Ask Angry is a weekly column wherein I – The Angry GM – answer one reader-submitted question with no-nonsense advice, painful truth, and plenty of abuse. If you’re a masochist and want me to answer your gaming question, e-mail me at ask.angry@angry.games. Keep it brief and make sure you explicitly tell me who to credit the question to.
The Dingus with No Name Asks…
“I’ve played a smattering of TTRPG systems (admittedly, most of them fairly close to good ol’ D&D) and, while I’ve seen lots of mechanics for lots of stuff, some better than others, I still have yet to come across a really solid mechanical system for resolving encounters with words. Most of them boil down to saying, “just talk in character and sometimes the DM will make you roll some dice.” Have you ever come across a system with rules for this stuff that you really liked? Is it even possible or necessary to have these rules since a conversation can be adjudicated by having a conversation?”
Why is it so f$&%ing hard for people to follow simple instructions? Look, I can’t assume that just because you sign off with a name at the end of your e-mail or that your e-mail address includes an actual, human name, that you are giving me permission to publicly use that name. You need to be clear and explicit. People are getting blackballed on the Internet for doxing just for repeating publicly available nicknames from someone’s own f&$%ing bio. So, lacking clear permission that will hold up in court, I have to make up a placeholder name.
Thanks for your question, Dingus. Unfortunately, I have to call you that even though I’m sure you think you were clear about your name. Worse, I also have to give you an answer that you may not like. Though, that last sentence in your e-mail is very apt. It’s one many GMs should consider and few actually do. See, this whole ‘social interaction encounter system’ is another one of those holy grail systems. It’s something every armchair game designer GM is trying to build. At least the ones not already working on a crafting system.
First, there ARE a couple of RPGs that have some decent social interaction systems. Look at Fantasy Flight Games’ Legend of the Five Rings, for example. I’m a latecomer to the L5R thing, so I can’t talk about the previous versions, but I can say the most recent FFG edition has a pretty good social interaction system that is only slightly hindered by the fact that the rest of the game is such a f&$%ing mess. It’s FFG. Which means it uses custom dice and an overly complicated action resolution system that really bogs the game down. But the framework for intrigue encounters – that’s what L5R calls them – is pretty solid. Likewise, Green Ronin’s A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, which was designed by the pretty awesome Robert J. Schwalb, has a pretty good social encounter system too. There’s no reason you couldn’t adapt either of their frameworks to a d20 system and have something that sort of works.
I’ll also mention that both Burning Wheel and some incarnations of Fate have generic conflict resolution systems that work equally well for fighting and talking and for other kinds of conflicts. But, when I say ‘equally well,’ you have to remember that we’re talking about Fate and Burning Wheel. And while there are some things I would actually do with Fate – and even admit Fate is the best system to do those things with – I would never wish Burning Wheel on anyone. Not even someone I hate. The only thing Burning Wheel can do is run Burning Wheel. And no wants or deserves that s$%&. And yes, I’m including the BW derivates too like Mouse People and Shadowgate: Torchbearer.
Actually, I need to update that joke now that Darkest Dungeons exists. Because, while Torchbearer is definitely a love letter to the old Shadowgate game, it somehow managed to basically BE Darkest Dungeons: The Table-Top RPG before Darkest Dungeons existed. And I don’t recommend any of those things any more than I recommend BW. Anyone – myself included – who tells you Shadowgate was good is blinded by nostalgia and the remake really does recapture the entire s$%&y screwjob experience perfectly. And Darkest Dungeons is yet another example of a game that does one unique thing very well and therefore has been given a pass by absolutely f&$%ing everyone for all the rest of the boring, s$%&y gameplay decisions that ruined that piece of crap game.
And speaking of s$%& that I’m sure the commenters will make me miserable over, I’ll bet everyone is going to chime in with their favorite crappy, pretentious indie story game that is basically the second coming of RPGeesus and therefore handles social interaction – and absolutely everything else – perfectly. But me, I can’t be a%&ed to keep up with every latest ripoff of Apocalypse World. Sorry.
That’s the first question out of the way. And now that I’ve fulfilled my vague obligation to provide something useful, I can spend the rest of my word count rambling about why the concept of a mechanical system for social interaction is misguided. Not doomed to fail, mind you. They’re not. That’s the problem. They can succeed. It’s just that they probably shouldn’t.
The first sign that there’s something inherently wrong with the Quest for the Holy Social Encounter Grail is that, when you ask one of the questers what they think it should look like, the answers they give are really vague. And lots of them mention combat. The standard answer is usually something like “I want a system that makes social interactions as deep or as strategic or as complex or as interesting as combat.” And then they usually point to some dumba$& thing some designer said about pillars of the game or something.
The problem is that no one actually knows what they really want. So, no one knows what to actually design. The only thing they know is that combat is deep and strategic and interesting and complex. And so, that’s where they start. I’ve had lots of people propose lots of social interaction systems to me and you can pretty much see the combat engine under almost all of them. Many have some form of ‘social hit points’ for the players to deplete and most define all sorts of specific actions the players can take on their turns and strategies they can employ and special character abilities they can invoke. They turn social interaction into a chess game. Maneuver, counter, deplete your opponent’s resources, corner him, and win. Just like combat.
Now, I totally understand why that happens. Let’s be honest, social interaction rules in most games are complete s$%&. Totally unsatisfying to use. And combat rules in most games are detailed and really fun to use. The obvious solution then is to make social interaction more like combat.
And then there’s video games. Video game designers are constantly trying to make social interaction more engaging. And savvy TTRPG designers pay attention to what other people are doing in other interactive entertainment spaces because we’re all often trying to solve the same problems. I can’t count the number of times someone has linked me to the Game Maker’s Toolkit video Can We Make Talking as Much Fun as Shooting. And by the way, guys, I’ve seen it. Okay? I see every GMTK video the day it comes out. It’s one of my favorite video game design channels on YouTube. The others are Adam Millard: Architect of Games and Design Doc. And, as a counterpoint to the GMTK video about social interaction – and for some background on the things I’m about to say – I suggest you watch Adam Millard’s Why Don’t Mystery Games Need Mechanics. But I digress.
Point is, I’m all for taking lessons from video game design. But you can’t take EVERY lesson from video game design. Every medium has its own strengths, its own weaknesses, and its own constraints. Video games struggle with social interaction systems because a video game literally cannot understand social interaction. It has to fake it with things like branching dialogue trees and finite state machines and s$%& like that. TTRPGs don’t have to struggle with social interaction the same way because TTRPGs are run by human brains who are hardwired for linguistic communication and social interaction. Most of our brain’s space and resources are devoted to that s$%& in the same way that most of a computer’s space and resources are devoted to graphics and lighting.
It’s like this. You wouldn’t make a TTRPG that required huge amounts of complex math to resolve every action. Like, you wouldn’t make a space opera RPG that made you change the initiative tracker or resize the tactical map every time your ship changed speed to account for relativistic time dilation and length contraction. Or, more relevantly, there’s a reason why a computer can figure out the precise light level of every one of 8.3 million pixels sixty times every second but we have to make do with a lighting engine that describes an entire room as either bright, shadowy, or dark.
Video games and TTRPGs do have some of the same design problems. But they are also running on very different hardware.
But what you really have to understand about TTRPGs is something I brought up yesterday when I talked about The Whatever Stat. Rules and mechanics in TTRPGs are a necessary evil. They are born out of constraints and limitations. In my head, I can’t run a physics engine or simulate a biomechanical model sufficient to determine whether a person running at a given speed can jump over an 11.36-foot-wide pit. But I can roll a d20 and add a few numbers together. And computers cannot parse human language and really understand it, but they can run a person through a multiple-choice test with ten thousand different possible combinations of answers and cue up an audio file and animation for every possible answer. That’s why most of the social interaction crap in video games is smoke and mirrors. It’s amazing how many video games that are renowned for their story-driven roleplaying are just using basic magician’s patter to make you think you have a choice when, really, the outcome is mostly the same no matter what.
A true role-playing game is something only a human being can run. So far, anyway. And it’s based on a very simple premise. One human being imagines a situation and verbally describes it. The other human beings decide what they would do if they were actually in that situation. And if they were different people. And then the first human being decides how those actions play out. It provides a totally open-ended, unconstrained play experience. Anything you can imagine can happen in the game. Because the human mind is really good at imagining things and communicating things with words.
Of course, for a variety of reasons, there are rules. The most basic rule, for example, is the one that says that when a character tries to do something with an uncertain outcome, you use dice to determine the result. That provides tension, uncertainty, and surprise. Necessary parts of the game. But there are also rules that allow the player to nudge the outcome with their character’s skills, talents, and equipment. That provides opportunities for strategic play, creates a persistent sense of character and consistency, and ensures a level of fairness. And fairness is important because whenever human beings are engaged in a group activity, perceived fairness determines how satisfied those humans are with the outcome.
But there’s other rules too. And those exist for different reasons. For example, the human brain can’t process dozens of actions fast enough to make them all appear simultaneous in the way that a computer can. So, we break combat down into rounds and turns. Actually, we break the whole game down into rounds and turns. The game world is constantly pausing and unpausing as the GM shifts their attention from one person and action to the next. The D&D world has to run at a stutter because that’s the only way a human brain can run it.
But there’s other costs of having rules too. Anyone who’s studied a martial art can tell you there’s a lot more to using a weapon than just attacking. I was a fencer back in the day, for example. In foil fencing – and I’m greatly simplifying – there are eight different basic attacks. And yet, in D&D, when you use a rapier, you attack. Done. That’s a lot of depth lost to simplify things for the game table. Every rule in a TTRPG effectively reduces the game’s open-endedness. Every action in D&D, for example, has to be pared down to one – and precisely one – of six ability scores and possibly get refined down to one of eighteen different skill proficiencies.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Or a good thing. It’s just a thing. It’s a fact. Every rule is a constraint. And that’s why GMs are allowed to go outside the rules or invent new rules as needed. The GM can expand the boundaries of the game to include whatever things the players can imagine, but there is a human tendency to try to operate within the rules first and to only go outside of them when all other possibilities are exhausted. It’s actually really hard to get a human being to operate outside of an imaginary boundary. So, even though you’re allowed to break the rules, they still provide a psychological constraint.
In return, the rules provide tension, strategy, consistency, and fairness. And they also allow us to include things in the game for which we have no basis for judgment. Like magic. We need rules to define things we can’t comprehend or imagine or that we might all comprehend or imagine radically differently. And the rules can also replace specialized knowledge. You can be a fencer in D&D without having to know the eight lines of attack and their corresponding parries. You can play a rock climber without actually knowing how to assess a climb or make an ascent. Sort of. Because, depending on how much the game simplifies the activity in question, you probably won’t actually FEEL like a fencer or a rock climber.
I’m not a rock climber. My entire experience with rock climbing comes from failing to climb one artificial, indoor climbing wall one time. So, I can’t say what rock climbing feels like. Except that it feels like it probably requires more upper-body strength and less body mass than I have. But I also think climbing in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild feels a lot more like rock climbing than the climbing in Uncharted does. In LoZ:BotW, you can climb all sorts of vertical surfaces just by holding a button and pressing an analog stick in the appropriate direction. But you have a stamina gauge. And if you run out of stamina, you fall. And your stamina drains more quickly if the surface you’re climbing is sheerer. And you can recover stamina if you can find a reasonably level ledge to rest on. And you can use all of your remaining stamina to lunge for a ledge that’s just out of reach and pull yourself up. So, to make a long climb, you try to pick out a good route up the wall. You stick to less sheer parts of the cliff. And you tend to move from ledge to ledge and rest whenever you can. And if you’re really close and almost exhausted, you expend your last bit of stamina to pull yourself up. If you ask me, that feels the sort of thing rock climbers do.
Meanwhile, in Uncharted, you tilt the analog stick toward the next ledge that’s inexplicably yellow. Then toward the next. And then the next. Thus, you follow a linear, connect-the-dots path up the wall. No decisions. No risks. It LOOKS like you’re climbing, but it doesn’t feel like climbing.
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What the hell does all of this crap have to do with social interaction systems? A few things. First, social interaction is something human beings naturally know how to do. We know how to talk, we know how to argue, and we know how social conflicts play out. They’re a big part of our lives. So, social interaction is something the human brain should be good at resolving. It doesn’t need a lot of rules to make up for the shortcomings of the hardware. Which isn’t the same, by the way, as saying it doesn’t need any rules.
Second, social interaction is incredibly open-ended by its nature. Humans are complex and no two humans interact in precisely the same way. That’s why social interaction is how we learn about ourselves and about other people. Dialogue scenes are the ones in fiction that show us the most about fictional characters.
Third, social interaction – unlike combat or rock climbing or archaeology – is perfectly suited to a game that’s played out as a conversation between humans because the players are already doing exactly what the game is trying to simulate.
Of course, it’s easy to say that social interaction is something that every human does every day, but the fact is that some people are better at it than others. It’s both a talent and a skill. Well, actually, it’s a big collection of different talents and skills. And that means that people with strong social interaction skills will have an advantage in the parts of the game that deal with social interaction. And it also means that people who want to play characters whose social skills and talents differ from their own will have a hard time. Knowledge of rock climbing gives you no advantage when your character scales a cliff in D&D. And you don’t have to know anything about rock climbing for your character to do it. The rules gloss over that. Shouldn’t the rules similarly gloss over social interaction?
Well, I have opinions on that. Good, strong, correct opinions. Which I can make a good case for because I have a lot of social skills and talents. But my opinion doesn’t matter here. Yet. What matters here is acknowledging the question and the trade-off. If you’re going to design a social interaction system, you are putting constraints on social interaction. Considering social interaction is the one thing that a TTRPG is uniquely equipped to handle with minimal rules, you really want to consider whether that’s a good idea. And because every rule you create is going to make social interaction feel less like social interaction, you have to be really careful about how you do it. You want to make damned sure you don’t move from rock climbing past Breath of the Wild and into Uncharted territory. No pun intended.
Most GMs don’t think through the problem like this. They don’t identify the things that make social interaction feel like social interaction before they start. And they don’t consider that RPGs are inherently capable of handling social interaction without rules to begin with. Instead, they decide to make a social combat system because there are already combat rules and they are really fun. The problem is that social interaction doesn’t play out like a fistfight and people don’t think about debates the way they think about fencing matches. So, to take a system that’s meant to approximate the broadest possible strokes of a fistfight or fencing match so a human brain can process it and use it to simulate a debate is just ludicrous. In the end, you end up with something that not only doesn’t feel like social interaction, but it also won’t feel like anything except a game of rolling dice to push numbers around.
And that’s a shame. D&D is a social game. Therapists all over the country – probably the world – have figured that out and use it to teach social skills and to treat disabilities that inhibit socialization. D&D can’t really teach you anything about combat or rock climbing. It’s got no value there. But it can help you become more socially adept. And given various metrics and statistics about the socialization of young people since the early to mid-nineties, I think that could be a VERY good thing. But that’s all I’ll say about that.
BUT…
There’s a reason why lots of people think they need a social interaction system in D&D. It’s because they – we – can all tell that something is missing from D&D and other RPGs when it comes to social interaction. Something’s wrong. Something’s off. But no one is really sure what it is. No one but me, of course. Because I’m a f&$%ing genius.
When it comes to combat encounters, for example, there’s a pretty solid framework to build on. You know you need a bunch of monsters and you know what statistics those monsters need and you know what their challenge rating should add up to. And you know you need a map that’s big enough to handle the fight. And eventually, you develop a talent for mixing and matching monsters and building custom monsters and designing interesting terrain and adding hazards and s$%&. And you also know pretty much how the fight will play out. You know it will take about four rounds to play out and each creature gets one turn every round. And, over time, you learn to assess how a combat will play out in more detail and more accurately.
If there’s a monster guarding a room that the party has to fight their way past, you know how to build that encounter. But if there’s a guard that the party has to talk their way past, how do you build that? There’s nothing in most games to tell you how to construct that encounter. You just write down, “and the party has to convince the guard to let them in.”
And since you don’t know how to build the encounter, you really can’t run it either. You don’t know how to set the scene or invite the players to act. Which means the players probably won’t know what to do. To them, it’s just a person saying “sorry, you can’t come in.” You don’t know how to build any levers, so the players can’t find anything to pull and you can’t point them to anything.
D&D isn’t lacking a good system for resolving social encounters. It’s lacking a good framework for defining and describing social encounters. Actually, it’s lacking a good system for generally defining and describing any encounter at all. But I don’t want to get too far off-topic.
If you look at the systems I mentioned above, you’ll notice they spend time talking about how to define the social encounter’s objective and how the NPC’s disposition affects its interactions with the party. They also explore the general strategies that someone might employ to accomplish their objectives. That’s the good, useful, framework stuff. Then, they go too far toward Uncharted. They define specific actions and dice rolls and have tables and encounters and fiddly bits so the focus isn’t on deciding what to say, it’s on picking a specific skill to employ or action to take. And that’s bad. Because what makes a social interaction FEEL like a social interaction is that you choose what you say and you can say absolutely anything. You don’t pick between eight different attacks like a fencer, you communicate using the infinite palette that is language. And your communication is flavored by your emotions and your attitude. Or maybe you try not to let your emotions and attitude flavor your communication. If you gloss over that s$&% with a list of actions, attitudes, and a die roll, it’ll never feel like social interaction.
Of course, there are other problems with social interaction systems in D&D and other RPGs. D&D’s ability scores are complete s$%& for resolving social interactions. And the anemic skill system doesn’t help. The Charisma stat is the biggest obstacle to building a good social interaction system in D&D. And every f$&%ing RPG takes its cue from D&D and copies that s$%&.
The reason that D&D’s ability scores suck for dealing with social interaction is that they were never meant to. Once upon a time – and for a very long time – we gamers didn’t need or want rules for social interaction. Hell, we didn’t feel like we needed rules for a lot of things. We liked the fact that the game was open-ended and relied on our imaginations first and rules and mechanics a distant second. I’d been adjudicating conversations by having conversations for over a decade with no problems at all. Then, in 2000, it became a problem that needed solving.
I think it IS possible to build a system for social encounters. But I think most people working on the problem are barking up the wrong tree. I think what’s missing is a set of encounter design tools that the GM can use to define and describe a social encounter. And that has to be a core part of the game design. Just as much as the rules for combat encounters are a core part of the game. But it has to be less mechanically rigorous than combat. It needs to give the GM tools for translating the conversation that plays out at the table into game effects and not turn a social encounter into an exercise in tapping skills, pushing buttons, and moving numbers around. Character skill has to figure into it, but not the same way that character skill figures into making an attack. Does that mean I’m discounting the people who want to play more Charismatic characters than they are themselves? And does that mean that I’m putting less socially adept players in the position of having to ‘git gud’ if they want to win a social fight? Yes. It does. If you want to play baseball, you have to learn how to bat and throw and run. If you want to play a social game, work on those social skills. And it’s a myth to think you can play a character who is substantially mentally different from you. Sorry.
I’ve talked about my own system for resolving social encounters before. And it basically falls in line with all the crap I said above. The GM defines objections and incentives for the NPC. The GM uses those to invite the players to act and to evaluate the effectiveness of the things the players say. The GM flavors the interaction with the NPC’s defined personality traits and the NPC’s dwindling level of patience for the players’ crap. And it works okay. Not great. Just okay. But that’s because it’s stuck using the crappy D&D social skills and Charisma stat. Someday, I won’t have to deal with that s$%& anymore. I’ll have something I built from the ground up.
Anyway, Dingus, thanks for writing. I hope there was something resembling an answer in all that crap I spewed. Sorry I couldn’t call you by your name.
Building a Social Encounter System in a RPG always felt to me like resolving who gets punched in a boxing match by having the athletes play a game of rock-em shock-em robots with the referee.
I do believe though that a major reason people feel the need for a Social Encounter System is because they want to play characters that are more socially adept than they are. As they want to play characters smarter than they are and if rpgs could communicate at any level that these things are not possible through the medium then the need would almost certainly decrease.
y’know its funny, i always resolved my social encounters by a mix of the two “camps”. players described what they said, and combined with how resilient the person they were talking to was, i determined a DC. it let charismatic players AND charismatic characters do well in social interaction, and having both made you great. just like combat rewards tactical play AND effective characters/equipment. my players like it, but my players are also 13, so i dont have the best intel.
Only that isn’t really a system, you are adjudicating an action according to the approach the player is taking, that is what you do with any action. Combat ,which is a system, won’t let you fudge an AC if your player describes an attack according to what he/she learned in HEMA classes.
Maybe I’m not using a system either, but if my players describe an approach that seems to be so effective as to actively neutralize or substantively change the state of the conflict, I’ll usually just give it to them – they came up with something brilliant, why not let them have it?
Why isn’t that a system? And what’s so great about a system anyway? Being too systematic is anathema to role-playing. That was the whole point.
I would imagine that as a system in the current context we would describe a collection of interconnected rules with the purpose to achieve, to some degree, a coherent and consistent experience of play. For example the Combat System which is a mosaic of several rules all working in a somewhat synergistic way to achieve fairness(or the illusion of) and challenge in a combat encounter. So I would say that adjudicating an action isn’t a system. It is too open ended and malleable, as it should be, to be called a system.
Lots of thing are great about a system. As a long time reader I feel it is redundant to number them here. Mostly because on my original post what I expressed was the redundancy of a Social Encounter System in a inherently social game. How absurd it is to resolve a conversation in a game that takes place almost entirely in a conversation using a system outside of the conversation that “emulates” a conversation.
Your definition is too narrow. In my last two articles, I’ve specifically called out the misguided rejection of subjective judgment and GM adjudication as non-mechanical and non-systematic. The word system can include sets of principles, ideas, or criteria as well as interconnected, unyielding mechanics. Which is the major problem I’m addressing here. And in the previous definition. Eight years ago, I demonstrated that action adjudication is systematic even if it the GM uses their own best judgment and never needs the rules or dice.
But the real problem here is that arguing that something is or is not a system is useless semantical nonsense. At best it changes nothing practical about the game. At best, it draws a line across which value judgments – like those I keep calling out – can be drawn.
also just highjacking my own comment here, you could have a thing where they roll social and roleplay it, and you use whichever. this is simpler, but also means a charismatic player can use charisma as a dump stat and talk circles around the king despite having -4 charisma and no social skills.
I break it up into two methods – if someone wants to go into hard “verbatim” RP mode, I’ll let them talk directly to the NPC using their own words and MAYBE make a roll to assess degree of success or failure. Alternately, if the high Cha bard (played by a fairly socially adept player whose social talents don’t always apply well to the table) wants to describe what they’re trying to accomplish without RPing too much then I just set a DC and have them roll. Which usually results in wild success, because Bard.
I use an equivalent of Angry’s Whatever stat to keep track of how the conversation is going – the players are trying to reach a natural conclusion instead of a set goal number of points or successes and the Whatever stat affects how beneficial/detrimental their outcome is.
Thanks so much for answering! Apparently all my years of schooling have still not made me able to follow directions…
I was kind of expecting an answer along these lines, and its sort of the one I came to myself while thinking about my question. Still, whenever I run social encounters, I always end up feeling like I’m not able to properly adjudicate; a better defined framework would probably help a lot, but it can still be hard to decide if a player invoking the fact that orcs killed an NPCs mom so he should want revenge on them outweighs his fear of bringing the horde’s vengeance down on his town – but I suppose that’s what die rolls are for. Still, it feels like I’m having to adjudicate whether an overhead blow from a battleaxe would get past the goblin’s defenses, and if it does, how much would it harm him, based on just measures of the combatant’s speeds, strengths, etc. that don’t define any resolution system beyond that. Granted, in this example, I would have a good and intrinsic understanding of medieval melee combat because I engage in it every day with everyone I meet, but its still tricky just because of the disconnect between reality and fantasy (which rules can be useful for overcoming in a way that feels fair and objective.)
Another issue is that players often don’t view conversations, even high-stakes ones, as challenges to be overcome, but instead as just another opportunity to goof around/show off their character’s wonderful personality. Obviously, having rules isn’t the only way to fix this and might really just be a crutch for much larger issues that have seeped into RPGs, but that’s a whole other discussion. If nothing else, some explicit mechanics would indicate that certain conversations are something to be won and lost and expect strategy and thoughtfulness.
I think the design goal of a social encounter system should be to create something that requires social skills and ‘feels’ like a conversation (which I realize is very vague), even in a strict mechanical framework. The card game Coup keeps coming to mind – the rules are only tenuously connected to anything really involved with political intrigue, but the game evokes that feeling by making you bluff, try to read your opponents, backstab, lie, etc.
Thanks again for answering and helping me along my quest for the grail. Much more helpful than that Tim the Enchanter fellow.
A system will not fix your players’ assumptions necessarily. I found with certain types of players there’s no fix.
I had somebody who played a bard and wanted to be the group diplomat so hard… but he kept saying things that would surely offend any stranger that just met you. Other players would slap their faces. He expected to negotiate his ways through adventures, but he didn’t understand that other people or monsters might actually want something or what leverage is. In other words, he didn’t have the skills he was meant to roleplay.
Call me inept, but I found no way to fix this. And I’m not sure I want to play in a game that somehow takes the play-acting part away and replaces it with “character skill.” I tried to teach him actually how to do this better.
Sometimes groups lack maturity, or the people lack in certain skills. This will kind of dictate what games will be fun to play with them. And it’s not the system necessarily. I mean, play “Leverage” with somebody who can’t come up with ideas how to hoodwink someone. (Leverage is the RPG to accompany the TV show where gold-hearted thieves and crooks trick really bad people to settle a score – kind of like a modern day A-Team.) If you can’t think like how to set up a person you can’t execute a plan on them. You need a plan. And somebody has to come up with it. If everybody just looks at each other even after the opportunities and possible leverage have been presented, then end that session and say “This won’t work.”
Some groups love choice and get crazy-creative. Some groups need to feel straight tracks under them or get lost. Systems can’t fix that. Leverage has a good system for playing heists. But it can’t fix a mismatch in players and the skills needed.
How do you feel about “contacts” type systems, as a way to mechanize information gathering and resource access?
personally, i love the IDEA of a “know a guy” stat, like circles in torchbearer/mouse guard/ on fire mess/ etc, but they always feel weird to level up, use, and just generally have. a game i’m working on has a similar thing, but its a skill and its more used for how well your name gets around. also, i just realized after typing this whole comment that that isn’t actually what your talking about here, but i dont want to re-type it as a standalone comment.
One of my favorite RPGs is Cortex Classic, and it handles contacts with a “trait” (kinda like a Feat) you can take at character creation if you want to be the guy who just knows people, or you can spend “plot points” as a cost for spontaneously coming up with a contact.
ive got some system (i dont remember which) with an ability called “i know a guy” that would let you know an expert in a necessary field, and then you would lose it untill you took the ability again. it was presumably quite powerful, given that it was essentialy one use
Eclipse Phase has a mechanic for this. It uses a combination of a Networking [Faction] skill and a reputation score per faction to determine what kind of favours you can get and from whom you can get them. The reputation score is just a Whatever Stat, while the Networking skill is something you can actively level up.
The issue I’ve run into the most has been that first step of asking “is this possible; can it either pass or fail?” Like, my players propose an approach and an outcome; in the situations where I don’t think that’s a reasonable outcome, I haven’t found a way to resolve it that satisfies everyone. The pure role play side has led to what seems to me like the NPCs natural response to the approach (but isn’t what the players want); while allowing a dice role has felt like “I want to roll for this outcome, regardless of what makes sense with my approach”.
Clearly there should be a mixed approach, but the core of the problem is still adjudicating if their approach can reach an outcome. And the obvious problem is that human interactions are complex and subjective enough that the GM and players can easily disagree on what’s possible. That’s where a good system should step in and provide a framework to fairly resolve that, but I’ve yet to find one.
I’m currently using Angry’s Social InterACTION system, and it’s helped me more clearly define and state what objections are in place – it’s definitely been a step in the right direction. But I still run into the adjudication issue, and if there’s been anything like multiple objections or deflections, my players have gotten frustrated over it being too dragged out and complex. The patience and interest players have for a social scene can clearly vary a lot between people and games, but it seems like especially D&D, and double especially if they’re trying to get to the plot, there is very little patience. And if there’s a disagreement about the adjudication, it becomes very frustrating quickly.
There’s actually a really interesting point here and one that probably warrants an entire article. And that is, as a GM, you’re not strictly role-playing an NPC. That’s not quite what you do. Instead, you and the dice have to role-play the NPC and you have to portray whatever comes out of that that. You don’t really make all of the decisions for the NPC. Instead, you judge the action in terms of what you know about the NPCs motives and personalities so you can see what the possible outcomes are. The dice – the player’s action – picks the outcome. And you play that outcome.
For example, the players spin a sob story for the guard? Might the guard believe that and be sympathetic? Yes. But might the guard also be suspicious and afraid for his job? Also yes. The dice will tell you which one it actually is and then YOU play that accordingly.
That might make a very worthwhile article indeed!
I loathed FFG’s stab at social rules in L5R, because they killed actual RP and conversational flow d-e-a-d. As has basically other attempt at a “social combat system” I’ve ever interacted with. I actually think the previous edition of L5R had better tools, even if it didn’t organize them very well for players and GMs to see they were there: it had multiple social/mental stats, and multiple skills that interlocked with them (rather than boiling it all down to Diplomacy and maybe Intimidation and calling it a day). Sure, Awareness was typically overburdened as the all-singing all-dancing Charisma equivalent, but there were ways around that (which the game mostly didn’t describe for you — one of my last contributions to the game before it got sold off was to write out a whole thing for one of the books explaining to people how to move beyond the basics of Courtier / Awareness vs. Etiquette / Willpower). And I loved that it had Sincerity as a skill, which was used not only for lying, but also for telling the truth in a believable fashion. I haven’t seen that in any other game, which is a pity.
In the end, social matters work better when viewed at a high level rather than the granular one of initiative, your action for the round, specific defenses (“I move into Total Skepticism and get a +4 to my resistance!”), etc. The equivalent to combat maneuvers can be somewhat useful; I liked L5R’s courtier techniques for being able to do things like make somebody defend against a persuasion roll with Intelligence instead of Willpower, i.e. you could put them into a situation where they felt like they had to muster a counter-argument instead of just saying “no.” But the main thing is knowing what a character might be susceptible to (appeals to their honor) and what they are going to brush off (attempts at bribery). That works better when it’s generally qualitative rather than nailed down to a set of stats.
Something that always bugs me about playing someone who is socially more adept than you: it is also pretty much impossible to play as someone more tactically adept than you, and (for good reason) I don’t see anyone trying to “fix” this. The system allows you to play as a more competent combatant (for example, by having higher numbers/more attacks/powers/whatever), but your tactics are still limited by yourself.
In my mind (and this is something Angry’s Whatever Stat system actually does), it makes sense that you the player define an approach but your character skills define sucess or failure
You win a cookie for noticing that!
You don’t see people asking to roll Int to have the GM tell them which enemy it is tactically optimal to target or which spell they should cast? This is my favorite counterpoint to use against people arguing for rollplaying social interaction…
But to be fair, some people find tactical combat puzzles fun, but not to find good arguments in social encounters. That’s also a valid preference to have. The game don’t have to be coherent across all types of challenges, it can be mainly about combat if that’s what’s sought after. It would be helpful if more people were self-concious about it, though.
I actually have seen a player ask to roll intelligence to determine the optimal tactical strategy, at which point the DM just pointed out obvious weakness, like the treaty was weak against fire, but I could tell they wanted more. There are also now PbtA games that have a mechanic to roll to learn the most tactical approach. God know man my table is avoiding those kinds of systems, but there is definitely a market for TTRPGs that let you play characters smarter and more sociable than you.
One player is just one data point. And the fact that a game exists that caters to that does not tell you anything about the size of the market. Markets exist for almost everything. That is, you can find someone who will buy almost any damned thing. But the size of the market determines how many people you’re serving or whether it’s even worth expending design resources to serve that market. For example, your table doesn’t want that s$&% at all. So if you were building a game to cater to your table, you wouldn’t wasted the time and energy and resources and page count on building that s$&%. If there’s a million TTRPG fans in the world and only a thousand people are buying those games. Or even demanding them, you have to ask yourself whether it’s worth the time and energy to chase those people. Especially if doing so might alienate some of the million TTRPG fans who want to actually just play their characters and make decisions for themselves.
If you’re leaving all decisions up to the GM based on an INT roll and random dice, you’re not even playing a TTRPG anymore, you’re playing a decision-less board game, a boring one without a board. At that point, play candy land.
I would not want a game that lets you ROLL to be tactically smarter and more sociable. That takes away ALL decision making. You wouldn’t be able to play such a game, you would be a machine designed to roll dice.
I was about to say… that’s a board game. And nobody tells a board game designer “I don’t want to think about what the best move is, tell me!” They get a simpler game, probably.
But I have one caveat. Plenty of people would probably love to play in games less focused on combat. But they might only know about D&D. So they end up wanting to fix D&D. Maybe that’s the issue.
It took me a long time to realize that I don’t want to play so much combat, nor do I enjoy it that much. So I went away from running my campaigns in D&D. I always thought I needed to fix my approach to encounter building. All I needed to admit to myself is that I want way less encounters, possibly encounters only at dramatic high points, and then I realized a lot of systems fit that better than D&D and D&D never will.
There’s a couple of systems that have mechanical support for “super tactics” abilities. One common method is retroactive preparation – the player gets a benefit they can use at any time, and it’s fluffed as “I’m such a good tactician that I was prepared for this exact situation.” Blades in the Dark has a mechanic where any player can do a “flashback” where they narrate how they planned something to handle the situation.
(IIRC the Dungeon Master’s Guide also suggests this as a way to play a high-Int monster – let the players come up with an approach and then reveal the villain was one step ahead and had some item or spell prepared to counter it.)
The other common option is to grant extra tactical flexibility with bonus moves or actions. In D&D, the White Raven School from Bo9S has some abilities that grant free, out-of-turn moves or attacks, with the fluff that you’re such a good tactician that your team is always where they need to be. Obviously, this doesn’t make the players any better at tactics, but it lets them smooth over tactical blunders or create new opportunities, which makes them *feel* tactical and clever.
The equivalent for socializing would be an ability that lets you fine-tune your approach in a similar way – maybe it lets you retry diplomacy when it normally would be impossible, since you’re such a charismatic guy you can just smooth over whatever dumb thing the player said while roleplaying.
i do this, but its a bit more constrained. in my heartbreaker system, there is a fighter skill called “tactical eye” that lets the user discern elements of a target/good strategies against it with a roll. however, the player cant just go “i use tactical eye, tell me what to do” or fail and say “but [character name] is a brilliant tactician, they would never make that mistake!”. i also do this for monsters, where a number of times per encounter based on their intelligence score, they can know something or have something i didnt actually pre-plan for them to know or have.
Aside from not being able to play characters with too high mental stats, too low stats can be just as much an issue. For me it is low wisdom that I have trouble with. I can’t really turn of the part of my brain that analyzes a characters motivations as I hear them speak, and I tend to pick up on things the DM describes as a cryptic hint fairly often. Fortunately a large component of wisdom is mechanical and perception based, but I find it incredibly difficult to get in the headspace of someone who doesn’t do that, and it is not fun for me. I’ve also seen naturally ‘charismatic’ people get frustrated when they made charisma their dump stat.
I feel like the reason there is no great push to make characters more tactically adept than their players is about accepted stereotypes. The roleplayers I see out there generally see themselves as tactical masters, and will question your understanding of the rules, knowledge of physics, and how closely related your parents might be if you suggest otherwise. If they do something dumb in a social interaction, they’ll fall back on the argument that D&D is for the socially awkward, and the system should translate their misanthropy into purple prose “because I have an 18 in charisma!”
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Halito, I’ve been reading way to much Angry and among the 1.5 dozen articles on CHARISMA and encounter building there is a half decent idea to make combat a part of the world and not another dimension while giving better structure to social scenes.
So have you ever played those dumb grid RPGs from japan, like Lacross War Records, or something. The battles there have explicit win/loss conditions, kill the bad guys, don’t let the beautiful dragon die, etc. The point is those encounters always have a clear goal and a clear way to fail. And sometimes it’s not just a murder fest.
So I was reading lots of your brilliant and not at all flawed blogs, and it hit me, combat and social interactions should not be handled differently, they both have those win/loss conditions. You need to convince the king to send his army north and prevent his court from convincing him otherwise, a win/loss condition. You need to kill/drive off/whatever the goblins and not be killed/driven off/whatever.
Just like monsters, the king, his court, and his knight all have stat blocks (3 total, 1 for each), but instead of beating them with swords, you beat them with INFORMATION, a court noble’s afiair, the risk the goblins pose, things the players have learned and gathered before meeting the king. You can design “rules” to make this flow obvious to the GM building the scene encounter and to the players so they can think of MORE ways to handle it.
I got these idea from reading your holy knowledge gifted to us on this site, so it can’t be wrong, unless it is. This is just how I think “social combat” could work, clear goals and structure is all that’s needed. Also fuck the social stat, it’s gone. I’m out of characters now, so the details of why this idea isn’t terrible are left with me until I release my shite RPG on instagram or something.
Your observations are very apt, but I don’t think you got to quite the right conclusion. And I don’t think it’s fair to blame me for your wrong conclusions.
Here’s the deal: you’re right in noting that there are certain things that all encounters need to work as encounters. Things like a dramatic question and sources of conflict and decision points. I’ve written about all of that. But you’re missing the fact that just because two types of encounters share some qualities, that doesn’t mean they are drastically different in other ways.
If you really want to view things the Angry Way, the idea is like this: there IS a general thing that is “an encounter.” And it requires certain things to make it an encounter. Every encounter shares those things in common. Basically, they come down to defining the objective and the different ways by which the conflict might be resolved. However, there are vast differences in the ways those conflicts actually get resolved. Social interaction is extremely different from combat. And so, over the top of those basic things that every encounter must have, specialized rules get layered for different kinds of resolutions. So, there’d be a layer for combat encounters and a layer for social encounters and a layer for investigation encounters and so on. Those contain the specifics – like initiative for combat and motivations for social encounters and clue-finding for investigation – that make the different kinds of encounters feel different. And that’s how it would be presented in the rules, too. There’d be a chapter called “encounters” and it’d start with a definition of an encounter and how to build all the general things every encounter needs. And then it would explain the different tools like initiative and whatever stats and timers and all that other shit. And then it would define a dozen or so of the most common types of encounters and how those tools are used and add on specialzed stats for those specific encounters. And it’d end with explaining how to use the general and specific tools to invent your own totally unique types of encounters too.
I mean… if I were building an RPG, that’s how I’d do it anyway.
man, this completley hypothetical RPG sounds like my jam! too bad it will totally never exist, and has nothing to do with the post on an rpg without rulebooks, or any of the posts referencing “the angry rpg”. i sure do wish it would exist within a 1-4 year timeframe, but alas, i am woe bettiden.
Oh I’m not blaming you for my ideas. I’m simply going through a thought process. I know there needs to be rules for resolving situations, I was also just remembering your article on how combat doesn’t need things like initiative and extending that into an idea of a “”universal”” encounter building system.
I was thinking closer to encounter presentation. I personally would NOT present any encounter as social, or combat, or a puzzle. And let the party decided for themselves how to resolve it, and then have rule and systems that allow them to solve it.
This is still half-baked in my head as I keep going back to the game feel planning stage to make sure I’m designing what I want (And is why I removed the Charisma/Composure stat yesterday since it didn’t do what I wanted in my 5-man-band stats).
I don’ think I would even use the word “combat” as it implies something is special there, I would rather use “violent-resolution” as that is always an option and it implies “non-violent” resolution is also a thing that is an option.
Finally, thanks for the reply. More words to chew and think on while designing.
The youtube link about mysteries touches upon why even though my primary mode of playing RPGs is mysteries, the concept of GUMSHOE doesn’t appeal to me. What I like about mysteries is the feel of playing a character solving it by actually figuring out where to look for clues etc myself. Instead of having the game hardcoded to give the clues to me automatically, that feels more like reading/writing a mystery novel. Some people are different though, they just want to describe how smart their character is without having to solve things themselves, fun of expression et al.
Same for social interaction. I want the feel of social interaction by formulating the arguments myself, and I find a more freeform approach fun and immersive. I suspect the people wanting more complicated systems don’t care about feeling charismatic themselves, they just want their character portrayed as that, and that’s fine too, just different preferences…
The issue with that in something like D&D is that social skill (and mystery-related stuff like investigation for that matter) is a character investment with opportunity cost. You might have chosen to be proficient in Persuasion or Investigation instead of Athletics (which has hard-coded benefits in combat). If your investigation skills are never tied to your character’s abilities and your social skills aren’t tied to your character’s abilities, why invest in those at all? You can play a fighter, dump all your points into physical stats to excel at combat, and still run circles around your socially inept friend who actually invested in-game resources into being a bard so he could do the things you do for free. Thus the choices he made when planning out his character are invalidated.
I can’t speak for everyone who tries to build a social encounter system, but the reason I try to keep dice/character abilities incorporated is to honor those character choices. If there is a stat or class abilities for something, I want to reward those who choose to focus on doing that thing well – or maybe introduce negative consequences for those who ignored their ability to do that thing.
At the same time I totally acknowledge that, “I roll Persuasion to make him do the thing we want him to do” is not a satisfying social encounter by any means. You need a way to allow the players to engage while still respecting their character choices.
Lastly, you imply a couple of times that players rely on their character’s skills because they don’t “feel like” being intuitive or charismatic. I feel the need to point out that some people aren’t just too lazy to role-play those things – they literally don’t have the capacity. It’s not really fair to just kind of dismiss their desire to role-play a character beyond their own abilities when characters regularly surpass our own abilities in other ways all the time.
For the first part, those are just personal preferences. A game can scew heavy towards combat over social interaction and plenty people find it fun being that way. Personally I prefer simple mechanics, but a robust scenario (npcs with motivations etc), and free-form or describe the interaction until we can identify if some kind of roll is needed or not. Sometimes there is no conflict, sometimes the arguments presented or the method described is too weak to work, and sometimes there is uncertainty that needs to be resolved using the character stats. That’s a fun approach to me.
For the last part, no I don’t imply that, at least not intentionally. I’m saying that some game experiences makes the players feel like they are charismatic, not that the players feel like doing that. It’s fair to desire roleplaying more charismatic characters, but if the player isn’t themself, they are simply out of luck. With a more complex social system they will indeed be able to portray a more charismatic character and that’s cool, but the experience still isn’t going to make them feel like one IMO. It’s like solving puzzles; if the player solves it themself they will feel smart. If they can point to their characters’ high Int to have the GM give them a heavy clue, that will make them able to portray a smart character, but it wont make the player feel smarter. If they just want to portray that character and don’t really care about feeling like one, then this kind of system can suit them well.
Oh boy, burning wheel. I remember about 6 months ago, I asked Reddit for a more complex character creation and social interaction system and they suggested burning wheel. Talk about a monkeys paw wish. I actually did like the character creation, since it worked well for the campaign I was envisioning, but the social system? That would have sucked all the fun out of social encounters and turned them into rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock. And I was left flabbergasted when I saw they did the same thing with combat. I spent days reading the whole book, and vowed to never play a game with that system.
Count yourself lucky you didn’t PLAY that s%&$. Worst three months of my gaming career.
burning wheel seems like its dnd, but they added complexity to the boring parts, and took it away from the fun parts, and just ended up with hundreds of pages of rules that never amounted to anything. i wish it was good, because the ideas are so interesting
Some of the mechanics, the pure nuts and bolts, are interesting. What was it? White, grey, and black skills and what numbers on the dice are considered successes? Nice. Some good idea, if you ask me.
Then I look at the drudgery of Torchbearer and my mind despairs. There is no way you could play a city adventure without modding the game. It’s a game so restrictive about how it’s meant to be played, it’s just proof to me that they want to replace the GM with the game designers. They should go and write video games instead, the whole gang.
Trying to resolve an encounter in Mouse Guard was effed up. There’s no way I could have sold Torchbearer to my players, especially that you can’t beat certain enemies, and that the rules foresaw (at least seemed to me) no way of changing that as your characters grew.
I like being a GM and assessing situations and making calls. BW seems to hate the GM.
Well all I can say is that my experience with the Burning Wheel combat and social combat systems is mostly positive. In one game, my character stood before the college of cardinals of a Catholic type religion arguing and verbally sparring with the other factions to elect my candidate the new Pope. I found using the Duel of Wits and the back and forth nature of the debate made the moment epic not dull. It was all the more satisfying because part of the win was me out-thinking my opponent by choosing the right moves rather than simply having a higher die roll or the DM agreeing with my words.
Now if every social interaction required a Duel of Wits, it would get old fast. It is only meant to get pulled out at the big moments that warrant it.
Angry’s point about Burning Wheel is well taken though. It is tightly designed to produce a specific type of game and it is either your thing or it isn’t.
you could have a thing where boring encounters (fighting 2 goblin sentries, talking to a guard, etc) require a single roll, and cool stuff (fighting an ice dragon, electing pope, etc) use a larger conflict resolution system.
There’s some players that like it. But personally I dislike GMing it and it feels like the designers want to remove the GM without knowing how.
Now I’m really curious what the tings are you would use Fate for?
Actually I’d love to see articles where you dissect game systems like Fate or Dungeon World and explain where the problems are and what you can learn from them nonetheless.
personally, i would use fate for an obsure genre/mixed genre, because fate is alright at everything, and good at nothing, so if no game exists, fate is okay.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the most hazardous part of a social combat system: sooner or later, a GM will want to use it against the PCs.
That’s because any GM who wants to lacks a fundamental understanding of the game and their role in it. At this point, I shouldn’t have to deal with that s$&% anymore.
It could get worse, players using it against other players. That just feels worse, because the loser basically gets btfo of their roleplaying. PvP is already looked down upon, imagine if the wise wizard lying to prevent the barbarian from doing something stupid was forced to become social PvP. The Barbarian player would not enjoy it.
Whether it’s NPC on player or player on player, the issue is one of player agency. It’s one of the three core elements that makes an RPG tick.
some people have suggested that if a social roll is made on a player, the player sets the DC. they can make the roll impossible if they dont want to do it (or just say no) but if they want a chance, or for it to happen, they can set a lower difficulty.
That goes against the very core of the idea of the DC. It is the Dungeon Master, as the Mediator of the game, that is supposed to set those, not the players. It is literally part of his very Role at the table.
That’s a cool idea: it allows a player who doesn’t know if the attempt should work or not have a chance. I would only add that both parties should agree on what might happen, so one player (including a GM) doesn’t have carte blanche control over another PC.
The “never use social skills on PCs” has long been a crutch of bad game designers to justify not making a decent social system. A social system that can’t be used on players is probably a terrible social system in the first place. Literally every other system in the game can be used on players. It’s not like players just decide that wall of force or stealth checks don’t apply to them. The only reason social skills are the exception is because D&D players (and yeah this is largely a D&D thing) have seen social systems that are so awful and illogical that PCs don’t want them influencing their actions. You know this is the magic wand in 3E where a diplomancer can turn your archenemy friendly in a single action without so much as a saving throw. Yeah well of course the PCs don’t want that crap being used, because it’s a trash system.
But look at it this way… I bet at some point some NPC rolled a bluff check against a PC and they rolled insight to see if he was lying. And I’m also going to go out on a limb and guess that your PCs didn’t flip the table and claim it was unfair that NPCs get to lie to him. Because the bluff / insight system is generally functional and thus PCs are fine with it being used against them. But you successfully pulled off using a social skill on a PC and the game didn’t implode.
And that should be the goal for a designer, coming up with a system that works both ways. Because it says your social system is helpful but not too invasive. If it’s too invasive, the players are likely to complain and so that’s a good check and balance as the designer. If people don’t like the idea of a diplomacy skill that acts like mind-control, it’s probably a good indicator that maybe you should tone down the skill a bit.
I’ve been in plenty of games / systems where the DM used social skills on PCs, or PCs used them on other PCs. It didn’t turn into the PC hissyfit apocalypse that the nay-sayers would predict. Truth be told, if you have a half decent social system and a half-decent DM, the effects of social skills are pretty much going to be stuff you should be doing anyway as a player if you’re making any attempt to roleplay. And people are generally fine with it.
The problem isn’t a hissyfit as you so adeptly put it. It’s about understanding the basic assumptions of the game. There is literally no reason why systems should work the same way against the players as they work against the obstacles of the system. None. The game is asynchronous to begin with. In fact, the assumption that everything must work the same leads to extremely bloated, overwrought design.
Anyway, I’ve addressed this entire thing before and written thousands of words on it. I really don’t feel like going through it all again. For like the fourth time. Toning down a skill like Persuasion or Diplomacy doesn’t change the essential fact that it determines how the attitude of the target changes in response to the character’s act. And that’s precisely how it should work. Because the players need to be able to use it that way to overcome social challenges. Or as part of the way to overcome social challenges. But turned in the other direction, no matter how small you make the effect, it still amounts to telling the players what their character’s response must be.
This argument is otherwise outside the scope of this article. Please go back and read my other articles on this subject and refer to the discussion of agency in my book. Consider that my entire counterpoint. And then we can put this tired old debate to bed. Thanks.
Oh, I have read the other articles. I just disagree. I also disagree that this is particularly off-topic…
[[ …which really doesn’t matter because it’s not your call, it’s mine. Thread over. -Angry ]]
I recall a “social combat” style framework in the Slayers RPG (D20 I think)…bought it as a gift for a friend, browsed it (after gifting) but didn’t really read too closely.
The anime series/films Slayers feature a pair of characters with different anger management issues generally played for the humor value, and the “social combat” system was built, I think, to model those characters and their interactions with the world. As I recall there were effectively “social hit points” that could be overcome to lead to a specific outcome – fleeing in shame, going berserk, that sort of thing.
As it was for a partly-funny kind of game with a D20 framework it might not be all the useful…but the basic idea might be useful for some people.
Has anyone looked at it with a more critical eye?
I have never thought of myself as a lighting engine before haha.
Good article, as a relatively inexperienced gm I’m still working on my social interaction skills and this certainly helps..
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I think I’ve come at this discussion from the opposite direction but reached the same conclusion. D&D (and other RPGs) are indeed social games, but I think that’s what makes describing social interaction difficult. Because we don’t really have a vocabulary for describing even what it is to “do social interaction well”. (Even the idea of saying that sounds stupid and reductive and like someone complaining that there ought to be rules for a conversation, which is part of the point the post was making, if I’ve read it right.) We _do_ have vocab for describing doing physical things well: I can say, I’ll climb the big curtain in the theatre and then leap from there to the swinging chandelier, pull my rapier out with my off hand, and somersault into the villain’s box before slashing him across the face. Could I do this thing myself? Not in a million years. But I can imagine it, and describe it. However… how do we describe outwitting someone in a battle of, er, wits? It’s almost impossible to do unless you’re actually verbally adept enough to do it yourself. Give it a try. The description IS the action; if you can explain in words how you talk your way past the guard and into the bank vault, then you literally have succeeded IN talking your way past the guard and into the bank vault. So in the absence of the ability to do that, you have only “I talk my way past him… by rolling a 22 Charisma (Persuasion) check!” which is mechanical and boring. Still, this is (again, if I’m reading it correctly) exactly what’s being discussed above when the article speaks about players portraying characters who are more socially adept than they are. Get better at social interaction and you’ll get better at describing and acting social interaction… because to describe it is pretty similar to actually doing it, I think.
You could describe the approach – “I act like a haughty nobleman inspecting the vault, and if the guard asks for my papers I just glare at him until he goes away.” Although that still takes a certain amount of imagination, it’s easier than actually acting it out.
I think what’s lacking is a way to signpost what sorts of approaches are viable. Yes, there’s Bluff/Diplomacy/Intimidate, but those are still pretty broad descriptions. Bluff could be anything from “I’m actually a noble and I’m allowed to be here” to “I’m the guard on the next shift, you can take off early and go for a drink” and depending on what you’re breaking into (and if you’re trying to bring the rest of your party in with you), those could be sensible approaches or obvious lies, with a corresponding impact on your Bluff DC.
But people usually don’t see social encounters in that way. Players think “I’m going to bluff past the guard” rather than “I’m going to watch the gate for a bit, see who the guard lets through, and use that to make a plausible bluff.” And the GM thinks “Yeah, they can try talking their way past the guard” instead of “the guard is a suck-up who will let in anyone who looks remotely noble.” If you want players to roleplay a social engineering attack, you need to set up a social environment which has security holes to exploit. Just like if you want players to do acrobatic chandelier-swinging, it helps to put some chandeliers in the environment.
I have one friend in particularwho can talk circles around anyone. I mean, I’m not socially inept or anything, but I hate having him as a player because he can argue a reason for almost anything to work in his favour, and he fully believes his arguments should be effective and can get angry if I try to brush them off. For social encounters in particular its almost impossible for him to ever fail an in-game social encounter because HIS skill outclasses MINE, not his character vs my npc.
Now, that’s not supposed to be an excuse. I try to learn how to plan more foolproof situations each time, but I think it explains why I am one of those people want more rules that I can rely on in-game instead of feeling personally incapable.
Or you could let him enjoy his little successes and play things a bit differently. Give him his spotlight. Let him have this way. But make sure others get theirs, too. Split the group and let others also have social encounters. Just consider most of his encounters as already lost and as something his character is good at.
Personally, if somebody would be like that I would require them to stat high in intelligence and charisma. (Because people sometimes love to gamble the system, dump these stats, but then roleplay with silver tongues and outwit anyone else.) If you want to fill the role of the bard, play the bard. (How do you like them apples? I hate the bard class. His and your mileage may differ…)
In the end, as long as everyone gets their core engagements filled, winning is a good thing, no? It’s not your job to make them fail, at least not in D&D. You can even use those encounters to give extra clues and exposition to players that you planned on giving them anyway. If you think of it this way, it’s not a loss. He made your job easier.
There’s a lot of possible challenges and obstacles in a D&D, and you can always change the mix. And even for social encounters, it helps to keep track of motivations. Is your NPC scared? Like really scared? Prejudiced? An asshole? How many times in real life does a smooth talker actually get around that? It might just piss somebody off. Let him have the wins he earns but also consider context.
Hopes any of that was even remotely helpful. 🙂
What about a social inventory system? Groups can have an inventory of social resources, e.g. Secrets, Stories, Lies, rhetoric, songs, etc. Players can collect these resources over the game by exploring a dungeon, interrogating certain characters, etc. They roll to comprehend and collect these resources.
During social encounters, the players and DM would trade social resources to affect the story in certain ways. e.g. DMs can determine how many Stories would the Humming Bard before he agrees to share the location of the treasure map. Maybe a PC would need a certain number of “Clues” during downtime to discover some crucial information. Maybe the party might be forced by the DM to trade the “Falsity” the group has collected, causing the army to have inaccurate information.
In a sense, this brings social encounters in contrast with the Combat portion of the game. I think this helps provide some structure, while still being relatively open-ended. The key here is to keep the resources vague so that they can be applicable in any social encounter, and avoiding some “disposition” meter that players need to fill. It might be enough to keep players who are looking for “mechanics” to be satisfied.
While the way you wrote this up makes it too abstract for my tastes, there’s a very interesting idea in there nonetheless. I must think on this.
I think I might like to adhoc something like this into my approach. If not directly as consumable resources, some form of “item” that can be used. Maybe a whatever stat of clues required to solve a case, or gossip required to influence an NPC… Although the idea of using a secret, or a story, like a potion to a known affect is interesting
This gives me the idea of using this system to measure henchmen loyalty. In most cases it would start positive. Then the players responsability is to not let it become negative. It can be made more positive with better payment, meeting goals or good leadership. While failure to pay, danger or atrocious acts by the PCs could make the loyalty fall. What ticks more depends on the henchman.
A henchman whose loyalty turns negative will want to quit, desert, or even betray the party if they really screw up.
A possible benefit to this use is that it could connect henchmen motivations to how the PCs act. (The players don’t have to see the system. They just have to know that the connection exists) In one direction the PCs can try to choose those working for them and try to keep them on their side. On the other, the henchmen will react to the PCs actions, in accordance to their own motivations.
A problem this use could have is that it’s another thing to track. This is a problem that this system doesn’t have when used as intended in an encounter, as it exists only for as long as the encounter lasts.
I think with a bit of communication between a DM and a player they could find a way to play a character outside of their own tactical or social ability. I mean part of playing a RPG is to be someone other than yourself, and most players want to play someone more competent than they really are in reality. As long as a solution is fair and consistent, and feels right for everyone at the table, it should work. But it also seems so case-by-case in nature that it would be impossible to design something that worked for everyone out of the box
At my table it usually boils down to “because of my character’s skill/background/whatever would they know if this approach is viable, or if not any clue as to what might work better?” I usually toss advantage or a clue if so. I definitely describe if something was effective or not during adjudication, and probably over-emphasize such things to skill-appropriate characters. Of course I actually design my own encounters around the characters anyway, so it’s easy for me to nudge them in the right direction. On the other hand my players have a tendency to treat my pre-designed plans as toilet paper and flush them down the toilet just after my description of the scene. So it’s just as often improvisation
Well, I strongly disagree.
If the bard wants to seduce the elven princess at the banquett, we do need some sort of mechanism to resolve that scene and to guess his chances of success. The same is true if the rogue wants to bribe the city-guard or intimidate a shopkeeper. There are many situations where “social combat” does make sense. Simply having a conversation will not give you a degree of success. The DM can make up any result he likes. But most people will prefer some sort of die-roll instead of a more or less arbitraty ruling, because this gives them the illusion of control.
I think you misunderstood my point.
“it’s a myth to think you can play a character who is substantially mentally different from you.”
Utter fucking crap, players pull this shit all the time, from wizards to netrunners to cthulhu. You’re confusing the act of playing a game with whatever the fuck the players are doing (usually NOT playing a game), completely missing that a (generous) 50% of communication is squarely physical. At that point you might as well have the figher lifting weights, if your response to Timmy’s stuttering is “git gud”.
Let him roll + Cha. Let the solar exalted use Eternal Empress of Love Attitude. Let Biggle spend a spellslot to cast fireball – or are you going to make him solve the equation for quantum thermal tunnelling? He should be able to, right? The game relies on our minds, doesn’t it??
Anyway great fucking article, 7.5/10 would not read again