So anyway. All too often someone makes a half assed attempt at dealing with social mechanics.Rumsfeld wrote:...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.
They make questionable decisions and groundlessly dismiss the basic "Infinite Lists" issues with endless specific social goals and endless specific contextual modifiers.
Then they make a system that revolves entirely around a haggling mechanic for trading/begging items/favors/stuff of specific values.
I'm making this thread to call attention to one specific problem, "What's In The Bag?".
See almost all the piss poor "social mechanics as begging!" proposals are... fundamentally broken, because they are built from the ground up on the dual assumptions of perfect information and perfect (uniform) rational actors.
The goal is in the form of items or favors that have objective values that all parties in the mechanic are both aware of and agree upon.
And that is quiet frankly ridiculous. Because what if my interaction isn't to ask for something. What if I am giving you something? What if it is not what it seems to be?
The Price Of Mystery
So first issue. Most begging mechanics try to achieve balance by pricing "minor" benefits low and "major" benefits high.
You immediately break their pricing system the moment a player invents the suit case bomb.
Because "Hey can you hold my bag for me?" is almost always the lowest difficulty on the begging table. While "Die Please?" is generally the highest... but why ask someone to "Die Please?" when you can ask them to "Hold my bag for me?" and hand them a huge fucking bomb.
Worse still begging systems generally don't even BEGIN to deal with the idea of giving gifts. They instead revolve around difficulties for, well, begging, or at best haggling. Often they have a huge blind spot for "How hard is it to convince someone to receive a shiny gift that appears to be something they want FOR FREE!" Or if not for free then for any seeming profit. At best these systems weight such a transaction as even easier than the "minor favor" of "Hold My Bag?" if not having such a huge blind spot as to either drop it into MTP or worse, auto success territory.
So where "Hold My Bag?" breaks the entire system, "Would you like this gift wrapped present?" breaks it even more.
Worse still you can totally set up a situation where the other party asks YOU for something and you plan to give it to them with a bomb inside it.
Objective Lies
Some will say, "So what? As soon as I get around to implementing deception this will all magically work!".
No. No it won't. And next time you had best consider it from the start instead of writing another failed begging/haggling system that breaks the moment it contacts imperfect information.
But anyway. The idea is that you could try to solve this issue with an objective valuation system where, contrary to reality, the big lies are objectively harder to tell.
The idea being "Hold my bag (which secretly contains whoopee cushion)" is objectively easier than "Hold my bag (which secretly contains an atom bomb)".
Unfortunately we hit several problems.
The Value Of Deception Is Contextual
So the whoopee cushion bag, at the big atomic peace conference, could be as bad as the atomic bomb bag. But it's rather hard to argue that the lie to hand over the whoopee cushion bag should be as hard as the atomic bomb bag... because then people will just say "screw it, lets just hand them the atomic bomb bag, it's not like it's a harder lie".
And if that isn't enough... the character may not KNOW that the whoopee cushion bag is so much more dangerous/valuable as a lie... because...
Deception is Subjective
One of the problems with "what is in the bag?" is that not only does the receiver not know the truth, but the gift giver may ALSO not know the truth.
If you say that lie difficulty is objective regardless of knowledge by the gift giver (even if they think they are being honest!) then you still value the atomic bomb bag high. BUT your game breaks when the player THINKS they are handing over the atomic bomb bag but inexplicably has incredibly easy rolls because the bag is really empty, or the reverse!
Hell, what if no one knows there is an atom bomb in the bag? Under an Objective deception mechanic it is almost impossible to convince anyone to take that bag even if no living person in the game world knows it contains a bomb.
Worse the game breaks and gives objectively incorrect values when the players simply outsmart the GM and "mystery bag" a trap he doesn't fully realize the value of. An act which under such a system is actively cheating as ridiculous as that may be. All just because one of the problems with dealing with objectively valued knowledge is... well actually in reality even the GM's, and the players actual knowledge is subjective and flawed.
Useful idiots
Alternatively to all that, if you say the lie difficulty is Subjective... then players use "Useful Idiots" as intermediaries effectively wrapping their "bomb" in the "bag" of a genuinely honest dupe. Or even themselves act as bumbling idiots who honestly forgot they put a bomb in there for the significant bonus they gain for being three stooges based assassins.
So hey maybe you implement a "deduce information" mechanic so complex and over the top that you get an additional deduction phase/action that lets you determine if the person providing your information is not only subjectively honest but ALSO to use the deduce information check to determine something about THEIR information source and it's potential honesty.
That's... already kinda bad on a number of levels. But basically there has GOT to be some sort of "second hand information" penalty here on that deduction check. And then it's really just a question of "how many intermediaries to an auto success?" followed by "do we REALLY want to mechanically encourage players to setup shell games so elaborate as to create entire shell corporations worth of useful idiots?"
Not to mention, once again, what if nobody knows? What if the deduce information check simply reveals that it appears to be turtles all the way down?
Paved With Good Intentions
Now, on top of the rest of the Subjective valuation issues. Just like people who write lame begging social mechanics have a blind spot for gifts... when they come to writing a deception mechanic they have a blind spot for honesty.
Which means you get all that bomb in bag bullshit AND more often as not if the gift giver thinks it's a real gift they get actual negative DCs/modifiers and possibly even an autosuccess or "System doesn't even cover it, so MTP!".
And in the mean time it will sometimes be desperately important to convince people of the truth and lets be honest here. Very very few social mechanics ever even come close to addressing this. And if you think "what's in the bag" was a kettle of fish, good luck navigating the minefields of telling "An Inconvenient Truth".
And it's not just literal bombs and bags
And yeah as a reminder this is not just literal bombs and bags. That's just a metaphor for deception and imperfect knowledge and you can do this with cursed swords, incriminating evidence, stolen valuables, seemingly helpful false information and a million other things.
And then there were Irrational Actors
And if THAT wasn't bad enough... all the above STILL assumes that while knowledge may be imperfect all parties involved are still perfectly rational actors who behave in a consistent if not uniform manner.
Which is itself unreasonable and a deeply flawed way of approaching social interactions.
But needs to be considered because should you ever somehow untangle the appropriate value for "Have a nice present!" you now STILL need to deal with the additional layer of "This character has sworn never to accept undeserved gifts for obscure philosophical reasons". Which could result in your "here have a gift lie" suddenly going off the difficulty charts for purely arbitrary reasons, or worse still remaining the same BUT now with the ADDED benefit of the gift recipient declaring he "Owes you a karmic/work ethic based favor".
So basically at some point here you probably need another "deduce information" pass where characters attempt to determine that the king will be more likely to receive a purple wrapped gift bomb than a pink wrapped gift bomb, or that he just really likes bombs and it doesn't actually benefit gift wrapping.
End Point Complexity
Eventually all this gets you to an end point in complexity where juggling all your imperfect information and intermediaries and irrational actors such that you have at least two additional deduction rolls, who knows how many deception rolls, and THEN maybe some actual transaction rolls. And before all of that the GM has not just the basic valuation to pull out of his arbitrary decision ass but ALSO the rationality of the actors, how many intermediaries are involved, and how much subjective/objective information is accurate or false.
And you need to do all of that to deal with asking someone to pass the salt at the dinner table. In part because that's just what happens when you start basing your system off "all goals ever!" but also because that salt might be a bomb.
And once you get up to actions that actually do matter and actually do contain bombs... the actual difficulties will be wildly divergent and arbitrary to the point of being utterly non-functional in any form of balance.
Creating a system which is objectively worse than pure MTP on basically every front.
So THAT is basically the point where back in the day I said "well screw this methodology" and turned around and went with a system focused on ally creation that bypasses this entire mess as largely unsolvable.
