CK2 Trait-like based diplomacy

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, here's a fundamental problem with diplomacy as Frank pointed out.

If you're trying to convince the elven queen to enter an anti-illithid alliance with the dwarves, it should be easier if she's wise (even if she's racist) and harder if she's foolish (even if she's tolerant). If you're trying to convince the elven queen to invest in your tulip craze, if should be harder if she's wise (even if she's greedy) and easier if she's foolish (even if she's austere).

The thing is, foolish and stubborn and deceitful and whatever are emergent reactions to personality traits. Scrooge is a miser who not going to spend money either on a cheap gym membership or a bridge in Brooklyn, but he's considered foolish if he turns down the gym membership and wise if he turns down the bridge.

So instead of trying to conduct diplomacy through shit like Insight and wisdom scores and diplomacy modifiers, I propose this instead. All characters have personality traits that determine how they will respond to certain proposals. If you want to convince people to do something, you need to appeal to their personality traits. For example:

Stubborn - The character responds positively to arguments that involve them doing what they already want to do and negatively to arguments that involve them changing their opinion.
Zealous - This character responds positively to proposals that involve them inflicting their beliefs and negatively to ones where they have to restrain them.
Experimenter - This character responds positively to proposals where they're doing a new process and negatively to ones that involve repeating failed ones.
Planner - This character responds positively to proposals that require detailed thought and negatively to those that require a quick decision.
Loner - This character responds positively to proposals that reduce others' commitments to them and negatively to proposals to increase others' commitments to them.
Forgiving - This character responds positively to proposals that suggest patience to repentant entities that have aggrieved them and negatively to proposals that promote hostility.

So in the above example, our 'foolish' queen would have the traits of Greedy, Loner, Xenophobic, and Experimenter. A typical proposal of entering the anti-illithid alliance by appealing to her sense of Traditions Of Ancient Alliances and emphasizing safety in numbers is going to fall on deaf ears and should get a penalty. An alternate proposal where you suggest that you have an unequal treaty where the kingdoms have equal spoils but the dwarves do most of the military work would be received better.

[brized]

How do you plan to keep track of the NPC's plans/goals, beliefs, and who has wronged them? How would the players get access to this information? How could it be presented in a way one could reference in less than a minute?

[Lago PARANOIA]

For important characters, you'd just assign them the traits as part of statting them up. For characters who weren't previously important (for example, a PC tries to schmooze an anonymous city guard into investigating a rival merchant), you can just randomly roll them.

As for finding them out, you can roleplay them to find it out (the count of this city is so generous even though he's racist) or just roll an insight check.

The traits should be obvious so that a player doesn't have to think too hard about how to convince them. If a player thinks that the gnome artificer is a prude and greedy and they want to convince them to let the party look at their inventions, it should be obvious what kind of diplomatic track to take.

[Username17]

An advantage to CK2 style diplomacy is that it creates opportunity for player character differentiation in the social minigame. That characters could have traits like "crude" where they are better at talking to the sailors and worse at talking to the guildmasters. Abilities like Deception and Insight could be used to mimic traits you don't have or determine what traits people actually do have. Example: use of Insight to determine the Queen is "lonely" responds well to "sympathetic" traits.

I think the main drawback of this kind of diplomacy system is the number of moving parts it would have to have. Actual CK2 has dozens of traits and you'd want more for an RPG. Keeping track of the traits of minor characters could get pretty harsh - do you honestly give a shit if Goblin Fishmonger #3 is "lustful" and "lazy"? Probably not, but it's game important information.

I do think this is the direction things should go, but I think you'd need some pretty big NPC tables and generators.

-Username17

[MGuy]

This kind of just seems like you made a writing prompt than solved some deep issue with the system. Oh this GM might not be able to decide exactly what motivation this King has for being so stubborn. So instead of thinking they roll on a table and get a few personality descriptors then work from there to build an actual conflict around it. I wouldn't see this as solving some deep issue with modeling social interactions. I wouldn't really even classify this as a problem unless you were against GMs just deciding on motivations themselves and leaving everything else too work as a function of your generic social minigame.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This kind of just seems like you made a writing prompt than solved some deep issue with the system.

That's the goal. People get offended if you, an otherwise qualified courtier PC, simply roll a d20, add generic modifiers, and then tell the king to make you court vizier. People don't get offended a qualified courtier PC rolls a d20, then stacks the modifiers for appealing to the king's greed, his affection for lower-class louts, and your shared training under the same archmage he loves and asks the king to make them court vizier.

If you're making requests with low levels of commitment to them (like asking the shopkeeper for rumors around town or asking to work in the stables for a few days) then you don't need to go into the traits. You can just roll a d20 to see if they're interested in doing what you say without any special appeals.

[deaddmwalking]

You don't have to identify all the traits in advance. It would work to allow a way of DISCOVERING a trait making it a trait that can be activated.

There could be a variety of ways of either discovering or possibly CREATING specific traits that you would then exploit. For example, talking with someone about all the ways they could spend that money to better their lives might give them the GREEDY trait, so it's easier to convince them to take a 'safe financial bet', but if you fail that check, the GREEDY will counteract the 'initial investment'.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I am strongly against using a talking minigame to do what you described. It's just a self-contained positive feedback loop that rewards people with the best bonuses regardless of roleplaying context -- which is what this system is trying to avoid!

[MGuy]

While I don't think this solves the problem people actually have with die rolling into grand vizierdom I think it is useful to have a list of prompts for beginning GMs to use. It's the best reason to buy a GM's guide actual guidance. More often than not people tend to gravitate toward using written stuff to help influence their choices and just the existence of these descriptors would probably get more tables to frame social encounters differently. Having it tie to their backstory or whatever you're using to give roleplaying prompts that is not alignment helps influence players to maybe remember what they wrote for their own character.

[Lago PARANOIA]

While I don't think this solves the problem people actually have with die rolling into grand vizierdom

The thing is, I don't think people actually have a problem in abstract with player characters going from riffraff off of the street to grand vizier/crown prince/lead general after impressing the monarch. Fantasy stories are packed to the brim with intrepid merchants and sultry seducers and Tyrion-like influencers and even just fast-talking Puss and Boots types going from nobody to nightmare in an instant.

What people don't like is how the die roll that makes this kind of instant social climbing possible completely is divorced from roleplaying and the narrative. If static modifiers are small and situational modifiers are decisive, people won't mind you rolling your way into grand admiral of the court because your character did their homework and pulled on the monarch's strings.

[shinimasu]

This is very close to something I thought of a long time ago, though instead of phrasing it as personality traits I phrased it in terms of preferred approaches. As in "This NPC responds positively to compliments and a bit of brown nosing, if you can figure out how to say the thing as nicely as possible you'll get the best results" or "This NPC is easily cowed if you take a forceful approach to the conversation."

I do like this better though because I feel like it accounts for the relative wisdom of the NPC better than just how do they like to be talked to. It is however kind of gratifying to have someone else independently arrive at a similar NPC tag system for social mechanics.

[MGuy]

While I don't think this solves the problem people actually have with die rolling into grand vizierdom

The thing is, I don't think people actually have a problem in abstract with player characters going from riffraff off of the street to grand vizier/crown prince/lead general after impressing the monarch. Fantasy stories are packed to the brim with intrepid merchants and sultry seducers and Tyrion-like influencers and even just fast-talking Puss and Boots types going from nobody to nightmare in an instant.

What people don't like is how the die roll that makes this kind of instant social climbing possible completely is divorced from roleplaying and the narrative. If static modifiers are small and situational modifiers are decisive, people won't mind you rolling your way into grand admiral of the court because your character did their homework and pulled on the monarch's strings.

The instant die roll is in fact what I was referring to. The tag system doesn't make the single die roll to the king's most trusted ally any more comfortable for people. If the players go and have a whole adventure where they save the kingdom and its royal family to earn their way into trusted seats of power that's all well and good. But getting a +4 situation bonus for knowing the king is militaristic and will like people who sound similar when the bard makes the single die roll to launch himself from street performer to second to head of state is not more satisfying. At least not in the way you're describing.

Let's be real here. People already do what you're describing here on their own. It's written into APs paizo produces. The benefit I see from the tags is to get people more engaged with trying to understand the npcs but it didn't 'solve' any major issue with diplomancing. It's a a good idea to help roleplay by giving a mechanical benefit for caring a bit more about the details but you still have to create a functional social system without this before this could be of any use.

[Username17]

Your diplomacy system wants to model the following scenarios:

• The wise elf queen agrees to commit troops to the cause as soon as evidence of the lich king threat is presented.
• The villagers start treating you like valued heroes as soon as you slay the manticore.
• The hermit wizard stops trying to blow you up and invites you in for tea as soon as he realizes you aren't one of the dragon-bound soldiers despoiling the land.
• The orc chief agrees to hear you out after your berserker performs a feat of strength.

None of these are "level based" in any particular sense. You do a thing that is appropriate to the character and then they switch to friendly. You don't overwhelm their level appropriate Insight DC with your level appropriate Diplomacy result, you provide something relevant and then they become friendly.

A list of traits that would imply what appropriate actions to get people on side would help cut out a lot of diplomacy rules failures.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

The tag system doesn't make the single die roll to the king's most trusted ally any more comfortable for people.

Then these people are idiots who don't understand action-adventure fiction. People making fast friends with powerful people who want to help the heroes or put the heroes' talents to use is a fundamental part of action-adventure fiction, and we're talking about going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

We're not even debating whether it's plausible or in-genre for player characters to undertake an action that makes them instant friends after one lone narrative action. What we're doing is coming up with a way player characters to make that lone action A) relevant to the opposition party's interests and B) have foreshadowing or at least makes internally coherent narrative sense. But if what you're objecting to is the idea of PCs becoming fast friends with the nomad leader after a few minutes showing off their horseback riding skills, then fuck off.

[MGuy]

Calling your audience idiots for not understanding the genre in the same way as you is really... not a defense when you made an appeal to 'the people's' sensibilities.

I didn't know we were debating A or B because both of those things, once again, have been done by people all the time, are done regularly as part of mind caulk people use to adjudicate these things, and are seen in various adventures with X person reacts favorably to Y action. I'm not even debating if it is 'in genre' as I never brought that up. I'm not even talking about making X person more friendly to you with you do to some action.

What I'm saying is actually:

1) This does not solve any issues with Diplomacy. It's more a writing prompt than anything else. It's useful for encouraging engagement but isn't useful for actually solving the 'hard' Diplomacy issue.

2) That people legit have a problem, not with Oh the king likes the sound of your nationalistic pride and is therefore more likely to trade war stories with you, but with Oh the king likes that you 'also' like to boar hunt and now you're his most trusted friend ever and he will do anything for you. Which is a thing people don't like about bonus stacking in current Diplomacy which this thing does not resolve.

I'm actually not sure that we're arguing. It feels more like I'm saying "This is interesting but doesn't actually do much by itself. You still need a functional social system before any of this can mean a damn thing because people have been adding this stuff in for decades themselves." and you're telling me "I think one roll should allow you to be grand vizier if there are special modifiers you can take advantage of by pretending you admire old school playwrights".

[Lago PARANOIA]

Calling your audience idiots for not understanding the genre in the same way as you is really... not a defense when you made an appeal to 'the people's' sensibilities.

People want strategic outcomes that conflict with their priors and processes all of the time. And the more obvious the contradiction, the more contempt I have for their thought processes.

Action-adventure fiction relies heavily on dramatic changes in personal relations at a speed we'd find baffling and improbable in real life. Heroes decide to abandon their old lives on the word of mentors, people fall madly in love at first sight, kings put huge faith in outside advisers, peasants agree to sacrifice their lives in the name of worthy causes, strangers decide they're ride-or-die battle companions after a few minutes, whatever. There's plenty of good reasons why this is so, but that's the name of the game.

If you're making a game that's supposed to model fantasy stories and you object to this basic building block of said fantasy stories, then I'm going to conclude that you just don't understand action-adventure fiction that well. If you're making some kind of postmodern deconstructionist point about this omnipresent storytelling trope, fair enough, but most people aren't doing that. No, they just don't have a clue how the fiction they love works. Which is a level of misunderstanding the genre akin to asking 'why does the crime fiction genre have so many murders in it, that is ridiculous, in real life most crimes are petty misdemeanors and our police simulator game should reflect that'. And I have no fucking patience for people like that.

[MGuy]

So I'm not clear on what you're defending. In genre yea a named dude can be befriended by the protagonist but if the plot of the story hinges on them getting into the good graces of named dude there is usually some trial or another they have to face. They don't do it in one sit down because they happen to both be into WW2 memorabilia. That's something that happens to mooks or people who don't matter. If we're talking about plot relevant people it is widely out of genre for a single witty opening line to get you into the King's personal retinue.

I don't think you're actually wanting to defend the thing I'm pointing out and are actually defending something else.

[Lago PARANOIA]

In genre yea a named dude can be befriended by the protagonist but if the plot of the story hinges on them getting into the good graces of named dude there is usually some trial or another they have to face.

That's wrong. First of all, your conception of diplomacy sucks ass. I used the term 'dramatic changes in personal relations' for a reason.

Go back to Frank's list. Your diplomacy system needs to do all that, because those are basic fantasy plots. Yes, 'in real life' things would typically (but not always) move at a pace and decision process that's too slow and undramatic for a die roll. So fucking what? It's a fantasy story. We don't need to say that the mentor convinced the farmboy to go on an epic quest after weeks of regaling the hero with stories about their grandfather and reminding them of the empire's atrocities and treating them to tasty meals. We don't cry 'hax' if the paladin rallies the mayor against the evil empire in one dramatic speech instead of a series of rallies and town halls.

And you know what? This happens for EVERY and ANY character in a fantasy story. The idea that certain characters are too 'important' or 'plot relevant' not to have dramatic changes in personal relations after spending a few minutes with someone persuasive is metagaming bullshit from someone who had their brains broken by video games.

[Username17]

The goal is to reduce the number of traits you need to keep track of to the minimum. Our villagers can be reduced to a single trait: Fearful.

The fact that they are Fearful means that you can get them onside by slaying a monster and getting adopted as their protector and source of hope. It also means that you can demagogue them into being an unruly torch wielding mob. And of course it means that until you do one of those things, no one is going to talk to you above a whisper and they will say little of use when they do.

It seems to me that there aren't a whole lot of village archetypes and you could probably have each one defined by a single trait. Or two traits if you include the fact that this village is mostly Halflings or whatever. So you have a Welcoming Gnome Village and a Fearful Goblin Village and so on.

-Username17

[MGuy]

In genre yea a named dude can be befriended by the protagonist but if the plot of the story hinges on them getting into the good graces of named dude there is usually some trial or another they have to face.

That's wrong. First of all, your conception of diplomacy sucks ass. I used the term 'dramatic changes in personal relations' for a reason.

So... the part you are quoting here doesn't match up with what you're complaining about. It's not my conception. It's what happens in genre. The fellowship doesn't start out buzzom buddies because someone in the party is witty. They got rallied to do a job. They become closer over the course of the story. Which is the point 'I' was making. I don't know where you're getting this 'Can't rally the mayor to do a thing' and 'Too important to have dramatic changes'. That's a pretty... obvious misreading of what I said considering I literally say in the part you're quoting me that there's "more to it" than making a roll.

Look, Lago, I appreciate the 'idea' of having a bunch of traits that change some numbers around. It works as a writing prompt. It is bait to get players to get engaged with details. That's cool. It doesn't solve any problems whatsoever unless you already have a functioning social system. I really don't understand why you're aggressively misreading what I'm saying in order to go on these tangents. I would think if you actually disagreed with my actual point you'd make some kind of argument or make an example of how the inclusion of these traits actually solves any issues current socializing systems have instead of this being neat mechanical goodies to get players to act a certain kind of way.

[Username17]

With villages there aren't that many meaningfully different diplomatic endpoints, and a table that told you which means of getting to one or the other was easy or hard depending on what trait the village had could be pretty simple. So the list of endpoints where the village gives you resources (whether it be coins, supplies, or troops) could probably be reduced to something like:

• Angry Mob
• Martial Alliance
• Fearful Tribute
• Lawful Taxes
• Hero's Welcome
• Contracted Payments

And so you could imagine a simple table that would tell you the relative difficulty of getting to one of those end states with different kinds of appeals.

The Elf Queen is a bit trickier, because you might plausibly want to seduce her or allow you to build a fort in a wilderness area nominally in her demesne. There's more ways you might want to interact with her, so she needs more traits like an actual CK2 leader that specify things like "likes poetry" that only have effects on specific types of appeals.

-Username17

[Dean]

One way you can get some free mileage out of a trait based system like this is to not only have personal traits but also culture traits. If a random Viking Jarl becomes relevant you can generate his personal traits but you should have some frame of reference when interacting with him just on the basis that you know he is a Viking.

If I walk out into the snow naked and drink an entire flagon of ale before shouting "To the king!" then the Viking King will think I'm fucking awesome and the Elven King will never allow me in court again. This just means one of those people has the Warrior Culture trait and one has the High Elven Culture trait (or possibly just the High Society trait). You wouldn't even have that written down for most people you can just know that if you challenge a random Orc warrior to trial by strength he's more likely to respect you even if you haven't generated that Orc warrior's individual traits. In the same way that individual Dwarves have their own characters and ability score makeups but there's some general things you can assume about them having low light vision and being hardy the players could just know that everyone at the Masquerade should be assumed to have the "Upper Class" trait even without the DM knowing any of the party goers individual stats or psychological makeups.

[jt]

Villages having a summarizing personality trait sounds like a nice bridge into a logistics and dragons system, if you have one. You could pretty easily output something off Frank's list while playing kingdom builder, show up in person, and know how the town's going to act.

Like MGuy, I'm not sure a trait system adds anything more than roleplaying prompts if you're still at an adventurer scope. But at a larger scope I could see building a coalition against the lich king being routine enough that you want it to take only a few minutes to send evidence to the elf queen, send a champion to show off for the nomad prince, fail to convince the dwarves, and decide that your next adventure is doing something for the dwarves in person.

I love that this proposed trait system has "wise" as a trait. Not because it's that interesting itself, but because what its negation implies about everybody else. Like... "can be convinced to do something if it's a good idea" is a special character trait that most people don't have. That's awesome.

Also, maybe it makes sense to get rid of the diplomacy skill entirely? People seem pretty on board with rolling $relevant_personal_connection instead, whether that's horsemanship or poetry.

[shinimasu]

If there are mechanical bonuses associated with picking the right traits, or even treating traits as an auto win in certain situations, adds a layer of social deduction/info gathering not currently incentivised by standard d20 social mechanics.

If the DC to hit is 20, and I have 15 diplomacy, then there's no reason to try and get a read on the queen before going to meet with her.

If there's a tiered system like "The DC is 20, you can raise/lower it by hitting the right/wrong tag during interaction, and/or if you peg this other thing you essentially get a bonus success" then suddenly it behooves the players to try and get to know the NPC a little, or ask around about them, before they try and get their diplomacy on. It also gives social support skills like sense motive more of a role outside of figuring out if someone's trying to bluff (the skill would probably need to be renamed to encompass the broader scope).

But more importantly having the tags make social interaction feel less like mother may I with dice. In the current system the information "Duke earlington likes puppies and is too ambitious for his own good" will net me different results at different tables. One GM might have added it purely for flavor, and will give me no bonus to my roll if I try and persuade the duke with promises of higher status. One GM might give me a +2. Another might give me a +5. Another might declare a bribe of puppies an auto success, no roll needed. Yet another might have already made up his mind that the duke is persuadable no matter what I manage to dig up on him.

A tag or approach system is useful because it standardizes the results. Condition A is a bonus, Condition B is a Victory, Condition C is a penalty, and so on. Ideally this system also prompts the GM to tell us when an NPC is "locked" into a choice and won't change their mind about it come hell or high water. If I sniff out information on the duke and the GM has already decided that the Duke is too stubborn to be convinced then there should be a condition written in the game's own language that communicates that to the player so they don't spend 30 minutes arguing in circles.

[MGuy]

Add standardizes bonuses and nomenclature to conditional socially relevant bonuses/penalties to my list of compliments for the idea. I don't think anyone has made mention of their being lingo to indicate auto failure or successes into the mix that communicates a condition where the players have to take a less direct to roll route to convince a figure of something or to induce a change of heart in them is also a good idea.