Gender and sexuality diversity in RPG settings

[quinron]

Just be aware that if I wanted to feel depressed about the sheer inertia driving most social problems I'd just go outside. One of the main reasons to play a heroic PC type is to be able to make a significant difference through my actions. In true superhero fashion that does often involve punching one figurehead and doing a bit of speechifying, but that's because other methods of trying to solve major social problems through game mechanics range from poorly implemented to nonexistent.



Skimming your work I see pages and pages of rules for combat and equipment that can be used for combat. Where do you have rules for speechifying, and for the unintended consequences and unforeseen complications that might come of your attempts to fix one problem?

What a game's rules spend more or less attention on will affect what players will see as more or less important. Heart of Darkness doesn't really show me any rules for changing hearts and minds or meaningfully changing the world, outside of the superhero version I mentioned above. Be aware that countless people have tried "we're totally about Deep Roleplaying" while cribbing someone else's rule engine. (Usually some version of D&D, but oWoD was notably based on the Shadowrun ruleset at first.) Intent matters a lot less than what the rules actually support/encourage.

I haven't read Talakeal's game, so I can't comment on the merit of this critique. But it seems self-contradictory - you say that attempting to solve social problems through game mechanics is usually done poorly, then you ask where Talakeal's game mechanics for solving social problems are.

I'd be all for a game where social interaction mechanics don't exist specifically because they make conversation feel gamified and inorganic - I can't tell you how many times I've had players ask to roll Sense Motive or Insight checks with nothing to go on instead of bothering to do the necessary work to catch a character in a lie. But I actually agree with the gist of your last point - while I don't think you need dense rules to make something seem important, having dense rules implies something is important. If you want a game that's supposed to be about balancing social interaction and combat, and you specifically do not want social interaction rules, you need to keep the combat rules bare-bones.