I've decided that I'm going to spend a bit more time ruminating on this to see what I can put together. I want to eventually work toward a more stable foundation so that I can build something workable later. I still like to develop ideas in the format where I start with asking myself a few questions about what I want and how I'm going to implement it, then asking myself questions about what I come up with until I've drawn myself a good starting point.
The first question is what do I want my social mechanic to do?
Just as with any other rule I want it to adjudicate interactions between player characters and the world. In this case social interactions between players and NPCs in that world. Also I have to note for myself that the interactions have to go a bit farther in simulating these interactions and do it well enough to get people to use them over making everything up. I want to make my mechanics intuitive in general but it is especially important in the realm of social interactions since people of all stripes interact a lot with people and might then be less tolerant of things that break away from their perceptions of what social interactions are like.
What do players want?
All players who take time to use any kind of social interaction skill ultimately want who they are interacting with to do or feel a certain thing that they are not already wanting to do or do not currently feel. I'd say a hidden penultimate thing players want is for interactions to 'feel' right. Definitely
THE biggest concern people bring up with every conversation about social mechanics, and whether or not they should even exist, is the idea that someone will be convinced to do something with the
wrong argument. Despite this being the primary concern people talk about with these things it isn't the ultimate thing players want because the flip side of this coin is that they want the
right arguments to succeed. So still, people want to convince people to do things and they want to do it (mostly) with arguments they consider "good".
So there's concern about believability on both sides of the screen. How do you know what people will accept as far as social interactions are concerned?
I don't. I don't think there 'is' a way you could reasonably map out social interactions in a way that could even come close simulating how people interact.
So how are you going to possibly make things believable?
By doing as little as possible. I'm an African American male. This, along with many other factors including but not limited to: my socioeconomic status, philosophical beliefs, and how hungry I am at present will determine how I interact with people from moment to moment. I suspect that other people are equally as complex. I'm not the genius that's going to break the code and be able to understand the META for all human interactions for all of time. This is a game though. So I don't need to. What I need to do is come up with something that is functional first, and second, is flexible enough to bend but not break when people with different perspectives than my own start using it.
But still how am I going to do this? Still, by doing as little as possible. Throughout this thread I get the feeling that the best strategy is to cut corners where I can. I don't need to cover every kind of potential encounter. I've already mentioned that I don't even want to. By cutting down on the instances where these encounters actually involve action on the part of the player I can better focus my energies toward making what's left fun and engaging.
I think my position on what the Bluff skill represents is instructive here.
What is it about bluff that it is important to the whole cutting corners thing?
Context is king and the secondary issue that haunts this topic is one that basically is a difference in perspective. If I ask someone "what is a 'believable' lie?" I'm probably going to get as many different responses as there are people that exist who can even understand that question. One thing that I'm sure is going to be a part of every response is context. Well then I just leave it at that. I don't need to figure out myself. I pass the job of determining what that means to the groups.
What I think my job is from there is to decide how likely 'I' think someone telling a believable lie is to succeed in fooling their mark (sans other modifiers). This might be a little trickier. When I assign a number, a percentage chance, that a believable lie is accepted I am making a decision that has to work for everyone. This will then be compared to every other contextual factor I add. Now maybe, that isn't so bad. If someone thinks a lie is believable, and the table more or less agrees, then having that work often isn't so bad.
What will likely matter more is where I set the numbers for an unbelievable lie. As I said earlier, the thing people are often worried about is someone being convinced with an argument they don't agree with. If this is set too low then you're going to get situations people are going to balk at. So instead I should just set it high. Like probably off the RNG high. If this is what people are worried about (and I am sure they are) just take it off the table as a possibility and thus I don't have to deal with it.
What about if you have a level system or a skill system or some other thing that might put something off the RNG on it?
This is not a universal concern but is one where leveled systems or systems that have a lot of big, growing numbers is concerned. If you want to keep something out of reach of any rolls/bonuses/etc you could make it so that the number is so high that no one could ever reach it but then why would you even include it? You could just say "any attempts at anything unbelievable fail" but that's no good. There are ways you can convince people to believe or at least be curious of things they wouldn't ordinarily believe. There are a lot of ideas that we take for granted now that had to be first imagined by people who believed you could make the seemingly impossible, possible after all. So there needs to be a satisfying way to at least attempt to get someone to believe something that they would ordinarily not believe. Here's where I think just having enough conditional modifiers to lead to a satisfying resolution for this kind of situation.
Reasonably if the person trusts/likes the character enough and/or if they have strong proof of something then it is easier to get someone to at least be open to an idea. The percentage chance of fooling them completely might be still off the table but reasonably you can, in the right circumstances, possibly get someone to receptive to some seemingly crazy notion.
What about people with the big numbers?!
Well I guess I just don't mind it that much if people who are operating at number levels that basically invalidate lower leveled people can pull mind control esque levels of hijinks upon their lessers. This might not be satisfying for people who insist that people at 20th level still be interacting with a 1st level person as if they were equals, just because it's in a social context. To those people I've got nothing much to say. If I am to accept that in this game you can have really big skill numbers that allow you to do the impossible or that are supposed to significantly separate the lowly from the highly skilled then I think it's reasonable to suspect that only the most skilled people should stand to challenge these demi godlike beings.
What if you make enough broad descriptors that give numbers that would invalidate the need to roll?
Just with the introduction of the sky high unbelievable lie TN and the idea that there should be modifiers that make that sky high TN achievable even under a system with a reasonable number of a bonuses provided by skills/attributes I am suggesting that conditional modifiers can pretty much make rolling unnecessary. If you can stack the bonuses/penalties high enough to make rolling unnecessary then wouldn't that mean you should just shoot to get the conditional bonuses instead of relying on your skills?
Yes. And I think that's a good thing. Again I believe that what people penultimately worry about is whether or not the system produces outputs that come from conditions they find acceptable. Reasonably then if the hoops you have to jump through to reliably make a lie work involve actually doing manipulative things (telling a lie in a way that makes it believable, scrounging up fake evidence, and getting a more trusted individual to back the lie) then I believe that's the exact thing I want people doing. If a person that's a less charismatic or a less slick liar is able to match a silver tongued word smith by creating conditions that enable them to compete then that is a good thing. If the silver tongued word smith then does the same thing and thus is able to regain advantage over a competitor then that's good as well and is the game working as intended.
This is all well and good for telling lies but what about the other kinds of social interaction skills?
Firstly I'll probably have similar set ups for attempting to charm and intimidate someone. Some things can probably overlap between these three kind of skills as well. Trust and familiarity can probably effect both charm and bluff. Your social rank or reputation will likely effect your ability to bluff and intimidate (and in some cases charm) a person. They will also probably use conditions and descriptors that are broad enough to fit a slew of things under them like "personal cost of performing favor" which would have the GM weigh what they believe the NPC has to lose from a social interaction and can cover any number of things based off the situation.
Second I will not cover everything.
Dice rolls keep coming up. Is everything going to be dice rolls?
No. There will be dice rolls, don't get me wrong, but I do not think that most things I'm going to deal with are going to be done in a dice roll. I am thinking that social interactions are going to take place on one of four levels.
1: Abstracted and ignored. Things like going to the shopkeeper and haggling is not something I want to cover. I think it's boring. I'll let there be a modifier or something you get from having relevant skills or penalties that change how you're rewarded by other people and let that stand on its own.
2: Brief side encounters: Carousing, maintaining relationships, and other background things will be relegated here where I might have random 'events' happen much like brief random encounters where a roll might be made to determine how well/bad things go but nothing big. Maybe this can happen with haggling so people who really want it to maybe happen in a scene can possibly get their fix but it's not something I'm going to do a lot with. These'll mostly be things I might write on a random encounter table that exist to break up any monotony that may set in during downtime but will be intended to be brief with consequences that are quickly processed. This is also where brief interactions might take place. Distracting a guard, passing a forgery as the real thing, etc. Things that happen in the moment but don't really call for a bigger scene.
3: A full on social encounter. This is going to be when important discussions happen. Arguing in the king's court to try to broker an alliance, interrogating an important suspect during a mystery or investigation, anything that is substantial and important enough for the GM to decide that they want to stat out an NPC for it. This is where you get your social combat minigame.
4: Long term relationship/status/reputation/etc tracking. A lot of social interactions, arguments, debates, etc take place over longer periods of time. People accrue a kind of 'social credit', respect, and other benefits with other people based off of any number of factors. This is probably where I'd do something like have a system where you can leverage your points for favors, gamble them away when you perform certain big social/political maneuvers, and earn more through doing favors, properly investing and trading them between other groups/persons of status so that you ultimately benefit, and things like that. This is littered with its own issues and might do well with some pruning but suffice it to say that I'm going to need some kind of set up for social maneuvering that takes place outside of any one given interaction and point tracking I think is the best way to go.
Now I said four but there's a potential 5th
5: Interparty I might have something that involves players being able to interact with one another within some kind of framework but I'm less sure that this is a good idea. I do think that if I have a clear way for players to lose more serious social encounters as outlined in 3 then it wouldn't be a big leap to allow players to do important social encounters among themselves. This would work well with Grek's Hopes and Fears idea where part of getting over one's fears and developing new hopes can require other party members. I can think of interesting way to have players having to act out the worst sides of their character while others try to help them overcome it in an interparty interaction. There could even be a chance to fail at it and consequences that introduce risk to even trying.
What are you avoiding by doing this?
I want to use this list because I think it's a good lay out of some things you might definitely expect to find in a game that takes talking to people seriously:
kaelik wrote:1) Meeting a stranger, deciding if you fight, team up, or pass each other. This also applies to stumbling in on the dragon in his horde.
2) Negotiating your rewards for quests and/or buying shit at the store.
3) Uh Oh, we doing politics now, convincing the king he should definitely abandon the city or stop cutting down the dryad's trees or whatever. This would also be less Kingy where you convince some not actually extremely political figure to do something they wouldn't otherwise do.
4) Still doing politics, Favor Trading, where you are on some council or working for someone on the council and you fucks are all working towards lots of shared and unshared goals and trading off shit.
5) Convincing a crowd to take your side on some issue with a rousing rhetorical speech and/or manipulating public opinion in some other way by spreading rumors.
6) Interrogating/investigating for information, where you either don't want the person to know you are looking for the info or that it is important to you, or where they do know and don't want you to find out and you have to anyway.
I think this covers a good range of things that I might expect to happen in a game.
1) I don't think I need to cover this. The idea that there needs to be some kind random dice roll to determine how people first interact and I have not seen a convincing argument for why having a dice roll to determine anything upon first meeting a person is at all necessary. I only care about dictating what happens when people start talking to each other.
2)That's something I am looking to turn just into a passive bonus so I don't have to cover it.
3)This is likely going to be one of those actual social combats or at least one of those events that'll require a roll.
4)I'm not sure how deep into political intrigue I'm going to get with my game. It's tempting to go all out on it as there are a lot of interesting adventures that involve starting an organization, a kingdom, and the like. In 2E I think it was pretty much expected that everyone did it by default in some way. If I do it that would be where the social status/currency would come into play.
5)Would be a function of either a one off event or a long term thing for mass public opinion.
6) If this is important then it would definitely qualify for social combat. I think the situation sounds intricate and in this case important enough that the GM probably has the target statted up for it.
That's all I have for the time being. This is mostly a conversation I'm having with myself so nothing is set in stone. I have 'no' idea yet how any of the long term stuff is going to look like in the end. I'll have to compile a list of possible failure points and try to find a way to avoid them at some time in the future.