[3.X] Diplomacy Hack: Reaction Rolls (PL, please stay out)

[Voss]

I can't figure out how this is suppose to make any sense at all, to be honest. There is an 8.33% chance that travelling merchants, guard patrols, travelers and couriers are just going to flat out try to murder passers-by, for no apparent reason.

What are your actual goals and expectations with this?

[tussock]

@Voss, if you're thinking it's ludicrous for someone to ever inspire combat, they have +2 or more on you. So merchants, Guards!, travellers[citation needed], and couriers all have at least +2.

The tax collector, OTOH, will just occasionally get run out of town by force (which is why he has Guards!). Adventurers may get similar treatment in places that aren't a fan of superpowered murder-hobos.

[virgil]

Tussock has the right idea for what kind of scenarios would cause that, essentially. However, it's not a huge concern for modelling NPCvsNPC reactions, because it's not good at doing so. The system requires a passive, quantum superposition of their backstory to decide how to react while the other side is a known factor that can preemptively decide important stuff like whether or not they treat people friendly.

By definition, these rules require PC input to function and cannot work for pure NPC interactions without empowering only one side with free will.

[hogarth]

I can't figure out how this is suppose to make any sense at all, to be honest. There is an 8.33% chance that travelling merchants, guard patrols, travelers and couriers are just going to flat out try to murder passers-by, for no apparent reason.

Personally, I have fewer problems with friends randomly hating the PCs at first sight than with enemies randomly loving the PCs at first sight. Maybe that just makes me a pessimist.

What are your actual goals and expectations with this?

The goal seems fairly clear: to add more variation to encounters with NPCs and to make them seem less foreordained. The issue I have is that it seems to sacrifice realism; all things being equal, I just don't think there is much variation in a person's reaction at first sight. To rephrase an example I used in one of Frank's "reaction roll" threads, if I entered a room with 36 people in identical gorilla costumes, my instant reaction would not be to say "I hate 6 gorillas, I feel negatively towards 15 gorillas, I feel neutral towards 14 gorillas and I love 1 gorilla".

[Starmaker]

I can't figure out how this is suppose to make any sense at all, to be honest. There is an 8.33% chance that travelling merchants, guard patrols, travelers and couriers are just going to flat out try to murder passers-by, for no apparent reason.

Personally, I have fewer problems with friends randomly hating the PCs at first sight than with enemies randomly loving the PCs at first sight. Maybe that just makes me a pessimist.

I am of the opposite opinion. When an enemy is randomly friendly, the PCs can still attack him ot I can always write up more enemies, but an established friend is an investment on part of the PCs, and taking that investment away is a dick move.

[Hicks]

Whenever you first encounter a creature, make a reaction roll

The whole "Friends turning on you" thing is not a part of this reaction roll system.

[hogarth]

The whole "Friends turning on you" thing is not a part of this reaction roll system.

"Friend" and "enemy" was probably a poor choice of words. I should have said "member of Team Good Guy" and "member of Team Bad Guy" or something like that.

[Omegonthesane]

Whenever you first encounter a creature, make a reaction roll

The whole "Friends turning on you" thing is not a part of this reaction roll system.

Past Experiences How you treat someone will influence future behavior, for obvious reasons.

• Nemesis: -4
• Violent Past, Asshole Neighbor: -2
• Stranger, Acquaintance: +0
• Friendly Past, Good Neighbor: +2
• Comrade, Boss, Shag Buddy: +4

Your friends are on a +4 before other factors, +6 if you assume that friends of yours are generally on your own side. (This is not always the case - Ygritte is Jon Snow's Shag Buddy (+4) but also part of an Unfriendly, Hostile faction (-2) so could roll ATTAAACK! if he approaches with swords drawn or in unsafe lands.)

[Hicks]

Ok, that was primarily for Starmaker who was talking about established allies flipping out, but even "other dudes on team hero who you have now first encountered" will still sometimes try to stab you in the face for reasons: mistaken identity, fog of war, mind control, racism, hidden mole assassin, seeking assisted suicide, whatever.

The biggest thing this reaction system needs is a chart tying it to level: opponents that are outclassed should talk more and jump on your sword less, while opponents that outclassed the PCs need to be more indifferent of those who can't hurt them instead of insta-killing the party.

And a NPC morale system tacked on after to let opponents that are outmatched cower in fear or run away.

[Voss]

Tussock has the right idea for what kind of scenarios would cause that, essentially. However, it's not a huge concern for modelling NPCvsNPC reactions, because it's not good at doing so. The system requires a passive, quantum superposition of their backstory to decide how to react while the other side is a known factor that can preemptively decide important stuff like whether or not they treat people friendly.

By definition, these rules require PC input to function and cannot work for pure NPC interactions without empowering only one side with free will.

That doesn't really change anything. Even if you're only reacting to PCs, as written, you still have random travelers hauling off and attacking the PCs for no reason regardless of who or what they are, or how well armed they or the PCs are.

This is really a step backwards to random Gygaxian bullshit because Tables Make it So.

[virgil]

Uhmm, it specifically takes into account who they and the PCs are, so that parts wrong. While we're at it, the party won't get attacked by normal people if they do a simple wave hello when they pass by to get the Friendly entrance modifier.

Again, the reason is decided retroactively; so why they attack is up to you. If it's truly for no reason, that's a failure of imagination on your part.

[PhoneLobster]

Uhmm, it specifically takes into account who they and the PCs are

Here is the thing. You get to choose ONE of two routes to go with this mechanic and defending it against the "this is fucking stupid" criticism.

1) Yes. It generates fucking stupid results
Friendly faction people attack each other at random on a regular basis, enemy faction dudes are randomly your best buds. Up is down, down is up and only a dice roll makes this decision.

2) No. It uses arbitrary situational modifiers to remove the random generation of stupid results
Aaaaand you've just rendered the entire fucking mechanic irrelevant. Because the whole fucking point was to add "variation" and remove "pre-ordained" decisions about who was or wasn't friendly. If your "friendly Faction" modifiers and such are big enough to ensure stupid results don't happen... then that means you are BACK to a situation where the GM is in fact just deciding which encounters are friendly or not.

Only you now have a complex bullshit mechanic added to the system and some mid range of random insanity to deal with.

Honestly. At that point a FAR superior mechanic is "GM decides if encounter starts friendly or enemy, and if he can't decide instead of using this bullshit mechanic with various modifiers he just fucking flips a coin".

[tussock]

@Virgil, it seems people may read your tables more generously if the default roll is against local guildsmen and questgivers rather than potentially hostile "neutrals". Perhaps shift the targets down 4 points and say you need a negative number to generate combat, then make sure all your negative modifiers should at least produce some reasonable quantity of hostility.


@PL, the middle ground is where someone at work isn't going to hit you, but maybe they're having a bad day and will make it clear they want you to fuck off and leave them alone for a while. Or where there's a desperate mugger, but he's still building his courage and decides to wait.

Which is to say, you know who this person is, but not their current state of mind.

[PhoneLobster]

@PL, the middle ground is where someone at work isn't going to hit you, but maybe they're having a bad day and will make it clear they want you to fuck off and leave them alone for a while. Or where there's a desperate mugger, but he's still building his courage and decides to wait.

Which is to say, you know who this person is, but not their current state of mind.

No. That is bug fuck crazy.

This is a mechanic supposedly intended to deliver a fucking gaming outcome, to generate variance in encounters, and potentially to very VERY badly objectively measure and reward the way players handle meet and greets. It is NOT there to act as an accurate simulator of internal angst and uncertainty in accurately simulated minds of fictional fucking people.

How many times do people need to be reminded? This is fucking Game Design not a fucking reality simulation. Stop being so delusional, it makes your ideas crazy.

[PhoneLobster]

AND ANOTHER THING...

Looking at it as if this were ever a sane proposition the ideal mechanic is actually an unmodified roll on a table of potential outcomes only used when the GM can't just fucking make his mind up.

And while an argument could be made for modifiers on the basis of excluding potential results it is a VERY poor argument because it would actually be better as a mechanic if you skipped out the middle man and JUST excluded the results the GM had managed to make a decision on ruling out based on the context.

Because the weightings involved are not purely binary in nature. You might want to rule out super friendly, you might want to rule out super angry, but you ALSO might want to rule out both of those things. And any modifier based roll pretty much fails at that.

[Grek]

ITT: Phone Lobster gets pissy about diplomacy just like he does in every other diplomacy thread.

[PhoneLobster]

ITT: Phone Lobster gets pissy about diplomacy just like he does in every other diplomacy thread.

How dare I criticize a really terrible idea implemented in a really terrible way then defended in a really terrible way from really basic criticism.

I guess I shouldn't do that I guess you actually think this would be a better place if we all pretended Virgil's idea isn't really stupid.

Or I dunno. Do you have ANYTHING positive to say about this mechanic?

[Grek]

It's not a bad system. That's the problem. Your "criticism" of it is that any diplomacy system has to either be random or use modifiers and that random is bad because it's random and modifiers are bad because it isn't random. The problem isn't that the system is bad, it's that you're an impossible to please twat.

[MGuy]

Now I've grown accustomed to PL going ballistic at shit but I agree with him here. There is no conceivable benefit to going through these extra steps to determine how NPCs react to the PCs. The difficulty you'd go through with making sure you cut out the massive amount of stupid crap that keeps being brought up (in this very thread no less) is not even worth it when just letting the GM make it up works just as well if not better since you don't have to jump through extra hoops to do it. If you just want random then you indeed have to accept that shit that people won't like will happen because that's part of randomness.

Now you can curtail some of the seemingly more retarded results (since no one is gonna want to have to rationalize and act upon ever stupid result) as much as you can but seriously by the time you're done then you'll make it so that the GM can and will warp the possible results so that results that GM doesn't want to happen will be nigh impossible. GMs will undoubtedly do this unless they straight up do not care about the results of the interaction which, if that is the case, they will most likely skip over it anyway (which has been the bandaid offered for the system to also curtail stupid results). What possible boon could you be possibly looking to get from this that would be better than just letting the GM decide in the first place?

[Username17]

What possible boon could you be possibly looking to get from this that would be better than just letting the GM decide in the first place?

Obviously, you're going to have to jigger the numerical inputs, but once you've done that you have a functional diplomacy system that allows people to wander around in the wilderness and diplomacize creatures they meet.

"GM Decides" is not a functional diplomacy system, it's the absence of a diplomacy system. When the GM decides, your numbers on your character sheet don't decide. And that means that you can't play a diplomancer, only the GM's girlfriend can play a diplomancer.

If you wanted to go the full monte, take Charisma stats off character sheets entirely and give players no option to sink skill points into Diplomacy or Etiquette or any of that shit and go full freeform - that's fine. But as long as characters have numbers on their sheet that says how good they are at diplomacy and the players actually pay things to get those numbers, that's not acceptable.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

It's not a bad system.

How?

What does it do that helps... anything... in anyway? It adds complexity and goes NOWHERE. It alternatively generates stupid results, or goes the long way round of accumulating purely arbitrary bonuses until it bypasses itself entirely to make it's complexity utterly irrelevant to the results.

Like MGuy just said. What is the damn point of this mechanic? What is so good that it should be included. How is it actually better than just arbitrarily deciding NPC attitudes.

I want to see a "Why?" for this mechanic then I want to see a "How this specific mechanic achieves that" I'm not accepting "but the problem is it's actually just good in an unspecified way!" as an answer. That's a dumb answer. What is this thing even supposed to be doing here?

[PhoneLobster]

you have a functional diplomacy system

This isn't a functional diplomacy system. It is a fragment of a failed concept lifted from failed 2E or earlier D&D.

A reaction mechanic is NOT a functional diplomacy system. At best it is a very strange and non-productive way of setting up your diplomacy encounters (or the diplomatic aspect of your encounters).

What OTHER parts of encounter set up look like this mechanic? What do you even roll to determine opponent strength or type for encounters? At BEST you might be using an archaic "random encounter table" and that sure as hell doesn't look like this kind of mechanic.

This is not a productive or efficient way of setting up encounters or running games. It is not used in any other aspect of game play why the fuck would you use it here and pretend you were laying the foundations of ANYTHING functional (with might I add, no actual explanation of where the hell this supposedly goes next).

edit: In fact. I'm going to take a moment to call bullshit on this INCREDIBLE claim that this is required for a functional basis of a numeric diplomacy mechanic and anything else means throwing out charisma and everything else thing.

This proposed mechanic generates only four possible outcomes.

ONLY FOUR. And they are generic. And simple. And are all outcomes that can and should be expected in a very wide range of situations and at all levels of play.

Any system built on those only four outcomes as a foundation MUST assume that any encounter at any level could begin in any of those four states. The rest of the system in fact has to not particularly care which state is generated by this mechanic in order for the rest of the system to then function.

IF you could build a functional diplomacy system that takes the inputs from this "mechanic" as it's foundation you actually literally could swap this mechanic for "GM says so" and the rest of the system would not even notice.

Indeed the fact that you can, with far more box ticking and adding up than should reasonably be required actually bypass this mechanic as is as part of the actual proposal... yeah even WITHIN this proposal "GM says so" IS regularly the foundation that any further diplomacy mechanic WOULD in fact be built on.

So what the fuck crack is Frank smoking here?

[Username17]

What OTHER parts of encounter set up look like this mechanic?

Spot versus Hide. Or really, any surprise metric you care to name in any edition of any game ever. You roll dice to determine whether you have or get to act in a combat encounter, why the fuck wouldn't you roll dice to determine whether you have or get to act in a diplomatic encounter?

If it wouldn't be OK for the GM to roll zero dice and simply "decide" that you get surprised and attacked by bugbears without being able to defend yourself, why would it be OK for the GM to roll zero dice and simply "decide" that the bugbears are irrevocably hostile and you don't get to parlay? It's exactly the same denial of agency and nearly every game system written has a mechanic for dealing with the first issue, precisely because it's so obviously necessary and so blatantly unfair to handle it via "GM Decides."

-Username17

[Grek]

There's a number of advantages:

First and foremost, having a social system means that you have a social system. It means having a framework that other parts of the game can point to when they do social effects. Can you Intimidate someone and then use Diplomacy on them to cumulative effect? What about Charm Person and then Diplomacy? Charm Person and then Intimidate? What happens if you try to disguise yourself as someone more intimidating than you are? With a mechanical system in place, there can not only be answers to these questions, but implicit answers that arise from the base system in a well-defined way rather than special cases spelled out in each individual spell and effect that start working weirder and stupider as you pile in options written by more people. The rest of those specific effects need to be spelled out, of course, but that isn't any sort of insurmountable obstacle.

Secondly, the fact that there's a social system implies that there are social numbers. And having social numbers lets you have a degree of nuance and granularity beyond what you get by having the GM pick a one word description like "hostile" or "indifferent" off a list of five possibilities. In the current situation, an ability that makes people like you needs to be either vague and non-mechanical (ie. "Dwarves are more likely to be friendly to the 2nd level Dwarfbrother.") or too broad (ie. "Dwarves will always start out as at least friendly to the 2nd level Dwarfbrother."). If you have a system in place, you can just fucking say "The 2nd level Dwarfbrother gets +2 to Reaction Rolls with dwarves.". It isn't vague (you know exactly how much more likely the dwarves are to be friendly; +2 on your 2d6 roll more friendly) and it isn't excessively broad (some knowable number of dwarves will be suspicious or indifferent rather than all uniformly friendly).

Thirdly, it informs the players of probable consequences of their actions in a way that doesn't involve reading the GM's mind. Having it say "keeping your weapons out is -2 to all interaction rolls" in the rules is a hell of a lot less ambiguous than having it say "whether the PCs have their weapons out or not is something the GM should consider when deciding if an encounter is hostile". When the players know how big of an effect a given action will have on their social interactions, they can balance it against other concerns (like wanting your weapons out of you suddenly get attacked by ninjas) instead of balancing those concerns against "maybe the GM will screw for this, or maybe he won't care."

[PhoneLobster]

Spot versus Hide.

Bzzzt. Wrong.

Spot vs Hide is the equivalent of the bit of this system that hasn't been written yet. It's the actual attempt to execute some diplomacy AFTER you have gone through this proposed mechanic.

The equivalent in spot vs hide would be a random weighted table of how sneaky the NPCs are feeling and whether they are open to even considering attempting an ambush or not. With four possible outcomes and seventeen different modifiers just in the brief draft version.