This here’s part of my year-long course in True Game Mastery. You don’t have to read the lessons in order, but that’s how they work best. So, if you’re new here, check out the series index and start at the beginning.
Click here for the True Game Mastery series index.
Man, did I get lost in the fucking weeds. I’ve been rambling my ass off for weeks about social interaction. And it’s mostly been high-concept, background crap. Which is something I promised not to do in this True Game Mastery series.
Honestly, I blame you. Because y’all kept fighting me. And that stops now.
Ride Restrictions
In these next two lessons, I’m gonna tell you precisely how to adjudicate Social Actions like a True Game Master.
Either you’re going to trust me and do shit my way and wonder at how amazingly awesome your game becomes or you’ll keep running the same shitty-ass games you’ve been running all along. The ones that brought you to my door begging for help in the first place.
This lesson starts with you accepting a few things as absolute, immutable facts. They’re the things I’ve blown 15,000 words arguing and that I ain’t arguing further. If you’re not convinced at this point, your brain’s too stupid and you’re beyond my help.
The facts are thus:
Players choose; characters act. In social situations, that means the players must decide what their characters say and how they say it and if there’s any uncertainty about how the world responds to it, you resolve it with attribute and skill checks as described in your system duh jury.
It matters not how players communicate their characters’ actions. In social situations, that means players can either speak the words that come out of their characters’ mouths or they can describe generally what their characters are saying and what tone they’re adopting and what facts their citing and so on.
Non-player characters choose; Game Masters act. In social situations, that means the game mechanics — usually the players’ attribute and skill checks — determine how the NPCs respond to the PCs, and it’s up to the GM to portray those responses as if they were the logical, rational choices of a human-like being.
For now, forget all the other crap I wrote about social interactions. You will need some of that shit I wrote about how social conflicts work later, but I’ll tell you which bits you need when you need them.
Rules established, signs posted, let’s get this social shit over with once and for all.
It’s Hard to Be Social
Do you struggle to adjudicate Social Actions and resolve social conflicts… in tabletop roleplaying games, I mean? Of course you do; everyone does. Even True Game Masters struggle with the social parts of the game. Hell, I struggle with them and I’m the Truest True Game Master that ever Mastered a Game. It’s True.
In principle, Social Actions ain’t hard to handle. There’s no difference between Social Actions and other kinds of in-game actions. “I stab the orc until it’s dead” is just the same as “I threaten the orc until it runs away.” “I search the dais for hidden traps” is the same as “I keep the duke talking and try to catch him in a lie.” It’s all just actions players choose, characters take, and Game Masters resolve.
But principle ain’t practice and three things stop Game Masters from treating asks and says like stabs and sneaks and searches.
The Flow of Conversation
Why Can’t Players Just ‘Git Gud’
I dig self-improvement, hard work, and practice. That’s how you get what you want. If you waste your time demanding people smooth the path or clear the roadblocks for you, you disempower yourself. You put your success in other people’s hands. But, like every piece of real-life advice, you have to tack a big ole “within reason” on the end. Especially when it comes to games.
Adding an Easy Mode to Dark Souls ain’t “within reason,” by the way. I’ll save you the comment.
Lots of Game Masters want their players to learn how to play better. Or play more strategically. Or engage socially. So they ask their players to read books, watch YouTube videos, read memos written by Internet assholes, or sit through long-ass tutorial encounters. And this is especially true when it comes to learning how to win social encounters.
Those Game Masters forget, first, that the best way to learn is through experiment, practice, and experience. By letting the players play the game and nudging them toward success, you’re teaching them — slowly, but surely — how to win. They get to see what works and what doesn’t. And that knowledge sticks.
Most Game Masters also forget that demanding things from players won’t make them put in the work. Especially when it comes to dumb games about pretend elves that are just supposed to be fun.
Roleplaying games have a rhythm to them. They have a flow. And that flow is what I encapsulated in the Declare-Determine-Describe cycle. Except that all goes out the window in social interactions.
Conversations don’t follow the Declare-Determine-Describe cycle. People just sort of say what they say when it occurs to them to say it. And a lot of what people do is just useless. For every firm attempt to convince or build rapport — more on those below — there are ten polite pleasantries or conversational dead ends or repetitions or words of assent or whatever.
The more into a conversation the table is, the more the conversation deviates from the normal Declare-Determine-Describe cycle. And the more noise there is. This means the groups that dig social shit the most are also the ones where it’s the hardest to resolve. If your players speak in character, your social interactions are free-for-all messes of pleasantries and playacting and interruptions and chatter and all the other normal shit that happens when bunches of people talk.
And if you — as a Game Master — try to manage the flow like you manage a battle, you’re ruining the social interaction. You’re preventing it from feeling like an actual interaction.
Long story slightly shorter, social interaction scenes require you — the Game Master — to spot the hidden Declarations in the noisy chaos of human chatter and quickly and quietly do your Determine-and-Describe thing without breaking the flow.
Undeclared Declarations
As if that ain’t hard enough, social action declarations don’t look like action declarations. Especially when the players are into the scene. There’s no “I stab the orc with my sword in an attempt to kill it.” It’s just people yelling, shit like, “You’re a damned dirty liar and you can count us out!”
You must remember that everything a player says in a social scene is a Declaration. When Chris says, “You’re a damned dirty liar and you can count us out,” what he means to say is, “Cabe says to the duke, ‘You’re a damned dirty liar and you can count us out.'” Or, even more specifically, “Cabe calls the duke a damned dirty liar and tells the duke that the party refuses to assist him in his plans.”
Actually, it’s more complicated than that. Because if Chris shakes his fist or glares or points his finger or slaps the table, you need to interpret that as “Cabe calls the duke a damned dirty liar, gesticulating angrily for emphasis. He further tells the duke that the party refuses to assist him in his plans.”
Yeah, body language and tone and shit make this way more complicated. But you actually want the players doing that stuff because it means they’re emotionally invested. Remember Investment? I started this True Game Mastery crap telling you Investment was your word for the year.
So running a social scene demands that you — the Game Master — pay attention to everything every player says and translate every word into a Declaration. In your head. Without breaking the flow.
Unknown Intentions
Now, I’m gonna blow your minds…
Most players have no idea what they’re doing in social situations. Hell, most people have no idea. In social situations, people don’t act with deliberate intention; they just say whatever occurs to them. Even highly persuasive, charismatic charmers — like me — usually aren’t consciously strategizing their way through social exchanges. They just feel things out.
I am not saying there’s no place for strategy, reason, and deliberate action. Of course, there is. And people can learn that shit. If I were teaching a course on communication and conflict resolution, I’d cover that shit. But I’m not.
Moreover, social skills are intuitive, and social exchanges run on emotion, not reason. So most socially skilled individuals get by on experiential learning and intuition and books and courses can only get you so far. You need to practice this shit, develop your social intuition, and learn by doing.
The point is that players don’t declare social actions with clear strategies and deliberate intentions. They throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. They feel their way through, one sentence at a time. They try things and see how they work.
So running a social scene demands that you — the poor Game Master — figure out not what each player is trying to accomplish when they say what they say, but what they conceivably could accomplish by saying what they say.
How to Run a Social Scene Like a True Game Master
So what’s this shit mean for you, oh aspiring True Game Master? Let me spell it out…
To run a social scene, you must first pay careful attention to absolutely everything every player says their character says and does and how they say their character does it, and how they, themselves, do it. Then, you’ve got to reframe every such action as a proper action declaration. And then, you’ve got to figure out anything and everything that the character’s action could conceivably accomplish. And you can’t ask the player because they have no frigging idea.
In other words, when Beth says, “Wow, that totally sucks,” you have to parse that as Beth saying, “In an attempt to build a rapport with the grieving woman, Beryllia acknowledges and validates her pain.” In your head. In the background. Instantly.
It’s as simple as that…
Slow Down!
All right, kids, calm your tits. It was a joke. I know that doesn’t sound simple. It’s not. But it’s also not impossible. And it’s not like I’m leaving you totally high and dry here. Look at the scroll bar on this article. I ain’t nearly done. So let me tell you how to pull that shit off. Or, at least, how to learn how to pull it off.
The first step is the same first step I told you ages ago. Remember, “Breathe, then speak?” The same trick works here.
Slow down!
Running a social scene is not a race. There’s no prize for the fastest time. See, most people — in general — talk too damned fast. This is why most people just blurt out the first thought to cross their mind most of the time. True Game Masters don’t do that.
Most people — in general — also don’t listen. Studies show people spend most of their non-speaking social time thinking about the next thing they’re going to say. They do so to the point where they ignore most of what people say to them. And you can catch yourself doing this if you pay attention. How often do you stop listening partway through someone else’s story because you’re suddenly reminded of a story of your own and now you’re gearing up to jump in and tell it when it’s your turn to talk?
True Game Masters must pay attention to everything every player says — and how they say it — and they must take some time to process that shit as an action.
You ain’t supposed to blurt shit out anyway. You’re not supposed to think about the NPC’s response because you don’t choose how NPCs respond. You resolve actions that sometimes result in NPCs responding. Until the action’s parsed, you have no idea what the NPC’s going to say and do.
So slow down and pay careful attention.
Guessing Intentions
Social Strategies and Tactics
Game Masters are often tripped up in social scenes by their inability to separate strategies — or goals — from tactics — or individual actions. Then again, most people in general have that problem.
When a fight breaks out, the players know their goal is to beat the monsters. They can’t do it in one go. Rather, they have to pick the right combination of individual actions to get to that goal. It’s the same in social scenes. There’s a goal — get information from the frightened witness — and the players must say and do the right things to get the witness to talk.
Game Masters don’t resolve the question of whether the players beat the monsters, they resolve the outcomes of the individual actions the players choose and keep an eye out for when the monsters end up defeated. Likewise, Game Masters don’t resolve goals like “get the information” or “talk your way out of trouble.” They resolve one social action at a time and assess when the goal’s been reached.
You can’t resolve an action if you don’t know what that action is meant to accomplish. But, in social scenes, players themselves rarely know what their actions are meant to accomplish. Oh, sure, they have an idea of their overall goal — get information, say, or talk their way out of trouble — but they have no idea how to talk their way to that goal So they just say shit that seems like it should move them in the right direction.
It’s your job to figure out exactly how each Social Action might move the player toward their overall goal. You have to ask yourself, “How might this remark move the character closer to receiving the information.”
I know that sounds daunting, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. The truth is that, in most social scenes, you can pretty much drop all useful Social Actions into one of five buckets.
Now, I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I ain’t saying there are only five kinds of social actions. I ain’t advocating for some dumbass social combat system with five cards to play. I ain’t suggesting that the entire length and breadth of human social conflict resolution can be summed up in five words. I’m just saying that you, a poor, put-upon, True Game Master who’s in way over your head can run very good, very real-seeming conversations if you just look at everything through one or more of five basic lenses.
I’m going to describe the lenses here in brief, but you won’t totally get them until the next lesson when we hit the Determine-and-Describe parts of the Declare-Determine-Describe cycle. And even then, it’s important to note that these are vague, blurry, and intuitive. And there’s going to be times when you have to do some hamfisted cramming or make a blind guess about which lens is best. That’s the best you can hope for when it comes to social scenes in open-ended role-playing gaming experiences.
And really, if you’re still looking for bright lines and concrete definitions from me at this stage of the game, you’re a complete and total dumbass and wholly beyond my help.
Connect
This Outcome — which I could also call Build Rapport — is the most basic social outcome on the list. It hinges on the fact that people go along with people they like. Or with people they feel connected to. Anything you can do to establish an emotional connection with someone boosts all your interactions. When a character tries to find a common ground with an NPC or shows an interest in an NPC or flatters them or expresses sympathy for their struggles, they’re Connecting.
If a social action seems like it might make the NPC like the PC more, resolve it as an attempt to Connect.
Assert
This Outcome is all about stating needs, wants, or desires. When a character states a desire, makes a request, issues a demand, or even just hints at what they want, they’re Asserting. Assertions rarely elicit a response beyond, “I accede” or “I refuse,” so that’s your clue that an Assertion’s happening.
Assertions are great and you should pay close attention to them because they tell you a player’s overall goal in the scene.
Understand
This Outcome involves the player learning what’s going on in the NPC’s head. In social situations, it’s useful to know what your opponent wants, why they’re opposing you, and what they value, desire, and fear. That’s all ammo for resolving the conflict. Characters can glean understanding by asking direct questions, but understanding can also come just from letting the NPC have some space to talk or even by asking them questions and intuiting their emotional responses.
Unfortunately, lots of players are too dumb to see the value of Understanding. Fortunately, most people — and therefore most NPCs — will volunteer information willingly or unconsciously if they’re allowed to talk. So you can slip this shit in as a default Outcome to just about any open-ended question.
Convince
This outcome is about changing the NPC’s goals, drives, desires, perspectives, priorities, or understanding. Remember that social conflicts arise from incompatible goals between the player-characters and the NPC they’re dealing with. One way to resolve such a conflict, then, is to make the NPC believe their goals aren’t threatened. Or that their goals might be served by giving in. Or that some other, better goal might be served. Or that some other goal might be threatened by not giving in.
This is the most common intention employed by players and it encompasses a broad swath of in-game social interactions. Attempts to persuade or reason fall into this Outcome, but so too do attempts to coerce or even blackmail, since both involve reframing a situation to put some other drive — fear of loss, fear of injury, whatever — ahead of whatever objection the NPC has to helping.
In short, you’ll be using this outcome a lot.
Negotiate
This outcome might seem similar to the Convince outcome above, but there’s an important difference. Negotiating is about offering an NPC something they want in trade for them giving up their objection. Something they value. And it’s important to note that this covers a pretty broad swath of human social behaviors. Attempts to Negotiate can be indirect. They can even be implied. And they can be abstract. Take, for example, seduction. Seduction is an implied promise to trade something for the NPC’s cooperation. And that something isn’t even, necessarily sexual pleasure. Attention from — or flattery by — an attractive person can be valuable enough to some to get a favor from them. I know that’s really abstract, but that’s human social interaction for you.
If a character is offering an NPC something — or even just letting an NPC believe there’s a payoff to be had — they’re Negotiating.
On the Approach
Umm…
People speak too damned fast. They’re inclined to compete for spotlight time. So most people learn — intuitively and by habit — that they absolutely must hold their place in the talking queue when it’s their turn to talk. And that’s why people say “umm…” Or “uh…” or “okay…” or “like…” or “let’s see…” “Umm…” means, “I heard you and I know it’s my turn to talk but I need a moment to think through what I want to say.”
You’ve probably been told to excise that shit from your vocabulary. Or, if you host a podcast, to cut it in post. And that’s terrible advice. As a Game Master, you absolutely must control the pace of your game — and hold your spot in the talking queue — but you must also give yourself time to think. So it’s actually good practice — great practice — to interject a placeholder “umm” — or your noise of choice — to stop the players talking and indicate you’re loading up a response.
True Game Masters “umm” it up without shame.
Proper action declarations include both Intentions — that is to say, desired Outcomes — and Approaches. A player decides what their character is trying to accomplish and how they’re trying to accomplish it.
Social Approaches include the words the character says, but they also encompass how the character says it. Social Approaches include tone, posture, demeanor, body language, and even appearance. Hell, it’s possible to take a Social Action without saying a word. That’s why I told you to pay attention to how players act out their Social Actions. It’s all part of the Approach.
Keep in mind that game mechanical social skills are about the Approaches the characters take, not the Outcomes they Intend. Dungeons & Dragons includes four social skills that basically amount to being friendly, being scary, being tricky, and being intiutive. Any of those skills can be used to accomplish any of the Outcomes I listed above. You can use deception to Connect, to Understand, to Assert, to Convince, or to Negotiate as easily as you can use persuasion. Or intimidation.
So don’t conflate Outcomes with Approaches and match game mechanics to Approaches, not Outcomes. And think of the D&D skills as demeanor indicators. Read them as “… using charm,” “… using fear,” “… using deceit,” and “… using intuition.”
Parsing the Action
Got all that shit? Of course not! You’re going to have to practice the hell out of this. This is hard. But let’s pretend, for now, that you have got all that shit. How do you use it?
After a player’s dropped a Social Action in the game — which you spotted because you slowed down and paid attention — you’ve got to parse what they said into a proper declaration. Ultimately, your goal is to cram whatever dumbass thing the player said into a sentence like this…
In an attempt to [INTENTION] the NPC, my character says and/or does [WHATEVER]
And to append…
… by using [APPROACH]
… as appropriate.
So, when Adam says…
We know you saw something the night of the murder!
You must translate that to…
In an attempt to Assert a Demand for Information from the witness, Ardrick says, ‘We know you saw something the night of the murder!’
And when Beth says…
I tell Adam to stop yelling at the dude and then I calm him down. The dude. Not Adam.
You must parse that as…
In an attempt to Connect with the witness, Beryllia chastises Adam and comforts the witness using friendliness.
And when Chris says…
Cabe takes out a shiny platinum coin and begins flipping it in the air where the witness can see it. He gives a friendly smile.
You translate that as…
In an attempt to Negotiate with the witness, Cabe, using charm, implies the party is willing to pay well for the information by playing with a valuable coin in front of the witness.
And when Danielle says…
“Danae pleads with the witness. ‘Someone’s daughter died last night. And more deaths will follow. You’re the only one who can help us. Please tell us what you know.'”
You must read that… how?
Right. She’s saying…
In an attempt to Convince the witness, Danae appeals to the man’s sense of good in a persuasive way.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Coyote Time and Aim Assist
A lot of you are going to read the shit I’m saying about assigning intentions to the players’ random social actions and think “holy crap, is Angry telling me to play the game for the players?” And the answer is, “Yes, he is.” Or rather, he’s telling you to help the players succeed.
Let me tell you about Coyote Time. It’s one of ten thousand tricks video game designers secretly employ in their games to make games playable without superhuman reflexes and skills. In platforming games, if you walk your character off a ledge, you have an extra split second to hit the jump button before you’re committed to a fall to your death.
Every video game has hidden tweaks that make the game playable. Or at least make it forgiving. Because you can only expect so much from your players before your game becomes unplayable. Or, at least, unfun to play.
I’ve compared you Game Masters to video game consoles before. And the comparison’s apt. It’s your job to tweak shit under the hood so your game’s playable even if you don’t have a table of strategic geniuses or master debaters. If you can’t handle that, you ain’t cut out to sit behind the screen. Sorry.
And I’ll leave it to you folks at home to figure out why this doesn’t include fudging die rolls. That shit’s unforgivable.
As I’ve said several times now, this shit ain’t easy. It’s hard. It’s one of the hardest things True Game Masters have to learn. And I’m not even talking about resolving Social Actions yet. I’m just telling you how to spot and interpret them. Resolving comes later. Next week, to be exact. I want to tell you that that will be the easy part, but I’d be lying. Resolving social actions is easier than parsing them into proper Declarations, but easier doesn’t mean easy. Sorry.
Start practicing this crap today. Right now. Force yourself to slow down and pay attention to every social action your players take. Even the ones that don’t involve social conflicts with NPCs. Pay complete attention to what the players say and do when the characters are planning amongst themselves or shooting the shit around the campfire.
Meanwhile, make yourself a Social Outcome Cheat Sheet and practice fitting actions into them. Practice parsing Approaches too. You must get to the point where this shit’s second nature to you. And there’s a long, hard road between here and there with no shortcuts.
That said, take comfort in the fact that you can’t really get this right or wrong. The point isn’t to guess the Outcome the player intends — the players have no frigging clue what they intend — it’s merely to provide a reasonable Outcome to whatever actions the players take. So there’s not nearly as much pressure as you think.
Now practice!
Wow, this Is the article I was waiting for the last three months, and it’s just for my birthday!
Thanks Angry!
Excellent article! The five lenses you provided seem very helpful for categorizing intentions during social actions.
In the declare-determine-describe article you mention the importance of posting warnings and confirming actions with the players to make sure you’re on the same page about the action they declared. Is there a place for that in social actions too, via describing their social action back to them the way you’ve translated them into an intent and approach? Or is the flow of conversation generally more important?
The flow must spice!
Okay, that didn’t work. The flow is everything. And confirming actions, generally, is pointless in social interactions because of the way people just tend to blurt shit out. That said, it is good form to warn players when they say or do something that is likely to cause a complete disaster that a reasonable person might foresee. In much the same way you warn players that they might trigger an attack of opportunity if they go ahead or that what they’re trying is impossible but likely to lead to injury.
When my group first started RPGing, our GMs (including me) would ruthlessly hold every player to whatever their character said — even if that meant the NPC in question would take offence and reach for a weapon. No warnings, no re-dos. “You said what you said!”
I’m proud to say I was the first one in our group to break that tradition. A player character shouldn’t accidentally offend the widow’s late husband any more than she should walk through a wall of flames because her player forgot it was in the scene.
I love the list of five social actions, even though I suspect it can be limiting if used too dogmatically. I wonder, though, if it wouldn’t help to hand it over to players, so they can better understand how the ‘game’ works. Or would that shatter the illusion for them, like Dungeon World’s Moves do?
These are not social actions, they are lenses to help the GM frame conversation as an action declaration. This is not social combat. If you do this I guarantee players will begin treating these lenses like buttons to press “I convince them!” Practice using the lenses, use the NPCs responses to show them what they’re saying and how they’re saying it matters and let them figure out the rest. That’s the best way to help your players.
That was a fantastic article. I’m just leading a collaborative storytelling experience right now instead of running a game, but I can get a lot of use out of this. Adding the 5 outcomes to my collection of sticky notes on my GM screen immediately!
Great article, Angry. Last campaign, I noticed my issues with social interaction, and I hope that this series will help me improve the next game I run.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it enough to make a cheat sheet. I’m going to be patient though, because I think it’s the Determine and Describe steps I need. That, and the encounter design which I hope will at least be explained in broad strokes.
Scratch that. It’s laid out right here.
“But, in social scenes, players themselves rarely know what their actions are meant to accomplish. Oh, sure, they have an idea of their overall goal — get information, say, or talk their way out of trouble — but they have no idea how to talk their way to that goal So they just say shit that seems like it should move them in the right direction.”
I have a hard time parsing the goal. And then the NPC has their own goal I need to consider, not to mention what they want, why they’re opposing you, and what they value, desire, and fear.
How do I prepare all that? A loot table is much easier.
Anyone fell free to chime in.
I suspect that in some cases the NPCs goals can often arise in play. Whenever a player character succeeds or fails at a given social action you have to assess why it succeeded or failed based on the intention and approach and make the result seem like a facsimile of human action. Coming up with a reason why the NPC declined a request could be informed by a pre-existing goal or result in the creation of one, providing a new goal is consistent with everything that has happened previously.
NPCs don’t have goals. They’re game constructs. They’re opposing you because that’s what’s best for the story.
But they do have motivations, which covers some of the same territory IMO.
I did warn you about that.
Encounter design is not being discussed anytime soon. Sorry. This is a series for people running games, not people writing them. That’s next next year.
One of the reasons I like 3rd person “conversations” are that it reinforces the idea that I’m the player of the character, and not that I AM the character. Secondly it allows me to put my intentions across better. It helps my GM adjudicate better.
Further more, it makes it easier to know when a character says something, and when they just make a remark about the game. Which isn’t always easy to pick up on unless players does “voice acting” when they speak in character.
All approach are Ok, but keep into mind that you are also reducing the emotion impact on you.
When you are roleplaying in first person, the emotion you emulate partly become real.
It is a trick known by both actors and yoga/meditation : if you make your body mimic an emotion, you feel that emotion.
There are multiple scientific proof on it, but my understanding is that an emotion is mostly an interpretation of the body reaction. The normal behavior is : Your body react, you feel the emotion, and only later you try to explain it.
By simulating the first part, the rest of the behavior still happens.
There is a huge body of research on this. And, in fact, the feedback loop between how you behave, how you feel, and how you think is a central feature in several therapeutic practices as well including the highly successful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, though CBT does focus more on the “how you think” part of the cycle, but the cycle is an essential element. The point is: if you act the way a happy person acts, you will end up eventually feeling happier.
The point is: Thought – Feeling – Behavior is a feedback loop. How you behave affects how you think, how you think affects how you feel, how you feel affects how you behave, and how you behave… so if you can take control of any part of that cycle, you can send things circling in a different direction. In pretend elf games of course. Because I don’t do life advice.
This article was very informative, it fleshed out the pattern of play nicely. It reminds me of something I’m 99% sure you said about hexcrawls, how the hexcrawl is a method of organizing things for the dm, and the players should never see the hex grid.
More ‘backend’ for the game engine seems to be what’s needed for good dming, but it feels like the game tends to think of dms and players as the same kind of user. I bring to mind the way that lots of things that really should have statblocks do.
My players love our hex grid; it helps them visualize the world and their place within it. When I say, “You hear a rumour about young nobles disappearing from estates at the base of the Blue Mountains,” they look at the hex map and discuss things like how long it would take to investigate and what dangers they might encounter along the way, as well as any allies they could ask for help in the region.
I’m having trouble guessing what the downside to that is. Can you elaborate? Is it just an aversion to player-facing mechanics in general?
Regarding ‘approaches’, I’d say- the bad cop intimidates; the good cop charms; the psych profiler is the intuitive dude; and the asset sent into the holding cell is the deceiver;
Also, I think I watch too many cop shows…
Watching a video with your finger poised over the pause button could help you practice this skill. After a character finishes speaking, pause the video and translate what the character said into something like “Dirty Harry Asserts to the punk that he should not reach for the gun, using a threat (to blow his head clean off)” or “Darth Vader tries to Negotiate with Luke that Luke join him, and help him destroy the emperor, by offering to replace his current perilous situation with the security of being co-ruler of the galaxy.”
I think you got your intro accidentally appended to the last paragraph?
And on the matter: is there any advice for people like me who wouldn’t know a social intent if it stared them into the eye, beyond “git gud” — like, in terms of that accommodation sidebar?
(Also, not on the matter at all: I’m not much of a fun of FromSoftware games, but note how Elden Ring was made more player-friendly than Dark Souls without strictly being easier? I think discussion of Dark Souls can conflate its punishing difficulty and its almost deliberate player-unfriendliness in terms of UI and knowing what actions are available.)
Elden Ring is also the lesser From Software game. And I do not agree with your assessment of Dark Souls as either punishing or player unfriendly. I deliberately mention Dark Souls because I think it’s the better game.
Without wanting to get into too great a fight here, I don’t find that video offering any seriously compelling arguments. It’s offering, at the very best, a mix and opinions and basic facts of about the game’s design. The video is also making the argument that if you haven’t enjoyed or so far haven’t jumped into the Soulsborne franchise, Elden Ring might be different enough for you to enjoy. Two of their points overlap, one has nothing to with the game’s design at all, and the remainders don’t have arguments as to why the features they’re talking about actually make the game better. In the end, it’s just a list of “things about Elden Ring,” not an actual, critical review and commentary.
Let’s be fair, though: it’s an Outside Xtra list video. It’s not really meant to offer insightful critical review, analysis, or commentary, is it?
I stand by what I said: I don’t think Elden Ring is actually the best Soulsborne offering, I don’t think Dark Souls is player unfriendly or punishing, and I think Dark Souls makes the point better for the example I used it for.
The intention lenses, as vague and blurry as they are, I wonder if there have always been these 5 lenses in your true GM brain or you were forced to identify the lenses for us aspiring GMs and had to solidify the list *a bit* in order to explain it to us. Figuring that, I wonder what previous drafts of “intention lenses list” looked like—what other lenses did you consider sharing with us?
Honestly, about half of what I write is: “can I figure out a way to codify or explain what I do without thinking at the table due to intuition, experience, and judgment”
The second half is: “now that I analyze this, I realize I could be doing this way better if I do this or that or the other”
The third half is: “I really should be doing shit this way because I can see how good it is for a game, but man that’s hard work way and I’m a lazy shit.”