Social Encounter Structures in D&D And Derivatives

[Sparky McDibben]

Hey y'all,

So I wanted to set up some space to work through my thoughts on social encounter structures in an upcoming urban 5E game I'm running. I'm pulling from various rulesets to try to figure out the experience I'd like to bring to the table, and how to accomplish it. A few notes before I start in:

Structure <> Mechanics. Every time I do one of these, someone gets it twisted. Structure is the degree to which the game spells out how it should be run; mechanics are how we adjudicate rules interactions. As an example, the 5E combat structure fits in a little callout box on page 189 of the PHB. The combat mechanics are the entire chapter 9 of the PHB.

"I don't need extra rules to run social encounters!" This is not helpful feedback, because it doesn't give me any insight into how to run social encounters. What is helpful is how you run social encounters at your table. What assumptions do you make? What kind of experience are you trying to deliver? What rules are you using, and what supplements (if any)? That's gold, even if it's free kriegspiel or totally resolved free of mechanical interactions (actually, those are some of the resolution frameworks I'm most interested to hear about).

Challenge-Based Play <> Adversarial DMing. This is another take I see a lot of. Challenge-based play relies on the players figuring out how to use what they have to solve problems that I (the DM) put in front of them. It's one of several playstyles I enjoy, but I never let it become adversarial, because I'm rolling in the open and communicating why what's about to happen is about to happen. If anyone's unclear, we just talk it out.

Alright, with those quick pre-emptive responses out of the way, let's do some ... defining! I'm defining social encounters as encounters with opponents disinterested in combat, but of variable alignment to the party's goals (that is, the NPCs could be aligned, opposed, or neutral vs the party), and with the opportunity for the PCs to change those alignments.

I'm looking for a way to deliver high-stakes set-piece social encounters with minimal DM prep-load, some procedural content generation, and consequences that drive the play of the campaign forward.

I've already looked at a few systems, and come up dry. For example, Exalted and A Song of Ice and Fire RPG both use what are essentially "mental hit points" to measure how resistant PCs are to NPC influence, and vice versa. This is unsatisfying because it is an entirely mechanical resolution (so there's no opportunity for RP), with no real choices to make, and it takes away player control of their character. Now, this is sometimes OK (mind control is a thing in base D&D after all), but I feel like that if you want a player to make a bad deal, you need to convince them to take a bad deal, not go, "Well, your mental HP have run out, so you totally hit on the countess. Oops! Bad move, dude!"

The Alexandrian's Party Planning Structure. (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/37995/roleplaying-games/game-structure-party-planning) This one is OK, and if you have nothing else, it's better than nothing. My problem is that it lacks a certain spontaneity. I'm looking for those scenes where the PCs can be the ones who accidentally spill red wine on the high priest's immaculate white robes, or gallantly catch the klutzy wizard as he's about to fall down the stairs. What Mr. Alexander gives us here is a great foundation and backdrop, but nothing to poke at the PCs with aside from what I already have planned (and lowering our prep requirements was one of the goals).

Pendragon would be ideal, except for the part where I have to re-jigger the whole D&D system to allow for 13 paired stats, and hope like hell the PCs are all from similar cultural backgrounds, or else I might have to come up with multiple sets of paired stats.

Errant has an interesting idea, in that they are basically breaking up a conversation into rounds called exchanges, but once I'm in the flow of RP, there's no way in hell I'm going to remember to tick down how many exchanges we've done. Not to mention it gets complicated when multiple PCs start trying to talk to the same NPC. Oof.

Blades in the Dark has social Scores where the party can basically con someone into something. The problem here is that this is relies on flashbacks as a failsafe mechanic, and flashbacks give the PCs control of the environment at the expense of control over their characters. That's fun in theory, but can be really jarring in practice for D&D players, not to mention derailing the fun of reacting to things going wrong (thanks to BeholderEyeDr, Tanarii, and Unoriginal for helping me figure this out!).

Alright, so I've got a problem. In an urban game, intrigue (discovering and leveraging secrets) and social encounters should be a major part of play, but if you simply utilize ability checks (like Persuasion, Deception, etc.), then the player's actual RP tends to get undercut by bad rolls, their actual decisions matter less (because all they're going to get is advantage, no matter how good their plan is), and it boils down an entire evening's worth of activity into a single check. You could use a skill challenge, I suppose, but that's not really a good solution. For one thing, it does nothing to solve the first two problems with ability checks. Second, you'll have to deal with the barbarian insisting that they should get to use Athletics to impress people, and that can really undermine the tone of the encounter. Third, skill challenges are intended to inject tension into situations with defined beginning- and end-states by requiring multiple rolls to succeed (to account for 4E's jacked-up math), and social encounters might not have a defined end-state, but rather a ton of end-states.

So that's my initial problem and the various solutions I've tried. Again, the goal is to deliver high-stakes set-piece social encounters with minimal DM prep-load, some procedural content generation, and consequences that drive the play of the campaign forward.

I've got one more idea that I want to cogitate upon, but in the interim, I'm interested in hearing everyone else's experiences with social encounters in D&D and it's derivatives. How do you run them? What assumptions do you bring to the table? What tools do you use?

[Vahnavoi]

Quickly go over in your mind all social games you've played, starting with children's games, that, this is important, don't use dice to determine who wins or loses. Identify which social situations they pertain to. Then use those as framework for how to run social situations.

Examples would include Simon Says (observance and obedience to authority), Mother May I (negotiating with someone in a better position), Twenty Questions (using binary questions and logic to deduce what is in someone's mind), Murder (spot and vote out the traitor), Chinese Whispers (effective communication when means are limited), Ultimatum game (how to make an offer the other party won't refuse) etc.

If necessary, have your players play a round or two of these other games to remind how they work, or if you're feeling sneaky, have their characters play them inside a roleplaying game.

Some are already hidden in the ruleset, for example, Twenty Question has traditionally been embedded in D&D in form of a spell (Divination or Contact Other Plane, etc.).

[Telok]

I'm interested in hearing everyone else's experiences with social encounters in D&D and it's derivatives. How do you run them? What assumptions do you bring to the table? What tools do you use?

In D&D? They're crap outside the old 2d10 reaction table from AD&D being used in the manner it was intended. Marrying everything to d20 rolls has had the various issues you've described.

I've found in nonD&D that the "mental ac & hp" model works decently with the understanding that there's some sort of contest of wills, wits, or something, and that one party can just shut down, walk away, or stop participating. Assuming they're willing to take the consequences.

It works for the same reason D&D style ac & hp combat works. You get multiple turns of getting to try different things, it evens out the lol-random of the d20 flat distributiin, and you get feedback about what works & what doesn't while its going on. All in a structure and with mechanics that everyone at the table has a similar understanding of.

[Satinavian]

I've found in nonD&D that the "mental ac & hp" model works decently with the understanding that there's some sort of contest of wills, wits, or something, and that one party can just shut down, walk away, or stop participating. Assuming they're willing to take the consequences.It kinda works for simple contests of will. But it pretty much fails for the cooperative part of social engagement. It also tends to fail with any situation with more than 2 participants or several topics or many possible end states that don't fit into win/lose. Additionally the "consequences of walking away when you are losing" are more often then not quite tricky.

I played games like this but overall i find that i would want to use these rules only in very specific instances.

[Zhorn]

So the biggest challenge I've found with social encounters at the different tables I've been at is in just getting all players on the same page about how it is expected to run.

Currently training my table to view a social encounter through a process of
Information Phase
Social Shift
Lock it in
Names are unimportant, call them anything as long as the intent is communicated. Mostly it's just an extrapolation of the 5e DMG rules on Social Interactions (pg. 244-245) in a way that made a bit more sense.

In the Information Phase; it's about establishing
NPC attitudes towards the party/player (Friendly / Indifferent / Hostile).
Who has what goals (PC or NPC, aligned, opposed, neutral, etc).
Details about the NPC that can be gathered (insight, investigation, general carousing checks, etc).

The Social Shift is about improving your standing with the NPC, or at least putting them in a situation where they are more inclined to cooperate with the party/player.
Acting on information gathered about the NPC.
Make your goals appear to be aligned with the NPCs goals.
Make yourself liked, feared, trusted (persuasion, intimidation, deceptions, general carousing check, roleplay, etc).
You are either trying to move the attitude of the NPC up to a more favourable state, or avoid having it drop to a less favourable state (Friendly <> Indifferent <> Hostile), and thus more favourable social DCs. Only one shift per encounter. Cannot go all the way from hostile to friendly,

Finally Lock It In; perform the last step of roleplay and apply the appropriate rolls to complete the encounter.
Land the deal, get the information, send the enemies fleeing in a huff, or have the allied forces rally to your cause, etc.
This is where you finally use the tables in DMG pg 245. Note that these shouldn't be seen as binary pass/fails. Fail forwards, success at a cost, open a new encounter, establish different terms based on the results.

Again, the names are not that important, it's just a matter of communicating between DM and Players how a social encounter is expected to play out.
If you just waltz in, shout a dice number at the DM and sit there expectantly, while the DM had something else in mind... yeah, it'll all turn into a mess really quick.

[Anonymouswizard]

The simple fact is that 'social encounters' is not equivalent to 'combat encounters', it's equivalent to 'physical encounters'. So you don't want a structure or set of mechanics for social interaction, you want ones for 'debate' or 'coercion' (outside of D&D-likes you might need systems about making friends or calling in favours, or really anything that's important to your game in the social sphere). Similarly you don't want rules for 'mental encounters', you want rules for 'investigation' or the like.

For most social encounters 'roll when it seems' appropriate is fine. You don't need a subsystem or framework for convincing the barkeep to sleep with you, just as you don't need one for climbing wall. In fact many can probably be breezed past without a roll, just like we don't call for a roll for every physical challenge.

One of my favourite social frameworks is CofD's rules for manipulation. Depending on the other side's opinion of you can might be able to get what you want in a single meeting, but most likely it'll take days or weeks of talking, leverage, and care in order to get them to cave and give you the code to the Prince's basement or whatever. You always have the option of putting a gun to their family's temples to get it done NOW, but it's harder and you'll almost certainly completely burn that bridge whether you succeed or fail. Sure at the end of the day it boils down to the group making rolls to whittle down 'social hp' (thankfully not Willpower this time), but the structures around it are what makes it work. It takes something that would normally be solved now with a single roll and tells you that no, they are not going to cave that easily.

[GloatingSwine]

Alright, so I've got a problem. In an urban game, intrigue (discovering and leveraging secrets) and social encounters should be a major part of play, but if you simply utilize ability checks (like Persuasion, Deception, etc.), then the player's actual RP tends to get undercut by bad rolls, their actual decisions matter less (because all they're going to get is advantage, no matter how good their plan is), and it boils down an entire evening's worth of activity into a single check.

That only really happens if you put too much weight on a single check. If you put in more variables in the situation (not just persuading one person of one thing, but chipping away around the one person, finding out who they already trust or what they really value, persuading those people or showing them evidence they are likely to accept so they will speak in your favour, for example) then there are opportunities for ability checks that contribute to success but not be solely determinative. Especially if they allow the players to skip doing something extra like owing a favour, or stealing something from someone, or paying a bribe, or any other obstacle they could overcome by other means than "persuade this man with dice".

Once there are alternatives to any check, the players' RP is not "undercut by bad dice rolls", they picked one of a number of possible approaches with this character or group and it didn't work, now they do it a different way (and hopefully you made sure they knew what that was because someone told them what this character wants. Once you need to work multiple angles to get the overall win then the scene doesn't collapse down to the last roll, because you build up success by lots of roll and non-roll actions over the scene.

If you want to systematise it, maybe look at something like the Landsmeet scene in Dragon Age and adapt that for a scene with a real GM who can make the NPCs a bit less binary and more fluid. The players need to score a certain number of "points" across the scene and different involved NPCs and factions have different ways they can be tapped for one of those points.

[Anonymouswizard]

If you want to systematise it, maybe look at something like the Landsmeet scene in Dragon Age and adapt that for a scene with a real GM who can make the NPCs a bit less binary and more fluid. The players need to score a certain number of "points" across the scene and different involved NPCs and factions have different ways they can be tapped for one of those points.

Honestly, I think I'd just use the Duel of Wits system from Burning Wheel. In the computer game it's an all or nothing because the developers only have the resources for so many outcomes, but I think you can make it better on the tabletop by moving away from that.

So you have the two debating parties, the Warden and Loghain, who have two opposing positions (whether or not to bolster their forces with outside aid, the question of 'who takes the throne' is actually pretty irrelevant*). But the more interesting part for a group is that the system is designed to force each party to compromise on various points. The PCs are unlikely to claim an outright win, but they're also probably not going to outright fail.

* It gets settled relatively easily afterwards, the debate is more about guilt for Calian's death.

[GloatingSwine]

Honestly, I think I'd just use the Duel of Wits system from Burning Wheel. In the computer game it's an all or nothing because the developers only have the resources for so many outcomes, but I think you can make it better on the tabletop by moving away from that.

So you have the two debating parties, the Warden and Loghain, who have two opposing positions (whether or not to bolster their forces with outside aid, the question of 'who takes the throne' is actually pretty irrelevant*). But the more interesting part for a group is that the system is designed to force each party to compromise on various points. The PCs are unlikely to claim an outright win, but they're also probably not going to outright fail.

* It gets settled relatively easily afterwards, the debate is more about guilt for Calian's death.

That's a social conflict resolution system though, it doesn't really generate a whole scene it's intended to be used as part of a scene. Making a whole social scene to my mind is more about including more interactions with more characters that all build up to the desired end goal.

Like you need the King to Do A Thing, but you can't just walk up and convince him to do it because he doesn't have a reason to listen to anything you say. You know he trusts his chancellor though and he's more available, so if you can convince the chancellor he will back your claim. But the marshal doesn't like the chancellor and will always assume he's out for his own ends and argue against it. So you need to: Persuade the chancellor or show him evidence that supports your argument and either persuade the marshal as well or at least find some way to keep him out of the argument.

You can have social conflict resolutions in any of those, and you can handle at least some parts without using ability checks at all (if, for instance, you find out that the marshal is overfond of drink and spike his so he's too busy sleeping it off to interfere).

It's more about the scenario design of who you talk to and what you do with them than how you roll it out.

[Telok]

It kinda works for simple contests of will. But it pretty much fails for the cooperative part of social engagement. It also tends to fail with any situation with more than 2 participants or several topics or many possible end states that don't fit into win/lose. Additionally the "consequences of walking away when you are losing" are more often then not quite tricky.

I played games like this but overall i find that i would want to use these rules only in very specific instances.

It all depends on framing it one way or another. You can take the same "run a con on a rube" or other social/mental thing and describe + details + run it as a single check, opposed check, various types of series of checks, or a whole non-physical combat system. It works best in systems with truely unified mechanics, not the D&Ds with different combat & noncombat mechanics. Also works better if the game/GM isn't setting things up as binary win(kill/crush all opponents completely) vs lose(tpk/game over failure state).

[Tohron]

I came up with some ideas for how to use diplomacy (with some assistance from Bluff and other situational skills) to make negotiation more interesting. Basically, it requires the GM to decide how favorable an offer is (selecting from tiers ranging from "very favorable" to "unacceptable") and decide if there are any specific situational modifiers that might make the deal more or less attractive, then plug those values into a formula (which also factors in the level & Sense Motive modifier of the target, which make it easier to score favorable deals, and harder to score unfavorable ones), which generates the Diplomacy DC they have to beat.

The detailed rules are here, if anyone's interested: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?649423-D20-Diplomacy-Houserules&p=25571915#post25571915

[Quertus]

Help me understand the question - what would be the downsides of “just roleplay”? Like, if the 50 people at the party were all PCs, and you had 50 players in the room, roleplaying those PCs interacting with one another, what specific problem(s) would you need solved?

I ask because, the way I handle social encounters… well, the baseline is to simply roleplay the NPCs. Occasionally, I’ll filter a PCs stated actions through their stats (ie, that should have been really offensive, but you have a really high <Charisma, Etiquette, whatever>, and didn’t mean it as such, so...), or someone will call for a roll, but mostly I handle social encounters by knowing the NPC’s personality and desires, and roleplaying them accordingly.

And kudos to @Telok for calling out the goodness of the 2d10 “reaction” (“initial attitude”) table. That is indeed the best social mechanic - how does the NPC react to the PCs? What is their initial impression of your character, that sets the (initial) tone of the encounter? Is it obvious from context? If not, then here’s a handy table to roll on. Brilliantly simple, and doesn’t get in the way of the roleplay. 10/10, would highly recommend.

[LibraryOgre]

"I don't need extra rules to run social encounters!" This is not helpful feedback, because it doesn't give me any insight into how to run social encounters. What is helpful is how you run social encounters at your table. What assumptions do you make? What kind of experience are you trying to deliver? What rules are you using, and what supplements (if any)? That's gold, even if it's free kriegspiel or totally resolved free of mechanical interactions (actually, those are some of the resolution frameworks I'm most interested to hear about).


I am a fan of having mechanics that interact with social encounters, from the simple 2d10 encounter reaction table to something more complex involving skills. I like having mechanics because, if I made a mechanical choice, it should have an effect on the world. If my PC has an 18 Charisma, they should be treated as someone who is charismatic, even if I have the charisma of pudding, just as Fumble-fingers McGee gets to play someone with an 18 Dexterity, even though he never rolls dice on the table the first time.

This does not necessarily mean that social interactions should be entirely dictated by what's on your character sheet, merely that what's there shouldn't be immaterial. Player fiat should not control social interactions, or things like interrogation. "I'm not talking!" "Dave, Killmaster has a 3 Wisdom. They cracked your will like a peanut shell."

I've had a couple separate systems to cover this; one for d6 Star Wars (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2016/12/d6-social-combat.html), one for Hackmaster. (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2019/08/hackmaster-social-conflict.html)

[Satinavian]

You can take the same "run a con on a rube" That is antagonistic and has two sides. That one a social combat with hp system can reasonably do.
Now take for example a situation where 2 parties try to reach common understanding with the only end states "both succeed" and "both lose". Suddenly attacking each other with social skills whittling hp down is nonsense.

Framing all social interaction as some kind of contest of will or wits won't give you a good system for social rules. Even if you manage to make a good "contest of will/wits" subsystem.

[GloatingSwine]

Help me understand the question - what would be the downsides of “just roleplay”? .

How does "just roleplay" judge success or failure? It can't be on how well the players do it, because "good roleplay" is choosing actions that are consistent with what the character as previously presented would do. It doesn't determine whether those actions will be successful, only whether they are appropriate for the character as presented so far.

How does it differentiate between different parties with different skills? Is a party of four barbarians more or less likely to succeed in pulling a complicated social con than a party of four social skill focused rogues? If so what is making that difference beyond vibes? How do the social skill rogues know that they are being rewarded for their skill investment and shouldn't have put those skills elsewhere so they can succeed just as well in situations where you do call for dice as situations where you don't?

[Quertus]

How does "just roleplay" judge success or failure? It can't be on how well the players do it, because "good roleplay" is choosing actions that are consistent with what the character as previously presented would do. It doesn't determine whether those actions will be successful, only whether they are appropriate for the character as presented so far.

How does it differentiate between different parties with different skills? Is a party of four barbarians more or less likely to succeed in pulling a complicated social con than a party of four social skill focused rogues? If so what is making that difference beyond vibes? How do the social skill rogues know that they are being rewarded for their skill investment and shouldn't have put those skills elsewhere so they can succeed just as well in situations where you do call for dice as situations where you don't?

What does “judge success or failure” mean? I’m guessing the answer is covered by 50 players all roleplaying their characters: “well, *would* Sir Squishy agree agree to leave the party with Lady Inferno?”

Absolutely agree 100% that “good roleplay is choosing actions that are consistent with what the character as previously presented would do”. Well, 99%, but I’ll not quibble over details while trying to get at the big picture.

If you were the OP, I’d answer more of these questions, and move onto the next logical steps of “ok, gotcha, I see what you’re asking for now”. Since you’re not, I’ll just focus on one specific question: “How do the social skill rogues know that they are being rewarded for their skill investment and shouldn't have put those skills elsewhere so they can succeed just as well in situations where you do call for dice as situations where you don't?”

That’s a good question. The answer is, communication. Both verbal and nonverbal. I will explicitly ask players their relevant skills / tell them when an NPC responded to their skill. I won’t do that all the time; I’ll also give the same nonverbal clues (choose a set of facial expressions for this, do a head nod to mark off “social HP” of “your skill saved you from an unintended embarrassment”, etc), reference the notecard where I wrote down their social skills (even if I don’t need to, I already know them and looking at it is for the players’ benefit), etc.

I had a 2e D&D party where the lowest Charisma in the party was 15. They had no doubts that I was taking their Charisma into account. (EDIT: or that it was more important that how eloquent their delivery was. However, their *choices*, of choosing to flatter the Duke vs insult his rival, were more important still. Just like the choice of whether you choose to attack the Wizard or his Hydra mount, or run away, generally matters more than the fiddly differences of your specific attack, which Matter way more than how you describe your attack.)

[Martin Greywolf]

If our starting point is DnD, we are already fighting uphill. Systems that aren't so laser-focused on tactical combat tend to have things like social-equivalent-of-HP already baked into them, and often have a more engaging resolution system to non-fighting actions than a single check. What we therefore need to do is make some of those things ourselves.

Seeing as this is a d20 system, we will keep the d20+modifiers as our base, with modifiers here being a skill and appropriate ability modifier.

Next we need to figure out how to use those rolls. The absolute first thing that needs to be said is that only reasonable things work - if you try to convince a guard to stab the king "for the memes", you can certainly use your action to do so, but it will work no better than if you tried to shoot a bow through a mountain. The critical part is that in social encounters, you don't always know what will or will not work, and you should do some legwork (e.g. finding out is a given NPC is corrupt) to figure that out.

Next step is finding out a resolution method other than a single roll, and with DnD, we only have combat. That's fine, we can use it just fine, all we have to do is determine loosing and winning conditions. Some sort of social HP is essential to this, obviously.

This social HP doesn't represent how convinced you are or how much you like someone, it represents a combination of your willpower, stubbornness, control of your emotions and credibility. Failure state of zero social HP (let's call them SP) means you storm off in a huff, or everyone gets sick of your "helpful inputs" at a meeting. In some cases, you can still stay in the given debate, but your arguments will not be taken seriously - how that shakes out depends on the situation, a negotiation with some nobles will probably end up with guards escorting you out, a debate at an inn will likely see you stay there, but be ignored by other participants (that, or you start a brawl).

An important detail here, which should happen in physical combat a lot more often as well, is that people will rarely go absolutely feral and try to fight it out until their SP goes to zero. Once someone sees they are about to be beaten, or that things aren't going so well, they may well try to save face and bow out with grace. Unwillingness to do so should result in people committing social suicide and being known as "that guy" - conversely, so will going after the opponent willing to concede. These sorts of consequences will have to be handled outside of this resolution mechanic, much like letting goblin strike force retreat with honor has to.

If the social encounter is entirely adversarial, then the overall goal of all parties is to reduce enemy SP to zero. If it isn't, e.g. a negotiation or trying to reach a common ground, you are either trying to reduce SP of especially obnoxious members of the opposing party to zero, so that their more even-handed colleagues can take over, or the SP reduction represents how many concessions the opposing side is willing to make. This last bit is somewhat unfortunate, because it can't rely on hard mechanics, but that's a problem you can't entirely remove - you can make systems for specific negotiations, but a generic one would be either too vague as this one is, or far too complex to use easily.

[GloatingSwine]

What does “judge success or failure” mean?

The player has a desired outcome when they decide an action for their character, what decides whether they get that outcome or some other? Remember, the roleplay is them choosing the action.


That’s a good question. The answer is, communication. Both verbal and nonverbal. I will explicitly ask players their relevant skills / tell them when an NPC responded to their skill. I won’t do that all the time; I’ll also give the same nonverbal clues (choose a set of facial expressions for this, do a head nod to mark off “social HP” of “your skill saved you from an unintended embarrassment”, etc), reference the notecard where I wrote down their social skills (even if I don’t need to, I already know them and looking at it is for the players’ benefit), etc.

I had a 2e D&D party where the lowest Charisma in the party was 15. They had no doubts that I was taking their Charisma into account.

Right, but how do they know whether the level of investment they made is what's making the difference? Would you have accepted the same skills with half the investment? How do they know?

If they use their skills or abilities in a check, they know how valuable they are. They know that they are getting something from playing this character not a different one. If you don't call for checks and just go on *well you have this skill so I guess" vibes they don't.

[Quertus]

The player has a desired outcome when they decide an action for their character, what decides whether they get that outcome or some other? Remember, the roleplay is them choosing the action.

If someone asks you out / asks for a favor / offers you a trade / etc irl, what determines whether they get the outcome they want, or some other?

When the NPC quest giver asks the PCs to assassinate the good and rightful king, what determines whether they get the outcome they want, or some other?

When the NPC Rogue attempts to bribe the PCs to look the other way, what determines whether they get the outcome they want, or some other?

When one PC attempts to trade items with another PC, what determines whether they get the outcome they want, or some other?

When the bandit leader attempts to surrender after the PCs have killed all the other bandits, what determines whether they get the outcome they want, or some other?

When the BBEG burns down the orphanage to distract the PCs, what determines whether they get the outcome they want, or some other?

When the now homeless orphans seek out the PCs to help with their latest problem, what determines whether they get the outcome they want, or some other?

When the PCs take a social action, what determines whether they get the outcome they want, or some other?

I’d say that the mood and personality of the individual involved, the relationship they have with the individual in question, the perceived cost and benefit of the “ask”, random supporting factors (the smell of smoke wafting off the orphans), and the delivery (how your cousin / best friend / whatever goes about confessing their love for you) all factor into it.

Note how very little of that is “how they did on a Social roll”.


Right, but how do they know whether the level of investment they made is what's making the difference? Would you have accepted the same skills with half the investment? How do they know?

How does the Fighter know that their investment in +17 Attack bonus mattered, and that they wouldn’t have hit with a +16, or that their 52 damage mattered, and the Ogre working have been dead with just 50 damage? The answer is, they don’t.

That said, they can know, in either case, through communicating more than the bare minimum of “it’s an Ogre” / your skill helped you here. Or they can get a feel for it by playing the game a lot, and noting their successes and failures relative to their bonuses.

[GloatingSwine]

I’d say that the mood and personality of the individual involved, the relationship they have with the individual in question, the perceived cost and benefit of the “ask”, random supporting factors (the smell of smoke wafting off the orphans), and the delivery (how your cousin / best friend / whatever goes about confessing their love for you) all factor into it.

Note how very little of that is “how they did on a Social roll”.


You've ducked the question. The player has chosen an action, it is completely in character as they have played up to this point, they are talking to one of a dozen NPCs in this scene and trying to get something out of them, what do you do to determine whether they get what they want?

Keep this within the context of a DM running an RPG session, what a real human or a PC played individually by one player with a strong identification with that PC would do is irrelevant because nobody runs NPCs like that, it's not a practical or sensible way to approach answering this question because you need to resolve this and move on.


How does the Fighter know that their investment in +17 Attack bonus mattered, and that they wouldn’t have hit with a +16, or that their 52 damage mattered, and the Ogre working have been dead with just 50 damage? The answer is, they don’t.

That said, they can know, in either case, through communicating more than the bare minimum of “it’s an Ogre” / your skill helped you here. Or they can get a feel for it by playing the game a lot, and noting their successes and failures relative to their bonuses.

Because they know the value of their attack bonus vs. the variance the die can produce, and comparing it with others in similar situations around the table. They will *always* know that value, even if you aren't open with the stats of the monsters they are fighting. If they roll a 3 and hit they're going to appreciate their +17 irrespective of anything else.

[Telok]

That is antagonistic and has two sides. That one a social combat with hp system can reasonably do.
Now take for example a situation where 2 parties try to reach common understanding with the only end states "both succeed" and "both lose". Suddenly attacking each other with social skills whittling hp down is nonsense.

Framing all social interaction as some kind of contest of will or wits won't give you a good system for social rules. Even if you manage to make a good "contest of will/wits" subsystem.

Um... that's... not a conflict. Why are you trying to use conflict resolution to run that? It'd be like using the D&D combat system for, I dunno, climbing a tree? It's climbing, what are you doing with a Phantasmal Killer spell?

The goal of a game system is to be fun and produce reasonable results. It's OK to need some kigical limits like using a fighting subsystem for fighting and not for crafting or some such.

A full "social rules" system will look more like a complete game with exploration, discovery, resources, conflict, etc., etc. Like D&D hp/ac only applies to the physical damage part of the combat subsystem, a mental or social hp/ac should apply to the 'will to fight' or social standing or whatever you're making conflict resolution rules for.

[Vahnavoi]

Help me understand the question - what would be the downsides of “just roleplay”?

"Just roleplay" is equivalent to "just act". At some point, you have to realize there are entire books written on how to act, so if you want to give useful, actionable advice, you ought to have a lot to say on how to roleplay just as well. I'll take some snippets from your post where you almost do this, but which would need more detail to become actual guides for how to roleplay:


Occasionally, I’ll filter a PCs stated actions through their stats (ie, that should have been really offensive, but you have a really high <Charisma, Etiquette, whatever>, and didn’t mean it as such, so...)

Okay, so how should a character's reactions differ towards a person with, say, 10 Cha as opposed to 8, or 13, or 18? This is the kind of question mathematical mechanics are meant to answer. On a d20 roll, a 1 point difference typically means 5% difference in how likely you are to get a favorable reaction. Reaction rolls are a really straightforward example of this - more on them below.


[M]ostly I handle social encounters by knowing the NPC’s personality and desires, and roleplaying them accordingly.

Okay. So how to you generate these personalities and desires? Do you roll them on a chart? Draw cards with personality traits on them? Base them on real people? Do you record this information and if so, when and how? How do you organize it so that it's convenient to use? Do you have any tips on, say, how to play a cowardly person, or someone who is after wealth above all else? How should these impact reactions of such characters towards the players'? So on and so forth.

---

Anyways, some commentary on mechanics I do use in OSR games:

Reaction rolls. Already mentioned. I typically use a 2d6 table rather than 2d10, but the dice are secondary to actual entries on the table. The entries, typically, go: hostile, unfriedly, uncaring, neutral, friendly, amicable. What these entries mean:

Hostile: these characters will try to hurt the players'. They won't co-operate with them, since as far as they are concerned, co-operation has already broken down or is impossible. Will only be satisfied by defeat, destruction or unconditional surrender of the player characters. Example: enemy soldiers ambushing you at night, a mother bear defending its cubs.

Unfriendly: If possible these characters will actively avert any interaction with the player'. Will only co-operate under conditions biased towards them (multiply base cost; see below) or when forced to. Example: enemy civilians, an escaped (untamed) horse.

Uncaring: these characters are not there for the players'. Unless disturbed, they will ignore the players' and go about their own business. Might co-operate with sufficient incentive (multiply base cost; see below), will react poorly if none exists. Example: town passersby, a wild animal at a drinking hole.

Neutral: these characters have no preconceptions of the players' and have nothing else occupying their attention. Willing to co-operate if their conditions are met (see base cost, below). Examples: market salesmen, a curious otter.

Friendly: these characters are favorably inclined towards the players'. Will be pleased by interaction and might co-operate at reduced to the players' (see base cost, below). Examples: civilians in your own territory, a pet cat.

Amicable: these characters will actively seek interaction with the players' and consider their mere presence pleasing. Might co-operate for free or at a cost to themselves. Examples: your retainers, a pet dog.

A reaction roll is made on first contact if a game master has no existing idea for how the encounter ought to go. The roll is typically made for the whole party, but class, species (race), alignment and charisma score can all influence the result for individuals:

Charisma: charisma modifier can apply either to the reaction roll or the reaction result. If using dice with low spread (such as 2d6) and a small range of modifiers (-3 to +3), I suggest modifying the result directly (f.ex. 13 Cha for +1 modifier turns Uncaring results into Neutral). If using larger spreads (such as 2d10) and larger modifiers (-5 to +N), I suggest modifying the roll and re-checking the result.

Alignment: Using single axis alignment, the base chart applies to creatures of same alignment. Difference in alignment modifies all results in a negative direction, one step for each step of difference (f.ex Lawful interacting with Chaos turns Neutral results into Unfriendly). Using biaxial alignment, the base chart applies to the center point (Absolute Neutral). For non-center alignments, each step towards one's own alignment along either axis modifies all results in a favorable direction (f.ex. Lawful interacting with Lawful turns Neutral results to Friendly). Each step away from one's own alignment along either axis modifies all results in an unfavorable direction (f.ex. Lawful interacting with Chaos turns Neutral results to Uncaring). Where appropriate, these accumulate or cancel out (f.ex. Chaotic Good interacting with Lawful Good, or Lawful Good interacting with Lawful Evil, means no change; Lawful Good interacting with Chaotic Evil or Chaotic Good interacting with Lawful Evil turns Neutral results to Unfriendly). The modifier is applied when a person's alignment becomes known (detection spells are used, alignment language is spoken etc.) or when they publicly perform a strongly aligned action (f.ex. a person backing up a known Lawful Evil tyrant will make that person perceived as Lawful Evil).

Species (or race): It's possible to have a matrix for default reactions for cross-species interaction, like D&D used to have. This would codify information like Orcs hating Elves (default reaction: Hostile; all reactions three steps worse) or Humans adoring Hobbits (default reaction: Friendly; all reactions one step better). Depends on the setting and number of entries if you need this, you might substitute nationality or ethnicity if number of species is small or if each species is so large that no species-scale trend can be said to exist.

Class: Same as above, except for character class. May be social class, or you might have additional matrix for social class if that is decoupled from character class. Used for codifying information like Barbarians being outsiders to civilization (everyone else's default reaction is Unfriendly; all results are two steps worse) or nobility looking down on commoners (defeault reaction is Uncaring; all results are one step worse). Every class views others of their own class one step more favorably.

As with alignment, species and class modifiers are applied when the relevant details becomes known.

Where applicable, modifiers accumulate or cancel out. This ought to have the effect that there isn't a single character who always makes the most sense as the party's "face". An uncharismatic (Cha 8/-1 modifier) Chaotic Evil Orc Fighter will still get more favorable reactions from other Chaotic Evil Orc Fighters, than a charismatic (Cha 16/+2 modifier) Lawful Good Elf Sorcerer (or whatever).

Let's move on to Barter rolls. This is an universalized form of "hiring retainers" roll. In addition to negotiating terms with retainers, I use it for when the players want to bribe or haggle with someone. In each situation, for each job or service, there is a base cost. For retainers, this is typically measured in wage, living space and work space. If the base cost is met, the base chance for successfully hiring, bribing or haggling is 50/50. Charisma modifies this up or down. Pick the dice appropriate to your range of modifiers, I use 3d6 for a modifier range of -3 to +3. The result of the roll also sets morale for the retainer (see below) or whoever else (in case of a bribed person, this measures how likely they're going to betray the briber later down the line).

The result can be modified by offering better or worse terms (f.ex. offering +25% better wage ups the roll result by 1, offering -10% worse reduces it by 1). Lack of Charisma can hence be overcome by material wealth. You can use reaction roll results to adjust the base cost (f.ex. in Unfriendly territory, foreigners pay triple).

You might want a table or other information resource for common jobs, their requirements, and costs.

Morale is a score each non-player character has. In combat, this obviously measures how likely a character is to stand and fight in a bad situation, with a failed morale check meaning that character panics, surrender or flees, as appropriate to their nature. In a social situation, the interpretation depends on context, I'll go over some below. I use a morale score ranging from 2 to 12 and check it by rolling under on a 2d6. This mean characters with morale 12 never break, while those with 2 always do. I pick morale based on personality of a character, largely independent of their character level, ability scores or such. This means a big, scary dragon might have a low score because it's a coward, while a zealous commoner has a high score because they're utterly loyal to their cause. Traditionally, supernaturally fearless creatures (golems, mindless undead etc.) are only ones with perfect scores.

Typical situations to check morale in:

Combat: for individuals, when a character is first injured and again when their hitpoints fall below 50%. You may substitute failing a saving throw against any bad thing for the first one. For groups, check when a group has been incapacitated (20% losses, one person down in a 4-man team) and again when a group has been destroyed (50% losses, two persons down in a 4-man team).

A successful check means the relevant party keeps fighting towards their existing goals; they will only adjust behaviour to the extent it will make victory more plausible (healing themselves, rescuing downed members etc.)

Failed check means (on a 1d6) 1 - 4 attempted surrender or 5 - 6 panic. For surrender, you may apply the bartering mechanic, above, for negotiating terms - you may invent rules for warfare to set acceptable base costs. (Animals can and do surrender; use real animal behaviours for guidelines. In absence of better knowledge, surrender means signalling submission, ceasing to attack and then removing itself from the territory.) If surrender is denied (conditions are unacceptable or the other party remains hostile), the surrendering party will also panic. Panicked creatures will try to flee through the most obvious route available, abandoning all other goals and equipment that would get in the way. If escape is prevented or impossible, panicked creatures may play dead or hide, if that seems like it would work. If there is no escape and playing possum is possible neither, panicked creatures will enter a frenzy and will fight to death, or until a path to escape presents itself.

Retainers: retainers check morale when they are mistreated, when they see another retainer being mistreated, when they come across knowledge or rumours of their master mistreating someone else like them, when their master tries to weasel out of their original contract terms, when they are ordered to do something that's not their job, when someone who is not their master tries to boss them around, when payments are late, when someone screws with their belongings, when their master embarrasses themselves or when another retainer in their presence fails a morale check. The list is not exhaustive, use your common sense.

A successful check means the retainer continues to do their job, does as ordered, stands with their master in a conflict, so on and so forth, whatever is applicable.

A failed check means the retainer demands renegotiation of terms (go back to the bartering phase, above) if the situation allows for it. If the situation does not, they will just walk out (for combat, see above). If their master is not present (they are being bribed behind their back etc.), they will betray their master or just abandon their duties altogether.

Bribery: often, a failed morale check is a requisite for a character to consider a bribe at all. As long as that requisite is met, the process works like the bartering phase above (so a bribe might still fail due to being too small, etc.). On a successful attempt, the bribed character receives a new morale score pertaining to whatever they were bribed to do. Morale is then checked whenever something happens that would place the bribed character in peril, or a better deal is offered (f.ex. they learn their boss will fire them for accepting the bribe, someone offers them a larger bribe to stop the original briber, etc.).

A successful check means the character continues to act like they were originally bribed to do. A failed check means the character changes their mind and betrays the briber in whatever manner appropriate. This can happen immediately upon receiving a bribe (f.ex. you haggled a bouncer to let you in for 100$, the bouncer took your money and still didn't let you in.)

Other social situations: in general, you might want to check morale for all relevant characters whenever their association with the player characters puts their life, belongings or social station in peril. Successful checks mean they keep associating with or backing the player characters. Each failed check means their reactions become one step worse. For example, if the player characters publicly make a fool of themselves, previously Neutral townsfolk may suddenly find they have something better to do, becoming Unfriendly.

For situations where player characters threaten someone with violence, refer to combat, above, as a guideline. If violence is unexpected, you may want to check morale immediately when violence is threatened, even before anyone becomes hurt. If violence is expected, don't. For example, armed travelling mercenaries or members of a town militia probably won't panic just because someone draws a sword on them (though their reaction might become worse, as described above); children at a school or party-goers in dance ball might.

An important difference between reaction rolls and morale checks as compared to social skill checks, is that they're purely game master facing. These are guidelines for a game master on how to play their characters, that is, the non-player ones. There isn't a point anywhere in the process where players call for reaction rolls or morale checks, the players describe what their characters do and the game master reacts to that (duh). The corollary is that no roll or check is necessary if a game master already knows how their character would react.

Even for bartering, the deal offered is primary, the roll is secondary. A player doesn't get to roll anything before they detail what it is that they're offering. Sometimes the initial offer is so good a non-player character would gobble it up, no further questions asked. So pay more attention on the base costs than check target numbers or such.

---

Moving on. In an open-ended game, you want methods for creating new characters fast. Behind the Name is a good resource for one simple thing: names. Names are chore to invent on the fly. Use a random generator or make a list to pick those from.

Next is personality and goals. A simple chart to roll on can last you a long time. Of existing resources, Red and Pleasant Land, from Lamentations of the Flame Princess roster, has some good tables for rolling, for example, correspondence and existing social relations between members of a (vampire) court. As an alternative, a deck of cards to draw from, either normal playing cards or some Tarot deck, can be used to quickly divine personality traits. There are a lot of existing resources for card symbolism, get your hands on some. Another idea is to write aphorisms or character traits on slips of paper and put them in a hat or something - the players can participate, both in writing those slips and drawing them. Fortune cookies can also work. Point is, it's a multiplayer game, you can have something to do for the other people.

The point of procedural generation methods is that they are force multipliers. Crafting a good chart (etc.) might take longer than crafting one, fleshed-out character, but the former will keep spitting out more playable material for a long time with not much more work. The corollary is that use procedural generation for things you will do a lot. A random table for daily weather is worth it if each play sessions covers weeks on the road, a wandering monster list is worth it if your players will move around the relevant area a lot. Similarly, procedural generation is worth it if you don't know beforehand where your player characters will go and who they will meet, but you do know they will meet a lot of people. For contrast, if your idea for a game is centered around a small handful of specific people, handcraft those people.

Related, if you want a game about specific people, a family drama for example, consider having players play those roles. Remember the actual at-the-table reality you're working with. The paradigm for social encounters where a game master plays all the interesting characters on one side and is only interacted with by the one player of a dedicated "face" of the party is freaking dumb and a waste of resources. Take cues from Murder, Paranoia, Mafia, Diplomacy, Werewolf or virtually any other game where the players have secret or conflicting goals. Even the existing system of alignment works for this, keeping in mind all the ways to obscure it.

If that makes you queasy, ask yourself: what is the appeal of "social encounters" in the first place? I know for me it is dialogue, it is debate, it is people around the table expressing various viewpoints and acting out how their characters feel about it. I know they are likely to do that concerning how to murder goblins in their camp, provided the situation has enough variables to it. The point is to direct that completely normal instinct from how to do combat, to how keep losing face in court, or how to be prettiest girl at prom (or, since you did kill those goblins, how to explain it's not a war crime to the party paladin).

Before anyone goes "b-b-but D&D is a co-operative game!", so what? So is Murder - the point is to co-operate with the non-murderers to catch the one who did it. The problem of co-operation is made hard enough to make the game interesting because that is what the players are there to solve. For an even less antagonistic example, there is Chinese Whispers and its variations - the entire point is to effectively co-operate (communicate) a thing, but virtually all of the fun comes from the fact that people are bad at this and will fail in amusing ways.

It is really, really low that hobbyists keeps chanting "the game master is not the adversary!" and then have the GM play all the antagonist roles anyway. If you actually want the game master to not be the adversary sometimes, share the burden, have some player take up that role. If your players can't handle the idea that (*gasp*) sometimes, a member of the party might not be fully aligned with their own goals, or might be a traitor, go back to playing those simpler children's game until they get used to the idea.

As a practical tip, draw relationship charts or matrices about how important characters feel about each other, and have your players do the same. If you're following the train of thought outlined in the above four paragraphs, it pays to have one relationship chart just about the player characters. Make it so that at least one version of it is public and that each player has the option to update their own character's part on it at their own iniative. Prepare for interesting discussions when one character proclaims their undying hate (or love) for one another. (If you can't handle that, again, what is that you want out of social encounters?)

---

As a side note: "social hitpoints" and comparable inventions are great... if you're programming a computer program and want a simple algorithm for an AI to tell it how to act in a given situation. For a tabletop game, it's usually a lot of trouble to give you, the game master, advice on how to do something you ought to know already. For actually roleplaying people being hurt or offended, reading a book on basic rhetoric or psychology or etiquette goes a much longer way. It's not like you can actually check if your social hitpoint system is doing what it's meant to if you don't have an idea how social situations actually work.

Another reason I dislike "social hitpoints" is that roleplaying games are already full of tracked resources that you can use as bartering chips in social situations to see who wins or loses: food. Money. Magic items. Information. Experience points. Ordinary hitpoints, as the morale system already ties into it.

You already know you've lost, if you don't have enough material wealth to pay someone to do what you want and not enough hitpoints to survive a physical confrontation to force them to do it.

[GloatingSwine]

Related, if you want a game about specific people, a family drama for example, consider having players play those roles. Remember the actual at-the-table reality you're working with. The paradigm for social encounters where a game master plays all the interesting characters on one side and is only interacted with by the one player of a dedicated "face" of the party is freaking dumb and a waste of resources. Take cues from Murder, Paranoia, Mafia, Diplomacy, Werewolf or virtually any other game where the players have secret or conflicting goals. Even the existing system of alignment works for this, keeping in mind all the ways to obscure it.

I think the goal the OP was looking at is something to quickly and dynamically generate large enough scenes to have all the players involved whilst playing their own characters.

The "face does everything" problem goes away when there are too many people who need talking to at the same time for one character to do all of it (you know, like most combats will need everyone to do their thing rather than just watch the beatstick do it all), but that is when you need resolution mechanics where the significant things are more satisfying than one roll because the DM has too many plates to spin otherwise.

[Vahnavoi]

I think the goal the OP was looking at is something to quickly and dynamically generate large enough scenes to have all the players involved whilst playing their own characters.

The players' characters being the sort to bounce off of each other is what will dynamically create scenes or at least keep them going. That's the point. Resolution mechanics are secondary to the point of being unnecessary when you get that going, since such scenes have natural resolution states based on how players choose to act and react.

[GloatingSwine]

The players' characters being the sort to bounce off of each other is what will dynamically create scenes or at least keep them going. That's the point. Resolution mechanics are secondary to the point of being unnecessary when you get that going, since such scenes have natural resolution states based on how players choose to act and react.

Yeah, but if you want to simulate a large social scene where there are, say, a dozen significant NPCs and ten times that in background characters and all of the player characters are interacting with different bits of the scene at the same time, PC interplay doesn't do what you're looking for. (This is from the Party Planning Structure being mentioned, it's intended to produce large events with many NPCs spread over a wide area, OP just wanted something that could be a bit more dynamic and need a bit less time investment from the DM so it could be done at shorter notice).

[Vahnavoi]

You really aren't getting what I am saying at all.

In a paradigm where the game master plays all the interesting people on one side, when the players decide to interact with "different bit" of the "same scene", one person still carries the burden of being involved in every damn sub-scene.

Change the balance of roles, and you can do away that in part, or even entirely. That is, if player characters are going to break down in cliques anyway (both you and Alexandrian propose this as normal), what you get is players A and B having one discussion, players C and D have another, players E and F having a third, so on and so forth. The game master can sit back and listen, intervening only when necessary, rather than all the time.

This is how freeform games do it naturally. This also how live-action roleplaying games, even ones with a game master, do it, both because it is natural and because a game master playing part in every discussion would be unfeasible in a game that's not confined to a tabletop.

If you want more characters than there are players, the solution is simple: have each player play more than one character, a solution that's quite usual both to freeform games (multiple roles are norm) and OSR games (distribute playing of retainers in a way that's convenient for what you're after).

More, if the players' characters are the ones running the scene of interest, you can make three-quarters of what the Alexandrian has a game master do the players' responsibility, because it is their characters who would be responsible for those details within the game world in the first place. If you wanted to be mean, you'd literally start with one of the players having to, in character, decide which of the others' characters to add to the guest list.

[GloatingSwine]

You really aren't getting what I am saying at all.

In a paradigm where the game master plays all the interesting people on one side, when the players decide to interact with "different bit" of the "same scene", one person still carries the burden of being involved in every damn sub-scene.

Change the balance of roles, and you can do away that in part, or even entirely. That is, if player characters are going to break down in cliques anyway (both you and Alexandrian propose this as normal), what you get is players A and B having one discussion, players C and D have another, players E and F having a third, so on and so forth. The game master can sit back and listen, intervening only when necessary, rather than all the time.

This is how freeform games do it naturally. This also how live-action roleplaying games, even ones with a game master, do it, both because it is natural and because a game master playing part in every discussion would be unfeasible in a game that's not confined to a tabletop.

And we're back to the problem of not being able to include the social stats of the characters who have chosen to invest there in a way that the player feels the value of their investment. That's why you need a conflict resolution system, because there are challenges to be overcome using the abilities of the characters, that's why you play D&D not have a natter down the pub.

Also, especially in D&D the game will generally have a progression-objective, something directly quantifiable that the players are looking forward to getting (much moreso than in freeform RPGs), and in a social scene the key NPCs need to be overcome to move towards the objective. Since all the players tend to share the same objective at the scene level they will be less motivated to act fully as the NPCs who are the obstacle to their own objectives (especially when they also aren't playing their own character who they formed a stronger affinity for). So you can't really use this when it matters, only when it doesn't.

And if it doesn't matter, it needs to be fun on its own terms and "drop your own character to play Lord Bignose for ten minutes whilst Jimmy chats to him about trees" probably ain't.

Changing who says the lines lets the DM rest their voice, it doesn't help them adjudicate whether the players are moving towards success in the scene.


If you wanted to be mean, you'd literally start with one of the players having to, in character, decide which of the others' characters to add to the guest list.

The one with the highest charisma or relevant skills. Next silly question? Remember that this is still intended to be overcoming a challenge using the abilities of characters, and some of the characters will be mathematically better for that challenge. You've just returned to "make the party Face do all the talking".

[Vahnavoi]

And we're back to the problem of not being able to include the social stats of the characters who have chosen to invest there in a way that the player feels the value of their investment.

Wrong. That's a topic I didn't get to yet, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. You are making the mistake of assuming that "social stats" are something you invest into on the abstract level, probably at the expense of something else, and then getting sad at the thought of a player not getting a return on their investment.

Don't do that. It's an unnecessary assumption AND a bad design paradigm.

In reality, when "social stats" are something that is "just roleplayed", or rather, acted by a player, they "invest" in social skills by acting social. And they feel the weight of their character's role when other players let them get away with more, or less, based on how the acting fits the character.

For an example that is way more concrete than any numerical example: imagine a male player with a really low voice, playing a character described with a really high-pitched voice. The player may be able to change their voice, but, it's understood by everyone at the table, not to the point of full imitation. So, where that player's individual skills end, the other players pick up by acting as if that character's voice is high-pitched.

The character's voice can be entirely free choice on the player's part. It does not need to have any tortured trade-off with more abstracted traits of that character, such as how well they swing a sword or how well they can dodge. The only trade-off that ought to exists is the natural one of other characters' reaction toward a person with a high voice versus a low one. Similarly, the only trade-off that needs to exists on the side of player skill is how satisfyingly (to themselves and others at the table) they can pull it off, compared to other roles that would be easier to them.


That's why you need a conflict resolution system, because there are challenges to be overcome using the abilities of the characters, that's why you play D&D not have a natter down the pub.

Also wrong. You don't need a system for conflict resolution at all to feel your character's capabilities. Or rather, the conflict can be resolved by the players looking at the information they have and deciding how they feel about it - for example, as continuation of the above, a player can just decide how their character would feel about another with a high-pitched voice, no numerical mechanics or die rolls needed.

What a game can do instead, is change the information at hand. Just writing down "imagine my character has high-pitched voice" already does this for any player who understands English and has an idea of how such a person would sound like. If, by comparison, "my character has 18 Charisma" does not have that effect, it's because some part of that sentence is horribly ill-defined.

Also, remember: the very presence of a game master, in combination with a rule such as "game master has final word over game events", is already a conflict resolution system. If players A and B disagree over how their characters should react to each other, they can appeal to the game master to referee how.

Finally, I don't play D&D, and I especially don't play social encounters, to see who rolls highest on a dice or is best at doing math with small numbers. I already stated what I want out of social encounters: I want dialogue, I want debate, so on and so forth. None of that is generated by die rolls, or drawing cards, or what have you. They ARE generated by people actually talking, and acting as they talk, and any time people talk, they are already capable of resolving conflicts using that very instrument of natural language. I've literally played D&D, in a pub, as a form of natter. Your implied juxtaposition hence fails on every level, as far as what I'm saying goes. If you think what I'm saying is incompatible with "why" we play D&D, sorry, whatever you imagine as the reason "why" has nothing to do with reality at my end.


Also, especially in D&D the game will generally have a progression-objective, something directly quantifiable that the players are looking forward to getting (much moreso than in freeform RPGs), and in a social scene the key NPCs need to be overcome to move towards the objective. Since all the players tend to share the same objective at the scene level they will be less motivated to act fully as the NPCs who are the obstacle to their own objectives (especially when they also aren't playing their own character who they formed a stronger affinity for). So you can't really use this when it matters, only when it doesn't.

And if it doesn't matter, it needs to be fun on its own terms and "drop your own character to play Lord Bignose for ten minutes whilst Jimmy chats to him about trees" probably ain't.

Changing who says the lines lets the DM rest their voice, it doesn't help them adjudicate whether the players are moving towards success in the scene.

The progression-objective in a social encounters can literally just be getting a character to say something, easily measured by player of that character literally saying that specific thing aloud. Even in a game of D&D, the objective doesn't have to be something outside the social situation, heck, getting into that social situation can be the objective of everything else in a game scenario. That is, rather than talking to the king to get the money to buy the magic sword to slay the dragon, you raise the money, buy the magic sword and slay the dragon so you can say your piece before the king!

As far as assumption of shared objective goes, you are literally replying to me telling you to do away with such assumptions. Stop talking about what is generally done. I'm not talking in terms of what is generally done. I'm talking about what CAN be done and how to use that to do more work. I literally named a bunch of games where players serve as obstacles to each other to use as inspiration. It isn't hard to make players fully motivated to trick, obfuscate, betray or otherwise get in each other's way, and it isn't hard to make it "fun", as attested by entire genres of other games based on just that.

The smaller paragraphs are once more proof you really, really aren't getting what I'm talking about. At all. In the paradigm I'm talking about, "Lord Bignose" is not a tertiary character that a player drops their main character for when a game master asks them to - "Lord Bignose" is either their main character or an important secondary character that the player keeps track of on full-time or nearly full-time basis. If game master is the one handing out the role, then "Lord Bignose" is given to the player most interested in playing that character, along with power to adjucate how that character feels and uses their abilities.


The one with the highest charisma or relevant skills. Next silly question? Remember that this is still intended to be overcoming a challenge using the abilities of characters, and some of the characters will be mathematically better for that challenge. You've just returned to "make the party Face do all the talking".

The question of "which characters to add to my characters guest list" is not readily answered by the answer you gave, so once again: you didn't get it. At all. Why? Because you are ignoring the very crux of what I was talking about, as the thing you can leverage to have characters bounce off of each other: secret or conflicting goals. Choosing the right people is already a challenge because one of those people might be out to get you, and you don't know who. Math? Character abilities? Maybe a high Charisma (or Intelligence) score lets you know more information of who other people are playing, but, crucially, not enough to do all your work for you. You still have to play and still have to make the ultimate decision yourself.

If you don't invite someone, you will have to deal with that person's, and their character's, reaction to your rejection. If you do invite everyone, you have to deal with figuring out security, and whatever resources and abilities you use, they can use theirs in turn to pursue whatever it is that they want as opposed to what you want. When A is dealing with B, C and D might be over there plotting how to stab one or both in the back, and if A and B get together to give boot to C, D might go and get together with E and F to retaliate. Player actions create tensions, and reactions create events. Remember: this isn't a relevantly different dynamic from what exists between a game master and the players, when the game master is playing the antagonists. The difference is that when players do some of the work, the game master doesn't have to do all the work.

If you want something done faster and with less effort to yourself, use the other people at the table. It is that simple.

[JNAProductions]

You want to allow players who aren’t charismatic to be able to play charismatic PCs.

Unless you don’t allow people who can’t lift 300 pounds without a sweat to play Strength 20 PCs… that’d be consistent, at least, but not fun.

[Vahnavoi]

@JNAProductions:

Who are you responding to?

Me?

Because I literally, in the post above, described how you can let an uncharismatic person play a more charismatic character.

We aren't talking about physical strength. You want to talk about physical strength? The reason I don't ask people to lift things in a tabletop roleplaying game is because that quickly gets out-of-bounds for the tabletop. It becomes a live-action roleplaying game instead.

In a live-action roleplaying game? Yeah people will lift things to model lifting things. If I want someone who can't lift 300 lbs to play a character who can, I ask them to, say, lift an appropriately-sized block of styrofoam that is within their capacity lift, and then act as if that styrofoam weighs more than it does. And I ask the people playing characters who aren't supposed to lift 300 lbs, to act as if that styrofoam is too much for them.

It's that simple.

Stop making a tired old strawman argument.

[GloatingSwine]

Wrong. That's a topic I didn't get to yet, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. You are making the mistake of assuming that "social stats" are something you invest into on the abstract level, probably at the expense of something else, and then getting sad at the thought of a player not getting a return on their investment.

Don't do that. It's an unnecessary assumption AND a bad design paradigm.

In reality, when "social stats" are something that is "just roleplayed", or rather, acted by a player, they "invest" in social skills by acting social. And they feel the weight of their character's role when other players let them get away with more, or less, based on how the acting fits the character.



Roleplaying is not acting

What you are doing is banning shy or socially awkward people from this aspect of your game by forcing them to do something they would find uncomfortable in the presence of people they often only know through this one activity.

This is the absolute worst way to handle social scenes in games. The shy, uncharismatic, socially awkward player simply cannot play a high charisma character under your scheme because if they could they wouldn't be uncharismatic, shy, and socially awkward, and they will actively avoid trying to do so at your table because you are forcing them into doing something they find uncomfortable and embarrassing because they aren't good at it.

It also means that anyone who puts the bare minimum into social stats at your table and just "acts better" gets to have the benefit of stats they didn't invest in *and* ones they did.


What a game can do instead, is change the information at hand. Just writing down "imagine my character has high-pitched voice" already does this for any player who understands English and has an idea of how such a person would sound like. If, by comparison, "my character has 18 Charisma" does not have that effect, it's because some part of that sentence is horribly ill-defined.

And yet if a player who has absolutely no idea what to say and how to say it in order to appear charming and charismatic wants to play an 18CHA character they must be allowed to do so. They aren't at your table because they have no way of saying "my character would know what to say and how but I don't, or am too shy to embarass myself acting it out in front of these people".

And remember "18 charisma" has a defined mathematical effect and cost just the same as the other ability scores. A player who has it could have had 18 Str instead and, if they can engage in your subjectively judged am-dram well enough, also have the benefit of 18 Cha.

Your idea is not only not appropriate for D&D it's exclusionary to the hobby as a whole.

This is not your Am-dram class, it's a game hobby. A player who comes to your table and wants to do 100% of their roleplaying in the third person by declaring actions and letting their character sheet carry them out needs to be as welcome as anyone else. You say they aren't, they should just find another hobby.

[S@tanicoaldo]

I don't play in systems that use social stats, so i don't know how helpful my advice will be.

I try to see social encounters as a type of puzzle, so I give them all the tools to solve it before hand, let's say they will have to talk to the chief of the guard of convince him to release a powerful wizard under his custody so the arty may use his unique artifact to open a magically sealed chest. This is the puzzle "How to convince a guy with more social status and power to do what the characters (a bunch of outsiders) want.

I give them hints and the information they need on how social rituals and transactions go in this place, I tell them for exemple that knowing and asking for names is taboo and they should refer to people for their titles, I drop the information that the captain has a sweet tooth and love sweets and pastries, in a another social event I showed them that in this culture it's expected to present a gift to the person you are asking a favor, they also overhear during another adventure that the second in command was demoted and banished to a bad place for speaking against a strategy even tho he was right.

So now the players have tons of information abut this character before even meeting him, and they can use this info in their favor to prepare much like they would prepare to face a boss, is the boss undead? Bring certain things, Is the weak to fire? Bring certain things. Is the boss immune to magic? Bring certain thins.

This part has more to do with how I personally like to run games and rewards, but I try to put in my players head that sometimes collecting favors for rewards is just as good if not better than gold and items. This mindset really helps you run social games.

For exemple my players helped a famous chef a while ago, they could use the favor the chef owns them to bake a nice cake and offer to the chief when they meet him as the social etiquette of the realm demands, the cake would bring the captain to their side and them they could use the nuance of not contradicting the captain directly and making it seem like he got the idea of relinquish the wizard to people better equipped to handle magic.

But that's just one solution, players rarely do what you think they will, when they learned that the captain was an asshat and difficult to deal with it they went the Karen way and tired to speak to his superior a much older and more reasonable military man, they have been doing tons of quests and a bunch of people own them favors not just the chef, they spoke with a noble that owned them a favor, a powerful and ambitious viscount to use his influence and pull the strings behind the scenes and arrange a meeting with this more level headed individual, they talked to him and he didn't need much convincing since he is an ally to the viscount and they are implicated on a conspiracy, so helping his friend get rid of a favor he owns benefits him indirectly.

So yeah this "favors" system really makes the world seem lived in and realistic, you just need to keep track of the personal connections of all the npcs and it can be really fun, it makes the players go all "AHA" moments like they are in a Sherlock homes novel, it's really fun, makes them feel smart and gives them more autonomy than depending on rolls.

At least those are my views and experience.

[Quertus]

Choices > Stats >> Delivery.

When the angry Wizard mounted on a hydra comes your way, your choice of whether to attack the Wizard, attack the hydra, attempt Diplomacy, run away, etc, will generally have more impact than whether you have the Run feat, the type of the damage you deal, etc. Still, an übercharger or a Diplomancer are going to be more effective at their chosen vocation than a peasant. Regardless of how well the peasant’s player describes lodging their pitchfork consecutively in each of the two’s unmentionables.

I hold to the same basic principle of Choices > Stats >> Delivery when evaluating social interactions. When you’re at the royal banquet, do you choose to bring up how the King was reluctant to send forces to stop the orc invasion? Do you choose to humiliate the evil Princess by asking how many dragons she’s abducted lately? Do you choose to mention that you’re secretly working for a demon? These choices determine what kinds of impact your actions can have; the relationship with and perception of the speaker, the personality and biases, and, yes, the skill/charisma of the speaker and maybe even random chance determine which of those outcomes will occur for a given listener.

As a rule, Wizards don’t simply get so powerful that running away causes the hydra to Disintegrate; similarly, characters don’t get so charismatic as to produce incongruent effects.

This all seems like basic stuff I’d expect anyone who communicates irl to be able to grasp, so I’m struggling to understand what the problem is. And I don’t want to get too far into the weeds until the OP explains what problem, exactly, they’re trying to solve.

Still,


what do you do to determine whether they get what they want?

I… roleplay? Hence my question, “what’s the fail State you’re trying to solve that ‘just roleplay’ doesn’t cover?”


nobody runs NPCs like that,

Yes, yes, my life is a lie, I don’t actually give my NPCs personalities and backgrounds and motivations and roleplay them like I do my PCs.

Maybe I should have named my account “Nobody”. :smallamused:

[LibraryOgre]

What does “judge success or failure” mean? I’m guessing the answer is covered by 50 players all roleplaying their characters: “well, *would* Sir Squishy agree agree to leave the party with Lady Inferno?”


To an extent, I view it as mechanical choices having mechanical effects. In AD&D, this can be on the more macro scale of "How do your attributes interact with the world", while other systems might come down to "Where did you put skill points?"

If El Ravager has a Wisdom of 3, and Justina has a Wisdom of 15, Dave doesn't get to declare that Rav's not intimidated, or not going to break under torture, just because Dave (El Ravager's player) doesn't want Rav to break. "It's not what I want my character to do!" Well, I didn't want my character to die when stabbed to death by some traitorous senators, but I don't get to declare that it didn't happen... the mechanical representation of my character has certain strengths and weaknesses, and Dave deciding that Ol' Rav is never going to be intimidated isn't reasonable if the paper doesn't back it up.

So, mechanics happen.

[Sparky McDibben]

For most social encounters 'roll when it seems' appropriate is fine. You don't need a subsystem or framework for convincing the barkeep to sleep with you, just as you don't need one for climbing wall. In fact many can probably be breezed past without a roll, just like we don't call for a roll for every physical challenge.

Yep, so to specify, this is for big social encounters where I might not have all the goals, objectives, and motivations of every NPC completely nailed down (because the PCs said, "hey, let's throw a party!" five minutes ago and I haven't had time to prep it). Completely agree that just talking to a barkeep or a merchant doesn't require a roll.


I am a fan of having mechanics that interact with social encounters, from the simple 2d10 encounter reaction table to something more complex involving skills. I like having mechanics because, if I made a mechanical choice, it should have an effect on the world. If my PC has an 18 Charisma, they should be treated as someone who is charismatic, even if I have the charisma of pudding, just as Fumble-fingers McGee gets to play someone with an 18 Dexterity, even though he never rolls dice on the table the first time.

Yep. I use 2d6, but the same concept. I probably should have included that in the OP. I think that hits on something else, which is that I want my PCs to have to think about the NPCs point of view, but not have to worry about Method Acting prep. I usually ask, "Can you give me the gist of what they're saying to the duke?" "Uh, probably something like, 'look, dude, sorry about your nephew, but in our defense, we did think he was possessed by a ghost at the time, and boofing is a well-known ghost-cure in our native land.'" That way they don't have to worry about some Shakespearean monologue crap, and we can all imagine that conversation at the table.


I think the goal the OP was looking at is something to quickly and dynamically generate large enough scenes to have all the players involved whilst playing their own characters.

The "face does everything" problem goes away when there are too many people who need talking to at the same time for one character to do all of it (you know, like most combats will need everyone to do their thing rather than just watch the beatstick do it all), but that is when you need resolution mechanics where the significant things are more satisfying than one roll because the DM has too many plates to spin otherwise.

Spot on. Really, what I'm looking for is to procedurally generate a social encounter that dynamically engages with the PCs and requires minimal prep from me, and can preferably be done on-the-fly.

This has been a fascinating discussion, and I really appreciate the various points of view. I'm thinking about leveraging Necropraxis' Hazard Die (found initially here, (https://www.necropraxis.com/2014/02/03/overloading-the-encounter-die/) now in a revised format here (https://www.necropraxis.com/2017/11/22/hazard-system-v0-3/)) into a social context. Let's quickly examine the various entries on that die, and why they're there.

Most of you are probably really familiar with this procedure; the post isn't intended to bore you, but rather to help me organize my thoughts around why and how I could leverage this into a social context.

But first, let's examine the point of the Hazard Die itself. It's intended purpose is threefold:

1) Simulate a living dungeon environment without requiring the DM to hold the whole thing in their head at once.

2) Give a meaningful cost to time spent exploring; every ten minutes you spend searching this room is ten minutes you won't have later when you're trying to outrun a minotaur.

3) Give the dungeon more options to screw with the party than, "Wandering monster shows up!" You can be forced to rest, eat your rations, have your torches blow out, guards rotate, etc.

For those of you who don't know, dungeon exploration turns are 10 minutes long, and at the end of every 10 minutes, you're rolling the Hazard Die to see what happens. I know most people on here probably knew that, but I didn't know that until about a year or two ago, and it's been super-handy for me. Everything you want to do in a dungeon that reasonably could take longer than 1 minute and less than 15 minutes gets shoved into a 10 minute window, generally. So, if you want to toss a whole room, that's 10 minutes. But if you just want to toss the Altar of Bric-a-Brac And Poor Life Choices, that might only be a minute (and therefore, save you a potential random encounter).

So, the basic form of the Hazard Die is as follows:

1) Setback: Something happens to actively screw with the party. In the dungeon, this is probably an encounter (note, not necessarily a combat encounter). This is here because we want something to whack the players with if they're screwing around and not carefully weighing risk and reward. Every room you search is a Hazard Die check, so you need to think carefully about whether a room is worth searching. You need to pay attention to the dungeon for clues that treasure might be in here.

2) Fatigue: You deplete a resource or suffer some small cost. This is here to prevent players from trying the same thing over and over again. The classic form of this is "rest for 10 minutes or risk overexertion (-1 hp)." You want to move through here as efficiently as possible, and you never know when you might have to choose between wasting time resting or pulling a hammie, so again, you need to be careful with your resources.

3) Expiration: Non-combat durations expire. So if you have a light spell up, it goes out. Torches burn down, lamps gutter (unless you have a good reason they should not, like "This lamp lasts for an hour."), etc. This is here because every torch you use up is 2 silver pieces that could have otherwise gone to XP, and also one more torch you won't have for the trip out of the dungeon.

4) Locality: Stuff changes in the area. Those guards on patrol are now in the Great Hall, not the East Wing. This could also be cosmetic effects, like the walls starting weeping syrup or something. This goes to the simulationist aspect - it shows the PCs that the world moves independently of their actions.

5) Percept: Foreshadow the next encounter. This lets you show the players the Encounter Stick without hitting them with it, which is always useful.

6) Advantage: This is usually just a free turn (nothing happens), but can be a useful discovery, or an unexpected ally.

So, what does the Hazard Die tell me? Well, for starters, that these OSR nerds really like their resource allocation. I figure we turn 'em loose on the Pentagon's budget and just see what happens.

It also tells me that it's very useful for enforcing resource scarcity, but minimally useful for the true simulationist aspect (minimally useful <> unuseful, though).

So when I turn my PCs loose in a ball or other high society event, I figure the stakes are not life-and-death, but that social stakes are still stakes. Like, sure, no one's going to cut your throat, but you could humiliate yourself, miss a chance to push your agenda, spill secrets, etc. So I want to dial down the resource management aspect, and dial up the "poking" the setting does at the PCs.

If I'm dialing down the resource management aspect, what resources are there to manage? Probably reputation first. That's time-consuming to build and difficult to recover when lost, so it should only be on the line after a player makes a mistake and is trying to recover. Next is time. This ball probably only lasts a few hours, and y'all came here to do a thing, so how you budget your time should be a consideration. Finally, money. That's easy enough to come by for PCs, so that should be the cost that's most often on the line.

Alright, rough draft:

1) Setback: Something happens that is potentially bad. Examples might include: An overburdened waiter stumbles toward you, carrying 13 trays of dishes, stacked so high that they can't see you. Can you get out of the way in time to avoid being covered in meringue? A rival calls you out in front of the court, accusing you of villainous actions. Can you talk your way out of it? You can stake reputation to provide a bonus or advantage on any rolls, but if you fail, you lose the staked reputation and suffer the consequences of the Setback.

2) Fatigue: You deplete a resource. Either a) you spend gold to move something forward (paying for an NPC's bar tab, or tipping the bartender, etc), or b) you are wearing on an NPC's patience (so if you're using clocks from Blades in the Dark, the NPCs patience gets a tick, representing you running out of time to make your case before they retire).

3) Expiration: Either a window of opportunity is closing or an NPC is out of restraint. A key NPC starts making their way toward the exit, intending to retire for the evening. Or another NPC decides that now is the time to make a move they want to make, such as challenge the PCs to a duel, mack on the PC's date for the evening, etc. PCs can spend gold to buy time (bribe the carriage drivers to slow-walk the horses, giving the PCs enough time to make their case) or deal with the problem (buy the drunk NPC a ride home so they can sleep it off).

4) Locality: Something changes in the PC's local area. If they're on the dance floor, the music either slows down or speeds up. If they're in the foyer, now is when the costume parade starts. Etc.

5) Free turn: Nothing happens

6) Advantage: The PCs get some time-limited advantage. Maybe a key NPC overindulged or is in a really good mood, and they are easier to persuade for the next 10 minutes.

Very much a work in progress, and I'd love to get feedback on this. Thanks for your patience and insights!

[Quertus]

To an extent, I view it as mechanical choices having mechanical effects. In AD&D, this can be on the more macro scale of "How do your attributes interact with the world", while other systems might come down to "Where did you put skill points?"

If El Ravager has a Wisdom of 3, and Justina has a Wisdom of 15, Dave doesn't get to declare that Rav's not intimidated, or not going to break under torture, just because Dave (El Ravager's player) doesn't want Rav to break. "It's not what I want my character to do!" Well, I didn't want my character to die when stabbed to death by some traitorous senators, but I don't get to declare that it didn't happen... the mechanical representation of my character has certain strengths and weaknesses, and Dave deciding that Ol' Rav is never going to be intimidated isn't reasonable if the paper doesn't back it up.

So, mechanics happen.

I mean, it depends on whether (and, if so, *how*) “Wisdom” would affect one’s response to torture. As “the psychology of torture” is not something I’ve pursued with my hobbiest interest in psychology (and most of what I *believe* about torture comes from a movie costarring Bruce Willis), it’s fair to say I’m not qualified to comment on how reasonable that is.

So, while something of a tautology, the high level “mechanics should have the impact they should have” is something I can agree to. The issue comes in agreeing what that “should” should look like.


Yep, so to specify, this is for big social encounters where I might not have all the goals, objectives, and motivations of every NPC completely nailed down (because the PCs said, "hey, let's throw a party!" five minutes ago and I haven't had time to prep it).

Ah, gotcha. So that’s the problem we’re trying to solve, and why “just roleplay” doesn’t work: because you explicitly don’t have a personality *to* roleplay.

I don’t have that problem for two reasons: 1) I follow “never introduce a sentiment being you’re not ready to have the PCs kill roleplay; 2) I run off “foundational events”, like Batman’s “parents killed by third with gun before his young eyes”, “scary encounter in dark cave with bats”.

And… I’m not sure how your “Hazard Die” (below) helps if you can’t roleplay the NPCs to begin with.


Completely agree that just talking to a barkeep or a merchant doesn't require a roll.

Why not?


Necropraxis' Hazard Die

b) you are wearing on an NPC's patience (so if you're using clocks from Blades in the Dark, the NPCs patience gets a tick, representing you running out of time to make your case before they retire).

Very much a work in progress, and I'd love to get feedback on this. Thanks for your patience and insights!

I’ll give the same feedback I’ve been getting: how does this take into account the PCs stats? The “part b” I quoted is the obvious one. For me, the *size* of the ticking clock is related to the character’s Charisma (and this ticking clock is what I call “social HP”, btw). For each of these results, ask yourself, should *vastly different characters* encounter these equally often / find that this has the same impact on them?

[Rynjin]

I actually really enjoy Pathfinder's social encounter and social combat rules. Crunchy enough to meaningful while lightweight enough to be adaptable. And, notably, takes into account multiple aspects of a character.

If one of the NPC's defining characteristics is that they love horses, Ride may be a better skill to get in their good graces than Diplomacy.

[GloatingSwine]

Spot on. Really, what I'm looking for is to procedurally generate a social encounter that dynamically engages with the PCs and requires minimal prep from me, and can preferably be done on-the-fly.


So to draw it together we need:

1. An NPC generator that can quickly spin up, I would say, 2-10 NPCs out of whole cloth (everyone else in the scene is social terrain, dancers at a ball, gamblers in an underground gaming den, etc. They can be used to modify how you interact with the people who count, eg. trying to interact with someone during a dance, or over a game of cards.
2. A structure that produces scenes of variable length which contain multiple discrete social encounters.
3. Social conflict resolution mechanics with variable levels for NPCs of varying significance.
4. A way to generate emergent events that mark the passage of time in the scene and affect which encounters are productive by feeding into point 3 and moving NPCs into and out of social terrain or which encounters are possible by adding or removing NPCs (the party planner's event track as mediated by the hazard die).

I'm going to go in with the assumption that the players want something from the scene. They are going to want the key NPCs in the scene to either do something or give something. To do that they need to persuade their way through the NPCs, getting support over the course of the scene. Each NPC in the scene should have a stance on the goal, basically For, Against, or Neutral. An NPC who has been persuaded or overcome is For, one who has been offended is Against, and everyone else is Neutral.

I don't know as I can think of something for all of these but I'll start with NPC generation:

The first step is to define the types of NPCs and how they are going to be encountered together. I think there should be four flavours of NPC in two broad groupings: Boss and Minions or Equal Partners.

1. Boss and Minions

This is when there's someone obviously in charge. A court, a gang, etc. This scene contains three types of NPC. The Boss, the Minions, and one or two Underbosses.

2. Equal Partners

This is when there is nobody in charge overall, a fellow adventuring party. There is usually only one type of NPC in this scene, the Partner.

The four types of NPC in ascending order of relevance:

Minion: Minions are intended to be the easy meat of the scene. They are intended to be persuaded with a single interaction using a simple ability check, they may provide one lever on one other NPC in the scene who is either another Minion or an Underboss.

Underboss: An Underboss is a chief minion, you can't win them over until at least one of their minions is on your side (or set up to replace them by the end of the scene), but can talk to them to get information. They may need more than one check to win over, and at least one lever.

Partner: Partners all matter. You should only use them in limited numbers (2-5) and use a conflict resolution system with social HP for dealing with them, if their social HP runs out they are won over to the players' goal. If a scene is with equal partners the players need more than half of them to agree to get what they want out of the scene. You might make one of them the Leader and give him more weight in the outcome. They can all provide levers on each other.

Boss: The boss is the only guy whose opinion really matters. If the players want something out of the scene and there's a boss, they need to win him over (or get him out of the way). Again, use a social conflict resolution system for dealing with them but give them more resilience than partners because they're one big target. The players can't go and deal directly with the Boss, they have to have at least one Underboss on their side before they can even talk to the Boss.

What type of NPC composition and how many to include should just emerge from what type of scene you want it to be. It's a DM free choice thing.

The actual NPCs need a few traits for the players to interact with. I think the basics that NPCs of all types should have are a temperament and a goal.

You can generate temperaments using a D4 on the four humours:

1. Melancholic
2. Phlegmatic
3. Sanguine
4. Choleric

Melancholic characters are harder to flatter and don't care about boasting (penalties on checks using those strategies), but easier to intimidate (bonus on check and better result on success). They will display conscientiousness and caution and respond positively to suggestions towards those outcomes. Levers based on interests or tasks work particularly well on them. They won't initiate contact with the PCs. They get a -1 on the Goal table.

Phlegmatic characters are harder to shift the loyalty or opinion of, any checks to try and get them to do so will take a penalty. It is harder to motivate them to individual actions, but easier to motivate them to go along with others. If an event pushes an NPC to leave the scene, it won't be them unless nobody else is left. They are last to choose who to talk to. Levers based on relationships to other NPCs work particularly well on them.

Sanguine characters respond well to entertaining boasts and friendly approaches. They are easy to motivate to action. Appeals to their competitive nature will work well, flattery will work well if they have just displayed some kind of skill by interacting with terrain (been a PC's dance partner, won a hand of cards or a tilt at a tourney, whatever). It is hard to motivate them to inaction or to stay out of something. They are first to choose who to talk to. Levers based on tasks work particularly well on them.

Choleric characters respond well to flattery and submissive approaches and extremely badly to intimidation. They will respond badly to any deal where they don't come out on top, and they expect deference from others. Levers based on relationships to NPCs work particularly well on them. They get +1 on the Goal table.

(These could probably do with expansion, this is OTOH stuff)

Then a D6 roll for Goal. This is what motivates the character for the purposes of the scene.

1. Survival.
2. Cooperation
3. Animosity
4. Greed
5. Ambition
6. Glory

A character with Survival as a goal just wants to get through the scene without conflict or embarassment. It is easy to push them towards inaction or following what others are doing.

A character with Cooperation as a goal wants to arrange a mutual benefit. It is easier to get them to co-operate with fair exchanges or favours.

A character with Animosity as a goal has a rival or someone they dislike in the scene. If they are a Minion it can only be another Minion or their Underboss. They can be motivated to act against that person or will be happy if that person loses out.

A character with Greed as a goal wants to get personal wealth. They can be motivated with deals in their favour or bribes.

A character with Amibiton as a goal wants to get advancement. If they are a Minion they may want to take over from their Underboss, an Underboss may want to be the Boss, or they may want some external advancement. They can be motivated to act with promises of support or actions in favour of their goal. Depending on the level of consequence of the characters this might be now or lead to a quest or other adventure.

A character with Glory as a goal wants to be held in high regard by everyone in the scene, they act like they are motivated by both Greed and Ambition, but they won't try to achieve their goal secretly. They have to win in public.

That gives you a variety of what NPCs want and how the players can work on them.

Then you need relationships between the NPCs. If they're boss and minions you have a heirarchy built in and relationships should probably go one step up or down. The relationships should be basically friendship<>rivalry and loyal<>disloyal, with neutral in the middle. I'd be tempted to assign this manually so you can construct a narrative out of the scene, given that not everyone needs them and varying the amount makes more variety. If someone rolled Animosity as a goal then always set them to rivalry with someone else.

Levers

Levers are kinda intentionally vague because they'll be really varied depending on the context of the social situation and who the NPCs are. They should be basically anything that gives you a hold over an NPC or lets you engage or draw them in. So things they're interested in, people they're loyal to, debts they have, secrets they want to keep secret, stuff like that. A lever can be used to skip a check, in addition to a check, or to get bonuses in a social conflict system (reducing social HP more, deflecting a loss of your own, etc). A successful bribe gives a lever.

Scene Structure and Length

An event is broken down into phases. In each phase you have a round of social interaction between players and NPCs. The first player chooses who to talk to, then the first free NPC chooses a player to talk to, then the next player, then the next NPC and so on. Spare NPCs will talk to each other unless they're all Melancholic, Melancholic NPCs will only talk to each other if they are also Friends, this might help or hinder the players depending on who is persuaded right now. NPCs are processed in order of Sanguine > Choleric > Phlegmatic. That makes the NPCs feel like they're also doing things at the event.

The actual interactions should be a quick couple of things, first of all the player uses any relevant skills and abilities to size up who they're talking to (perception, investigation, applicable knowledge, backgrounds, anything that might help). If they succeed they get a description that should let them figure out the personality type they're dealing with. They should understand that their aim in the conversation is to figure out what this character's goal is and what to do, give, or promise to them to gain their support towards their overall goal (extracting a lever on them or someone else). You only get one check against an NPC in one interaction or a couple of rounds of social conflict (rather than running until someone runs out of social HP).

Between phases the PCs can swap some information about the character they just dealt with, and the characters can move around. This is when you'd use your Hazard Die to see what happens dynamically, and you can also do any preplanned events if you've thought of them.

That gives you NPCs that are active in the scene, they're doing things even when the players aren't talking to them, and they're talking behind the players' back. When two NPCs talk if one is Neutral and the other is either For or Against give them a chance to bring the other NPC to their side. (it should be lowish, 10% maybe, because the players should be the main drivers, with some modifiers based on the heirarchy and relationship between the characters)

The other thing is how long a scene should be. It'd take playing out a few times to see how many phases are interesting to play through, but scenes should have the same number of phases representing a variable amount of time. I would split them basically into Short and Long scenes, with the main distinction being that in Short scenes you have less relevant terrain and the players get to swap less information about their previous interaction.

[Rynjin]

Yeah, that's basically how the rules I mentioned work. (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/social-conflicts/)

[NichG]

If I were to put structure to a mostly organic process, these are the things that seem important and their rough order of being decided when I generate situations:

- Start by identifying what I'd call 'irreducible tensions' in the world or society that the NPCs are a part of. These are basically things where there isn't a clear cut resolution and its not because people are holding the idiot ball, but because really with the resources and knowledge they possess you can't have it all ways. This doesn't necessarily need to be a zero-sum resource kind of situation, but it could be ideological conflicts or absurdities of life or things like that. 'This is a society whose culture teaches people their value is their job, but at the same time its working on automating away more and more jobs' is an example of this from the game I'm currently running. Generally keep these around from situation to situation - they're the underlying themes. Some should be visible, some should be hidden.

- When making a new significant NPC, I'm going to have to decide on: a social position, a theme that's relevant to them (a stressor), a strong personality trait, and an initial angle of approach that brings them into contact with the rest of the game. Based on the needs of the situation, I could start with any one of these and derive the rest to make sense. If something calls for instigation, I will start with 'this NPC is an instigator and is going to disrupt things' then ask myself 'Okay, why?'. If mentally I have a list of options for the 'why', I will try to at least once in one of these categories pick a non-obvious reason rather than the reason that is most likely.

- Theme: pick one of the setting themes and give the NPC a relationship with that theme as their current primary drive or stressor. This identifies in some sense 'what the NPC is primarily concerned with' (not exactly the same as a goal, maybe more of a world-view?). For maybe 1/4 of NPCs relating to the publically visible themes, decide on some secret or relationship that the NPC with that theme that others don't have access to, leading to a different perspective or stance. If it's a hidden theme, this is basically mandatory.

- Trait: Pick a flamboyant personality trait that could either be in accordance with that stress, perpendicular to it, or in contrast with it.

- Role: Depending on the relationship between the personality trait and the NPC's stressor, they may naturally slot into different kinds of roles - instigator, aggressor, person in need, reluctant participant, etc. That role is essentially the NPC's 'initial angle of approach' to a situation - given no existing relationship between them and another NPC or the PCs, this is sort of what they're going to try to be. This is also basically when the NPC's 'goals' and 'needs' and 'wants' become more clear to me, though I won't necessarily write those down as static things. Rather, they're derived dynamically from how the personality trait and world-view interact.

- Position: If I'm starting from position - e.g. I need there to be some NPC who is the head of this bureau or whatever - then I won't necessarily make the NPC's position make sense given them acting in accordance with their role; their position becomes a sort of side-property, and 'the more interesting thing about this NPC' is something hidden or at least not on the surface. If I'm starting from Role and it turns out to be a more active role (instigator, etc), then Position tends to derive from that - the NPC is going to be a more driven one, and their Position represents what they're doing in pursuit of their goals. Whereas if its a reactive role like 'I'm in trouble', then usually it'll be perpendicular or even in opposition.

Finally, I don't set this immediately, but I keep a mental space open for one or two 'quirks' - these are things about the NPC that are intentionally disconnected from their main reason for being in the situation or event, but which are privately important for that NPC in ways that don't have to make any sense. This guy is trying to rise to the head of his gang, but he happens to be obsessed with this online MMO, etc. 50% chance a quirk has some ironic thing about it that risks becoming important but isn't yet, like the guy is in a guild in that MMO with the police officer who is trying to break up the gang and they're good friends in the game and neither knows about the other. I keep this open rather than pre-setting it so that when I'm roleplaying the NPC I can improvise rather than pausing to remember or check my notes about what I had decided (or worse, forget, do something else, then feel pulled to retcon because I had made the quirk too rigid). If there's a moment in the conversation where I need the NPC to be weird (or need someone else who should know them better to sort of disrupt their game), I'll make up the quirk and introduce it on the spot. Or if e.g. a PC does background research into the NPC and needs 'what do they do when they're not guarding the emperor?' kinds of things to be generated, out comes the quirk. I find that once the NPC has acted their quirk in a conversation its much easier to remember than if its buried in notes somewhere.

So that's generation of an NPC. For a given situation, pick a few existing NPCs the party already knows of, throw in a few new ones, and toss in links to make sure that no one in that situation does not have some connection to at least two other characters present (can include the PCs) - two links means one can be pulled against the other, whereas a single link is pretty isolated.

[animorte]

Hello again! Apologies for not stepping in and providing my mediocre contributions yet. I have skimmed through previous comments a bit, but I’m mainly attempting to contribute to the OP, so don’t hold it against me, ok? I intend to go back through with a more discerning eye because some of these social interaction mechanics others have brought up look really helpful to incorporate into my games.

Disclaimer: I may not be as pleasant throughout as I intended, as I was 70% through when Yugi pulled the 5th Exodia piece and obliterated my progress.

I noticed that the exact two people I was in a discussion with on role-playing have brought the discussion over here as well. I want to summarize the depth of the topic in one way.

Ultimately, every single character (PC, NPC, BBEG, monster, etc.) has one thing in common. They each have some sort of motivation. Find that motivation and portray it however feels the most comfortable for you!
A lot of what I have below follows that concept.


Structure <> Mechanics. Every time I do one of these, someone gets it twisted. Structure is the degree to which the game spells out how it should be run; mechanics are how we adjudicate rules interactions. As an example, the 5E combat structure fits in a little callout box on page 189 of the PHB. The combat mechanics are the entire chapter 9 of the PHB.
Well said. I appreciate you explaining the difference here. Maybe provide this tag-line to everything? :smallbiggrin:

Getting started: One extremely valuable thing I do is always having a massive list of NPC names at the ready. No telling how many we’ll come across that might need one. I’ll put a little note next to their name (whenever their identity/occupation/etc. presents itself) with proper details to organize later.


A few things I like to reference from the DMG (p.89).
Appearance, Talents, and Mannerisms: Each has its own d20 table and I often pre-roll these (or come up with my own, as fitting). They’re sitting on a sheet of paper (or phone note) ready to go. Plug-n-play!
Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws/Secrets: Honestly, I don’t use these very much, but they’re a decent area to draw inspiration from.
Useful Knowledge: Typically if an NPC has useful information, they’re worth remembering and applying some of this information to.
Villain’s Scheme and Methods: I have rolled on these tables to inspire the bad guy for a one-shot to build around. If it is a campaign, these are useful for temporary under-boss folk, but my BBEG is always more fine-tuned.

This helps bring those characters to life and (again) to find their motivation and how it can be applied.


I appreciate the way Strixhaven builds on NPC interaction (p.43).
Strixhaven Memories: This is a fairly simple additional character sheet that helps keep track of the relationships you have with relevant NPCs (also extracurriculars, jobs, and report cards).
Extracurricular Options and Jobs: Each of these provides details of what that choice entails. They also list the NPCs that you will encounter there.
Relationship Points: At various points there are Relationship Encounters. You will have an opportunity to interact with a friendly (+1) or rivalrous (-1) response.
Fellow Students: Each student is detailed with their motivation (there’s that word again), school, year, extracurriculars, jobs, and the most important part (for sake of interaction):
Bond Boon and Bond Bane: You acquire these by building relationships with fellow students through relationship encounters and points. Each NPC has their own benefits of friendship and penalties of rivalry.
Stat Blocks: It explicitly states that these fellow students aren’t intended to combat the PCs or venture off campus with them (though I have disobeyed). If you choose to do as I did, it is kind enough to guide you to a stat block at the end of the book for each school and year (as well as plenty other stat blocks). Wonderful!

Of course, long-term exposure to NPCs is expected under this format. Either way, I have gained great benefit from using this idea in many other areas (often modified accordingly).


Influence [Action] from OneD&D tickles my fancy.
Attitude (Indifferent, Friendly, and Hostile): These determine how effective communication is with that particular NPC. (Their motivation as to why can easily depend on alignment, useful knowledge, relationship points, any of the other DMG variables, or <insert imagination here>.)
Interaction: This is really where you can go wild. Based on all of those pre-existing variables (however you decide what they are) the outcome of social encounters should equally vary with different NPCs, provided your NPCs have any depth.
Ability Check: Self-explanatory. I would like to say that this is where plenty of the other metrics can easily be taken into account. Depending on how your motive aligns with the NPC at hand, this may or may not require a check at all.

I think most of this, yet again, goes back to motivation. If you know the motivation of the character(s) at hand, all of this becomes much more clear.


The Fable game series presents a visible NPC interaction gauge.
Personality Traits: Each NPC you encounter has a few different attributes that determine how well they may respond to certain actions you may commit.
Expressions: Your character learns more and more expressions of varying nature (fun, rude, tricks, music, etc.) that can help to build renown with NPCs.

Yes, it’s a video game. However, the basic preferences of each NPC has been a template of mine ever since I started playing D&D. This goes all the way back to my first spoiler here.


In closing, I’ll say (for the 217th time now, at least) that my foundation for determining social interaction lies in the motivation for each character. Apply a couple basic metrics and actually allow them to impact narrative (and mechanical) outcomes.

I could put all of this together in a visual representation to closer resemble how I structure it, if it isn’t particularly clear.

P.S. I was going to include a couple other TTRPGs I have been reading up on and starting to try, but I quickly realized that they have little-to-no social interaction even mentioned. What a shame.

[Satinavian]

Um... that's... not a conflict. Why are you trying to use conflict resolution to run that? It'd be like using the D&D combat system for, I dunno, climbing a tree? It's climbing, what are you doing with a Phantasmal Killer spell?

The goal of a game system is to be fun and produce reasonable results. It's OK to need some kigical limits like using a fighting subsystem for fighting and not for crafting or some such.

A full "social rules" system will look more like a complete game with exploration, discovery, resources, conflict, etc., etc. Like D&D hp/ac only applies to the physical damage part of the combat subsystem, a mental or social hp/ac should apply to the 'will to fight' or social standing or whatever you're making conflict resolution rules for.
Because that is the kind of situation i want a good social rule system to cover as well.

Limiting stuff to conflicts is useless for me. Conflicts are the one thing nearly every rule system can do anyway. Just take the standard rules for extended tests, opposed rolls, extended rolls, put them together and done. Or make a social combat system, i guess, but that won't give you that much more utility here unless your general skill system is lacking. That was never the part that needed a solution.

But i have seen systems trying to fit all social stuff into some kind of combat mechanics. Most notably SiFRP. It just doesn't work. If you build an elaborate subsystem, be sure, that most of the relevant situations are actually covered.


The social rules should cover (most) kinds of social challenges. And social combat rules can't do that. They only work for stuff that is basically a combat in the first place. And that is way rarer in practice as many seem to think.

[KorvinStarmast]

So I wanted to set up some space to work through my thoughts on social encounter structures in an upcoming urban 5E game I'm running...Structure <> Mechanics.[/B] Every time I do one of these, someone gets it twisted. Structure is the degree to which the game spells out how it should be run; mechanics are how we adjudicate rules interactions. As an example, the 5E combat structure fits in a little callout box on page 189 of the PHB. The combat mechanics are the entire chapter 9 of the PHB. I won't address structure much, because what Vahnavoi posted covers a lot of that quite well.

Insofar as role playing not being acting: I agree, but you are still the brain driving your character.
What is being danced around in a lot of this discussion is this: You get better at role playing by doing it. (Citation: Mike Mornard from a discussion forum a while back) He's still right. Play Diplomacy with your group now and again.

The lame refrain just never ends.
"I want someone with poor social skills to play a high Cha character" - I think that this mental attitude overloads stats, dice, and mechanics and numbers at the expense of role play.
If you want to be good at role playing, role play.
Don't hide behind dice.
Don't hide behind stats
Don't hide behind numbers or mechanics.

Secondly, and crucially: focus on Approach and Intentions if a player needs a nudge during a role playing scene and is having some trouble articulating what they are after.
Ask the player for that, and see if a roll is even necessary. (It often isn't).

DMs helpful little Mechanic: 2d6. Been using it since OD&D. It's less complex than 5e's DMG table on hostile / neutral / friendly and a d20, but since you are playing a 5e game then open up the DMG and use that tool as an aid.

That trusty 2d6 is what I use if I need a die roll to help me arrive at an NPC reaction, since I have already mentally discerned the following about the NPC:

Hostile
Neutral
Friendly
Apathetic/Indifferent
Hungry.

Those are the five stances I generally start with, in terms of picking one, and it works.

Because I understand the initial stance, and in a given situation, I already know what the NPC's movitation is, I rarely need a die roll to figure out what an NPC will do in reaction to what the PCs present.

Aside: Vahnavoi's suggestion to have the PCs RP NPCs is IMO a good one, but that will depend on the people at your table buying into that approach. I don't know your players, so I can't assess what they will buy into or won't.

Then, as ever, do what you do in a TTRPG:

have a conversation.
Let it follow its course.


When you get to an impasse, or a "Hmm, now what?" point, then a die roll is a way to lubricate the gears and move the conversation forward, move it into a more productive direction, or to arrive at a decision.

"I don't need extra rules to run social encounters!" This is not helpful feedback, because it doesn't give me any insight into how to run social encounters.
^^^ This is an unhelpful, self-inflicted wound.
You do it - you run a social encounter - by having a conversation. You don't need numbers to do that.


I'm looking for a way to deliver high-stakes set-piece social encounters with minimal DM prep-load, some procedural content generation, and consequences that drive the play of the campaign forward.

I find your assumption of low to no Prep Dming for something that drives your campaign forward to be self defeating. The things that drive the campaign forward are decisions the PCs make, and the aims and goals of all NPCs, and how those two factors mesh/interact. (Alongside any environmental factors that the setting-world itself, not the characters, presents: oceans, deserts, hurricanes, volcanos,etc. )

I'm looking for those scenes where the PCs can be the ones who accidentally spill red wine on the high priest's immaculate white robes, or gallantly catch the klutzy wizard as he's about to fall down the stairs.
Roll a 2d6, see what reaction the NPC has if you can't intuitively figure it out yourself.

I like BitD, but I think your concern about shoe horning the flashback into D&D is a valid one.
I'd recommend against.

Alright, so I've got a problem. In an urban game, intrigue (discovering and leveraging secrets) and social encounters should be a major part of play, but if you simply utilize ability checks (like Persuasion, Deception, etc.), then the player's actual RP tends to get undercut by bad rolls Then stop rolling the dice so often; you are creating dead ends by doing so.

Quickly go over in your mind all social games you've played, starting with children's games, that, this is important, don't use dice to determine who wins or loses. Great post, I snipped the rest for brevity.

Information Phase
Social Shift
Lock it in
Nice structure, I applaud this template. :smallsmile:

That only really happens if you put too much weight on a single check. Bingo. An ability check is not a magic power. (As a reminder, D&D 5e is what Sparky is running).

This does not necessarily mean that social interactions should be entirely dictated by what's on your character sheet, merely that what's there shouldn't be immaterial. Then use it as a guide rather than a hard and fast imperative.
In other words, give benefit of the doubt for those with a higher score, and 'not benefit of the doubt' for those with a lower scores, and free both you and the player from the tyranny of a number.

As this is a 5e game Sparky is asking about, 5e offers the DM, anytime, the option to apply advantage or disadvantage for any number of circumstantial reasons so that, in the moment, the DM can offer aid or malus to a given course of action. It's a great tool in social situations.

How do the social skill rogues know that they are being rewarded for their skill investment and shouldn't have put those skills elsewhere so they can succeed just as well in situations where you do call for dice as situations where you don't?
I find this point of view both limiting, and a bit too close to min/max au outrance as an approach.

If our starting point is DnD, we are already fighting uphill.
Seeing as this is a d20 system, we will keep the d20+modifiers as our base, with modifiers here being a skill and appropriate ability modifier. While it is the d20 system, I find my 2d6 "DMs little helper" to be very useful, so I use it.

The absolute first thing that needs to be said is that only reasonable things work - if you try to convince a guard to stab the king "for the memes", you can certainly use your action to do so, but it will work no better than if you tried to shoot a bow through a mountain. The critical part is that in social encounters, you don't always know what will or will not work, and you should do some legwork (e.g. finding out is a given NPC is corrupt) to figure that out. And a 2d6 roll allows you to decide "pure as an angel" (10-12), "normal" (7 +/- 2) or "for sale" (2-4) (and shades in between) with little to no effort (That's but one example).

Some sort of social HP is essential to this, obviously. Here you lost me. Adding more fiddly bits strikes me as adding to GM workload. I'd suggest against.

And we're back to the problem of not being able to include the social stats of the characters who have chosen to invest there in a way that the player feels the value of their investment. Being numbers bound creates its own problems, yes. Own goal.

To an extent, I view it as mechanical choices having mechanical effects. In AD&D, this can be on the more macro scale of "How do your attributes interact with the world", while other systems might come down to "Where did you put skill points?" Interesting contrast.
I don't discourage any player from trying something due to a low score.
Blame that on my OD&D roots, which was before the numbers took on extra importance.
You can try anything, regardless of your score.
Don't hide behind a number.

[icefractal]

^^^ This is an unhelpful, self-inflicted wound.
You do it - you run a social encounter - by having a conversation. You don't need numbers to do that. You don't need numbers (or structure) to do that. Someone who's never been in court trying to play a court scene? No, it doesn't just "come natural" - it's natural once you know it, and it's easy to forget the learning process, but there still is one.

Like with swimming. Once you know how to swim, it's not something you need to consciously think about or have a manual for. You just think "I'm going to swim over to that raft" rather than "move right arm, move left arm, etc". But most people don't just inherently know how to do it, they do need to be taught, not just thrown into a pool and told "learn by doing!"


However, I wouldn't condense everything into a roll either. Personally, I consider a non-trivial social situation to be like a dungeon, not a single swing of a sword. Maybe a pretty small dungeon that doesn't take long to get through, but still not just a single target to hit. And like in a dungeon, rolls can be both insufficient (no amount of Pick Lock will turn a solid wall into a door) or unnecessary (if you're next to the lever which drops the bridge, you can defeat a monster on that bridge without a roll).

Does this mean that someone could "cheat" by making good enough arguments they don't need a roll? Yes, and that's not cheating. Any more than it's "cheating" if someone who's terrible at Climb and Jump crosses a chasm by finding some planks and making a bridge across it. Also, IME, if you make NPCs reject extremely reasonable terms because the Diplomacy roll isn't high enough, players (reasonably) view that NPC as an a-hole to be circumvented and/or humiliated.

The reverse - someone with a socially-adept character who keeps trying the equivalent of "Pick Lock on a wall" - is somewhat of an issue. But not really any more of an issue than someone who's playing a military-genius character but keeps making bad moves in combat. Personally I treat Diplomacy as "knowing what to say" in addition to delivery, so a check will let you know why your approach isn't working and what would work better, if that information isn't completely hidden.

[gbaji]

I'm pretty much with Quertus on the "just roleplay" bit.


Roleplaying is not acting

What you are doing is banning shy or socially awkward people from this aspect of your game by forcing them to do something they would find uncomfortable in the presence of people they often only know through this one activity.

Yeah. You don't have to require "acting" by your players. Some will do this. Some wont. Personally, I find it a bit annoying when people insist on speaking in a different voice, taking on inflections, using mangled psuedo-old/middle/whatever English to set the scene, making grand gesticulations, hopping up on the table, etc. A little of that can be fun. A lot of that gets tiresome.

I'm perfectly fine with a player simply telling me what their character is doing. I don't require players to stand up and demonstrate the sword strike their character is making, and I don't require that they come up with the Kings Speech on the spot to make some sort of social roll, either.


This is the absolute worst way to handle social scenes in games. The shy, uncharismatic, socially awkward player simply cannot play a high charisma character under your scheme because if they could they wouldn't be uncharismatic, shy, and socially awkward, and they will actively avoid trying to do so at your table because you are forcing them into doing something they find uncomfortable and embarrassing because they aren't good at it.

Yeah. Then don't do that. But also don't put it in the realm of "just make rolls to determine the result" either. There's a middle ground that works very well. Describe what you want your character to do. GM determines skills needed (if any) to succeed. Player rolls dice. GM determines results based on PC actions/results, and NPC reactions/results. Easy. No social situation resolution need be more complex than this.


And yet if a player who has absolutely no idea what to say and how to say it in order to appear charming and charismatic wants to play an 18CHA character they must be allowed to do so. They aren't at your table because they have no way of saying "my character would know what to say and how but I don't, or am too shy to embarass myself acting it out in front of these people".

Again. I think there is a middle ground here. We could say that this applies to every skill in a RPG, not just social skills. Players are still expected to make decisions about what their characters are doing in combat. If a player says "I'm going to stand here waving my sword around while the bad guys shoot at me with arrows", that's likely a poor choice on the players part, right? Yet, player agency means we let the players decide what they do. That's an obvious one, but there are a ton of much more minor combat decisions that players make for their characters that may improve or decrease their odds of success. The GM does not just have the player roll some combat skill and then the GM decides where the character moves, what combat actions they take, and whatnot, based on that success, right?

Why do that for social situations? Players can still make good and bad decisions. As the GM you arbitrate these based on the social skills on the sheet, but the actual decision of what to do? That's the players to make. That's not to say you maybe shouldn't clue them in if they're about to do something monumentally dumb (just like you might remind the player in the previous example, that the bad guys can still shoot at him, while he's not doing anything to them, and perhaps seeking some cover, or charging into melee range might work better). But outside of that, the GM still should just let players run their characters.

Whether they succeed at what they attempt to do is based on the stats, skills, etc. But what they choose to attempt to do should be the players decision. And yeah, a simple "I'm going to try to seduce the barmaid" is plenty enough for me to GM. I've also found that when you alllow players to do this, they actually learn and get better at making those decisions. They learn that "maybe just demanding that the baron do what I want isn't the best approach", and try something else instead. Dunno. I've just never had real issues with managing this. Not so much as to create any rules other than having a handful of social skills that PCs can use if/when we decide a roll is required for something.


Choices > Stats >> Delivery.

Pretty much this. Though I'd put "skills" in place of stats, but that's game system dependent. In most games, there are some set of social skllls available, and there may be bonuses based on stats, but the actual skill is what you roll.

Point being that it's not at all about the delivery. If a player wants to act out the scene, that's their choice, but it's not going to influence things much other than the table's amusement level (or annoyance level in some cases). The most significant thing is what they choose to do. Then they roll appropriate skills based on that choice. Then we determine what happens as a result.


I think part of my issue here is that one of the common complaints about many games is the lack of social encounters and resolutions, specifically in terms of how signicant they are. Which is valid. And there is a common thread that combat tends to take center stage because that's where most of the rules are focused. Which is also valid. I guess my problem is that this topic seems to assume that if we just put in as many detailed and complex rules for social encounters as we have for combat encounters, then this will fix the problem.

I think that's a completely false assumption. It will make things worlse. People avoid doing social stuff, because social stuff is tedious. It's not as exciting as combat. We have greater rules for combat because that's where most player's focus is on. If you create equally detailed and complex rules for social interactions, fewer people will want to use social methods to resolve anything, because you've just made it more complicated and more tedious than it was before. That's the wrong direction IMO.


The best way to make social interaction better and more relevant to any game system is to do another thing Quertus suggested:

Detail the NPCs

Yup. That's it. The NPCs are not game objects to be manipulated using skill rolls. They are living breathing people in your world. Treat them as such. Any NPC that interacts with the PCs should have a personality, hopes, goals, dreams, likes, hates, etc. Obviously, how detailed this is depends on how siginificant the NPC is (and should also determine how relevant any social interaction with them is). Anyone the PCs may wish to interact with for whom that interaction is significant, you as the GM should have detailed quite a bit.

It's not really that hard. The NPC wants things. The NPC has things they are willing to do to get those things, and other things they are not. You just roleplay the NPCs. If the PC wants to seduce the barmaid, start with "is this the kind of person who would allow themselves to be seduced in the first place?". Maybe the answer is yes, maybe no. Then you ask "is the PC the kind of person the barmaid would be seduced by?". This may be a combination of charisma stat, and whatever social skills the player chooses to use. Again, let the player determine approach. They could just walk up and ask (maybe she's "that kind of girl", and/or maybe she's the type to charge or something, who knows?). If the player wants to do some setup (buy her a drink, perform music ahead of time, write poetry, etc), let the PC attempt the relevant skills and determine the response from the result(s). Again, this is just not that hard.

You must start with "who is the NPC, and what do they want?" before you do anything else though. I find the idea of randomly generating NPCs to be silly. Why bother? If you're randomly generating NPCs, the why not just roll a die to determine overall success and move on? No one's going to gain a lot of enjoyment rolling different skills based on randomly generated NPCs with randomly generated checks to use against them, for randomly generated social situations. Then again, I also hate random encounter tables too, so there is that. Same thing. If the players feel the world is just a series of random stuff, it's not going to feel "real". If the GM creates the world, and fills it with things that make sense and work together (and that includes both places and people), then it will.

Create the NPCs. Decide who they are. Decide what they want. Decide who they like or dislike. The best social encounters (for the players) are going to be the ones where the GM has done the legwork, and created a set of NPCs that all fit together in some way, and with whom the PCs can interact with in a number of ways. Once you do that first bit, the actual encounter is easy.

I once ran an adventure where the PCs were basically in a haunted Inn. As in, they slept in an old burnt out town and woke up to find themselves interacting with the spirits of those who'd died in the calamity that destroyed the town (and the town itself appearing to be restored back to what it had been a century or so ago). The spirits were reliving their last hours, and the players basically interacted with them, figuring out "who dun it" somewhat along the way. I created a "cast of characters", gave them all names, professions, personalities, etc, and then just let it rip. Of course, the key bit was disovering that one of the Kings sons was meeting with some friends who were concerned about the King and his eldest son, and hoping to make changes in the kingdom, but that the elder son was plotiing to assassinate him and his "conspirators" (and burn the Inn and town down along the way). Oh, and there was also some embezzelment stuff going in, with hidden box of gold involved, and other mysteries to solve as well. The players got to interact with all of this, ask questions, and in many cases had to help people out with problems before they would get answers, all in a setting where these "ghosts" were really seeking resolution for their deaths so they could "move on". And if they got the right info, also the (still hidden) location of that stolen box of gold could be found once they woke up.

It was a great game session. Everyone loved it. And yeah, along the way, they learned a bit of history of this kingdom and how things got to how they were (one brother betraying the other), which totally coincidentally was a parallel to the current stuff going on in the game (current old king had two sons, oldest of which was more or less "evil", and the younger one was trying to form a core of resistance to prevent the evil stuff from happening). There were some social skill rolls made, but most of the scenario was just the players wandering around talking to people. Asking questions. Helping a little girl find her dolly. Stuff like that.

I would seriously recomment moving in the opposite direction of trying to create even more firm and specific rules for social situations than already exist in any given game system. Save yourself that time, and spend it instead on actually creating the social sitution details in the scenario you are running instead. You will get a lot more out of that IMO.

[GloatingSwine]

In other words, give benefit of the doubt for those with a higher score, and 'not benefit of the doubt' for those with a lower scores, and free both you and the player from the tyranny of a number.


What is a "higher score", what is a "lower score"? What is the tip over point where a player at your table wasted their ASI and should have put it into a combat relevant stat instead?

Because when the rubber hits the road in every other type of action they are bound to the tyranny of the numbers. So they need to make sure they have the numbers where you demand them and let them slide where you do.


You do it - you run a social encounter - by having a conversation. You don't need numbers to do that.

And when a player does not want to converse in character, and wants to describe their characters' actions instead because they find it more comfortable to do so, how do you deal with that?

[LibraryOgre]

A suggestion I saw, specifically related to puzzles, but perhaps applicable here, is that you have two tiers of "rewards" for a social encounter. One resolved primarily through dice can succeed, but one done primarily through player action (in the case of riddles, figuring them out; in the case of social encounters, role-playing) has an additional reward level to it... some bonus (in this case, the XP equivalent) that encourages the role-playing over the dice-play.

[KorvinStarmast]

What is a "higher score", what is a "lower score"? What is the tip over point where a player at your table wasted their ASI and should have put it into a combat relevant stat instead? Still boresited on
numbers, are we? The point I am trying to make went over your head, I think, but that might be due to how I presented the thought. Maybe I need to try another approach here.
Try letting go of min/max build as an assumption.
Here's another way to look at this: if you roll 3d6, what do you think a higher score, medium score, or a lower score is? Start there to free yourself from bonus dependence and min/max character assumptions.

And when a player does not want to converse in character, and wants to describe their characters' actions instead because they find it more comfortable to do so, how do you deal with that?
I ask them to speak in the first person. DM's get to have fun too. We are also players.
I still have to prompt some of my veteran players to do this; people I've known for years.

More importantly, though, as a matter of getting the social encounter moving again, I ask them to tell me their intentions and their approach, and their aim.
If they can't figure that out that's on them. (With beginners there is a whole host of things done to get players used to even playing an RPG character, which I am not including in this discussion as that is an entirely separate topic).

If you don't know what the heck it is you are trying to accomplish, and can't describe it in those simple terms - intent, approach, objective - the dice are worse than a crutch.

How does 5e work?

DM describes what the situation is
Player describes action or intended action
DM narrates the result.



That is the fundamental game loop. It is on the player to do step 2. Dice rolls may or may not be called for between 2 and 3.
Other RPGs may not have that same loop, but I am emphasizing this loop due to Sparky playing 5e D&D at the moment.

[Quertus]

I'm pretty much with Quertus on the "just roleplay" bit.

Cool. While that is my general stance, I do want to emphasize that my stance in this thread has been, "what specific problems does 'just roleplay' not solve, that the OP wants solved?".

In that regard, the answer most memorable to me has come, not from the OP, but from this:

You don't need numbers (or structure) to do that. Someone who's never been in court trying to play a court scene? No, it doesn't just "come natural" - it's natural once you know it, and it's easy to forget the learning process, but there still is one.

Like with swimming. Once you know how to swim, it's not something you need to consciously think about or have a manual for. You just think "I'm going to swim over to that raft" rather than "move right arm, move left arm, etc". But most people don't just inherently know how to do it, they do need to be taught, not just thrown into a pool and told "learn by doing!"

Which... relates back to my desire to run a character under 20+ different GMs, to let that character encounter the things that that GM does right, to really take the character for a proper test run.

There's plenty of social situations that I am just not gonna be able to roleplay to my high standards, whether that's courtroom drama, true narcissism, a concise and charismatic speaker, whatever. And it's the same for everybody. No single GM is going to be able to pull off all the different personalities and perspectives and situations well, to roleplay both someone who understands what one should infer about a customer when they ask, "how much is this", and someone who does not.

It's kinda the inverse of this:

A suggestion I saw, specifically related to puzzles, but perhaps applicable here, is that you have two tiers of "rewards" for a social encounter. One resolved primarily through dice can succeed, but one done primarily through player action (in the case of riddles, figuring them out; in the case of social encounters, role-playing) has an additional reward level to it... some bonus (in this case, the XP equivalent) that encourages the role-playing over the dice-play.

In that this is about the GM asking, "I know I can't do a good job of roleplaying my NPCs, so... how do I do a bad job?" It's the GM asking how to produce that inferior experience of "how do I run characters when I'm not familiar with how to run them?".

Or, at least, that's my takeaway from this thread so far.

And my answer, unhelpfully, is "don't do that?". That is, I find it superior to attempt to avoid being in such a situation as much as possible. My next least helpful response is... "aim for short duration and high abstraction". That is, if I'm not able to roleplay the narcissist's courtroom love triangle pentagon, I'll see if we can hand-wave past the scene with an OOC conversation about the objectives and intentions, and some back-and-forth that doesn't necessarily occur in linear time. And if it's something that the players seem interested in diving into in more depth, I'll see how much research and preparation I can do for next time.

So, my unhelpful answer is I simply don't roleplay a group of personalityless NPCs I came up with 5 minutes ago because the players want a ball. It's "broad strokes" or "next week".



Choices > Stats >> Delivery.

Pretty much this. Though I'd put "skills" in place of stats, but that's game system dependent. In most games, there are some set of social skllls available, and there may be bonuses based on stats, but the actual skill is what you roll.

"Stats" was meant to cover attributes and talents and skills and... it was meant to indicate the mechanical, character-sheet side of things.


Point being that it's not at all about the delivery. If a player wants to act out the scene, that's their choice, but it's not going to influence things much other than the table's amusement level (or annoyance level in some cases). The most significant thing is what they choose to do. Then they roll appropriate skills based on that choice. Then we determine what happens as a result.

Or not roll, if, you know, they've CaW'd the scene into "I've asked my mother for the time of day" equivalent, or are "rollplaying" the system, asking the King to trade his country for a rock.


I think part of my issue here is that one of the common complaints about many games is the lack of social encounters and resolutions, specifically in terms of how signicant they are. Which is valid. And there is a common thread that combat tends to take center stage because that's where most of the rules are focused. Which is also valid. I guess my problem is that this topic seems to assume that if we just put in as many detailed and complex rules for social encounters as we have for combat encounters, then this will fix the problem.

I think that's a completely false assumption. It will make things worlse. People avoid doing social stuff, because social stuff is tedious. It's not as exciting as combat. We have greater rules for combat because that's where most player's focus is on. If you create equally detailed and complex rules for social interactions, fewer people will want to use social methods to resolve anything, because you've just made it more complicated and more tedious than it was before. That's the wrong direction IMO.

Interesting. That's certainly true for me; I wonder if that actually holds true for others, as well.

I guess I generalize this as, "everything should be as simple as it can be... and no simpler."


The best way to make social interaction better and more relevant to any game system is to do another thing Quertus suggested:

Detail the NPCs

Yup. That's it. The NPCs are not game objects to be manipulated using skill rolls. They are living breathing people in your world. Treat them as such. Any NPC that interacts with the PCs should have a personality, hopes, goals, dreams, likes, hates, etc. Obviously, how detailed this is depends on how siginificant the NPC is (and should also determine how relevant any social interaction with them is). Anyone the PCs may wish to interact with for whom that interaction is significant, you as the GM should have detailed quite a bit.

It's not really that hard. The NPC wants things. The NPC has things they are willing to do to get those things, and other things they are not. You just roleplay the NPCs. If the PC wants to seduce the barmaid, start with "is this the kind of person who would allow themselves to be seduced in the first place?". Maybe the answer is yes, maybe no. Then you ask "is the PC the kind of person the barmaid would be seduced by?". This may be a combination of charisma stat, and whatever social skills the player chooses to use. Again, let the player determine approach. They could just walk up and ask (maybe she's "that kind of girl", and/or maybe she's the type to charge or something, who knows?). If the player wants to do some setup (buy her a drink, perform music ahead of time, write poetry, etc), let the PC attempt the relevant skills and determine the response from the result(s). Again, this is just not that hard.

You must start with "who is the NPC, and what do they want?" before you do anything else though.

:biggrin:

(what else can I say? That's hitting the nail square on the head.)


I find the idea of randomly generating NPCs to be silly. Why bother? If you're randomly generating NPCs, the why not just roll a die to determine overall success and move on? No one's going to gain a lot of enjoyment rolling different skills based on randomly generated NPCs with randomly generated checks to use against them, for randomly generated social situations. Then again, I also hate random encounter tables too, so there is that. Same thing. If the players feel the world is just a series of random stuff, it's not going to feel "real". If the GM creates the world, and fills it with things that make sense and work together (and that includes both places and people), then it will.

Eh, I can see the value here. You have your Paladin suddenly turn to a random citizen and interact with them. OK... what is this citizen like? <roll, roll> (Charismatic, opportunistic merchant who plays fair). Now that you've got that baseline, you practice roleplaying this random person, and learn what about this random personality worked well, and what worked poorly (how do they feel about family? the nation? magic? nobility?), so that you know what kind of details will actually be helpful to you when you go to create your NPCs "for real".

This is... not unlike how I came upon my method of "foundational events". So, with this roll, I'd want to generate a "foundational event" or three to serve as touchstones for those rolls. Like... maybe they have an older brother they idolize... whom they could never beat without opportunistically seizing any advantage they could find... but their elder brother got cheated and wrongfully imprisoned... leading to them taking over their brother's business... and vowing never to act as those who had hurt their brother did.

Now I can look through that lens when asking their opinion on class structure, or have them emote based on specific phrases that your Paladin or their companions use, etc. Alternately, I can abstract that to, "I'm gonna play them like Peter Bailey meets Tuld ('There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don't cheat.')".

But, yes, I much prefer to create the characters ahead of time, rather than trying to improvise personality and "foundational events" on the spot.


I would seriously recomment moving in the opposite direction of trying to create even more firm and specific rules for social situations than already exist in any given game system. Save yourself that time, and spend it instead on actually creating the social sitution details in the scenario you are running instead. You will get a lot more out of that IMO.

As a general rule, I strongly agree. More generally, "Play to your strengths", "Build your strengths" (both in number and quality)... and "make this (roleplaying NPCs, just like PCs) one of your strengths".

But... to get there, or to handle situations or spontaneous NPCs that aren't among your strengths? I can see use cases where "make people" and "just roleplay" can seem daunting.

Also... human psychology is weird. And gets even weirder when you deal with things like crowd psychology. I can understand most GMs, even if they can roleplay an NPC, struggling to properly roleplay a crowd in real time. As an example of a use case where a simple mechanical crutch may be advantageous.

But, yeah, "make people, just roleplay them" is still the optimal goal, to seek whenever possible. Just define the stress points where that's hard (court, crowds, party interrogates monsters in character, party chats with random citizens whom you expected to be backdrop, whatever), and act accordingly, building simple tools to prop up your weak personality preparation skills / weak scenario-handling skills, whether those tools are Quantum Ogre Personalities, random personality trait generators, drawing a card from a pre-prepared deck of anime wifus / real people you know, or simple tools like a "reaction roll" or "crowd mood". But always with the goal of analyzing the results and improving. Of recognizing that "just roleplaying" is almost always going to get you significantly better results, and, assuming that's the case (as opposed to, say, roleplaying a crowd), asking yourself, "why am I not able to do that here? How can I set myself up better for next time?". The tools should be chosen to help you learn to swim, not as permanent cruft that weighs you down, whenever possible.

[GloatingSwine]

Still boresited on
numbers, are we? The point I am trying to make went over your head, I think, but that might be due to how I presented the thought. Maybe I need to try another approach here.

Here's a question for you: Does anything ever run out of HP and die when you play D&D?

Numbers, game runs on 'em.


I ask them to speak in the first person. DM's get to have fun too. We are also players.
I still have to prompt some of my veteran players to do this; people I've known for years.

Sounds like their assumption for the social side of the game is actually different to you. Sounds like they want their characters to do the talking as their mental default, not talk as their characters. (If you can only have fun when they're doing drama club for you maybe join a drama club?)


More importantly, though, as a matter of getting the social encounter moving again, I ask them to tell me their intentions and their approach, and their aim.
If they can't figure that out that's on them. (With beginners there is a whole host of things done to get players used to even playing an RPG character, which I am not including in this discussion as that is an entirely separate topic).

If you don't know what the heck it is you are trying to accomplish, and can't describe it in those simple terms - intent, approach, objective - the dice are worse than a crutch.

How does 5e work?

DM describes what the situation is
Player describes action or intended action
DM narrates the result.



That is the fundamental game loop. It is on the player to do step 2. Dice rolls may or may not be called for between 2 and 3.

Yes, it is. So why are you so adamant that it isn't when you run a social scene?

The design of the game assumes that loop will be used, and assumes that the attributes it gives characters to work inside that loop have the same value as for every other incarnation of the loop used for any other challenge.

[Thane of Fife]

So, here's some thinking on a hypothetical social structure:

In my mind, social engagements are largely about networking. In general, though, we probably don't want to make up all of the people who might be at such a function and their interconnections. So this structure is going to use a deck of playing cards, where each card represents, nebulously, one person's support towards a specific objective. That objective has to be elucidated beforehand. The goal here is that the party needs to achieve some minimum poker hand (or something like a poker hand) in order to achieve the objective. So, if the party is hoping to convince the king to send troops to do something, or is trying to get sponsorship to join some exclusive club, getting a card means getting support from (usually) one person. That person may or may not be relevant depending on whether the card fits into the poker hand you're trying to build.

In terms of how you get these cards, I am imagining something like Pendragon feast events. A social scene has some number of rounds. Each round, each PC (or each group of PCs) gets a random event (rolled off some table), and the random event probably gives them the opportunity to get one or more cards. Many of these events can be pretty simple (You dance with someone. Make a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check and get a random card if you pass) or more complicated (Draw two cards. Person A is pestering Person B. If you want, you can help one of them, and then get that card. Obviously, this sort of thing could have other consequences). You could have random events that are bad (Guards come to arrest someone. Make a Charisma check or lose one random card). You can have a lot of role-playing opportunities in here (this person you don't like is a card you need, what do you do?).

Then, at the end of the event, the players put their cards together to see if they have a good enough poker hand to get what they wanted. There are many possible variants here: maybe each player has to make their own hand. Maybe there are some cards in common to all players and others that are player-specific. Maybe even if your hand isn't good enough, you can get a lesser reward by meeting some lower hand (Straight flush to meet the king, but just a regular straight to meet the prime minister). Maybe cards carry over from event to event, possibly with some rate of random loss (for example, there could be a party each month, each player loses one random card each month, and the party as a whole needs at least a three of a kind to get invited back, but otherwise, you can keep going to parties until you get the hand you need). You could have different suits or card values represent different types of people, or even specific individuals. You could have wild cards available from specific individuals. You could have abilities that interact with cards (You can spend x money to buy a random card. You're so hot, you get a card just walking into a party. You won that big gladiator fight so you get to draw three cards as a local celebrity).

[Composer99]

I'm going to strongly disagree that it's unnecessary to create a structure for a social interaction, writ large.

However, I think 5e is better suited for ad hoc structures that depend on what you're trying to model than a unified structure. (*)

For instance, if the party wants to shake down a large group of NPCs for information, you could call for a group check, with the number of successes determining what they learn instead of the normal group check binary/pass fail.

Or suppose you and some rival NPCs are trying to convince a third party to do (or not do) something. That could be a series of contests, which could be structured such that "first to X successes wins overall" or "the overall result depends on how many successes each group has", or something like that.

You could even use something like a 4e skill challenge for some kind of delicate negotiations.

Whatever the case, depending on how granular you want to get, you can give individual PCs advantage, disadvantage, auto pass on a check, or auto fail on a check, based on who they interact with and the approach they take.

(*) In games where social conflict is central to gameplay, it's a different story; D&D 5e isn't inherently such a game.

[KorvinStarmast]

(If you can only have fun when they're doing drama club for you maybe join a drama club?) And so the snark erupts for no good reason.
If you can't, or rather, won't, play make believe then maybe should play a game that isn't make believe.
Your numbers-over-focus is, as you are presenting it in the last post, your problem not mine.
If it's all about the numbers, the CRPGs and MMORPGs are over there. --------->
So is Yahtzee.

Yes, it is. So why are you so adamant that it isn't when you run a social scene? It's a good idea, sometimes, to stop being contrarian simply for the sake of being contrarian.
What I am describing is indeed that loop, to include how dice are not always needed to resolve a decision point or a scene.
If somehow you interpret it as not that loop, then all I can take from your response is that I'm going to stop wasting my time with you on this discussion.
Life is too short.
Will be happy to discuss other topics with you in the future.


In general, though, we probably don't want to make up all of the people who might be at such a function and their interconnections. So this structure is going to use a deck of playing cards, where each card represents, nebulously, one person's support towards a specific objective. That objective has to be elucidated beforehand. The goal here is that the party needs to achieve some minimum poker hand (or something like a poker hand) in order to achieve the objective. So, if the party is hoping to convince the king to send troops to do something, or is trying to get sponsorship to join some exclusive club, getting a card means getting support from (usually) one person. That person may or may not be relevant depending on whether the card fits into the poker hand you're trying to build. Is this you brainstorming, or, is this something you have done in the past? Sounds like an interesting tool / technique.

[Rynjin]

Reminds me a bit of the "planning poker" some teams will use in Agile development. Gives you a good semi-anonymous idea of what the team thinks about a specific task (how long it will take, how complex it is, etc.).

Each card has a specific value on it (from 1 to 100, but you jump numbers) so you can vote different levels of support/estimates on different tasks.

That might honestly work a little better. "The king gives you his full support; 100 points. His advisor is a bit more reticent, 40 points. The duke hates your guts; 1 point."

[Thane of Fife]

Is this you brainstorming, or, is this something you have done in the past? Sounds like an interesting tool / technique.

More brainstorming, but it's something of a combination of an RPG mechanic that definitely works and I have used (random events/Pendragon feasts) and a reasonably common icebreaker (where you give each person at an event a card and they have to mingle to form the best poker hand they can). Maybe a bit of the party game Haggle.