to the discussion since others are already asking for such a system. Instead, the discussion is about what would make for good rules. What should a social system be able to do? Can you sway a crowd? Barter over an item's cost? Intimidate rivals to make them stand down from a fight? Bargain with gods for power? Hire teamsters to haul loot back from the dungeon? Beyond that, how should it work within the framework of other rules? Should it rely on a similar system to combat or should it use its own framework? Are the character attributes that are in the game already sufficient to describe the new system or do we need to expand on them?

Willie the Duck
2019-12-31, 03:12 PM
The best game systems I have played to handle what your talking about would be either any White Wolf game and Fantasy Flight's take on Legend of the 5 Rings.

Anyway, onto skill systems. I am going to ignore social systems, because a) other people are covering them, and b) they never really work that well. I think the best I've seen is nWoD2e/CofD, where you have to do things to get NPCs to be willing to do something for you, represented by 'doors'.

I last played WoD back in the 90s when it was actually made by White Wolf. Although there were social stats and skills, there wasn't much of an actual rule-structure around using these to determine social outcome. I take it the more recent games have taken the critiques to heart? If so, is there an SRD-equivalent or other legally-free ruleset that includes this?


Hillfolk (Dramasystem) is a simple rpg game designed to focus on the socio-emotional aspects of relationships.

I just got it and it's amazing.

Much like GURPS is really good at 'mapping out people,' Hillfolk/Drama system is really good at 'mapping out relationships.' When the system hits play, though, it can be gamed as easily as some of the other ones mentioned. So again there is a necessary level of trust required.

Quertus
2019-12-31, 03:17 PM
There are many of games that support highly-detailed, tactical combat just as there are many games that support abstract combat. The existence of games with battle mats, specific positioning, cover, reach, difficult terrain, flanking rules, etc. does nothing to prevent the creation of games that use fuzzy positioning, abstract cover, and narrative tactical advantage. Both types of games are popular and the existence of one does nothing to extinguish the creation of another.

This discussion is not centered on whether or not abstract rules for social mechanics should exist - there are plenty of good reasons for why it should. The main ones are that without robust rules, outcomes are based almost entirely on GM fiat, which requires a great deal of trust; player skill and character skill are not always in-tune (for example, the 20-charisma bard being played by a shy person); and rules encourage gameplay within that space - if there are few rules for social interaction compared to combat, players believe that the game is primarily a combat-engine and are more reluctant to roleplay.

Whether you would enjoy rules and gameplay that rely on a social system is irrelevant to the discussion since others are already asking for such a system. Instead, the discussion is about what would make for good rules. What should a social system be able to do? Can you sway a crowd? Barter over an item's cost? Intimidate rivals to make them stand down from a fight? Bargain with gods for power? Hire teamsters to haul loot back from the dungeon? Beyond that, how should it work within the framework of other rules? Should it rely on a similar system to combat or should it use its own framework? Are the character attributes that are in the game already sufficient to describe the new system or do we need to expand on them?

Your first paragraph has nothing to do with what I was saying, beyond going into detail and taking the metaphor in a direction I wasn't, so that's all I'll say about that.

Your second paragraph is highly interesting to me, and I'd love to discuss it, but it's a bit further off-topic than what I was discussing. Hopefully, we can circle back to this once the thread has derailed a bit more?

But your third paragraph - that's what I was talking about. To sum up my post in my own words, "whether you enjoy a particular abstraction probably says more about you, and the ways that you use the abstraction / view social interaction than it does about the fitness of any given abstraction. Given the complexity human interactions, the various abstractions will (hopefully) all have things that they model reasonably, and things that they… don't.".

So, yes, the question very much is, "what makes a good social system?", except that it is inherently subjective, based on the desires and preconceptions of the user. So, instead, it's, "what makes a good social system for you?". Which was pretty much the point of my post (with a nod towards realizing the possibility that some people might not be satisfied with *any* abstraction, so, for them, it's an impossible quest).

I cannot answer what makes a good abstract social system for the OP. I could, at best, tell them the various ways social systems I have used worked, and the various ways that they have failed.

… OK, actually, in that light, your second paragraph could be on topic. Although I could only respond that, while your implementation of role-playing had those problems, my implementation (mostly) did not. I do agree that it makes the activity a trust building exercise - I just view that as a feature rather than a bug.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify the meaning of my metaphor. I probably would have rambled on about golf carts for a few posts before getting to the point otherwise. :smallwink: Or my senility would have made me forget entirely. :smallfrown:

jayem
2019-12-31, 04:41 PM
Unless we limit meaningful in-game interactions to trivial mappings of pieces, so things can be genuine

I will roleplay the effect of my 'in-story' ability to send troops from Silesia to Galacia combined with my ambassadors ability to lie to to theirs that no such thing will happen by telling the player that no such thing will happen when Sil-Gal is on my order card

Or we form some kind of deal with the mafia

It turns out that your character will lose a hand to save his sister from torture, good on you. Perhaps in gratitude she can role the next few dice...

Anything we do is going to be a trite gaming abstraction. That ship is sailed, gone into the ocean, founded a new colony and built dockyards of it's own.

With that in mind the question is what do we want from our abstraction of skill/social systems, which in turn depends on what we want from our game, Which in turn is related to the initial (and implicit contracted boundaries) of the situation. And then what trite gaming abstraction suits it.

White wolf's masqueradesque situations need a social/skills situation that can bite back at the player.
A good heist/court one, would need one that had complex levers (including over time)
Dungeons and Dragons can be as light and unobtrusive and very subservient to the combat system.

The three games I want to play are:
(players v terrain), in which case the game will hopefully provide half the situation for real life decisions to map game ones anyway
heists
courts, in which case I want something that can handle emotions and deceptions interestingly

_----_
The corollary being that the question is What skill/social systems work for which games.
(with a second corollary being what games/roles am I prepared to role-play)

MoiMagnus
2020-01-01, 06:04 AM
**About mind control and persuasion:**

Do peoples never had players that refuse to faithfully apply the effect of charms or any subtle mind control, forcing the DM to either accept a very weakened magical effect, or take full control of the PC for the duration of the spell (or at least players that get very openly frustrated)? A significant portion of the players are just against the idea of their character personality/behaviour being out of their control.

Magic sometimes get a pass because (1) it is temporary (2) it happens rarely and (3) magic often gets a pass to everything.

(Note that treating high charisma as supernatural, and the result of diplomacy / persuasion checks as an explicit "charm" that can be broken by another skill check latter on can help to treat social skills against PCs)

**About skill systems in D&D:**

If you don't like technical combat systems, you don't play D&D. There are plenty of RPG better for you.

However, among the D&D players, you will have a huge variety of expectations about "how technical the skill system should be". There will be peoples who don't want to be restrained by their own real-life skills and peoples who want at the contrary to play with (some of) those real-life skills. There will be will be peoples fine with a flexible universe (where the results of a diplomacy checks retroactively determine that the NPC's unspecified eldest child was a son or a daughter) and peoples who expect the world to resolve as a simulation from all the hidden informations and the actual wording of the arguments.

I think this is why D&D skill and social system is so minimalist. They tried to build something that could accommodate most tables. (And by accommodate I mean "try to frustrate the least amount of peoples" not "try to be fun to the most amount of peoples")

When going deeper on design of skill and social systems, you have to chose who will be your audience, because you won't please everyone.

Morty
2020-01-03, 06:51 AM
I cannot answer what makes a good abstract social system for the OP. I could, at best, tell them the various ways social systems I have used worked, and the various ways that they have failed.


Which is exactly what people have been doing since the start, so you've expended a lot of words to say nothing in particular.

Quertus
2020-01-03, 01:54 PM
Which is exactly what people have been doing since the start, so you've expended a lot of words to say nothing in particular.

. .. ... I suppose I cannot speak for anyone else. So I can only say that *I* did not enter this thread with that mindset. And that, if others were already posting with that mindset, then many of the posts are… suboptimal.

The linked thread does a reasonable job of explaining just how poorly Exalted models normal human communication. If you want to model supernatural mind control, sure, Exalted is great. If you want to model and incentivize people interacting even remotely similarly to how humans interact IRL? Forget about it.

Beyond that linked Exalted thread, my senile mind is only recalling a few instances where someone explicitly called out "X system does / does not handle Y situation well, because it does Z".

So, worst (best?) case scenario, everyone else was already looking at this question that way, and I was just talking to myself, getting up to speed.

Even then, I could try to add structure to the conversation. For example, what types of social interaction are there? What actions could one take in each scenario? What type of responses / results could one realistically expect to see from these actions? What governs the effectiveness of these actions?

For example, someone says that I have spent a lot of words saying nothing. How could I respond? I chose to try to convince them of the various value vectors of those words. What could the possible results of this action be? What governs which of those possibilities becomes reality?

Now, which game systems could model that particular social interaction with sufficient fidelity? And can you glean that answer solely from the posts in this thread?

NichG
2020-01-04, 03:28 AM
Well, making a system doesn't necessarily have to be about abstraction or conflict resolution. You can also design systems around augmentation of the participants' abilities. Examples I tend to use in thinking about social systems are:

- Takebacks. If the reaction you got wasn't what you wanted, you can back up and try a different approach.

- What if? Analyze a character's likely reaction to a proposed scenario or approach in advance of committing to it.

- Readouts. Get information about how characters view eachother as the situation progresses. Get information about motivations.

- Attention/cover/interrupt. Be able to have a voice in a conversation or suppress someone else's voice for a single sentence.

- Suspicion alarms. Receive notice just before pushing too hard or saying something that arouses suspicion.

These kinds of features don't replace dialogue as a social mechanism, but they absolutely can confer advantage. However, it will be like playing a rogue rather than a fighter - if you just wade in without giving thought to things like flanking, cover, and exposure to risk, you're likely to get swatted even if you're at a high level. So attempts to brute force 'charm the king to hand over his kingdom' in an augmentation based system are the equivalent of walking up to a dragon, attacking, and giving it an easy full attack in response.

Quertus
2020-01-04, 07:13 AM
Well, making a system doesn't necessarily have to be about abstraction or conflict resolution. You can also design systems around augmentation of the participants' abilities. Examples I tend to use in thinking about social systems are:

- Takebacks. If the reaction you got wasn't what you wanted, you can back up and try a different approach.

- What if? Analyze a character's likely reaction to a proposed scenario or approach in advance of committing to it.

- Readouts. Get information about how characters view eachother as the situation progresses. Get information about motivations.

- Attention/cover/interrupt. Be able to have a voice in a conversation or suppress someone else's voice for a single sentence.

- Suspicion alarms. Receive notice just before pushing too hard or saying something that arouses suspicion.

These kinds of features don't replace dialogue as a social mechanism, but they absolutely can confer advantage. However, it will be like playing a rogue rather than a fighter - if you just wade in without giving thought to things like flanking, cover, and exposure to risk, you're likely to get swatted even if you're at a high level. So attempts to brute force 'charm the king to hand over his kingdom' in an augmentation based system are the equivalent of walking up to a dragon, attacking, and giving it an easy full attack in response.

I'm probably going to feel dumb for asking, because these might be as simple as they sound, and because you said "think about" rather than "design", but, if you have made such systems, can you you give examples of how they worked / how they played out?

NichG
2020-01-04, 07:32 AM
I'm probably going to feel dumb for asking, because these might be as simple as they sound, and because you said "think about" rather than "design", but, if you have made such systems, can you you give examples of how they worked / how they played out?

I used mechanics like these in a Memoir, but honestly the players didn't make heavy use of them (that's not to say that the party didn't socialize, but no one went really deep into the mechanical side of it). Memoir in particular was kind of a surrealist post-apocalyptic setting, so while there could have in principle been advantages of going social, it wasn't as heavy as, say, a court intrigue campaign.

There was a subsequent system based on the same core rules called Dynasty which was more of a nation-building game, but a lot of the stuff was more nation scale than personal scale there. E.g. characters did things like 'the bank my clan runs is going to call in your debt unless you do what I say' or 'I have diplomatic immunity as the representative of a foreign nation'. I think there may have been some mechanical use of more person-scale abilities by that character in a negotiation to bankrupt a small island nation whose solitary export was coffee, but it's been awhile and I forget exactly how that situation ran - he might have gone with a stealth/theft approach instead, now that I think about it. In Dynasty there were still things like the Empathy skill, but rather than specific abilities like 'take back something you said', there were a schedule of DCs. I think 'Seduction' (which basically amounts to 'figure out what the target wants' rather than 'make the target do what you ask') got used a bit.

We did have a character in Memoir who used a mechanical ability called 'Thy Cup Runneth Over', which basically means that you're always the right kind of person to get bumped to the front of the queue for clubs, can always find someone willing to buy you a drink, etc, and that did see some use (it's of the form of the attention/cover type of ability, though it's on the edge of what I'd call an augment). It was somewhat explicitly supernatural in that game system - essentially, it was on the same list as abilities which work 'because the universe sees your character a certain way', a consequence of the PCs possessing tiny slivers of the portfolios of deities that had been basically shattered into millions of pieces in the event which started the campaign. There was a similar ability called 'Ha ha what a guy' (reference to an obscure puzzle game) which made it impossible for anyone to perceive the words coming out of the character's mouth as an insult no matter what - that's a bit beyond what I'd call an augment normally.

Quertus
2020-01-04, 08:55 AM
@NichG - so Memoir is a system that contains a lot of supernatural "win buttons" like "Thy Cup Runneth Over" and "Ha ha what a guy". OK, but… what mechanics did the system use for everyone else to determine if someone bought them a dink, or took offense at what they said?

NichG
2020-01-04, 09:04 AM
@NichG - so Memoir is a system that contains a lot of supernatural "win buttons" like "Thy Cup Runneth Over" and "Ha ha what a guy". OK, but… what mechanics did the system use for everyone else to determine if someone bought them a dink, or took offense at what they said?

Well as I said, the social mechanics in Memoir were not conflict resolution mechanics, they were augments. So there is no mechanic to decide 'did they take offense?' or 'would they buy you a drink?'. If you said something offensive to an NPC, they'd take offense. But you could use for example the Empathy skill at various levels to know ahead of time that they would/wouldn't take offense, to take something back that you said that had a result you didn't like, etc.

It's generally pretty hard to use abilities to forcibly affect targets in Memoir. Against most things, characters have a pool of points they can spend from to execute a perfect defense (even if they are unaware of the attack). So 'roll to convince' wouldn't really work in that system. Stuff like "Thy Cup Runneth Over" and "Ha ha what a guy" are starting perks - you can take up to 10 points of flaws to take up to 10 points of perks (of which both of them cost 2 I think), but there's no way to increase that after character creation. So you're spending a pretty serious resource to get a social ability that bypasses defenses (and even then, Thy Cup Runneth Over doesn't specify that any specific character will buy you a drink - given the wonkiness of Memoir, its more like you actually create such a person from nothingness purely for the purpose of buying you a drink, after which they cease to exist).

Quertus
2020-01-04, 09:41 AM
Well as I said, the social mechanics in Memoir were not conflict resolution mechanics, they were augments. So there is no mechanic to decide 'did they take offense?' or 'would they buy you a drink?'. If you said something offensive to an NPC, they'd take offense. But you could use for example the Empathy skill at various levels to know ahead of time that they would/wouldn't take offense, to take something back that you said that had a result you didn't like, etc.

It's generally pretty hard to use abilities to forcibly affect targets in Memoir. Against most things, characters have a pool of points they can spend from to execute a perfect defense (even if they are unaware of the attack). So 'roll to convince' wouldn't really work in that system. Stuff like "Thy Cup Runneth Over" and "Ha ha what a guy" are starting perks - you can take up to 10 points of flaws to take up to 10 points of perks (of which both of them cost 2 I think), but there's no way to increase that after character creation. So you're spending a pretty serious resource to get a social ability that bypasses defenses (and even then, Thy Cup Runneth Over doesn't specify that any specific character will buy you a drink - given the wonkiness of Memoir, its more like you actually create such a person from nothingness purely for the purpose of buying you a drink, after which they cease to exist).

OK, I'm hearing a lot of "just roleplay" / "use the human mind as the underlying system to handle social interaction", which is what I advocate / the only thing I've ever found adequate to the task. Now, let me compare my "systems" to yours, to see if I am following you / to see what I've missed / what other systems you have.

So, there's the issue of "saying something you shouldn't have". I tend to use Knowledge to allow retcon "you would have known better than to say that", and Likability to grant "social HP", to limit the damage done. So, in 3e parlance, each step on the "NPC attitude" chart might have a number of "social HP" equal to your Diplomacy bonus. If you say something dumb / offensive, it "damages" your relationship, and you check to see if that drops the NPC's attitude to a lower level. Whereas Knowledge would almost never be a check - either you've spent the effort / had the experiences to learn that the target is a… patriotic thrill-seeking sadistic devout pro-life gay vegetarian libertarian with a fear of spiders… or an overconfident vain sensual Nazi critic fitness-buff with a love of nature… or you haven't.

Whereas you… allow Empathy to… know only if you use it ahead time? Reflexively? As a retcon? to know that actions would be a bad idea (and take them back?).

(EDIT: I suppose, for me, Empathy would be a way to "test the waters", to get that Knowledge - but only in response to the correct stimulus (which the character could themselves provide (albeit at potential risk (of damaging their relationship / arousing suspicion / etc))))

As I said in another thread, one reason (the least important of the 6 or so reasons) Armus moves to protect one of the PCs (who has better defenses than he does) is to provide a stimulus for the other party to react to, to allow him to, in 3e parlance, "make a sense motive roll". Zombies will respond differently to Armus' action than predators, who will respond differently than trained soldiers, noncombatants, allies, etc etc. Armus takes that action, in part, to ask the question, "Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?", to see how you respond when Armus reframes the scene as a battlefield. (EDIT: this allows Armus to make any last-minute corrections to the board state, by making some inane comment like, "the big one's mine", "protect <the tank>”, or just whimpering.)

I handle this by listening to how my GM has the NPCs react, and, occasionally, with a Sense Motive style skill. How would Memoir handle (that portion of) Armus' action?

NichG
2020-01-04, 10:39 AM
Whereas you… allow Empathy to… know only if you use it ahead time? Reflexively? As a retcon? to know that actions would be a bad idea (and take them back?).

(EDIT: I suppose, for me, Empathy would be a way to "test the waters", to get that Knowledge - but only in response to the correct stimulus (which the character could themselves provide (albeit at potential risk (of damaging their relationship / arousing suspicion / etc))))


There's a gamut of things that you can accomplish. Advance uses are generally lower skill ranks than retcon abilities, but both exist.



As I said in another thread, one reason (the least important of the 6 or so reasons) Armus moves to protect one of the PCs (who has better defenses than he does) is to provide a stimulus for the other party to react to, to allow him to, in 3e parlance, "make a sense motive roll". Zombies will respond differently to Armus' action than predators, who will respond differently than trained soldiers, noncombatants, allies, etc etc. Armus takes that action, in part, to ask the question, "Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?", to see how you respond when Armus reframes the scene as a battlefield. (EDIT: this allows Armus to make any last-minute corrections to the board, by making some inane comment like, "the big one's mine", "protect <the tank>”, or just whimpering.)

I handle this by listening to how my GM has the NPCs react, and, occasionally, with a Sense Motive style skill. How would Memoir handle (that portion of) Armus' action?

In Memoir you can use any evidence that exists in the narration, any intuition of your own, etc, without ever making a roll or check. In addition to that, there are skill waza that do things like 'get the DM to interpret evidence you have and tell you absolutely if your conclusion is correct or incorrect', which you could use to double-check your own thinking (but not actually generate new information). Furthermore, there are waza you can use to directly read out passively available information in the scene - posture, expression, etc - which might not have been in the narration, in which case you do obtain new information. The function of such abilities is independent (and additive with) any actions you take to try to provoke information to be revealed.

So you can say 'I'd like to figure out if these guys are zombies, mercs, or non-combantants - I'm going to try to read them (roll)'. Then if that fails (or if it succeeds), you can say 'I'm going to take a defensive position but otherwise be non-threatening, and watch how they react' and there's no mechanics there - I just tell you what happens and if its useful to you, so be it (or if you draw a wrong conclusion, so be it).

The point is that the one doesn't replace the other (or abstract the other) - they're purely additive. You have 'everything you can do as a human with your own skills, abilities, and insights' + 'some extra game mechanical stuff you also get to have because of your character'.

Quertus
2020-01-04, 08:40 PM
So you can say 'I'd like to figure out if these guys are zombies, mercs, or non-combantants - I'm going to try to read them (roll)'. Then if that fails (or if it succeeds), you can say 'I'm going to take a defensive position but otherwise be non-threatening, and watch how they react'

The point is that the one doesn't replace the other (or abstract the other) - they're purely additive. You have 'everything you can do as a human with your own skills, abilities, and insights' + 'some extra game mechanical stuff you also get to have because of your character'.

I've had to scrap several replies, because this level of "fine tooth comb" is apparently really easy for me to get wrong.

So it doesn't get lost, I'll start by saying that I mostly like this general setup. But I focus more on "game mechanical stuff to fill in the difference between being there and getting a 3rd party account".

No, even that's not right. Let me try again. When a GM describes (or fails to describe) a room, my usual first question is, "entrances and exits?", because those are usually the details that are most important to most of my characters. But I also may ask about dust / trails / wear patterns on floor or other features, or any number of other questions, depending on the character and what's on their mind. Similarly, when the GM describes a group of people, I'll often ask questions to get the GM to fill in the details that my character likely would have noticed / paid attention to. Maybe that's looking for concealed weapons, maybe that's the condition of their clothes, maybe that's how they're positioned or whether the smile on their lips reaches their eyes. As you may guess, Spot and Sense Motive are by far my favorite skills in any system.

Now, sometimes, those questions require a roll (or an opposed roll); other times, it's just information my character could obviously gather just by looking.

So, I suppose, it's "questions are for when the GM does not give you all of the information that your character should have¹; rolls/mechanics are for when getting that information is not automatic²".

That out of the way… you've got a lot of supernatural and win button stuff that… shrug, I would probably never take. Rather than "is x true", I (at most) would want to ask, "is there any reason I wouldn't believe x?". I'm all about getting to be wrong, just not "pants on head stupid" because the GM failed to mention something¹.

I'm not in the habit of telling my GM, "I'd like to know if these guys are x". Usually, if my characters want to know about someone, they'll provide stimulus to let that person tell about themselves. Something as simple as leading a thirsty group to the river, and watching them drink, for example, often provides all the clues I need to get started. Armus moving to protect someone, and clearly framing the scene as a combat, is the Firefly-approved³ "volcano's edge" of getting to know someone.

But the purely additive method, where other people who enjoy that kind of game can play with those win buttons added, but I can play without them? Sounds like wins all around!

Actually, even better, if I wasn't in the mood to play Sherlock, I could, with the same character simply switch over to roll-based, "just tell me what I know", right? And Memoir would handle my moodiness / mental exhaustion / whatever fairly seamlessly?

So, back to this thread, Memoir does not have systems for "convincing people" beyond "OK, convince them" (kinda the opposite of people's expectations for 3e Diplomacy), has had limited play testing on political manipulation, and is tentatively Quertus-approved for information-gathering and supernatural social abilities⁴. Does that sound like a fair appraisal?

Actually, "OK, convince them" is probably Quertus-approved at that level, but the I'd need to look through the specifics of the take back mechanics etc, and probably declare it, at best, "not suited for many of my tables".

¹ this is a neutral statement, as there are both good and bad ways of and reasons for providing incomplete information.
² I happen to have a preference for maxing out information-gathering skills & abilities, and for minimizing the number of times there is any doubt whether my character could gather that information.
³ IIRC, Armus predates Firefly (or, at least, my exposure to it), so, sadly, Firefly was not the inspiration for Armus' behavior.
⁴ where Quertus is a tough audience for muggle social skills, but an easy audience for social magic, contrary to his usual desires for muggles to have nice things.

NichG
2020-01-04, 09:13 PM
So, back to this thread, Memoir does not have systems for "convincing people" beyond "OK, convince them" (kinda the opposite of people's expectations for 3e Diplomacy), has had limited play testing on political manipulation, and is tentatively Quertus-approved for information-gathering and supernatural social abilities⁴. Does that sound like a fair appraisal?

Actually, "OK, convince them" is probably Quertus-approved at that level, but the I'd need to look through the specifics of the take back mechanics etc, and probably declare it, at best, "not suited for many of my tables".


Basically a lot of the design of Memoir and associated systems centers around the idea that mechanics given to the players are all active things - they specify some kind of guarantee that 'you should assume that your character can do this' rather than being about answering the question of 'can your character do this?'. The attack vs defense systems and things like that also work the same way - defenses aren't designed the way they are because 'you should be able to defend', they're there to give a metagame ability to know more precisely when you're in danger and what your limits are. A lot of the game design basically works on players being able to 'buy' certainty about things (which is inspired by the way that D&D casters play, where if you have a spell you just cast the spell and get the effect, you don't roll to cast or cast to roll).

Segev
2020-01-06, 09:51 AM
For a very light social system, 5e is about 3/4 of the way there. The ideal, bond, and flaw that any important NPC should have is a list of traits that are theoretically discoverable, and any social interaction that plays on them will generally get a reaction. How closely those reaction matches to the socializing character’s desires will be a factor of how well the player rolls (convincing the target that his blandishments are sincere and relevant) and how well the line of discussion really ties the ideal, bond, or flaw to what the character rolling the skill wants.

This is still quite light, because “how well it lines up” and “what is a reasonable response” are very fuzzy, but it at least narrows the gap on what the rolls are trying to achieve.

Max_Killjoy
2020-01-06, 10:39 AM
For a very light social system, 5e is about 3/4 of the way there. The ideal, bond, and flaw that any important NPC should have is a list of traits that are theoretically discoverable, and any social interaction that plays on them will generally get a reaction. How closely those reaction matches to the socializing character’s desires will be a factor of how well the player rolls (convincing the target that his blandishments are sincere and relevant) and how well the line of discussion really ties the ideal, bond, or flaw to what the character rolling the skill wants.

This is still quite light, because “how well it lines up” and “what is a reasonable response” are very fuzzy, but it at least narrows the gap on what the rolls are trying to achieve.

Unless there's more in the DMG... reading through the PHB, any interaction between the Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws on one hand, and Skills on the other, appears to be entirely implied.

Morty
2020-01-06, 11:20 AM
I won't be surprised if in ten years or so, a sixth edition of D&D introduces a social system based on ideals, bonds and flaws while touting it as a groundbreaking invention.

And on a less glib note, to me a social interaction system has two main purposes. First is to help determine what is and isn't possible to accomplish with persuasion, deception, intimidation and so on, with less reliance on GM adjudication. Second is to give mechanical hooks for social interactions beyond just "have a good modifier and roll very well". This applies both to character building and to in-game decisions.

Knaight
2020-01-06, 03:16 PM
I won't be surprised if in ten years or so, a sixth edition of D&D introduces a social system based on ideals, bonds and flaws while touting it as a groundbreaking invention.

Based on the general D&D lagtime, 6e seems about due to introduce Aspects, then start talking about how groundbreaking they are. That would feed into the social skill system particularly easily.

Segev
2020-01-06, 04:04 PM
Unless there's more in the DMG... reading through the PHB, any interaction between the Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws on one hand, and Skills on the other, appears to be entirely implied.

There's a reason I said it's about 3/4 of a system. The majority of that missing 1/4 shares a vast amount of venn diagram space with what's missing from 5e's skill system, in general.

I've outlined, in other threads, an idea for building and manipulating ideals, bonds, and flaws, and it was somewhat rightfully pointed out that it sounds a lot like Exalted 3e's social system (because I was inspired by it). I will say that I was trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of Ex3's system, but it also was one man's effort of an hour or less of thought, so probably wasn't nearly perfect.

For me, the reason both Ex3 and 5e have reasonable starts on social systems is that they attempt to lay out the conceptual "field" in which the game is played. There's at least some knobs, hooks, or terrain features (depending on the analogy you want to use) on which to hang understanding what is and is not a good move, with more clarity as to why one thing works when another does not, and why one thing might be possible to convince somebody of or to do while another is entirely unreasonable.

You're not going to convince the guard who does his job for love of country, and who associates protecting his family with protecting his country AND with keeping his job long-term, to let you get away with violating the security of the things over which he has jurisdiction with a simple bribe. Even if it COULD retire him and his family comfortably forever, it risks their safety by risking the safety of his nation, and it violates his patriotic love of country. You're also not going to get him to betray his duty on purely patriotic principles that his country is corrupt and needs to be bettered, because the upheval could endanger his family and losing his job could make him unable to support them.

Knowing what it is that motivates him and how can help you construct your approach to persuading him, such that any rolling comes down to seeing how well you do in convincing him to value one of his drives over others, or in your sincerity or the veracity of your claims, rather than trying to say "you're changing his very heart over a 1 minute conversation."

The guard who isn't particularly interested in short-term bribes because he's got long-term plans for his job may not be persuaded without enormous wealth, but if he also has this cute girl he's got his eye on and you can tie the bribe to an expensive (but not life-changingly so) bit of jewelry, or a hard-to-get favor (e.g. access to an exclusive resort for a date), suddenly he might be more amenable to a smaller bribe, and all you have to do is convince him that the bribe will result in getting the girl's positive attentions, rather than having to convince him to change his financial priorities to accepting short-term gains at the expense of secure long-term prosperity.

(For whatever reason, I always default to convincing guards to do things in white room social rules discussions for my examples. I need to broaden my horizons a bit, but I have trouble coming up with generic "this would happen in about any RPG" scenarios.)

Willie the Duck
2020-01-07, 08:54 AM
There's a reason I said it's about 3/4 of a system. The majority of that missing 1/4 shares a vast amount of venn diagram space with what's missing from 5e's skill system, in general.

The Diplomancer was one of the extreme examples of skill-system misfires in 3e that I'm convinced are the reason that 5e skills are so loosey-goosey.


(For whatever reason, I always default to convincing guards to do things in white room social rules discussions for my examples. I need to broaden my horizons a bit, but I have trouble coming up with generic "this would happen in about any RPG" scenarios.)


"You have to let us through, it's an emergency!"
"You have to get out of here (despite _______), the place is about to blow up/flood/crash!"
"I need you to do us this favor, despite the risk you are taking."
"You really want to take this deal, even though what we're offering isn't quite what you are looking for."
"I can readily defeat you, but I don't want to hurt you, so put your weapons down and your hands up."

jayem
2020-01-07, 03:36 PM
(For whatever reason, I always default to convincing guards to do things in white room social rules discussions for my examples. I need to broaden my horizons a bit, but I have trouble coming up with generic "this would happen in about any RPG" scenarios.)
It makes a good test case, there's a clear simple desired outcome, a well defined single obstacle. The player is in a position of relatively perfect self-control.
Which gives almost pure freedom to try various approaches, and see what other factors then come into play (are modelled, are needed to be modelled).

Then some kind of intellectual debate/excercise to examine the boundary of PC and Player knowledge.

I'd suggest either torture or romance as being cases where the player has to react and unless the PC is a sociopath will not be interestingly modelled by a detatched player. Deciding that these are aspects you want to be outside of the game-game is of course a perfectly fine outcome (especially as there won't be a properly good outcome), however the better they are handled then the better more borderline cases (e.g. arranging food, keeping secrets) will be.

And some kind of crowd based problem. Perhaps "You have to get out of here, this place is going to (something obvious/something unbelievable") is a good one as everything is almost proscribed and everything totally depends on the PC/crowds attributes.

kyoryu
2020-01-08, 02:05 PM
You're not going to convince the guard who does his job for love of country, and who associates protecting his family with protecting his country AND with keeping his job long-term, to let you get away with violating the security of the things over which he has jurisdiction with a simple bribe. Even if it COULD retire him and his family comfortably forever, it risks their safety by risking the safety of his nation, and it violates his patriotic love of country. You're also not going to get him to betray his duty on purely patriotic principles that his country is corrupt and needs to be bettered, because the upheval could endanger his family and losing his job could make him unable to support them.

Knowing what it is that motivates him and how can help you construct your approach to persuading him, such that any rolling comes down to seeing how well you do in convincing him to value one of his drives over others, or in your sincerity or the veracity of your claims, rather than trying to say "you're changing his very heart over a 1 minute conversation."

This is really the key here, and the whole "social skills aren't magic."

Any social skill usage really comes down to one of two scenarios:

1) Getting someone to choose one thing they value over another thing they value. This is generally the pleasant type of social interaction.

2) Getting someone to choose to avoid something they don't want by giving up something they value. This is generally unpleasant (threats and intimidation)

Either of these can be accompanied by lies.

But in general, people won't give up something they value for nothing. They'll want something. This can be an abstract thing - it doesn't have to be material.

It's also useful to think of things in terms of values, and tactics (I've heard other terms for these but I forgot them). I "want to provide for my family" so "I'm working as a guard." is a great example. Getting people to change tactics is comparatively easy, compared to getting them to change values.

Normally I just eyeball this stuff and go from there, but I think you could use this as a starting place for a more mechanized system. Even allowing some "tactics" to become goals in some kind of hierarchical chain, with stats on how deeply held and important they are (which may not be the same thing), and how various things support each other.

Like, if a guard was a guard to protect the city, because he feels the nation is his home, because he believes the king is working for the best interest of all and is a good leader, then a sufficient attack on "the king is a good leader" could break the whole chain from there. Or something. I mean, again, for me just eyeballing this stuff is cool, but if someone wanted to mechanize it that's probably where I'd start.

Max_Killjoy
2020-01-08, 03:34 PM
This is really the key here, and the whole "social skills aren't magic."

Any social skill usage really comes down to one of two scenarios:

1) Getting someone to choose one thing they value over another thing they value. This is generally the pleasant type of social interaction.

2) Getting someone to choose to avoid something they don't want by giving up something they value. This is generally unpleasant (threats and intimidation)

Either of these can be accompanied by lies.

But in general, people won't give up something they value for nothing. They'll want something. This can be an abstract thing - it doesn't have to be material.

It's also useful to think of things in terms of values, and tactics (I've heard other terms for these but I forgot them). I "want to provide for my family" so "I'm working as a guard." is a great example. Getting people to change tactics is comparatively easy, compared to getting them to change values.

Normally I just eyeball this stuff and go from there, but I think you could use this as a starting place for a more mechanized system. Even allowing some "tactics" to become goals in some kind of hierarchical chain, with stats on how deeply held and important they are (which may not be the same thing), and how various things support each other.

Like, if a guard was a guard to protect the city, because he feels the nation is his home, because he believes the king is working for the best interest of all and is a good leader, then a sufficient attack on "the king is a good leader" could break the whole chain from there. Or something. I mean, again, for me just eyeballing this stuff is cool, but if someone wanted to mechanize it that's probably where I'd start.


It's probably the headache, knee, and painkiller talking (or loosening the tongue), but sometimes I get the impression that there are plenty of gamers who do think that social skills are some sort of magic.

And even if they don't, they often seem to consider social interaction with NPCs a waste of time, and want to get the social maneuvers out of the way so they can get to other things, so spending 5 minutes on figuring out how to influence the guard gets more negative response than 2 hours spent on fighting a few guards...

Segev
2020-01-08, 04:47 PM
It's probably the headache, knee, and painkiller talking (or loosening the tongue), but sometimes I get the impression that there are plenty of gamers who do think that social skills are some sort of magic.

And even if they don't, they often seem to consider social interaction with NPCs a waste of time, and want to get the social maneuvers out of the way so they can get to other things, so spending 5 minutes on figuring out how to influence the guard gets more negative response than 2 hours spent on fighting a few guards...

Well, to be fair, there are some players who just want to play the combat minigame, and maybe the dungeon-exploration minigame. And there's nothing wrong with that. The trouble is when and if they start to insist that anybody who has different interests not only shouldn't be in their game, but shouldn't be seeking to design or play a game that has parts other than those they like.

Morty
2020-01-09, 05:22 AM
An important part of a good social system is determining when you can't talk your way out of a situation, at least not at the time and not in that way. That's what Defining Intimacies and unacceptable influence in Exalted 3E are for.

Cluedrew
2020-01-09, 08:36 AM
Wow, this thread managed to mention three systems I have never heard of.

One thing I would like to add a bit of wait to is: For what? I think D&D's skill system barely deserves the title. But if you want to quickly resolve some one off bonuses or flavour options it is good enough, doesn't get in the way and takes minimal time to learn.

Powered by the Apocalypse not only has working rules, but the individual systems tend to pick very deliberate subsets of possible things to cover. Things like the "magic" system are obvious examples. Less obvious examples is one of my favorite hacks has rules for trips because it is about wilds and surviving in the great hostile outdoors. Another has rules for updating the plan because it is a heist game where you have a plan and things will go wrong and force you off the plan. Others don't have these rules.

Even within one type of system Exalted's social system may not do a good job of portraying realistic conversations, but it is a great tool for over the top social manipulators. I mean not all of that was intentional, but considering the characters Exalted is designed for, I'm not surprised they made the mistakes they did.

Quertus
2020-01-09, 02:21 PM
For a very light social system, 5e is about 3/4 of the way there. The ideal, bond, and flaw that any important NPC should have is a list of traits that are theoretically discoverable, and any social interaction that plays on them will generally get a reaction. How closely those reaction matches to the socializing character’s desires will be a factor of how well the player rolls (convincing the target that his blandishments are sincere and relevant) and how well the line of discussion really ties the ideal, bond, or flaw to what the character rolling the skill wants.

This is still quite light, because “how well it lines up” and “what is a reasonable response” are very fuzzy, but it at least narrows the gap on what the rolls are trying to achieve.

I'm… not exactly sure that that qualifies as a "system", any more than other fluff, like eye color.


This is really the key here, and the whole "social skills aren't magic."

Any social skill usage really comes down to one of two scenarios:

1) Getting someone to choose one thing they value over another thing they value. This is generally the pleasant type of social interaction.

2) Getting someone to choose to avoid something they don't want by giving up something they value. This is generally unpleasant (threats and intimidation)

Either of these can be accompanied by lies.

But in general, people won't give up something they value for nothing. They'll want something. This can be an abstract thing - it doesn't have to be material.

It's also useful to think of things in terms of values, and tactics (I've heard other terms for these but I forgot them). I "want to provide for my family" so "I'm working as a guard." is a great example. Getting people to change tactics is comparatively easy, compared to getting them to change values.

Normally I just eyeball this stuff and go from there, but I think you could use this as a starting place for a more mechanized system. Even allowing some "tactics" to become goals in some kind of hierarchical chain, with stats on how deeply held and important they are (which may not be the same thing), and how various things support each other.

Like, if a guard was a guard to protect the city, because he feels the nation is his home, because he believes the king is working for the best interest of all and is a good leader, then a sufficient attack on "the king is a good leader" could break the whole chain from there. Or something. I mean, again, for me just eyeballing this stuff is cool, but if someone wanted to mechanize it that's probably where I'd start.

A game built from the ground up around answering the question, "why?" certainly could have potential. But, how can we make it so that it can have the fidelity of modeling the full chain of "why" questions that leads to my "vegetarian Nazi (etc etc etc)" - ie, that leads to a believable NPC who is more than a cardboard cutout who can only be interacted with from one direction - while still making something that people would actually go through the effort to play?


It's probably the headache, knee, and painkiller talking (or loosening the tongue), but sometimes I get the impression that there are plenty of gamers who do think that social skills are some sort of magic.

And even if they don't, they often seem to consider social interaction with NPCs a waste of time, and want to get the social maneuvers out of the way so they can get to other things, so spending 5 minutes on figuring out how to influence the guard gets more negative response than 2 hours spent on fighting a few guards...

"What's the BAB DC to kill him"

"But you haven't positioned yourself to hit him. And, even if you had, he immune to nonmagical weapons. Also, combat isn't just a single roll in this system - it's a strategic 'back and forth', with opportunities to respond to your opponents' actions."

"Why do you have to make things so difficult? I just want to kill him, so I can get back to the 'mapping the dungeon, and making new friends' minigame."

Yeah, if that felt like a less likely exchange than its "ignore social tactics, and simplify it to a single die roll, so that we can get back to combat" counterpart, there's probably a reason for that.

Segev
2020-01-09, 02:53 PM
I'm… not exactly sure that that qualifies as a "system", any more than other fluff, like eye color.



It doesn't. It's about 3/4 of a system.

Let's look at what most "systems" are now: They're either "roll to see if you can Diplomacy them into obedience," or they're "role-play it out, and try to read the NPC through the DM's acting well enough to figure out what the NPC wants and/or is thinking so you can come up with an argument you can convince the DM would convince the NPC."

By having specific...knobs and levers, let's call them...in the form of Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws, with some rules half-way there to figure out what those are for a given NPC, you now have at least some idea, once you learn them, what your role-played arguments might be. You still have the gap of asking how close to the mark your arguments are in the DM's eyes, which he uses to set the DC of any finalized rolls, but it gets us closer.

It also lets us start thinking of the right intermediate steps to ask questions about: You know what drives the NPC, now what are you going to say to play on those drives? Okay, you have to convince the NPC that you're sincere, truthful, and right about what you're saying. So that's at least one roll, barring exquisite evidence that makes it an auto-success. Then you have to convince him that it matters, or that it really is tied to his interests in a useful way to you. Once that's done, you've either convinced him, or have one more persuasion-type roll to convince him that doing what you want will take the factors you've got him believing in and coalesce them into a course of action he now believes he wants to take.


Or something like that.

Yes, it's fuzzy. It's only 3/4 of a system, not a system. But it's a heck of a lot more than the starting points of "role play it out and try to socialize the DM" or "make a single roll to mind-control the NPC."

JoeJ
2020-01-09, 03:08 PM
By having specific...knobs and levers, let's call them...in the form of Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws, with some rules half-way there to figure out what those are for a given NPC, you now have at least some idea, once you learn them, what your role-played arguments might be. You still have the gap of asking how close to the mark your arguments are in the DM's eyes, which he uses to set the DC of any finalized rolls, but it gets us closer.

To build on this a little bit, if you're able to engage the NPC in small talk for a minute or two it should be pretty easy to discern at least one personality trait, ideal, bond, or flaw. I'd make it a DC 10 at most Wisdom (Insight) check. (Now, how hard it is to get them to participate in small talk obviously depends hugely on the circumstances, and might, in some cases, require a Charisma check.)

Morty
2020-01-09, 03:58 PM
I don't think "roll to mind-control the NPC into obedience" is as common as people make it out to be. When I investigated social systems while trying to homebrew one for Dark Heresy 2E, I used Exalted 3E of course, but also the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG and Black Crusade (since it's also a FFG WH40K) system. The main issue with those wasn't "mind-controlling NPCs into obedience", but the fact that they were adversarial. They focused on two characters engaging in negotiation (ASoIaF) or vying for influence on others (Black Crusade), with clear victory and loss conditions. This isn't going to apply to most situations.

Max_Killjoy
2020-01-09, 04:11 PM
Well, right after "social skills are magic" on the list of bad starting points for social systems in RPGs come "all social interaction is about winning and losing and power" and "social interaction is just like combat".

Segev
2020-01-09, 04:29 PM
Well, right after "social skills are magic" on the list of bad starting points for social systems in RPGs come "all social interaction is about winning and losing and power" and "social interaction is just like combat".

To some degree, this is simply because it's when you want to change the dynamics of a relationship, or get a specific behavior, that you invoke mechanics. I don't think even the most hard-core gamist is asking for game rules to model having a simple conversation on philosophy beyond, say, what 3e's Sense Motive and Bluff skills might have (in order to lie about what you believe or see if somebody is prevaricating). And those legitimately don't need to be more than a single opposed roll per conversational point, if not less than that.

JoeJ
2020-01-09, 04:35 PM
Well, right after "social skills are magic" on the list of bad starting points for social systems in RPGs come "all social interaction is about winning and losing and power" and "social interaction is just like combat".

All social interaction is not necessarily about winning and losing, but unless there is some kind of conflict you don't need a system to handle it. There don't need to be rules about whether you can convince a merchant to sell you some of their merchandise for a price the merchant thinks is fair, or whether a bored bystander waiting at a bus stop will talk to you about the weather. It's only when you're trying to convince an NPC to do something they weren't already willing to do that there needs to be some sort of rule.

Max_Killjoy
2020-01-09, 04:50 PM
To some degree, this is simply because it's when you want to change the dynamics of a relationship, or get a specific behavior, that you invoke mechanics. I don't think even the most hard-core gamist is asking for game rules to model having a simple conversation on philosophy beyond, say, what 3e's Sense Motive and Bluff skills might have (in order to lie about what you believe or see if somebody is prevaricating). And those legitimately don't need to be more than a single opposed roll per conversational point, if not less than that.


All social interaction is not necessarily about winning and losing, but unless there is some kind of conflict you don't need a system to handle it. There don't need to be rules about whether you can convince a merchant to sell you some of their merchandise for a price the merchant thinks is fair, or whether a bored bystander waiting at a bus stop will talk to you about the weather. It's only when you're trying to convince an NPC to do something they weren't already willing to do that there needs to be some sort of rule.

But even those social interactions that are "an issue in question" and "trying to convince someone" don't need to be adversarial or zero-sum or power/dominance to still sometimes need mechanics.

Segev
2020-01-09, 04:58 PM
But even those social interactions that are "an issue in question" and "trying to convince someone" don't need to be adversarial or zero-sum or power/dominance to still sometimes need mechanics.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to get across, here.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that it should be completely modeled on combat. What I've been discussing would encompass convincing somebody to engage in a win/win by, in part, convincing them that the suggested course of action IS a win/win, through knowing what they would consider a "win" and demonstrating that the proposal achieves this. The mechanics involved would center around figuring out what the other person considers a "win" and convincing them of the truth of your pitch regarding making that "win" come about.

JoeJ
2020-01-09, 05:01 PM
But even those social interactions that are "an issue in question" and "trying to convince someone" don't need to be adversarial or zero-sum or power/dominance to still sometimes need mechanics.

Absolutely. Unlike combat, a social interaction mechanic needs to allow for the possibility of a non-zero-sum (i.e. win/win) outcome. And I agree with Segev that 5e gives you levers to bring that about, but fails to explain how to use those levers to resolve an actual situation in the game. (At least, that's my understanding of his position.)

Max_Killjoy
2020-01-09, 05:02 PM
I'm not really sure what you're trying to get across, here.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that it should be completely modeled on combat. What I've been discussing would encompass convincing somebody to engage in a win/win by, in part, convincing them that the suggested course of action IS a win/win, through knowing what they would consider a "win" and demonstrating that the proposal achieves this. The mechanics involved would center around figuring out what the other person considers a "win" and convincing them of the truth of your pitch regarding making that "win" come about.

I was responding to Morty's comment about systems that seem to treat all social interaction as inherently adversarial, and noting that it's another one of those bad assumptions that seem to often go unquestioned as a basis for a social interaction system in RPG rules.

Morty
2020-01-09, 05:43 PM
I don't really know how many social systems have this problem; those were just the two I investigated, while Exalted 3E sidesteps this issue and many others neatly. I guess you could call Chronicles of Darkness' system adversarial, though I don't know if I would. It never came up in my chronicles. That might be my fault more than the system's, but it is weirdly focused.

Segev
2020-01-09, 05:44 PM
I was responding to Morty's comment about systems that seem to treat all social interaction as inherently adversarial, and noting that it's another one of those bad assumptions that seem to often go unquestioned as a basis for a social interaction system in RPG rules.

Ah, I see.

I think that stems from almost every other time we roll dice in an RPG, it's adversarial. Either combat, or a contest, or man vs. nature. Climb, Craft, et al are either successes or failures to overcome a difficulty presented by the world or environment or the like.

NichG
2020-01-09, 07:40 PM
Ah, I see.

I think that stems from almost every other time we roll dice in an RPG, it's adversarial. Either combat, or a contest, or man vs. nature. Climb, Craft, et al are either successes or failures to overcome a difficulty presented by the world or environment or the like.

I've been trying to actively avoid this in my current vein of system design as a bit of an experiment to expand the space. In the thing I'm working on now (will start running this weekend, so we'll see how it goes), dice are only ever rolled to determine the extent of a successful effect, never to determine success or failure. It's somewhat cribbed, philosophically, from 2ed 7th Sea. Basically, dice rolls generate resources which can be expended to produce or amplify outcomes. Mechanics correspond to guarantees - if you have the mechanic for something, you can do it at 100% success; if you don't have the mechanic, you can attempt it but the GM decides what happens; if you like how it goes, there's a resource you can spend to turn that into a mechanic for the future. Gradations are expressed as derived statistics that determine prerequisites for applying a mechanic (you can't hit if its out of range, you can't climb if it exceeds the steepness of a slope that your ability lets you climb, etc) or in variable costs.

In a conflict model, its like having a system where you never roll to hit, you only roll for damage. So there is some equivalency - e.g. if you get insufficient resources for what you wanted to achieve, you can interpret that as failure. But it doesn't use the ideas of 'success' or 'failure' as the building blocks underlying a roll, so hopefully that shifts the general feel and philosophy of the system.

Cluedrew
2020-01-09, 09:58 PM
To NichG: That sounds interesting I'd be interested in hearing more about it as you get further.

So rather being adversarial perhaps the better way to frame it would be simply "something is at stake". So success or failure can be at stake, but degree of success can also be at stake as well. Consider Powered by the Apocalypse which has miss, weak hit and strong hit as its three outcomes.

But there is not a lot at stake in a friendly conversation. Unless you model encouragement and get some bonuses out of friends chatting, which is sort of a think in real life (I was chatting with friends before this and it put me in a good mood) but that level of mental health effects is not something most systems represent. Maybe a really granular survival game about a small group of survivors struggling to keep their spirits up as they desperately search for some way to life another day would but that is hardly most systems.

(Also combat is not really zero-sum game, it is strictly loss in most systems (and in real life) where it is more about who looses less. So the sum would be negative.)

NichG
2020-01-10, 12:27 AM
To NichG: That sounds interesting I'd be interested in hearing more about it as you get further.

So rather being adversarial perhaps the better way to frame it would be simply "something is at stake". So success or failure can be at stake, but degree of success can also be at stake as well. Consider Powered by the Apocalypse which has miss, weak hit and strong hit as its three outcomes.

But there is not a lot at stake in a friendly conversation. Unless you model encouragement and get some bonuses out of friends chatting, which is sort of a think in real life (I was chatting with friends before this and it put me in a good mood) but that level of mental health effects is not something most systems represent. Maybe a really granular survival game about a small group of survivors struggling to keep their spirits up as they desperately search for some way to life another day would but that is hardly most systems.

(Also combat is not really zero-sum game, it is strictly loss in most systems (and in real life) where it is more about who looses less. So the sum would be negative.)

Teaching would be an example of a friendly social interaction where there's a difference between when it's done skilfully or poorly. Similarly, a lot of management and mediation-type interactions (helping someone express the source of their confusion, helping someone come to a decision, getting a meeting to stay on topic and conclude in a timely fashion). Also just getting information someone in a friendly setting can be non-adversarial but where the coherency and relevancy of the information you get depends on social skill.

Jakinbandw
2020-01-12, 06:00 PM
So I've finally got something that I want to share. It's the social interaction system that I am developing for a fairly high powered game. I wanted to try to do something slightly different than DnD with my system, so the system comes in two parts: Fist it treats social interaction like combat in that there are turns and each round every single PC and NPC that wishes gets a chance to interact. This is so that all the players have equal time in the spotlight rather than one taking over and hogging the spotlight until the social interaction is over.

The second is that most of my system involves the bartering of favours. This means that the PCs can offer a favour to have an NPC do something for them. The PCs are also encouraged to keep their word by gaining bennies each time they return or do a favour.

My social interaction system is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11P8e6-WTlKv9d1XScDsGoEfJgCsTglNJ8af4fAQ07ys/edit?usp=sharing

And the Index for my larger system (still in progress) is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10yrwbGha9olvN4tTdHrN2IanxGjEslMskE2WqphED_s/edit

jayem
2020-01-13, 05:21 PM
So I've finally got something that I want to share. It's the social interaction system that I am developing for a fairly high powered game. I wanted to try to do something slightly different than DnD with my system, so the system comes in two parts: Fist it treats social interaction like combat in that there are turns and each round every single PC and NPC that wishes gets a chance to interact. This is so that all the players have equal time in the spotlight rather than one taking over and hogging the spotlight until the social interaction is over.

The second is that most of my system involves the bartering of favours. This means that the PCs can offer a favour to have an NPC do something for them. The PCs are also encouraged to keep their word by gaining bennies each time they return or do a favour.

My social interaction system is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11P8e6-WTlKv9d1XScDsGoEfJgCsTglNJ8af4fAQ07ys/edit?usp=sharing

And the Index for my larger system (still in progress) is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10yrwbGha9olvN4tTdHrN2IanxGjEslMskE2WqphED_s/edit

Looks to have had quite a bit of thought put into it.
Where you say "rules of social interaction for for those times", I suspect the first "for" should be an "are" ?

I suspect you might want to double the number of 'levels' of favours also... There doesn't seem to be a lot of room once you add bonuses. I feel you don't want to no-sell an extremely law abiding policeman missing a parking ticket, it just should require ridiculous amounts of effort on your part.

Jakinbandw
2020-01-15, 09:20 AM
Thanks for catching that!


I suspect you might want to double the number of 'levels' of favours also... There doesn't seem to be a lot of room once you add bonuses. I feel you don't want to no-sell an extremely law abiding policeman missing a parking ticket, it just should require ridiculous amounts of effort on your part.

On one hand you are right, but on the other I made it this way to make it easy to work with. People can easily remember these levels, and I worry that if I doubled them, people would start getting hung up if a favour was Small, or Very Small.

Also, you can convince the law abiding policeman to ignore a ticket... If you're friends with them. Bonds lower the level of favours asked for. So If you have a medium bond, you'll owe the policeman a large favour (assuming they have the archtype policeman and the major quirk Always Does Things By the Book)