A social system that's fast & simple will never be accepted.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So here's a scenario for you. There's this really hot elven princess as princesses are wont to be and there are two people who really want to bang her.

1.) One of them is a half-celestial prince that's even prettier than she is. He has a naturally commanding voice, has a reputation across the kingdom for being valorous and awesome, and since he's a veteran of negotiations much tougher than that like getting the dwarves and kobolds to accept a permanent peace this is child's play.

2.) The other one is a down-on-his-luck human commoner. She's not particularly pretty nor does she have any natural seduction talents being both clumsy and a virgin. Even though she really really wants to bang the princess she's just an plain, average sort of girl. The fact that the princess hasn't shown any same-sex attraction before this doesn't help her chances.

Now, most people would have no trouble saying that the prince should be the one to get the princess and the everygal is just going to go have to go cry in a corner. Yet if you stacked more stuff on top of that people are going to be more inclined to say that the everygal should be the one to get the princess; she went on a madcap crossdressing adventure where she pretended to be her steward to bond in that creepily deceptive way romantic comedies seem to like, she wrote love letters for several months, made the princess her favorite food, won the tacit approval of the Queen, etc.

Even so, the fact remains that it's not hard to build or even imagine a system where just one of the prince's advantages outweigh all of that. True, the everygal went a country mile to win the princess's heart... but she's kind of dumpy and the prince is so fucking hot that even Hades is all 'stupid sexy Flanders'. In addition to all of his other advantages. But if you actually modeled that in a game, especially if the everygal and prince were played by PCs, people would get fucking pissed off and rant about rollplaying and all of that crap. Why?

Because when a social interaction game (or any game, really) is simple people feel cheated out of a story. The prince didn't even have to lift a finger to get the princess to throw her panties at him. When the everygal doesn't either no one feels offended that she doesn't get anything, but when the everygal does a romantic comedy adventure in of itself and still loses to the do-nothing prince people get pissed off... even though they'd be less pissed off if she just failed her Seduction roll but the prince never made a pass at the princess.

So any diplomacy system that's going to work needs to be baroque and needlessly complicated. Not because overcomplication is good, but because people just get plain crybaby when success is seen as too easy--especially when it's contrasted against someone who worked hard and still failed. Even when people accept this for almost every other minigame, even for ones that have larger ramifications like warfare or economic struggles.

[Whipstitch]

That's really the core issue that spawned that awful dumpshock post I referenced in the "Ideas that need to go away" thread. The topic that started it was the issue of a "low charisma" player playing a socially adept character, a problem that for the most part goes away if the MC is simply willing to accept the outcome of your average charisma+empathy roll and move the fuck on. What makes it really ugly is that you can easily run into situations where the player thinks it's OK to lean on their rolls while the MC gets all vindictive and starts stone walling you because you failed to detect that he feels the need to get his tea party on.

[hogarth]

So any diplomacy system that's going to work needs to be baroque and needlessly complicated. Not because overcomplication is good, but because people just get plain crybaby when success is seen as too easy--especially when it's contrasted against someone who worked hard and still failed.

I agree that people like stories that have multiple steps. I disagree that a story that lasts more than one paragraph to describe is "baroque and needlessly complicated".

[RobbyPants]

Because when a social interaction game (or any game, really) is simple people feel cheated out of a story. The prince didn't even have to lift a finger to get the princess to throw her panties at him. When the everygal doesn't either no one feels offended that she doesn't get anything, but when the everygal does a romantic comedy adventure in of itself and still loses to the do-nothing prince people get pissed off... even though they'd be less pissed off if she just failed her Seduction roll but the prince never made a pass at the princess.

I could see the idea of a social combat system working a lot like a normal combat system in this regard. Take a normal combat:

A dragon against one of two protagonists: an epic dragon-slaying knight with quite an impressive track record, and a lowly peasant who's looking to save his village.

The knight wins the fight pretty much no contest by his class levels and abilities alone. If the peasant just runs up with his pitchfork, he gets incinerated 150' away, and no one blinks an eye. So, instead, he goes on a bunch of fetch quests, gaining powerful items and information to leverage against the dragon, and a few levels all the while, and has a really hard fight where he barely wins. There are stories of this sort of thing, and people like that.

I think with a system as complicated as combat, you could model social combat in that way, too.

[Username17]

People actually get their panties in a bunch when you have social save or dies. People get upset about combat save or dies too. If you roll dice "only once", a substantial number of people get offended. For social systems, this is even more true.

If you calculate that you have a 13% chance of getting something to happen socially and then you roll the dice and move the fuck on with your life, people will get angry. Angry in a way that they wouldn't be if you had to roll an 11+ on three different d20s, even though that's basically the same thing. From the standpoint of probability, there is no actually difference between a specific series of events and a single event - but from the standpoint of offending peoples' sensibilities, it's night and day.

Yeah, people won't accept a social system that has less than 3 rolls in it, and twice that is probably better. It doesn't matter if you could condense the rolls together and have the chances be exactly the same - just the idea of rolling dice a small amount of times is itself offensive to people when you're modelling social interaction.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

(NP)

[Lago PARANOIA]

The knight wins the fight pretty much no contest by his class levels and abilities alone. If the peasant just runs up with his pitchfork, he gets incinerated 150' away, and no one blinks an eye. So, instead, he goes on a bunch of fetch quests, gaining powerful items and information to leverage against the dragon, and a few levels all the while, and has a really hard fight where he barely wins. There are stories of this sort of thing, and people like that.

The thing is, the Theory of Narrative Causality doesn't work for TTRPGs coherently. In a prewritten story, if a peasant gathers together enough friends and adventures and treasures we expect them to win the fight against the dragon just because the story explained those adventures; Trogdor-style joke endings aside, people would actually get offended if the story ended up with the dragon pouncing on the peasant's party while they were resting up for the Final Battle and burning them in their sleep. Not because it didn't totally make sense, but because of the whole narrative investment thing.

You CAN'T do this kind of thing for TTRPGs though. The DM and players can't just suspend stats and gameplay and declare that the plucky peasant wins the fight against the dragon even though their whole 'trying really hard' gambit still leaves them short a country mile--not without creating more problems. People can still barely accept that, but TTRPGs also say that there will be some knights like Gawain who will stroll on by and ice the dragon without a second thought while murmuring a little prayer for the nameless charred peasant corpses the dragon was munching on. Even though that's totally necessary for a game to work at all, people get pissed at that.

The funny thing about all this however, going back to the prince/everygal example is that people would suddenly be a lot less hostile towards the prince completely stomping his romantic rival in the love department if he did his own Rube Goldberg plot to win the princess's heart. If the prince did something like rescue her father from the depths of hell, cancelled her celestial contract with Hades, and spent several weeks trying to master the celestial harp to serenade her with a song/love poem he made for the occasion people would regard it as an acceptable result--even though he didn't need to do any of that stuff to get the princess in the sack in the first place.

It's less about a Social Save or Die and more about perceived effort I believe. People just for some retarded reason think that rolling a dice a bunch of time amounts to effort and it allows them not to think about the process.

[RobbyPants]

You CAN'T do this kind of thing for TTRPGs though. The DM and players can't just suspend stats and gameplay and declare that the plucky peasant wins the fight against the dragon even though their whole 'trying really hard' gambit still leaves them short a country mile--not without creating more problems. People can still barely accept that, but TTRPGs also say that there will be some knights like Gawain who will stroll on by and ice the dragon without a second thought while murmuring a little prayer for the nameless charred peasant corpses the dragon was munching on. Even though that's totally necessary for a game to work at all, people get pissed at that.

I'd say it's a bit of a false dichotomy. Part of the peasant vs dragon story involves the peasant doing things to actually give him a chance in the fight. So it's not like when the fight happens that you have commoner 1 with a Dragon Slaying sword +5 against a dragon. He's gained enough levels, swag, and knowledge to make it a CR appropriate boss fight.

Commoner 1 vs dragon is stupid and he deserves to get stepped on. Same as Sarah Plain and Tall trying to hook up with the princess with no other investment will probably get rejected. They both have a serious objective, and to obtain that objective, they need to go on some quests until the objective is level appropriate.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Part of the peasant vs dragon story involves the peasant doing things to actually give him a chance in the fight.

But effectiveness isn't the primary concern, it's effort. In a TTRPG you can quantify how effectively certain activities will advance you towards a goal down to the experience point, but not only are non-TTRPG stories incapable of doing that but they don't want to do that. They decide that it's time for the peasant to take on the dragon when it dramatically appropriate and the peasant's quest conforms around the needs of the story, not the other way around. In a TTRPG it's totally possible to do like twenty quests and undergo substantial plot and character development and still get toasted in one round without putting a dent on the dragon--but that result strains people's patience. But people are also offended if the peasant does something like get polymorphed into a solar, gets a suit of Samus Aran armor, and even gets some divine salient abilities because Pelor lost a bet against Kord and had to give all of that shit to the next peasant that crossed a certain bridge; the peasant didn't even need to finish his first adventure, he could just roll up to the dragon and smoke it without even caring. Even though, again, that's a totally possible result in a TTRPG and one we want to model.

Going back to the Sarah Plain and Tall example, in a TTRPG it's totally possible that no amount of modifiers she can gain from doing commoner-appropriate activities can overcome her penalty deficit (plain, clumsy, wrong social class, wrong gender, etc.) enough to even stand a chance against the prince's one 'he's fucking hot' modifier. It's actually desirable for this to happen because it makes his 'hot as Aphrodite' ability actually mean something. But if you actually model that result after having Everygal go through all that crap people get angry and offended.

[fectin]

People actually get their panties in a bunch when you have social save or dies.

Is this strictly true, or true only when applied to PCs?

Further, are they a set of people we care about? If nothing else, Shadzar is proof that someone will hate anything, and catering to them is an exercise in futility.

[Username17]

People actually get their panties in a bunch when you have social save or dies.

Is this strictly true, or true only when applied to PCs?

Further, are they a set of people we care about? If nothing else, Shadzar is proof that someone will hate anything, and catering to them is an exercise in futility.

It goes both ways. Players who get stuff in a single social roll are deemed to have not "earned" it. GMs get pissy and throw roadblocks at players who do that to force them to make more rolls.

It doesn't make a lot of sense, but fundamentally there is lower limit to how much time you can spend rolling dice before it feels to people at the table that you are cheating. Look up any of a million threads with people whining about how 3e monsters go down too fast, or read the deep content of any of the diplomacy complaint threads. Sure, people complain about how 3e Diplomancers are too powerful, but one of the most frequently uttered complaints is that rolling a single die is "too easy".

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

But effectiveness isn't the primary concern, it's effort. In a TTRPG you can quantify how effectively certain activities will advance you towards a goal down to the experience point, but not only are non-TTRPG stories incapable of doing that but they don't want to do that. They decide that it's time for the peasant to take on the dragon when it dramatically appropriate and the peasant's quest conforms around the needs of the story, not the other way around. In a TTRPG it's totally possible to do like twenty quests and undergo substantial plot and character development and still get toasted in one round without putting a dent on the dragon--but that result strains people's patience. But people are also offended if the peasant does something like get polymorphed into a solar, gets a suit of Samus Aran armor, and even gets some divine salient abilities because Pelor lost a bet against Kord and had to give all of that shit to the next peasant that crossed a certain bridge; the peasant didn't even need to finish his first adventure, he could just roll up to the dragon and smoke it without even caring. Even though, again, that's a totally possible result in a TTRPG and one we want to model.

I guess I'm not seeing the problem here. The peasant sees the dragon menace and knows Something Must be Done, so he goes out and starts doing it. If the peasant has his way, he'll get his ducks in a row (become level appropriate for the challenge) and then fight the dragon. If the dragon strikes him before he's ready, then that's basically the DM pitting the PCs against a fight they can't win. If there's no run away option, then the DM is just being a dick.

So far as effort is concerned, that's what I want. I want the peasant to have to work hard to come close to keeping up with a knight who's already fifteen levels ahead of him. If he doesn't work to close that gap, then he's screwed.

Going back to the Sarah Plain and Tall example, in a TTRPG it's totally possible that no amount of modifiers she can gain from doing commoner-appropriate activities can overcome her penalty deficit (plain, clumsy, wrong social class, wrong gender, etc.) enough to even stand a chance against the prince's one 'he's fucking hot' modifier. It's actually desirable for this to happen because it makes his 'hot as Aphrodite' ability actually mean something. But if you actually model that result after having Everygal go through all that crap people get angry and offended.

Well, if Sarah wants to win out over the prince, she'd better go on some quests and gains some levels and other appropriate things to boost her chances. She's up against some stiff competition (heh).

[hogarth]

People actually get their panties in a bunch when you have social save or dies.

Is this strictly true, or true only when applied to PCs?

I think there are people who dislike "skipping to the end", whether it's the PCs or the NPCs doing the skipping.

For instance, I could write a Lord of the Rings roleplaying game where the entirety of the rules is "Flip a coin, Heads = Frodo wins, Tails = Frodo loses", but I think most people would find something unsatisfying about that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, if Sarah wants to win out over the prince, she'd better go on some quests and gains some levels and other appropriate things to boost her chances. She's up against some stiff competition (heh).

What makes Sarah think that she'll have any chance at all that can be attributed to her own effort? She's dumpy, has no experience, is clumsy, is a peasant, and is a female trying to seduce a nominally heterosexual female. Conversely, why does Sarah need to do any questing to have a chance? Why can't she just have a visit from her Fairy Godmother or discover a Casanova potion? I mean, check the bottom out.

So far as effort is concerned, that's what I want. I want the peasant to have to work hard to come close to keeping up with a knight who's already fifteen levels ahead of him. If he doesn't work to close that gap, then he's screwed.

The point is that the game doesn't see a difference. It's entirely possible to imagine a game (mechanics aside) where one or more is true:

1.) The peasant plateaus in power. If you're doing something like Shadowrun or greek mythology or Exalted it's totally possible that you'll just peak and no matter how hard you try you'll never get within dragon-slaying distance.

2.) The peasant goes on entirely non-productive quests where while his powers advance is advancing him in a totally wrong sort of way. He's using up all of his Soul or Fate to gain levels in Explorer which while making him a really good Tour Guide is never going to put him at Dragon-Fighting level.

3.) The peasant dies well before taking on the dragon, making it an exercise in futility. Or he could have decided that making time for the hot bartender in the big city was more important than avenging his parents' deaths. Or the dragon gets killed before he makes any progress. Or the dragon makes such a hardcore Diplomacy check that the peasant agrees that burning his little sister was the right thing to do and the peasant becomes his willing servant.

4.) The peasant is interrupted halfway on the quest (and it could even be the FIRST quest) because Pelor or whoever smiles upon him and makes him totally badass with little effort because the peasants got touched with Vorlons. Or some shinigami tells her to take up her sword. Whatever. There's no need to quest, just go kill the dragon's ass.

5.) The story just hands the peasant the keys to the plot. Smaug reveals his weakness to the peasant but then passes out from booze because he ate a whole glen of satyrs. Even a small child with no training could kill him at this point.

All of the scenarios I mentioned are also plausible outcomes of the peasant's journey, even within D&D. There's absolutely no reason why the peasant has to be able to get anywhere with enough questing or why he needs to do any questing at all.

Yet people get offended when their efforts don't yield any fruit or when they have victory drop into their lap. It's nothing about what makes a good story or not, it's just Good Gameplay being locked in a deathmatch with the Theory of Narrative Causality. People often try to compromise things so that you can have both but Diplomacy seems to be where people draw the line in the sand and the demands of each are irreconcilable.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Wow, Lago, you sure have been on a contrived paradoxical situations kick lately.

Your situation boils down to this:
[*]Someone has a bunch of innate advantages and has a good chance of winning by virtue of being awesome.
[*]Someone else has no innate advantages but goes out of their way to pick up circumstantial bonuses like crazy.
[*]You tally the bonuses up on each side, roll a die or two, and someone wins. Depending on how all-out the second person went when bonus collecting, it could be a clear win for them, a clear win for the other, or a toss up.

---

As far as actual social 'combat' systems work, I've seen three that I like.

The first is MTP, which works really damn well as long as nobody is a big crybaby.

The second is MTP with information hiding: You use empathy checks to see if your character knows that the vizier is lying, even though OOC it's obvious (because he's a vizier). Then you and the GM and everyone else react how they think the character would based on the IC knowledge they've been shown to have.

The third is actually rules-heavy, like Frank's AS system, with gambits, debate techniques, and so forth.

[Lago PARANOIA]

No, CG, what you're missing is that people don't accept 3 and it's very unlikely for them to accept even the first premise. People don't actually want the roll to be a 'nice try, but I'm still hotter than Aphrodite so you'll never stand a chance' foregone victory or even for it to be a tossup. Which in a game with finite bonuses can quite possibly be the case. They actually want Sarah to win and the prince the lose by virtue of her working harder--not because she worked hard and effectively, but just because she worked hard.

And all three of your favored systems just prove my goddamn point. All of them at the very least involve a substantial amount of effort on everyone's part whether it's rules-light or rules-heavy. A DM might let Sarah or the questing peasant stack up a bunch of circumstantial modifiers but no one is going to let either of them just declare what kind of bonuses they have; they're going to make them earn them in the story. Which is fine, but something that requires effort in the arbitration process is also necessarily slow, which is what happens in all of your scenarios.

I don't particularly care for every social encounter to be a fucking project. It's fun to do cutscenes and court intrigues, but seriously, sometimes I just want to convince the king to honor his pact with the elves with no more than 1 minute worth of work and get on with my life. So my solution to that is to make the diplomacy check an intentionally baroque and complicated black box--but also make it FAST, or at least faster than having to roleplay an hour's worth of circumstantial bonus fetching. It's deceitful and has a high chance of causing mechanical problems, but it at least gets the people who get weepy over social Save or Dies to shut the fuck up at the cost of a minor increase in gameplay time.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Traveling around and collecting circumstance bonuses requires significant effort, but if you don't work hard enough you don't deserve to win. How hard is 'hard enough' depends on the scenario and the rules system.

To make a strained analogy, you're saying that people believe that they guy who built half a stone arch and then said 'Whew, that was a lot of work, time to go home!' should win in the bridge making competition against the guy who hoisted a few logs into place and said 'That'll do.'. Making a stone arch bridge is harder work than making a log bridge, but if you don't bother to finish the job it won't matter that you worked harder.

[Orion]

Lago, this whole post is made of dicks. Let's look at your dragon example in more depth. You're seriously complaining that a multi-session, even campaign-long story arc might not play out in exactly the way one of the PCs involved intended or expected it to? First of all, many of your examples of failure are not even bad for the game or the story. If the peasant gives up on dragonhunting to shack up with a hot bartender and protect her neighborhood from an evil thieves' guild, that's a great story. But second, don't you think asking the mechanics to reliably generate an entire formulaic plot arc is a little much? I mean, to do that dragonslaying arc requires a lot of co-operation from your MC. They have to place all the items and allies in the world that you need to take out the dragon so you can go collect them.

Well, if your MC has bought in to the dragon killing arc to that extent, why not make an explicit metagame agreement to make it happen. The MC should just promise not to kill the dragon offscreen or let the dragonslayer PC die beforehand. Same goes for the PC whose fondest desire is to bang the princess. She doesn't need a mechanic that lets her beat a high-levle elf because if the MC is interesting in a "bang the princess" story arc the MC will MTP away the other suitors.

Seriously, mechanics, ANY mechanics, have the potential to generate unthematic results. That's the price you pay for randomness and neutral arbitration. People who complain about that should go an play one of the many games with EXPLICITLY metagame mechanics where effort and player intention really can guarantee a story arc.

Universalis and Weapon of the Gods spring to mind.

[RobbyPants]

All of the scenarios I mentioned are also plausible outcomes of the peasant's journey, even within D&D. There's absolutely no reason why the peasant has to be able to get anywhere with enough questing or why he needs to do any questing at all.

Yet people get offended when their efforts don't yield any fruit or when they have victory drop into their lap. It's nothing about what makes a good story or not, it's just Good Gameplay being locked in a deathmatch with the Theory of Narrative Causality. People often try to compromise things so that you can have both but Diplomacy seems to be where people draw the line in the sand and the demands of each are irreconcilable.

I'm still just not seeing this. You have a challenge of difficulty X and you're level Y (less than X). If you want to succeed at that challenge, you need to make up the difference. All of your situations could work toward that.

I guess I don't see the problem of having an RPG model the whole "you do quests to accomplish something hard" paradigm. I don't really care if the protagonist/challenge match up is peasant/kill dragon or Sarah Plain and Tall/hook up with hot princess. The game could model that just fine. It's just one is combat and the other is social.

I don't see what the problem is if the prince's uber modifier comes form inate sexiness and Sarah's uber modifier comes from a fuckton of effort. I'm not even sure what the fuck you're arguing about anymore.

No, CG, what you're missing is that people don't accept 3 and it's very unlikely for them to accept even the first premise.

[who?]

[hogarth]

I don't particularly care for every social encounter to be a fucking project. It's fun to do cutscenes and court intrigues, but seriously, sometimes I just want to convince the king to honor his pact with the elves with no more than 1 minute worth of work and get on with my life.

Fair enough -- although if the king is really, really opposed to helping the elves (for whatever reason), it's a bit anti-climactic to say "yadda yadda yadda, he changes his mind".

So my solution to that is to make the diplomacy check an intentionally baroque and complicated black box--but also make it FAST, or at least faster than having to roleplay an hour's worth of circumstantial bonus fetching.

If you don't like roleplaying diplomatic scenarios for an hour (and I'm sympathetic with that -- I prefer killing monsters to political games), then what kind of roleplaying would you prefer to do for an hour instead?

[talozin]

So here's a scenario for you.

The human wins. Because lesbians are awesome. And lesbians turning ostensibly straight princesses is even more awesome.

[tzor]

What makes Sarah think that she'll have any chance at all that can be attributed to her own effort? She's dumpy, has no experience, is clumsy, is a peasant, and is a female trying to seduce a nominally heterosexual female. Conversely, why does Sarah need to do any questing to have a chance? Why can't she just have a visit from her Fairy Godmother or discover a Casanova potion? I mean, check the bottom out.

If you want to see the various genres of social fary tale interaction (and the horrible consequences of all of the methods) I strongly suggest you go and watch the musical "Into the Woods." It has both an argument and a counter argument for most of the aguments you have used.

But the problem remains. If Sara Plain wants to get the hand of the princess she is going to have to have a reason why the princess would want to give her the hand. It could literally be anything (Jessica loved Rodger Rabbit, for example, because "he makes me laugh").

The half-celestal prince could be, for example, full of himself. You have a lot of unknows here. It's not as easy as saying the one with the best stat wins.

Your idea does sound like a great idea for a NaNoWriMo. Extra fun if the prince decides to for a love triangle with Sara Plain.

Edit: I really should leave that typo in. But I won't.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Read that as 'Sara Palin'; was very confused for a short while.

[Josh_Kablack]

Lago, what the hell is with you and "country miles" in this thread?

[Username17]

People actually get their panties in a bunch when you have social save or dies.

Is this strictly true, or true only when applied to PCs?

I think there are people who dislike "skipping to the end", whether it's the PCs or the NPCs doing the skipping.

For instance, I could write a Lord of the Rings roleplaying game where the entirety of the rules is "Flip a coin, Heads = Frodo wins, Tails = Frodo loses", but I think most people would find something unsatisfying about that.

That's the main issue. There has to be a series of choices, potentially tension-filled die rolls, and events for it to not be considered "too cheap". It doesn't matter how stacked against you the odds actually are, a single die roll for diplomacy pisses people off.

So while I don't actually understand or care about Lago's contrived examples here, his suggestion that you put a series of baroque but reasonably fast mechanics in to power the social minigame is solid.

-Username17