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.

All right, dumbasses… enough talky-talky bullshit. It’s time to get back to cramming useful, practical advice into your craniums in the desperate hope something might stick in there.

This is the big one. Well, it’s the start of the big one. It’s what the last two bullshit discussions were building toward. Today, I start a three-part monster of a module about Resolving Social Conflict. I know lots of you have been waiting for it. In terms of vitally important things True Game Masters get right, Social Conflict’s second only to combat.

But unlike combat, Social Conflict’s one of those things everyone’s got opinions on. Everyone mostly agrees that handling combat by the book is mostly the best way. Mostly. But people think Social Conflict’s special. It ain’t. It’s just as much part of the game as firing bows, breaking doors, and disarming traps. True Game Masters know that.

The previous discussions were about getting you dumbasses to see that Social Conflict’s just another game challenge. That it works like any other part of the game. Players choose actions, characters take them, mechanics determine the outcomes, and you describe those outcomes. If there’s anyone left who thinks Social Conflict should work differently, I want them out of my damned classroom right frigging now.

Are they gone? Good.

My game plan is to split this Resolving Social Conflict into three parts. This first part — the shortest part — is all about helping you understand what you’re trying to trick the players into thinking is happening. It’s about giving you enough of an understanding of human social conflict that you know how to fake it. There’s gonna be a bunch of real human psychology wrapped up in this shit because, in the end, you’re goal is to shroud your game constructs in a human skin.

But I’ll get to that. First…

Defining Social Interaction

All that nitpicking I did about whether encounters exist and whether they come in different types is going to bite me in the ass here. Because it’s hard for me to explain exactly what I’m talking about today. What, exactly, is a Social Encounter or a Social Interaction or whatever? Even a simple definition like “Social Interactions happen when the player-characters talk to nonplayer-characters” leaves so much shit out.

Is glowering at someone and cracking your knuckles until they run away a Social Interaction?

What about stringing someone along with endless conversation or enrapturing them with a performance so they don’t notice your friends sneaking past with the stolen jade idol?

That’s the problem with trying to draw bright lines around shit. You end up arguing uselessly about where the lines are and what belongs inside them. Even now, I guarantee some asshole somewhere is typing out a comment about why distracting performances totally are — or totally are not — social interactions for reasons. And they ain’t going to garner a useful response. Hell, they might never even get posted depending on my mood during tomorrow’s moderation pass.

The point is, I ain’t trapping myself by trying to define anything. I ain’t even going to say something simple and safe like “Social Interactions occur when the player-characters try to influence the thoughts or behaviors of nonplayer-characters.” I’m just gonna say “Social Interactions are things that look like Social Interactions.”

Social Actions

At the heart of Social Interactions are Social Actions. Those are the actions player-characters take to influence nonplayer-character thoughts and behaviors. And most are easy to handle.

Social Actions start with a player declaring they’re taking such an action. Either the player describes the action — “Cabe threatens the regent with his knives to get him to talk” — or they speak as their character — “Look, Regent, you’re alone and unprotected and I’ve got a bunch of knives on my belt. So either you start talking or I’ll show you everything my fisherman father taught me about cleaning the catch of the day. And you’re the catch. Understand?”

Next, the Game Master uses the game’s mechanics to determine the outcome. Whether there’s a die roll involved or not — “roll a Charisma (Intimidation) check” — is down to action adjudication. But True Game Masters remember “players choose; characters act” and thus make sure the character’s skills and abilities figure into the outcome. And thus, even if they choose not to call for a die roll, they’re still considering the numbers as much as anything else.

Finally, the Game Master describes the outcome. Either the Game Master describes the non- player-character’s actions — “the regent is visibly shaken by your threat and lays out what happened. He explains…” — or else he acts as the character — “I… I… I never meant for things to go this far. It got out of control. It started when I was approached…”

But I ain’t explaining today how to adjudicate or describe the outcomes of Social Actions. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have two other lessons to share. Today, I want to explain a few things about the nature of Social Conflict. Which True Game Masters absolutely must understand.

Understanding What Makes People Tick

True Game Masters don’t roleplay. True Game Masters understand that the only reason the regent’s not telling the player-characters what they want to know is because games need challenges and obstacles and the regent is one of them. The regent is a treasure chest with a social-shaped lock and the information is the treasure. The regent is a dragon with a social breath weapon and the information is the dragon hoard. And the regent can’t just roll over the second the player-characters resort to threats for the same reason that declaring an intent to pick a lock ain’t enough to open the chest.

True Game Masters also understand they need to cake the game in an illusion that it’s a world. That the game’s world behaves like a world should and that its inhabitants could be real, relatable people. The game constructs have to behave plausibly or the whole thing breaks down.

You’ve got to understand how Social Conflict works so you can properly adjudicate actions and describe the results. Most Game Masters don’t get Social Conflict and thus they can’t ever imagine how bribes and threats could ever fail. What reasonable person would refuse a big-enough bribe or a scary-enough threat? Why would a person refuse any reasonable bargain at all?

Thus, when it’s time to decide whether a Social Action can succeed and whether it can fail, most Game Masters can’t see the possibilities. And when the mechanics lead to an outcome they can’t fathom, such Game Masters can’t portray that shit as a totally reasonable thing any human-type being might do.

That’s why I’m wasting time explaining some of the deeper aspects of human social nature. So that you’ve got a rich tapestry of possibilities to draw on when you have to adjudicate Social Actions and describe their outcomes. And for no other reason than that.

When Interaction Becomes Conflict

Player characters engage in lots of Social Interactions, but most are easy to handle. When the characters buy shit at a shop or ask directions to an inn, you don’t need any die rolling. You don’t even need to play out any kind of back-and-forth, though True Game Masters briefly play out a few such scenes every now and then for reasons. It’s those simple Social Interactions that convince Mere Game Executors that their job’s to roleplay nonplayer characters and make the choices those NPCs would make.

The reason those scenes don’t need any game mechanical complexity isn’t that the Game Master can just play the nonplayer character. It’s the lack of conflict.

Social Conflict is just conflict the players choose to resolve through Social Action. Which, by the way, is why you don’t design Social Encounters. You design Encounters and the players choose whether to resolve them through combat, stealth, investigation, interaction, or whatever. The players’ choices are sometimes limited by in-game circumstances — if the orcs ambush and attack, the players are kind of stuck dealing with a fight and if the players are on a city street, the laws, norms, and armed protectors of civilized society limit their ability to act — but they can still try to resolve the Encounter however they wish. They just have to live with the consequences.

And also, you don’t design Encounters at all because you’re a Game Master and not a Scenario Designer.

Anyway…

Conflict arises when the involved parties have incompatible desires, motivations, and goals. When what one party wants threatens what another party wants.

Most Mere Game Executors — at least the ones who’ve been reading my crap for a few years — understand that shit now. And while they can’t always explain why every conflict’s happening — because they have no idea what’s going on in their idiot players’ brain-boxes — they do at least know why the opposition is opposing things. Even Mere Game Executors know what the nonplayer character — or the trap or the natural hazard or the supernatural entity or the natural force — is trying to accomplish.

True Game Masters, though, don’t stop there. They know that Social Conflict doesn’t just arise from incompatible goals, desires, beliefs, and motivations. In fact, they know Social Conflicts can arise even when the two parties’ goals are totally compatible. And, thus, they also know why someone might refuse a bribe or obstruct someone threatening to gut them like a fish.

The Head Does What the Heart Wills

Social Conflict is rarely driven by incompatible goals alone. Hell, it can arise even when the participants’ goals are totally compatible. And that’s because the human brain isn’t really goal-oriented or logic-driven. It’s all about feelings. And when it comes to Social Conflict, certain feelings tend to take center stage.

Risk and Loss Aversion

People are tremendously risk and loss averse. That is to say, people don’t like to lose out on things. And they don’t like to risk losing out on things. Risk and loss aversion are pretty much the biggest drivers of human action that exist. Which is why the strongest emotions in the human heart are fear and anger. Fear is how you avoid risk and loss and anger is how you prevent or punish risk and loss.

Most people are angry cowards. I ain’t saying that’s a good thing. I ain’t saying you should embrace it. But I also ain’t saying it’s a bad thing. I’m not making any kind of moral statement here. I’m just saying the vast, vast, vast majority of people make most of their choices based on avoiding risk and loss even when the potential gains are more valuable than whatever they’re risking.

As a side note, the human brain does not distinguish between mental stress and literal threats to its life and safety. This is why more human beings on Earth fear public speaking than death. Because human brains can’t tell temporary humiliation from actual, literal dismemberment.

Mood

Once you get past risk and loss aversion, the next strongest influence on human choices is mood. That is, temporary emotional state. All else being equal, people in a bad mood tend to be more obstructive even when acquiescence would cost them nothing. And people in a good mood are more willing to suffer losses and take risks to help others. In general anyway. I mean, I am not going to go into self-destructive habits as a response to pain or into risk homeostasis here. This is just a broad overview.

Rapport

Beyond risk and loss aversion and mood, most people make choices based on how they feel about who they’re interacting with. You’re more likely to help out people you like and more likely to obstruct people you don’t. And this extends to people you see as part of your community. Psychologists call this in-group bias. If you see someone as on your team, you’re more inclined to trust, listen to, and be persuaded by them. People are forever positioning themselves in terms of the teams they’re on. It’s a necessary survival tool.

The point is, all else being equal, we help who we like and obstruct who we don’t. And if we don’t know the person, we use everything we can perceive about the person to decide whether we’re supposed to like them or not.

Personality and Temperament

Personality is one-part predisposition toward certain moods and behaviors and one-part habitual emotional state. That is, if your mood is your temporary emotional state, your personality is your default or long-term emotional state, and how your emotional state responds to external influences.

Some people are angry today, but others are always angry. Some people are feeling kind today, and others are always generous.

This personality shit can get really complicated really fast. That’s because, first, all of the shit I mentioned above can override your personality and temperament. Kind, generous people can have bad days and mistreat people in their pain and anger. Ornery people can offer kindness to someone they feel connected to. And fear and anger can short-circuit everything.

Second, though, there’s a feedback-loop aspect to all this shit. Some people, for example, have emotionally reactive personalities, and their behaviors are thus more affected by their temporary mood and by their risk and loss aversion. Others are more resilient and so their baseline personality tends not to get overridden by other factors. Hell, there are even people who have negative risk aversion and actually seek out risks.

This shit gets really complicated really fast. And to a greater or lesser extent we really, truly still don’t understand human behavior nearly as well as the psychologists want us to think.

Actual Motivations, Desires, and Goals

At the very bottom of the list, after you get through all the survival-oriented aversions to pain, loss, and risk; all the emotional judgment-clouding; and all the relationships, real and hypothetical; you finally get down to people actually trying to get what they want. Most people’s actual desires and motivations are overridden a lot of the time by their fears, anger, moods, and dispositions. Sad but true. People strive to be good people but, when confronted with adversity, they fall short. People want this or that goal, but when forced to make sacrifices or take risks to get it, loss and risk aversion kick in and they choose instant gratification and pain avoidance instead.

And Then There’s Trust

By itself, Trust doesn’t drive Social Conflict, but it does underlie pretty much every Social Interaction every human engages in.

See, humans can’t predict the future. And they can’t see what other humans are thinking. So, humans are stuck having to Trust each other. When one human says how they’re feeling, other humans have to Trust that they’re not hiding ulterior motives. When one human promises to do something as part of an exchange, other humans have to trust that they will follow through. And they have to Trust that the thing they’re exchanging is actually as advertised. And, strange as it sounds, when one human makes threats, other humans have to believe they are willing and able to carry out the threat.

Humans also have to trust the collective of human society to keep them safe and protect their property and enforce their laws just to walk around unarmed and leave their property or loved ones unguarded.

Though it’s rarely appreciated, every Social Interaction has an underlying poker game where each party is trying to decide whether to take the other at face value or whether they’re bluffing and whether they should call the bluff or counterbluff to get the upper hand.

Never thought about it like that, did you? But it’s true.

Understanding Nonplayer Characters

That short little tour of the human social psyche should be enough to convince you that people are really, really complicated and that Social Conflict isn’t driven by incompatible desires alone. And sometimes not at all. So what do you do with that? Do True Game Masters actually understand every aspect of a nonplayer character’s mental state and use that crap to guide the NPC’s actions?

Actually yes. A little. But also no. And also, you’re a dumbass.

Remember that Game Masters don’t decide what nonplayer characters do. Nonplayer characters take the actions they take because they’re game constructs and not thinking, feeling human characters. Game Masters have to make those actions look like the sort of things that thinking, feeling human characters would do. Even when they seem totally outlandish.

Basically, all that crap above is just a whole slew of excuses you can use to explain whatever bonkers action the game mechanics force your nonplayer characters to take. And, as I’m gonna show you in the third lesson, those excuses help True Game Masters trick their players into thinking their game constructs are more human than anything they could ever roleplay.

Consider that regent refusing to give up incriminating information when threatened with torture. Why might he do that? Look over everything I explained above and see if you can come up with a few reasons. Seriously. Pause the article and come up with three to five answers. Then unpause and keep reading.

Maybe the regent doesn’t believe Cabe will actually carry out the threat. He thinks Cabe’s bluffing. Maybe it’s because the regent trusts society enough to think it keeps him safe. That, whatever threats Cabe makes, he’ll back down under the threat of being branded an outlaw or a criminal or whatever.

Maybe the regent’s so afraid of what will happen to him if he reveals the information, he’s willing to risk the threat. Especially if he’s sure the threat’s a bluff anyway.

Maybe he sees Cabe as an enemy. Cabe’s not on his side so he’s willing to stonewall, especially if he thinks Cabe’s bluffing and that the law’s actually on the regent’s side.

It’s especially useful here to remember nothing’s true about a nonplayer character until it’s happened at the table. And this exercise — turning game-mechanical outcomes into plausible human reactions — defines — and therefore reveals — heretofore unknown aspects of the character. Maybe you didn’t write the regent as a zealous idealist willing to risk himself in pursuit of the greater good and willing to suffer for the cause, but that’s who he becomes when the Intimidation check fails. Or maybe he’s revealed to be so afraid of losing his status and position and so full of anger that he’s willing to sneer at an armed thug threatening him in the desperate hope the thug is bluffing.

Whereas a Mere Game Executor thinking only in terms of rational motivations might never even ask Chris to make a die roll — because no rational person would stand up to a murderhobo with a knife — a True Game Master that errs on the side of allowing a die roll and then explains it terms of human psychology ends up with a much richer, much deeper, and much more human character.

And eventually, I’ll teach you how to bring that character to life. For now, I’m just trying to get you to see the possibilities.

Not with a Bang, But a Whimper

I could quit now and — assuming you retained any of this shit — I’d consider this lesson a job well done. But given I’m trying to provide a useful overview of human Social Conflict and trying to unteach you all the stupid shit all you Game Masters know about Social Interaction, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss how Social Conflicts end. Because lots of you — especially you Mere Game Executors — think it’s all about the party completely shifting the nonplayer characters to their side.

That ain’t how it works.

People just don’t change their beliefs and give up their desires after one impassioned speech. And, if they do, it never sticks for long. Social Conflicts rarely end with someone saying, “You were right; I was wrong. I’m on your side now.”

Fortunately, few Social Conflicts in tabletop roleplaying games are actually about changing hearts and minds. Instead, the players walk into Social Conflicts trying to get specific somethings out of the nonplayer character in question. They want a thing or they want some information or they want the nonplayer character to take an action.

In short, the goal’s not agreement or belief or persuasion, it’s action.

As such, there are five four ways Social Conflicts might end.

Retreat

Retreat occurs when the initiator of the conflict — in TTRPGs, that’s the player-characters — retreat occurs when the player-characters walk away with nothing. They didn’t sway the other party to action. They lost. They failed.

This is a totally common, totally acceptable outcome. Except it never happens. Why? Because it requires the players to admit and accept their loss and walk away. Which they never, ever fucking do. Fortunately, in a later lesson, I’ll tell you how to make your players do just that.

Compromise

Compromise occurs when the player-characters accept something less than they wanted. Or else, they pay a very high price for what they get. And keep in mind I’m describing these outcomes specifically from the player-characters perspectives in tabletop roleplaying games here rather than talking about real-life compromise. In tabletop roleplaying games, the player-characters are almost always the initiators of Social Conflicts and it’s almost always the nonplayer-characters that have the things the player-characters want.

Because, again, nonplayer characters are basically just treasure chests with social-shaped padlocks.

Exchange

Exchanges occur when the parties in a Social Conflict agree to something they both perceive as a — mostly — even trade. The player-characters get what they want, but they also pay for it. They might pay with a favor or with money or with a promise; the cost doesn’t matter.

What most gamers — on either side of the screen — fail to realize is that this kind of even exchange is the default success state for most Social Conflicts. Remember this for later: most Social Conflicts aren’t about winning people over, they’re about settling on a price. And since you now know about Loss Aversion and how the human mind sees mental stress as a threat to life and limb, you understand why most Social Conflicts have to end with some kind of trade.

Right?

Conversion

Conversion is a chimerical outcome spoken of in legends wherein nonplayer characters willfully give the player-characters what they want without receiving anything they, themselves, want in trade. And the reason for my amusingly facetious tone is that most gamers — Masters and players alike — think this shit’s what a successful Social Conflict resolution looks like. Because they’re delusional. And that’s why most Game Masters suck at running Social Conflict and most players suck at playing them. But that’s a story for another time.

I ain’t saying it’s impossible to reach a total Conversion through Social Interaction, it’s just exceedingly rare for humans to get there without leaning heavily on threats and deception. This, by the way, is what makes threats and deception useful, but also what makes them so nasty. They basically amount to Social Robbery.

In Next Week’s Episode…

I know I started this off with a promise to get back to useful, practical advice and then I bullshitted my way through a glorified — and incomplete — overview of the human social psyche, and now I’m signing off with a promise to do something with it next time, but…

… but I have no idea how to finish that sentence. That’s what I did. And I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry because most people — not just gamers, people — have a piss-poor practical understanding of human social interaction. And a lot of it’s down to self-delusion. We all want to think we’re more rational and less emotional than we are. We’re all wrong.

This shouldn’t be a problem for Game Masters. After all, you can run a perfectly okay combat or lockpicking challenge without ever having been in a fight or having been a bonded locksmith’s apprentice. But, despite my insistence that Social Interactions aren’t different, they are. And that’s down to the nature of tabletop roleplaying games.

Most gamers find it totally unsatisfying to gloss over Social Interactions with dice rolls and abstractions as we do with combat. Partly, that’s because the game’s one big Social Interaction anyway so it’d be totally weird to bury the one thing the game can actually simulate beneath a bunch of abstract mechanics. But mostly — and most importantly — it’s because Social Interaction is the most humanizing thing there is. We learn almost everything we know about others — and about ourselves — through Social Interaction. Thus, Social Interaction humanizes the game’s world. It brings the world to life.

And that is why it’s worth mastering. And why it’s worth my writing three frigging lessons.