Social Combat

[shadzar]

Hogarth, do you really believe that anyone is proposing that when a party of 8 meets a party of 8 that you are supposed to make 64 seperate reaction rolls?

How the fuck should I know? It's not my system. But if I had to guess, yes, I'd imagine that in any sane system there would be the possibility of a NPC liking one PC and disliking another.

true and false. the permutations of reaction rolls wouldnt happen as a group meets as group, because there are 2 things meeting Group A and group B.

ONLY if the groups cohabitate long enough to get more personal, then the independent like/dislike of individuals occurs, but not all will require a reaction roll, unless dire circumstances. personal preference of the individuals will play a big part. character a from group A doesnt like wizards, not even the oens in group A, then he wont like the wizards in group B until lots of interaction occurs to change that personal stance. there wouldnt need to be a reaction roll until a possibility of change happens.

group A meets group B and both draw their weapons.. does initiative start, or is there time to resolve the clashing before fighting? (social combat)

it would be foolish to make 64 reactions rolls when two groups of people meet for the instance and split second they have met and not interacted yet.

if the system being discussed says make 64 reaction rolls when 8 meet 8 off the bat...the system is fucked from the start with too much work to begin with.

[quanta]

The pro-fiat crowd are asserting that the GM should have a detailed catalogue of the likes, dislikes and daily routine of every NPC no matter how minor in order to make an informed decision about how they would react to unexpected encounters with random groups.

Actually there are two separate arguments going on here. In the vast majority of cases, merely knowing the vaguest details of the NPC and where the NPC encounters PCs is enough to narrow down the range of reactions an incredible amount. You know very little about the people you'll pass by in the street every day, and they could all be very different, but none of them are going to shoot you or even spit on you (at least not with a % chance that could come from a d100 range even). Similarly, the differences that do exist are seriously small. Almost certainly none of them will loan you a $100. And most of them have things to do and places to go and won't stop to talk to you very long. The number of encounters with strangers you have that will deviate from social norms is probably too small to even be represented on a d20. At that point, reaction rolls are tracking some very minor initial differences; you may as well quit wasting time and rolling. You'll still have a representation of your character's charisma/diplomacy/cuddliness/whatever but it can just be a flat modifier.

A lot of social situations are so highly constrained the deviations of initial reaction will not reasonably fit on a small RNG. For example, if you're begging, you're probably not even managing a 5% success rate on getting some change. Even if you do pull off a 10% success rate, no one wants to roll repeatedly. At that point, the only sane way to do a randomized mechanic to represent begging is as a profession check or something across an hour of begging.

But quanta! you protest, begging is totally not what we're talking about. Fine, then. You walk into a bar. You order a drink. In most civilized countries, unless you're incredibly socially incompetent, you will receive a drink. "But what if it's the 1930s South and I'm black and walk into a white bar!" Then you almost certainly won't be served. And if the DM and players didn't decide whether the bar was black or white given the setting, it's probably best for the DM to pause and ask the players which type of bar they'd like to go to. Shit like whether or not the bartender winks at you or gives you extra peanuts is just flavor.

Lago's position that we need a reaction roll because the cowboy might be strolling down the street arms swinging or he might be covered in blood and furtively glancing around is retarded. Players should be able to dictate which of those two things they are doing, and DMs should be able to dictate which of those two things NPCs are doing. Reaction rolls should cover fairly tiny things in most situations, or be used because you didn't generate even the major details ahead of time (which actually does come up sometimes; although I don't think it's the only way to solve the problem of "oops, the town has no blacksmith but clearly should").

The second separate argument is about whether or not the "diplomacy" or "cuddliness" or "whatever" roll should affect whether or not assassins or demons sent to murder you decide to fight with you or talk. You know, whether or not being diplomatic will somehow prevent the very essence of chaotic evil that has come to murder you from trying biting your head off. My answer is "diplomacy doesn't have to do that to be useful." Not that it's somehow badwrong if it can do that, but that there are plenty of other useful things diplomacy could do that should come up in a fantasy heroes game.

Paraphrase: Lago being ok with the RNG pushing all but one result off the table.

And now do you see why if you allow this to happen between obviously equal level characters (JFK and LHO) it means the reaction roll system doesn't add to player agency (it doesn't take it away either of course)? It's obviously a completely separate issue as to whether your system should have reaction rolls and whether it supports player agency. DMs can just make everything they have that will fight the players be off the RNG unless you explicitly forbid it. And whether or not you do that is a separate question from whether or not you have reaction rolls.

If you want the game to guarantee some social encounters will be had, just put it in the fucking encounter rules. "There should be at least 2-4 social encounters per level out of the 13 encounters per level unless the players want less; DMs should structure adventures so that this can happen." Obviously, this is a mega lazy way of doing it, but that's because I don't actually have a rules set in front of me. It'd much clearer but still completely doable if you basically worked out the difficulties of various social tasks and how characters gain experience for social interactions. After all, games can totally work even if the initiative order is fixed by going around the table starting from the DM's left or something. You don't worry that you'll be unable to fight things in a D&D game even though it's the DM's job to create all the encounters by fiat.

[Username17]

Actually there are two separate arguments going on here. In the vast majority of cases, merely knowing the vaguest details of the NPC and where the NPC encounters PCs is enough to narrow down the range of reactions an incredible amount. You know very little about the people you'll pass by in the street every day, and they could all be very different, but none of them are going to shoot you or even spit on you (at least not with a % chance that could come from a d100 range even). Similarly, the differences that do exist are seriously small. Almost certainly none of them will loan you a $100. And most of them have things to do and places to go and won't stop to talk to you very long. The number of encounters with strangers you have that will deviate from social norms is probably too small to even be represented on a d20. At that point, reaction rolls are tracking some very minor initial differences; you may as well quit wasting time and rolling. You'll still have a representation of your character's charisma/diplomacy/cuddliness/whatever but it can just be a flat modifier.

Your post is meandering, contradictory, and frankly TL;DR.

You seem to be falling into a fundamental trap as regards to thought patterns. Do you think that just because there's a reaction roll that has modifiers on it, that any roll has the possibility to achieve every result? Because that would be totally stupid. While there are people who might attack you and people who might give you a blow job, there's no reason why a single roll of the dice would have to be able to provide both options at high or low results.

Truth is, modifiers are going to push things over so that you probably only have a couple of possible outcomes. For people walking around town, those results are probably something like "warm, indifferent, and dickish", and that's not really worth rolling for. But for wilderness encounters with Gnollish Druids, the difference between "violent, hostile, dickish" is super important. It's the difference between having a social encounter and having a combat encounter.

Stop it, Frank. The "horrible" flaws with mexican standoffs that your interpretation prevents are that the person who chooses to shoot first shoots first (or last, I'm not entirely clear on the order), and none of the people are flat-footed. And all you seem to gain is that people can presciently know when they're in battle?

This is incoherent. I cannot even parse what the hell you think you're trying to say. But sure, I'll run down the basic realities of the Mexican Standoff.

You sure as fucking fuck aren't going to ready an action. Because if you're The Good, your readied action would be to Shoot the Bad. That would be stupid, because if you actually shot The Bad, The Weird would shoot you right afterward. Readying the action to shoot would leave you exactly as vulnerable to being shot by the third man as just shooting the second man right after you win initiative.

What you actually do is to delay. Because the first person to actually shoot simply gets killed by the Third Man. But of course, the other two participants are in the same predicament: the first person who shoots simply hands victory to whoever the other guy was. And in a game that is supposed to actually handle Mexican Standoffs, once all three participants Delay, the "battle" ends and you start going to a social challenge.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

Oh, I thought you meant that your Mexican Standoffs didn't involve rolling initiative at all, when you said "There are no readied actions involved and initiative doesn't even get rolled."

Now I see that you mean initiative does get rolled, but it doesn't matter because everybody delays. That's a much more sensible position.

But wouldn't you want to ready the action "I will shoot whoever starts to shoot at me", thereby killing them before they attack? Readied actions do resolve first. I just checked.

[PhoneLobster]

The correct customs for ...

I think you missed the bigger issue there Grek. You entire "local customs" frame work is borked.

You are using local customs as a frame of reference to try and create a quick simple objective foundation for your formal mechanic. As generally happens when you do that with what is basically actually a highly subjective system you end up with a short cut that does really weird shit.

So if an Elf and a Dwarf meet in orc town... they are only counted as friendly if they are both following Orc town local customs. That's stupid.

You have literally written in as a foundation of your system that impressing people is not based on their ideas but on ideas that are local to your current geographic region. That is really very very silly.

DSM is correct in that I should probably have specified that only ONE party member has to make the check to find out what the customs are.

That doesn't make the whole "majority party attitude rules" thing any less silly where any minority up to 49% of a group consisting of either suave diplomats or foaming psycho's screaming for blood has NO impact on proceedings whatsoever. The minority diplomats and the minority psychos can exchange cultural notes, can still act the way they do, and still not have a damn impact.

This leads directly to the actual exploit where you are in a culture or geographical context (lets say the palace party garden) that frowns on bringing along carried weaponry so you just get more than 51% of your party members to take their weapons off and hand them to the minority 49% or less to carry openly along with all their own weapons. And now the group consisting of say 40% openly over loaded armed to the teeth weapon mules counts as friendly in places that don't want people carrying weapons.

And I should probably put in an "or flee" at the end of the "will immediately attack" bit at the end of the hostile posture section, because apparently people will assume "and flies into a bezerker rage making it incapable of fear or retreat" if I don't.

Your only description of what a hostile character will do is "Immediately Attack" or "Still Attack". That moron DSM is pretending your version of "Hostile" is a mechanically distinct definition from "hostile" which results in the situation being even worse because now your description is the ONLY one.

So yes I assume "attack" and is the intended result. And if it isn't, you probably SHOULD state as much. And clarify exactly how. "Attack if remotely productive, or do the most hostile thing possible otherwise" does not however make any of the system LESS FUCKING SILLY. Because it STILL means that if two English men travel to Italy and niether of them know how to greet each other politely in Italian they are going to draw swords and attack each other if that would be remotely survivable or do the most hostile possible thing they could to each other otherwise.

Do you not see the problem there? Really?

You wanted to talk specific mechanical examples. Fine. Yours sucks in various hilarious ways which it REALLY doesn't need to suck in. People in favor of reaction systems should be making fun of your system because of how stupid it is.

[Grek]

On one hand, your obstinate insistance on reading any rule you see in the most retarded way possible is kinda handy. It makes it very easy to write in boilerplate to prevent people from using retarded readings of it. But on the other hand, your constant wanking to your own 100% hypothetical and unposted ruleset while shitting on everything that isn't it is kinda annoying. I'd seriously like to see what you would put out as a first draft of a set of social combat rules.

That said, here's an updated version:

---

Whenever the party is going to an unfamiliar place where there may be unfriendly people, the party has a Posture, either Friendly or Hostile. To establish a Friendly Posture, you make a DC 20 Knowledge check appropriate to the of the place they are going or a DC 25 Diplomacy check to know what customs and protocols are appropriate to signal your peaceful intentions. If a knowledge check is used a local, history or geography check will usually be called for, but religion (when expecting to encounter extremely religious people), nobility (when meeting nobility), planes (when expecting to encounter extaplanar creatures) or even dungeoneering (for abberations) might sometimes be needed instead.

Generally speaking, the diplomatic protocols for a specific trip will have a handful of requirements that need to be fufilled by at least one member of the party (examples include stating your intentions in the correct language, making the correct gestures of good will, making a tribute or the like) and one or two non-negotiable requirements (such as keeping weapons put away, not approaching too closely without identifying oneself, not insulting the local gods) that every party member must satisfy or at least appear to satisfy in order to maintain a friendly posture.

Only one person needs to succed the check to determine the appropriate customs. They can then tell the other members of the party without them needing to make knowledge or diplomacy checks of their own. If the party follows these customs, your Posture will be Friendly, but if you are unable or unwilling to do so, your Posture defaults to Hostile. It may be possible, subject to DM discretion to Bluff your way out of not following certain customs.

When your Posture is Friendly, any intelligent creature(s) that your party encounters with an attitude of unfriendly or better will not immediately attack you. You can stop and engage them in conversation, or pass them by entirely without the encounter turning into a combat encounter. However, if you encounter a creature with a hostile attitude, it will behave normally (attacking, interfering, berating or fleeing) and gains a +4 circumstance bonus to initiative due to the party being unready for combat.

When your Posture is Hostile, all intelligent creatures you encounter with an attitude of indifferent or worse have their attitudes become one degree more hostile towards the party. If this brings their attitude down to unfriendly or lower, each party member makes an Intimidate check with a DC of 15 + the combined CR of the encountered creature(s). If any party member is successful, the encountered creatures will be too frightened to initiate combat themselves and will be shaken for 3 rounds at the start of combat if they are attacked. If no party member is successful the encountered creatures behave as per their new attitudes: attacking, fleeing, interfering etc. if now hostile and not attacking if unfriendly or better.

These rules are an addition to the default diplomacy and intimidation rules, not a replacement. Everything in the default rules is still allowed.

[PhoneLobster]

On one hand, your obstinate insistance on reading any rule you see in the most retarded way possible is kinda handy.

That's how you read rules. As they are literally written. You are proposing rules that REPLACE "Oh just make something up and use common sense". So we read them as you write them. Too bad if that then sucks for you.

But on the other hand, your constant wanking to your own 100% hypothetical and unposted ruleset

Er. Last time someone pulled the "oh yeah if my stuff demonstrably sucks then where is yours huh?" shit I actually went and put my rules set in my own invention. No one particularly cared. So... how... does it feel like to be wrong so often?

That said, here's an updated version:
Whenever the party is going to an unfamiliar place where there may be unfriendly people, the party has a Posture, either Friendly or Hostile.

They also really need a posture when at home and hanging around regular haunts.

Also they need to have subjective postures for different encounters and different characters/parties they meet.

Also really a GROUP posture system is... kinda poor we really DO need at least some potential for individual differentiation. You don't have it. That is a VERY bad thing. Because, again, GM Fiat can do that, your system is more complex but can't.

ALSO.... you STILL have it written as location based reaction requirements. That is STILL stupid. That is STILL "Englishmen in Italy attack each other because they can't speak Italian" territory. That is, like, the most laughably wrong thing you have going here.

Generally speaking

After, repeated, hand holding you've helped fix up your broken majority rules problems somewhat. Huzzah for you. But still only somewhat. NOW it has no penalty for as many people in the party as feel like it breaking all "negotiable" customs. And no benefit for more than one person in the party meeting things like basic language and courtesy requirements.

This is not good. You've knocked off the extremes, but not the problems the extremes were demonstrating. Which is basically that simplified group reaction mechanics sort of suck and that your system is worse at accounting for social reactions to the general politeness or whatever of a group than GM fiat is, but does it in a more complex way involving more rolls.

Only one person needs to succed the check to determine the appropriate customs. They can then tell the other members of the party without them needing to make knowledge or diplomacy checks of their own.

This is probably an improvement to everyone rolling themselves (or not bothering) and getting a wild smattering of randomised hostile/non hostile etc... as a result.

But you DO realize this means that it is a MINIMUM 1 roll per character until someone succeeds right? Maybe 2 per character if you add in one of your "and the local geography is religious!" checks. That's a fair bit of bullshit rolls for what hopefully will eventually be a close to auto success for any reasonable sized party.

You really need to do away with those extraneous rolls as much as possible. This is not good enough.

However, if you encounter a creature with a hostile attitude, it will behave normally (attacking, interfering, berating or fleeing) and gains a +4 circumstance bonus to initiative due to the party being unready for combat.

Oh my so, with that direct lift of part of the Hostile description, Hostile and hostile ARE the same? Whenever WILL DSM apologize for pulling the "they are clearly mechanically distinct!" bullshit.

But anyway. "Behave normally" is not appropriate. The standard hostile description actually states "Will take risks to hurt you". And anyway, what the hell is "normally" especially on the most extreme hostile result generated by your system? I give your description of "Hostile" 2 stars out of 10.

When your Posture is Hostile, all intelligent creatures you encounter with an attitude of indifferent or worse have their attitudes become one degree more hostile towards the party.

You do realise this means your system NEVER generates a scenario where you party does not know the local customs, meets an otherwise friendly or indifferent group. And that group negotiates peace with the PCs.

It's questionable if their hostile posture even permits the PCs to negotiate peace. But the NPCs, basically will DEFINITELY shift to attitudes where they will either attack, or will, at BEST, not wish to make new friends. And it's somewhat implied that PCs would too.

Allowing the default rules really doesn't help. And only confuses issues, especially as your rules DO interact with the default rules, and since PCs cannot actually be effected by Diplomacy as written (an over all bad thing), that means that yeah, either the PCs attempt to negotiate for peace or it NEVER EVER HAPPENS in your system, the PCs can seriously meet an actual party of actual peace loving dedicated high level diplomats and those diplomats WON'T want peace and COULDN'T ask for it if they did.

[virgil]

On one hand, your obstinate insistance on reading any rule you see in the most retarded way possible is kinda handy. It makes it very easy to write in boilerplate to prevent people from using retarded readings of it. But on the other hand, your constant wanking to your own 100% hypothetical and unposted ruleset while shitting on everything that isn't it is kinda annoying. I'd seriously like to see what you would put out as a first draft of a set of social combat rules.

Actually, he has posted his rules to a large extent in the IMOI sub-forum. It's quite obtuse and hard to read. Also, you can explicitly make the princess more likely to love if you beat her up first, and the difference between a slightly favorable trade agreement and mind slaving is largely academic.

I do think that your rules for getting into Posture are too cumbersome, especially since in many cases the difference in greetings between humanoids is going to be inconsequential (don't attack, empty hands are nice, etc); and any race that knows the same language is going to at least be passingly aware of each others' customs. Especially since Indifferent is the only attitude that means anything between the two postures.

[PhoneLobster]

Also, you can explicitly make the princess more likely to love if you beat her up first

The advantages of a single damage track are well established and significant. The disadvantage of "violent seduction" is something any civilized play group will not have to even encounter, and if they did, well, actually that already exists in d20 so why the fuck you think it's suddenly a problem is basically just your lack of other shit you can throw at my system with any hope of it sticking.

and the difference between a slightly favorable trade agreement and mind slaving is largely academic.

So. You negotiate slightly favorable trade agreements so often you need your mechanics to revolve around that instead of making allies which while a lot LIKE mind slaving is NOT precisely the same thing.

Your games sound SO exciting 'What did you do in D&D today?", "We used an elaborate combat like system to negotiate a trade agreement SLIGHTLY more favorable than it could have been! We got a minor concession on coffee prices! Coffee prices! A minor concession!"

So, sorry. No. Functional USEFUL social combat mechanics in a D&D style game NEED to revolve around making allies. We do NOT care about "slightly favorable trade agreements" those are boring, they are inconsequential and MTP handles those better than any system you or I can make and MTP is the only thing just plain CHEAP enough in game play terms to be justified as an expense for boring shit like that.

[Foxwarrior]

Doesn't your system convert all important social interactions into violent seduction, PhoneLobster?

[PhoneLobster]

No? I would not be surprised if some of the stupid lying fucks around here claimed as much, but no, really, it doesn't. Try reading it.

[Grek]

Oh my so, with that direct lift of part of the Hostile description, Hostile and hostile ARE the same?

Hostile Posture =/= hostile attitude. Maybe calling it something else would be easier for you to wrap you brain about. Next draft will use Aggressive posture and Unaggressive posture.

They also really need a posture when at home and hanging around regular haunts.

I haven't written the rules for diplomacy at home, because the specific thing that people are getting their panties in a bunch about is "Diplomacy must be able to prevent encounters from turning into combat encounters or it sucks." Those may come later.

It's questionable if their hostile posture even permits the PCs to negotiate peace.

Currently, you do this via the core diplomacy rules. With a hostile posture, indifferent creatures you encounter don't attack you, so you can talk to them and, after talking to them, make a DC 15 Diplomacy check to apologize for walking in with your sword hanging out. This makes them go back to indifferent and negotiation goes on from there. Like I said, I may or may not work on more extensive rules for other situations later on.

I do think that your rules for getting into Posture are too cumbersome,

Any recomendations here? There's PL's demand for less dice rolling, but I feel like there should be some kind of research step involved.

Especially since Indifferent is the only attitude that means anything between the two postures.

This is not actually true. Let's look at the different starting attitudes:

Helpful & Friendly: No difference between the two here.
Indifferent: Friendly posture means they remain indifferent, hostile posture means they become unfriendly.
Unfriendly: Friendly posture means they remain unfriendly. Hostile posture means they become hostile, and either attack you if you fail your intimidate check or flee from you if you succceed your intimidate check.
Hostile: Friendly posture means they attack you at a bonus. Hostile posture means they attack you if you fail your intimidate check or flee from you if you succeed your intimidate check.

[PhoneLobster]

Hostile Posture =/= hostile attitude.

YOU JUST CUT AND PASTED 80% OF THE ATTITUDE DESCRIPTION TO DESCRIBE THIS "POSTURE" YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT.

This is why you can't write rules. That. There. Your inability to achieve the most fundamental and basic clarity of what the FUCK you even think you are saying.

[jadagul]

PhoneLobster: I read your rules when you posted them a while ago, and enjoyed them. And your social combat rules really do work for the things you want them to do, at least as long as you have some sort of non-social-combat-system framework to keep the players from using their swords to negotiate a trade agreement--I get the impression that your table runs off your conviction that it's obviously dumb to engage in violence during a non-violent encounter, but from what I remember your rules don't actually give a reason not to start a seduction by beating up the princess or a negotiation by throwing fireballs at your potential allies. And that works for some games and genres but really doesn't for others.

But your rules don't, at all, cover situations like "two groups who've never met before run into each other in the woods. Neither one wants to fight, but neither wants to let the other get the jump on them, and they don't trust each other. Are they able to successfully negotiate their way to a peaceful encounter?" Your rules don't cover that, and they're not intended to cover that, and you've said upthread, I believe, that you don't think you need rules for that because if the two groups don't want to fight then they don't fight. But some of us find that unsatisfying for a number of reasons.

But the case that, if I understand your rules correctly, they fail most interestingly at, is the case where party A is more physically dangerous and party B is more socially adept, but where party A would rather avoid an actual fight. If party A engages in purely social combat, they lose, despite the fact that if they actually pulled their swords out they'd win. Which means that party A can't actually intimidate party B out of fighting them unless they are also the better negotiators, and that's kind of silly.


Grek: I worry about your system, actually for a lot of the same reasons PhoneLobster gave, but mainly because it sounds like it'll get really overcomplicated really quickly. But I do appreciate that you're at least trying to draft rules that would work.

If I had to draft something, it'd go something like this. First, every creature has a mood, at all times. And "moods" are things like "violent" or "angry" or "happy" or "grumpy" or "tired", and generate modifiers to the following checks.

When you first encounter a creature, it rolls a reaction check, which describes its attitude towards you specifically. This is different from and doesn't change the creature's mood; so you can have a violently angry creature that still decides it likes you, or whatever, but it'll still be in a bad mood.

The reaction roll is modified by the creature's mood and your posture (totally stealing the term). You have three choices of posture: Open, Cautious, and Aggressive. In Open posture you take a penalty to your initiative but get a bonus on reaction rolls, which is probably tied to your diplomacy skill (a talented diplomat should get more benefit from an Open posture than a lousy one would). Cautious gives no modifiers to anything. Aggressive gives you a penalty to your reaction rolls, but triggers an intimidate check.

If the creature's reaction roll comes up hostile and/or if the party has an aggressive posture (not sure if this should be always, but I'm going to stick with this for now to minimize rolling), the party rolls a passive intimidate check against the creature (possibly with a bonus if the posture is Aggressive). If the check succeeds, the creature runs away/hides/cowers in fear/begs for its life, as appropriate.

I'm tempted to add in a fourth posture for actual parleys, but I think it's unnecessary; if you're part of a culture with strong norms about respecting white flags or whatever, that probably gives a bonus to the reaction roll, and we don't need a separate posture for it.

Unlike your system, this allows you to influence the attitudes of other creatures on first meeting, and actually reduces the amount of rolling necessary. I think.

[Avoraciopoctules]

For people who haven't seen PL's homebrew thread, I think this is the link:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52760

[Grek]

Hostile Posture =/= hostile attitude.

YOU JUST CUT AND PASTED 80% OF THE ATTITUDE DESCRIPTION TO DESCRIBE THIS "POSTURE" YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT.

This is why you can't write rules. That. There. Your inability to achieve the most fundamental and basic clarity of what the FUCK you even think you are saying.

You are incapable of reading words. I copied the description for the behavior of creatures with hostile attitudes into a sentence describing how the behavior of creatures with hostile attitudes is unchanged by a specific posture.

Also, RE PhoneLobster's rules: I present the following direct quote.

so some characters are somewhat OBLIGATED to run around trying to seduce pretty looking french windows.

[Avoraciopoctules]

What's the context? Is this like Unknown Armies where you have specific stuff you need to do to charge your class abilities? Is this for a Dashing Scoundrel that stocks luck points with successful seductions or something?

[Grek]

Characters with the Decadent flaw in his system "Must spend All Energy Minimum 0 in order to target Pretty characters (or objects!) with anything other than Seductive actions"

So, yeah. He specifically wrote in a character trait that makes you seduce furniture.

[rampaging-poet]

PhoneLobster's system has a negative trait that prevents you from making non-Seduction attacks against entities with specific tags. Sufficiently beautiful windows have those tags, so people with that trait can talk to them but not smash them. [QUASIEDIT: Ninja'd].

I pointed out some weird edge cases in his initial object targeting rules, and in a later post he reconsidered and ruled that objects aren't valid targets for social attacks at this time.

Also, there's a simple way to ensure a single damage track systems doesn't feature stabination-based diplomacy: give every ability that makes someone your friend a line in the description saying it doesn't work on people who know they have recently been injured by you or your allies. It still falls prey to the edge case of befriending people after a false-flag attack, but prevents the worst and most obvious pitfalls of the single damage track while making intimidation more likely to succeed against injured targets.

[Username17]

But wouldn't you want to ready the action "I will shoot whoever starts to shoot at me", thereby killing them before they attack? Readied actions do resolve first. I just checked.

No. Because then the other guys can walk into full cover and start blasting away and shit. Committing yourself to a specific course of action when there are two other guys who can make plans accordingly involves you not winning. The third man to choose an action always wins (subject to whatever their chances of simply missing are in this hypothetical game).

Oh, I thought you meant that your Mexican Standoffs didn't involve rolling initiative at all, when you said "There are no readied actions involved and initiative doesn't even get rolled."

Now I see that you mean initiative does get rolled, but it doesn't matter because everybody delays. That's a much more sensible position.

The two states are equivalent. Everyone would delay if initiative is rolled, but no one is going to call for an initiative roll because they don't have any actions they want to declare. Anyone can demand to roll initiative whenever they want, but if there's no actual purpose in doing so, why would they?

---

Anyway, the thing about presentation is that its effects rather want to be based on what the other guy is doing. In the example of the potential ambusher: he has come to launch an attack at a defenseless city, so if the city has a fucking red dragon in it when he shows up, he's a lot less likely to open fire. In the example of the wandering Gnoll Druid, he's a lot more likely to start shit if he thinks he's being attacked.

So you'd have a first chart that had the NPC's stance and the player's stance, and that would change what modifiers to the roll you got (both in terms of where the zero point was and in what the players got bonuses and penalties for).

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

PhoneLobster's system has a negative trait that prevents you from making non-Seduction attacks against entities with specific tags. Sufficiently beautiful windows have those tags, so people with that trait can talk to them but not smash them. [QUASIEDIT: Ninja'd.

Pretty much. And the full context of the original French windows quote goes on to state...

...It's just that, assuming you DO defeat an inanimate object with lies, it doesn't DO anything, because it cannot control or change or even consider it's own actions...

Basically A decadent character cannot attack a pretty character, or object, with anything other than a Seduce attack, OR they have to pay a large resource cost to bypass that limitation.

And in the case of pretty furniture, well they COULD seduce it, but it doesn't do anything. As noted, you know. One line after mentioning it at all.

So really the entire passage was just an entertainingly worded explanation that decadent characters find it hard to smash some things, and no, seducing the french curtains doesn't actual DO anything. So decadent characters either don't smash them, or pay big costs and smash them.

There was further discussion there about other edge cases to do with furniture and how it needed to work in relation to social, and later some talk about why I even bothered not making furniture immune to social, and how really I probably should, etc...

The biggest issues actually with lying to furniture actually kick in on the social mult-targetting/multi target penalty mechanics and how if you allow the chairs to be viable targets despite there being no benefit in socially defeating them then group Friendly attacks on rooms with furniture in could suffer large penalties for no extra benefit. But that sort of thing IS the upshot of abstracted mechanics, and you have to actually consider and discus it to figure that out and define a way to make it stop doing crazy shit. You know. Like I did.

But hey if someone doesn't enjoy a mildly entertaining read and wants to take quotes out of context. Don't let me or anyone else stop them...

[Korwin]

Actually, he has posted his rules to a large extent in the IMOI sub-forum. It's quite obtuse and hard to read. Also, you can explicitly make the princess more likely to love if you beat her up first, and the difference between a slightly favorable trade agreement and mind slaving is largely academic.

Stockholm Syndrome? Now I need to read his rules...

[Grek]

After reading jadagul's draft and doing some thinking on my own, I'm now considering revising how postures work to allow for four postures instead of two:

Diplomatic: Requires that you not have your weapons out, not be buffed up for combat, not be trying to hide and either know or previously have researched the correct cultural niceties. Improves the attitude of every non-hostile creature you're prepared meet by one level towards you.
Aggressive: Requires that you be visibly threatening. Lowers the attitudes of indifferent or worse creature you meet by one level, but allows you to make intimidate checks to make the creatures you encounter not attack anyways.
Avoidant: Requires that you try to hide from/avoid meeting creatures. Gives you a bonus to spot/listen, but decreases the attitudes of anyone that you do end up meeting by one.
Neutral: If you're not specifically doing one of the above, you are neutral and whatever the attitude of what you're facing is, that's what it is when you encounter it.

This also allows for individual postures if you want to go that way.

[virgil]

Not sure about any possible inspiration from the following social combat system...
http://www.dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Social_Com ... iant_Rule)
...and then I read it with actual effort and find the whole thing broken on first principle.

My next foray through Google's search window brings me an obvious OSSR design...
http://aeonsnaugauries.blogspot.com/sea ... reputation
http://aeonsnaugauries.blogspot.com/201 ... ables.html
...haggling is a little too detailed for a modern audience. One nifty thing though is that you suffer reputation loss if you refuse the social compel, including accepting multiple gifts without giving in return; though it still suffers the flaw of narrative flow. People want to adventure, not get a horse for 20% off. Also, the blog seems to have died and never provided rules for reaction tables, invitations, feasts, intimidation...

I've heard that Burning Wheel has a functional social system, but it feels like a high-powered courtroom proceeding.

Has anyone read the RPG Sufficiently Advanced? It supposedly has functional rules for ad campaigns, fast arguments, political debate, or even cold war.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Has anyone read the RPG Sufficiently Advanced? It supposedly has functional rules for ad campaigns, fast arguments, political debate, or even cold war.

I have read it and played it.

When I played it (last year), the system for character vs character conflict was basically:

• Figure out the ratio of your number to the other guy's number
• Each of you gets to inflict 'complications' on the other character, with severity based on how well you did.
• You can spend a character resource to make both complications bigger or smaller

EDIT: Note: A SA character can be a single person, or a group of people (e.g., a civilization).

EDIT 2: Sufficiently Advanced (2 Beta)

EDIT 3: The term is 'complications' not 'consequences'

EDIT 4: A slightly more detailed explanation is on the second page of the character sheet here: http://suffadv.wikidot.com/forum/t-6947 ... -book-beta