[Domain TTRPG] Trust, Resource, Faith

[deaddmwalking]

So in a fantasy world where you leave home and begin adventuring, how long can you be away from home before your mother stops loving you?

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I don't think this thread is the place to discus Trust Decay mechanics.

Or any mechanics other than whatever the hell it is the OP was trying to describe.

If the poster who proposed it is a real boy and not made of AI wood then I suggest so as not to derail this thread, and also so as to avoid the baggage of the proposed nonsense here, that they propose their Trust Decay mechanic, ideally with some sort of relevant description of what the Trust mechanic is that is Decaying in a new fresh thread fit for purpose and not opening with a yawning pit of incomplete insanity.

I will not quote or name drop as my first cunning riddle to test if they are really human. Because. Well. Yeah.

[silver877]

Let's not hijack this thread with Trust Decay mechanics. If you're serious about proposing it, start a new thread and give us a clear explanation of what you're working with. And I'm curious to see if you can pass the 'human test' without quoting or name-dropping.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Way to fail that test in more than one way at once.

[Foxwarrior]

Let's not hijack this thread with Trust Decay mechanics. If you're serious about proposing it, start a new thread and give us a clear explanation of what you're working with. And I'm curious to see if you can pass the 'human test' without quoting or name-dropping.

Great job, PhoneLobster.

[PseudoStupidity]

Awww man, another new poster could turn out to be a bot?

Case for being a bot:
Formulaic name
Low signal to noise ratio
Copies posts above it with some regularity
Bot grammar

Case for being a human:
Low sample size of posts
Pretending to be a bot could be funny?

Who the fuck is training bots on TGD, and why would anyone do that? We've got posts from people like shadzar, shitmuffin, and Tussock; your LLM will be ruined by their cursed texts.

[deaddmwalking]

Who the fuck is training bots on TGD, and why would anyone do that? We've got posts from people like shadzar, shitmuffin, and Tussock; your LLM will be ruined by their cursed texts.

Or, and I believe this could be true, shadzar and Tussock were early versions of AI Bots - early precursors that were even more prone to spew out non-sequiturs or, when confronting conversation that they weren't prepared for they would revert to their initial programming.

Shitmuffin definitely exists in the world as a real person and I only wish I could believe that he was a bot.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Or, and I believe this could be true, shadzar and Tussock were early versions of AI Bots - early precursors .

As an official Computer Scientist allow me to assure you, no those guys were not bots.

The most complex thing we may have going on is the possibility that some tremendous moron is MANUALLY applying AI and posting it by hand being so stupid as to look at some of these AI responses and think "yeah that looks convincing and somehow furthers my nutball secret agenda".

But if that person isn't basically JonSetanta I can't imagine anyone who would read those AI posts and think "Excellent my sock puppet will somehow thrive with these words ahahahahaha"

[Kaelik]

Tussock is 100% a real person.

There is no way a bot could be so consistently wrong in the exact opposite way of everyone else.

Statistically it would have to be right and/or wrong in a normal way sometimes.

[Dean]

I'll pitch that trust mechanics, or most social mechanics for that part, don't need to go group by group. Trust, Leadership, Status, Favor: any stat you could use to track how much someone is given credence or held in disfavor by a community actually doesn't need to be measured by community. Humans have a weird way of carrying those things around with us wherever we go, and a surprising ability to pick up on the signals someone is outputting to know how their last community thought of them and how we should too.
It might seem logical that a talented musician who'd gained the respect of his audience and peers would only hold Favor with them, but we know that's not true. If you were at a party with that musician I bet you could tell by the way they carry themselves and interact with everyone that they are a person with high Favor. Likewise it might seem like a General would only have Leadership among his troops or his people but I'll bet you could register his aura as a person of leadership even before you know what he did, and if a fire broke out at that party I'll bet you'd respond to any commands he'd make without even asking who he knows here and if we respect him. Humans are very adept at carrying our social statuses around with us which makes designing a social system easier, because it means you can just track those scores internally by character. The thief can just know he was driven out of his last town as a liar and a backstabber and make people not trust him for a while cause of his shady vibes, likewise the Barbarian can just seem honorable and trustworthy to the people of this village he just got to because he just seems that way even if people might not be able to put their finger on exactly why, but feel it and are confident in it anyway.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Thing is Dean, that is less like "Trust" that's more like "Karma".

It would be much more manageable game mechanically than Trust, but the effects it would have on story and game play would be very... flavorful.

If you really wanted your game to have a heavy handed emphasis on your characters past misdeeds (or otherwise) in a sort of moralistic fairy tale way, then yeah, probably a workable direction. You could probably do a shallow star wars style light side dark side monstrosity with it and remind everyone at the table why those annoying dualistic moral choice mechanics in CRPGs fell out of fashion.

I'm not even sure I would call the exploits such a system opens up exploits, or features of its intended function, as long as you understand that it is basically the purpose of such a system to make the foreign princess (who has no idea who you are and only just met you) like you because you give free bread to the street orphans in your home town on the other side of the continent every day for ten years 3 years before you met her.

But I think it is perhaps a little outside of what people normally want from either a social mechanic or a social currency. It certainly meets my needs poorly. And likely not fit well for the OPs needs.

Or at least I assume that, because the unified single stat Karmic Trust variant is like the FIRST obvious mechanical variant of the numeric Trust mechanic I for one thought of when considering its mechanical complexity issues, so I assume EVERYONE has considered it, so I assume JonSetanta considered and rejected it.

I may be overestimating there.

[Thaluikhain]

Thing is Dean, that is less like "Trust" that's more like "Karma".

Or possible "presence" or something. A powerful domineering evil type might have presence but be low on karma.

(I would mention the Roman concept of "authoritas", but that more involves people knowing about your history)

[deaddmwalking]

If you're an important person, it makes sense that even your enemies don't kill you right away. Why does everyone capture Bond (besides plot armor) - they recognize that he is an important person so they take him to their leader. There are certainly a lot of cases of that type of thing in the real world and you don't have to be friendly to be respected by your enemies.

In the real world, this also isn't perfect as evinced by world-class performers busking in the subway and being ignored by the vast majority of commuters.

But personal gravitas becomes problematic when you either want to travel incognito or assume someone else's identity. If I don't want to be recognized can I 'dampen' my aura of respect in my home community? If I disguise myself as the king can I inherit his with a high enough roll?

There are definitely plenty of cases in the real world where people trust someone they SHOULDN'T - including someone who outside observers can easily recognize as a malign influence. Usually in games we fall in the trap of believing that people should never trust someone that is trying to take advantage of them, but that doesn't correspond to reality.

For a game system, when a well-respected general walks into a room and the cult leader commands his goons to 'seize him' we need to know if the loyalty to the cult leader is more powerful than the aura of command that Bond exudes. In cases where the cultists don't know anything about this man by reputation or appearance it's possible that they may recognize someone who is not as afraid as they should be or some other sign that this person isn't to be trifled with, but enough to ignore orders?

And while it might make sense that a powerful orator can dissuade brain-washed cultists some of the time, it's probably not interesting if it happens every time. I think it's pretty clear that you want a disagreement between the cult leader and his second-in-command to have a better chance of causing a schism than one of the prisoners pleading 'you don't really have to do this!'. That implies a level of relationship with a specific group much more than just a universal personal quality.

[Foxwarrior]

Fairly tale trust mechanics could be kinda neat, we are usually talking about fantasy games after all. And as an extra upside, it doesn't aim to model realistic social interactions so it's not doomed to exclusively produce results that are worse than mtp.
However, with a social mechanics system then how you exploit it is easily as important as how you use it properly, and Dean's version only explored the idea of a rogue who was a scrub and probably gonna have a redemption arc where they give up on back stabbing people.
Does the evil vizier who tells honeyed lies to the royal court build trust by telling the truth to his secret cult of loyal followers? Is there some ability to disguise your aura as someone trustworthy that can only be seen through by a few protagonist-type people?

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Is there some ability to disguise your aura as someone trustworthy that can only be seen through by a few protagonist-type people?

Or more importantly are you OK with your fairy tale being a world with no real racism or other all other unfair social biases?

It certainly works again, with a heavy handed not very introspective mortality fable for children type theme.

And lets not pretend I'm trying to support something morally superior. It doesn't work with the murder hobos are good guys. Or anything like it, that's a problem for most of us.

I'm not sure if they fact that this system cannot emulate say, Donald Trump, is a problem as well. But it feels like it would be pretty fast.

[Foxwarrior]

I think you can add racism to this aura-based system without too much trouble. Having a character who is racist doesn't require tracking that character's relationships with specific other characters or anything, just a modifier that says they don't trust elves even when the elf has a trustworthy aura or whatever. It just means you can't be a "credit to your race" because they have no specific value of their relationship to you, at best you can be so amazing that the character decides to stop being racist entirely. Which is a fairy tale-ish thing to do right.

Donald Trump isn't a fairy tale character... is he?

[deaddmwalking]

Leader of a troll army... Looks like a goblin. Convinced he's the fairest in the land.

Pretty sure he's a fairy tale character.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Donald Trump isn't a fairy tale character... is he?

The evil king whose followers think is the bestest goodestest king. And countless variations on the deceptive bad guy.

Can't do that with the sticky flashy karma system.

If someone is bad, everyone knows it. It's the classic D&D detect evil problem writ far larger and more in your face.

[MGuy]

The usefulness of modeling a Trump esque figure I feel is low for practical play. Trust or social credit or whatever is just another avenue players use to either get someone to do something for them that's not using diplomacy or something GMs use as a stick to get disincentivize doing heinous crimes or whatever. At least those are the only ways I think about using them. In actual play whether the goblin King is good or bad (or a buffoon) and whether or not they are loved is not going to be of great concern beyond being a background detail that may or may not matter for the game I am running.

If I'm looking to model the former (giving players another avenue to get people to do what they want) then I don't see why I wouldn't just give them a Meta token upon the completion of an adventure or side quest that they can later trade in to get a 'favor' performed by an NPC. If I'm looking to do the latter (remind players that they've done a terrible thing and people know) then I could just write down that it is known that players did X thing and use it as a roadblock they have to overcome sometime later in the game.

If either of these become the focal point of an adventure then I don't see the need for a subsystem. I'll have likely written a whole adventure around the task of getting an NPC to do something or clearing their names after they've been framed for something (or if they committed the crime getting the heat off of their backs). An additional subsystem for social credit would actually be more trouble than it'd be worth, imo, for these.

A long time ago I decided that players had to 'buy ' NPC helpers with some kind of meta currency in order to retain them as contacts who can show up regularly as guests to perform some kind of task. I'm still intending on doing that and briefly thought about adding some kind of relationship tracker to the mix but I don't think that I will because I can't think of how that would be useful in play just yet. At best it would be a tax on the PC's downtime which 'might' be useful but I haven't ironed out how limited players will be during downtime (though I do know they will be in that persona way).

For everything else I haven't seen anything that would be more efficient or useful than writing down any significant thing players do (good or bad) just to bring up later to help or hinder them. Every time I've considered making charts or point allotments to track that sort of thing it always felt wrong in some way.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Wow MGuy.

I was just mildly negative on this Karma thing as a not for me and probably a waste of time for most.

But after your post. I am rampantly against the very concept and think anyone in favor of it is a fucking addle brained moron.

And I mean you didn't even solidly advocate for it, since you are, as usual unable to commit to a single coherent position for fear of criticism, AND YET.

Well done sir, well done.

[Thaluikhain]

Donald Trump isn't a fairy tale character... is he?

I was going to say he's bad YA dystopian fiction character, only I guess YA dystopian writers are getting inspiration from people like him, so other way around. He's too cartoonishly evil to be a believable cartoon villain, and so probably shouldn't be represented in a game if you want to keep it grounded, if you see what I mean.

[Dean]

The critiques of sticky social systems so far have been that they might make princesses fall in love with good hearted princes who all the animals love even IF he's in a pauper costume (which is good). That it doesn't track racism and have us decide how racist everyone is (which is good). And questions about obviously deceitful but influential characters like Jafar or Wormtongue character might work: but remember both Jafar and Wormtongue both explicitly use mind influencing magic on their kings so that's actually working as intended. Literally everyone distrusts them on sight but they're using mind magic on the one person who's opinion really matters.
Finally as far as bad kings or presidents go it's actually totally unimportant how much of the peasantry trusts or distrusts them: They never meet each other so they don't trust or distrust each other at all. They don't meet. They don't trade. They don't take any actions related to trust. A treacherous kings treachery would be relevant if you were another King interacting with them, or someone looking to make deals with them in which case their aura of treachery would be totally relevant and palpable. Their subjects don't interact with their leader they just know of a propagandized story version of him: it would actually be a fun story to hear about the noble king your whole childhood and then finally meet them to pledge your adventuring parties swords to them and they're withered and powerhungry and gross and you reconsider.

Basically I'm not saying you could not track trust and racism and favor per community. You could also track it by person, by day, and have a little mood generator for everyone and have a big complex social tracker for everyone all the time. It's just that every step of complexity there gains you less and less and costs you more and more. IF you are deciding that social values like favor or trust or renown or whatever will be important in your game your goal should be to make them as small and as impactful as possible. A huge complex system that does little is a failure. A small impactful system is a success. Decide what you want to track then start figuring out where it matters, what it does: Will I get made a lord or noble if my Leadership or Favor is high enough? Can I get foes to ransom me rather than kill me if I'm famous enough? What do all these toggles DO once you're done flipping them? Because the answer for every social system I've ever seen is that it get's ignored because it's massively more onerous than just magical teaparty talking to NPC's.

People are down to do a bluff roll when it matters, or a sense motive roll when it could reveal something that matters. But mostly they want this shit to get out of their way.

If one really wanted to track social status by realm I would recommend a series of tags like Wanted, Leader, Lord, Beloved, or Infamous that could define in a sentence or two whether walking into the town hall meeting has all the guards draw arrest you, kneel to you, nod respectfully, or quake with fear. Those tags could drop when you went to different realms and I could see trying to become Beloved and avoid becoming Wanted in the new realm I went to.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

A huge complex system that does little is a failure. A small impactful system is a success.

Look seriously. I think your sticky karma proposal is dumb for most games and groups, but I see it working for a group/setting that looked at "guy pretends to be something he isn't" and said "we don't need to support THAT" or looked at games where detect evil is a thing and said "we need something LESS subtle and nuanced than detect evil to dominate OUR story lines".

But that line there in the quote, that is a blatant fallacy. If that's the core of your decision making process you have a problem. Efficiency in impactfulness without considering the nature of the impact is very obviously going to lead you head first into a lot of ditches.

In fact it is an excellent example of where being only half right can have still be at least as bad as being entirely wrong.

Because the answer for every social system I've ever seen is that it get's ignored because it's massively more onerous than just magical teaparty talking to NPC's.

People are down to do a bluff roll when it matters, or a sense motive roll when it could reveal something that matters. But mostly they want this shit to get out of their way.

Which honestly is why I think arguably the single most important thing about my/any half decent social mechanic is finding and defining a clear and practically functional cut off between arbitrary fairy tea party and formal resolution that actually works. A clear line that tells you when to make that bluff roll and what it does. Which, lets note, basically none of these Trust or Karma systems ever seem to have.

I would discuss that more but, again, really is THIS thread the place to discuss... anything?

If one really wanted to track social status by realm I would recommend a series of tags ...

And I would say. Sure take notes about these things. But taking reminder notes is not a mechanic regardless of your shorthand conventions and are you sure you need to, especially all the time, and what are you NOT going to let it have an effect when you do remember something relevant that you didn't actually write down?

[Kaelik]

The critiques of sticky social systems so far have been

I had no idea that anyone was even proposing "sticky social systems" as a unique idea, since that's already what for example, D&D has as a standard for at least 20 years now.

But yeah, people definitely shouldn't forget things as soon as they walk out of the room, not sure what that has to do with anything that's been discussed in this thread though.

[Dean]

If one really wanted to track social status by realm I would recommend a series of tags ...

And I would say. Sure take notes about these things. But taking reminder notes is not a mechanic ?

Of course it is. Someone becoming Restrained who therefore "can't run" is a mechanic. Writing down that you have become "Wanted" and therefore must avoid LOS to guards is identical. Write down a tag, what applies it, what it's effects are, and how to remove it. That's most mechanics in D&D.