PhoneLobster wrote:Your premise and point 6 seem to suggest to me you've got a rather odd idea of very permanent deeply irreversible (without specific special healing experts) social defeat states. My old "to the social death stuff" was never really about social-perma-death, it was basically just about acknowledging that either a complex minigame or something that is supposed to be a viable combat strategy needs to offer rewards on the scale of defeating opponents.
I should clarify - by social death / minion-izing, I didn't mean that the social rules themselves would declare such a state. It's just in the same way that Dominate Person effectively has "Duration: Until you forget to maintain it" - if someone can make you a minion for a while, that gives them a much stronger position to keep you as a minion forever.
Likewise, by social maiming, I meant something like -
Bob's whole thing is hating slavery and working to eradicate it everywhere he goes. Then he loses a social combat to some Guild operatives, and is convinced to help capture some slaves that would have escaped and then give a speech about how people shouldn't fight authority.
Not impossible to come back from, and the player might think it's a great plot twist to launch a redemption story. Or they might think it sucks and not want to play the character anymore. Much like losing an arm, hence the name.
In theory if you are keeping social abilities in line with level progression like that your physical body guards pretty much ARE your social ones, you would either need some ability to socially specialize and/or contextual external pressures like a society frowning on bringing your physical body guards to social events, but fine with you bringing your social specialist side kicks instead.
I was thinking of NPCs, often not as well-rounded as PCs, defense-wise. Personally, I don't mind the idea of social bodyguards anyway; it's odd, but not negative.
Point 2 is not a big deal and there actually SHOULD be contexts where you throw a social attack/action and the opponents respond by fleeing or yelling "how dare you, kill them all!", as long as those are not the ONLY outcomes. The reality is you DO want social to physical combat transitions to be a thing as much as you want the reverse to be possible.
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As long as lower stakes interactions can exist, then with an appropriate clear transition between "dangerous" social actions and trivial everyday ones town does not need to be a Darwinian social death trap of endless high stakes social actions only. Most interactions are made with regular low stakes options under the assumption that no party wants to risk social or physical consequences or retaliation if they think they can get what they want without pulling out their "high stakes" social actions.
It sounds like you're talking about a system where there are different levels of social interaction, and it's apparent IC when someone changes the level. That improves things quite a bit. In that, I think there would still be some odd results, but not inherently stupid ones.
In the experiment, I was thinking of the more extreme form, where any negotiation at all went straight into no-limits social combat.
