Gaming Religion Crisis of Faith III - Social Combat (vs HP)

[NichG]

Well there's the valid question of if you want to present 'strong and healthy' as a promised archetype too. If you're writing a new game and want to keep all the mental & social bits of a character out of the mechanics so theres just the physical stuff thats nice, or you could write one that just does social stuff and keeps all the physical action purely in the player skill area. That might be really interesting.

But for the games that do present "charming & persuasive" as an archtype, and do have the social stats & skills, I'm happier if they have some not-terrible structures for the bits of the game where they come into play. I don't think I've ever advocated for all systems doing social stuff and requiring support for every possible archtype.

Your issue with social "combat" is probably mostly framing. Sort of like you shouldn't normally use the physical combat systems for races or lock picking, so you shouldn't normally use social combat for seduction or haggling. Part of the issue there is some subsystems labeled 'social combat' are broader than just the 'combat' bit and others that are just the combat bit are being misused when you try to do all social activities with them. When to use social combat is probably like asking when to roll physical combat initative, you can get bunches of wildly different answers for slightly different use cases.

Well, if we go back to the thing about how experts see something versus how game developers who are not experts might bake in their biases, it's something like that but at the level of the hobby as a whole. Somehow there's this persistent idea that 'socially competent character = I should be able to make other characters do what I want'. I've suggested lots of mechanics for social interactions which wouldn't be mind control, but for whatever reason there's this attractor back to a fantasy of 'I can make other people do what I say' as the important thing. So I'm pushing back against that view as a whole. If there's an implicit assumption that a system should let you play a character who can do that, I want to push back against that. If there's an implicit assumption that social interactions require a conflict resolution mechanism (e.g. such that if the system didn't explicitly do something here, there would be questions of conflict that would have to be resolved) I want to push back against that. It's like whenever you push down one of these things, something else comes up like assuming that of course games are going to have mental stats (they don't have to) or of course we're talking about playing D&D with only minor adjustments (no need to assume this or restrict oneself to this) or of course the system has promised or depicted an archetype and is just cheating the player of their investment (we control what archetypes a system depicts, we're not obligated to copy the assumptions that other people have made before us).

So rather than arguing about 'yes this is realistic' or 'no this isn't realistic' or whatever, I think its better to put forward a different way of abstracting social interactions. I've described such mechanics in this thread already. Rather than centering things around conflict resolution or asking 'who wins?', you center the mechanics on being able to obtain information, predict reactions, control others' access to your own information, to prevent missteps and misunderstandings, and to make verbal decisions stick once made. So in such a system, you're never using the mechanics to directly answer the question 'do I successfully bribe the guard?'. Instead you use the mechanics to answer questions like 'if I approached this guard with a bribe, how would it turn out and if the guard would accept a bribe, what would I need to offer?' or 'is this person better approached using threats, lures, pressure from their existing connections, or calls to their morality or honor?'. Such a system does give benefits for investing in 'social stuff', those benefits can be quite powerful, it isn't a 'combat system', and it does allow depiction of fictional archetypes like a good negotiator, a blackmailer, a slick spy you can't pin down, a con man, etc. But just like someone playing a D&D Wizard has to understand stuff about how the particulars spells work and can't just say 'can I just roll a magic check to resolve this situation?', someone who wants to play a social manipulator in such a system needs to learn how and when to use those abilities.

Maybe what it comes down to is, if someone really wants to play a social manipulator via a system, I want them to at least be interested in thinking more deeply about social circumstances, characters, etc. Just as if someone really wanted to play a tactician I'd expect them to put more effort into things like understanding the abilities of units on the field, terrain, etc. What I have a knee jerk strong reaction against might come down to a sort of 'I don't like the social stuff (or when other people at the table get really into the social stuff) so I want a social system that lets me do the equivalent of rolling initiative and bringing it to the dice'. If someone doesn't like actually playing out the social stuff, I'd rather they ask for campaigns that feature less of it than to ask for systems which reduce its nuance.

[KorvinStarmast]

You don't demand of him to show the DM his ability to swing a sword or cast a spell,

A role playing game does not involve either action by the players. We are not at the dojo doing a martial art, we are sitting around a table playing make believe. That involves verbal skills. EDIT: and it also involves RL social skills.

To KorvinStarmast: While I am on the subject, I have found some of your "collage" posts pretty unreadable because of that (they usually aren't nitpicky though). Just a bit of feedback.

Multi quote is a tool. I use it. I often come back to a thread with a lot of pages of posts since my last visit. Responding to them in one post is more efficient.

[OldTrees1]

A role playing game does not involve either action by the players. We are not at the dojo doing a martial art, we are sitting around a table playing make believe. That involves verbal skills.

Quick note:
The skills involved in roleplaying a character rarely map 1:1 with the skills the character is using.

While this is obvious when it comes to "test a player's tactical knowledge when representing the character's combat skills", it also applies to "verbal skills".

Deciding and then communicating what you want the character to do and how you want them to do it calls on different skills than it would take for you to do it yourself.

For example when we want a character to tell an unnoticed lie, do we ask the player to try to get away with deceiving the GM? I don't. Most systems don't. Instead we have the player do something else (ex: *see below) and use that to represent the effectiveness of the character's attempt.

* Example: Describing the intended effect and attempted method. Maybe doing in character dialogue to give an example in addition to the declared intent

[kyoryu]

Quick note:
The skills involved in roleplaying a character rarely map 1:1 with the skills the character is using.

While this is obvious when it comes to "test a player's tactical knowledge when representing the character's combat skills", it also applies to "verbal skills".

Deciding and then communicating what you want the character to do and how you want them to do it calls on different skills than it would take for you to do it yourself.

For example when we want a character to tell an unnoticed lie, do we ask the player to try to get away with deceiving the GM? I don't. Most systems don't. Instead we have the player do something else (ex: *see below) and use that to represent the effectiveness of the character's attempt.

* Example: Describing the intended effect and attempted method. Maybe doing in character dialogue to give an example in addition to the declared intent

Another way of looking at it is a couple of questions:

1. what skills does the game test?
2. what skills do we want to gatekeep certain activities behind?

You can do combat by actually fighting - LARP solves this. But should you? That depends on who you want to play your game. Doing so means that the game tests your actual combat skills, and gatekeeps fighting behind actual combat skills. And that's okay, if that's the game you want to make. That just means that people that can't Actually Fight won't have a great time with your game, even if they're good at things like move optimization.

OTOH, a combat system that tests math skills indirectly, or move optimization game stuff, will gatekeep on those skills. Which means that someone that can Actually Fight, but is bad at both of those things will have a bad time.

Again, it's deciding who your intended audience is. They're all okay design decisions.