The Gaming Den

He means he does diplomacy with players, not at them. Maybe. What he wants to communicate is a weaselly politicians version of a no. A "No, kind of for now but hey, maybe some other day perhaps Yes? So you can't pin me down on it and complain." What he meant to say was "Player Charac...

FFS even that isn't a solid answer anyone could safely pin you down on is it?

Is it that hard to say "Player Characters are immune to this mechanic/action/entire social rules set."?

I just see more general obfuscation of what this specific mechanic even is. Your response to how does it effect player characters? "Here is a quote about my opinion of a an unrelated system that I'm not using yet" "And an almost relevant but highly noncommittal quote I've repurposed a...

For a system where the original designer intends to always be available to make balance decisions, it sure does spend a lot of time on describing creation systems so that any DM could make their own setting using these rules without fear of it being unbalanced. I see that as a tool for myself. It's...

Wow, necro hey. OK. So let me describe my design process. About once a year give or take, I decide to make changes to my rules. Tear up give or take half of it then rewrite close enough to the same thing. Somewhere before completion I'll start a campaign with it and shift my focus from functional ru...

the next conversation with myself Short version of my take aways. The bit where you open with over two thousand words that commit to and tell us basically nothing You are at least being slightly careful about outright fundamental errors in your writing. If only someone had given you an extended cha...

Group negotiation of the value of social actions And you still are. Which is a big reason why I told you your posts have been useless. Then seriously, I know you are melting down and apparently have become allergic to elaborating on a point but do please explain what this was all about... One thing...

Oh enough tone trolling excuses MGuy, defend on content it's disappointing to see you pull this. The reason I highlighted how short the list actually was But your list is shit. I've refrained from going into it, I've offered to go into it, you complained about both so... if you want it neither way t...

Over something concrete I actually provided. This coupled with everything else makes me think this isn't an attempt to actually be helpful. I was being charitable about not addressing it. Because providing "pull a number out of your ass for just short of no clearly defined reason up to 4 times...

Please yell at me about how stupid or great it is. I only skimmed it, and I'm sure that with that sort of mechanic and structure somewhere in there are exploitable or broken individual modifiers or DCs, that's a trivial thing. I can also see things you didn't address that are important. Your outcom...

You know MGuy, there is a point where "I don't understand" and "No way would my group do this thing that is absolutely bog standard human behavior" becomes... tiresome. I think you pulled both those cards a bit too much on the last post. I could understand if you missed just the ...

I've seen you say this over the years and I do not know what you're talking about. The core of your system is contextual modifiers. An unlimited number of them . Maybe you write a list, maybe you pull them out of your ass on the spot. I hope you both do the second and are prepared to admit that her...

I pass the job of determining what that means to the groups. So otherwise basically the infinite sized list of infinite sized modifiers pulled out of ass space. But I don't want to belittle the important proviso that the ass number pulling is done by collective group agreement. It's hardly a soluti...

I don't think putting forward pretty much the most terrible version of a commonly presented terrible idea and saying I would like to see something other than that is a particularly controversial position to take. And it definitely isn't "determining the value of someone else posting their ideas...

Are we just speaking in hypotheticals here or is it alright if we actually start tossing rules and shit around? Personally I'd just like people to try to come to terms with some of the underlying design constraints. The reason people keep utterly failing at social rules is things like going back ag...

I'm going to try this. I'm going to present a vile strawman version of Reputation, which is in the end, everything that mechanic name brings to my mind when I hear it, then I'm going to present something else you could do instead, not something I'm using or likely to, just an idea. Reputation system...

I just have to note how distasteful most players I've met seem to view the idea. Before I implemented my mechanics I would have half agreed with you on anecdotal experience of player reactions to social mechanics etc... Certainly internet poster reactions easily match that description. And only hal...

Ok lets see if I can clear up the last main points I wanted to cover. The little extra formal social rules [/size] Hey so, remember when I said that if you were looking at some extra edge case social mechanic and it looked like it could be represented by a unique but simple rule that would cover a b...

Strategies that are "in theme" for the setting and characters should be more effective than strategies that are out of theme, or your game will become a disjointed mess. Strategies that are not in theme for "your game" are not up for discussion. Period. If it's in the discussion...

Consequences aren't the only metric, ease of getting there is another. Well goes to show how that went right over your head then didn't it. The entire point is that "consequences" ARE the only metric that you can actually hope to work with. "The ease of getting there" (you were ...

"'here, hold this briefcase (which contains a bomb you don't know about)' is equivalent to 'let me kill you' because it has the same result, therefore if you win social combat hard enough to get them to hold your briefcase you should be allowed to get them to commit suicide instead. It's not a...

OK so there were a few more bits I wanted to cover. The power of social influence A very, very, important aspect of a social mechanic is understanding the potential power and impact of social influence. If you can make someone believe a thing is true, if you can make them like and trust you as a fri...

Dammit I knew I should have been quicker to start this thread first. That's my whole partial draft out the window. Pure Rules Free Resolution Sucks So you want rules. "Bang you are dead"/"Nuh ah I'm not!" is bad we know that already, it still applies to social rules. But Players ...

Like physical combat, social combat needs to produce outputs where one party cannot choose to continue to engage. You may argue that your barbarian can't be felled by such a weak attack from a kobold, but you had 3 hp left and it rolled 4 damage. Why do people keep belatedly coming to same conclusi...

Yeah, I'm so god damn glad I was on the record on the right side of the bigotry thread/driving off Cieling Cat and Crissa thing at the time it was happening.