Actual Anatomy of Failed Design: Diplomacy

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay.

1.) PCs should not be able to be diplomatized by other PCs or NPCs.

2.) Circumstantial bonuses should compose a large part of the diplomacy roll. Cynical and automatic modifiers to diplomacy should never get larger than the difference between 'guard is indifferent but wary of you' and 'guard wants to sleep with you enough to be derelict of duty but not something very harmful like kill a best friend or knowingly commit treason'.

3.) 1st-level NPC bar wenches of moderate attractiveness should have a chance with a minimal amount of circumstantial bonuses (like a +1 for being the right kind of pretty to them and a +2 for drinking and ego-boosting them all night) to convince a level-20 Skull Knight with no sexual mores, the right orientation, and average libido to sleep with him or her.

4.) Under normal circumstances, two parties acting peacefully and not openly displaying threats should not provoke a violent reaction. This exception can be waived in extreme circumstances like a guard being strung out on PCP and not liking your drow face.

5.) There's an automatic reaction roll that takes place before the two parties even being diplomacy negotiations proper. This will determine whether some stranger just plain doesn't like your face or whether the elven king takes a liking to you despite you being a smelly orc. Further diplomacy results will depend on the initial reaction roll. Like the above, sometimes the reaction roll will have the bandits opening fire before demanding your gold, other times the bandits will like you enough that they'll half-heartedly make the threat and then listen to your pleas to let you go unmolested through the woods.

6.) PCs and NPCs can take 10 on diplomacy rolls assuming that they meet the other requires, but not reaction rolls.

7.) The diplomacy system is made in such a way that it's a lot easier to get someone to hate you if you act up than it is for them to like you even if you go all out. You can get your dwarven allies to break off diplomatic relations with just one insulting courtier but you could suck up to the drow for generations and not get anywhere.

8.) Unintentional darkening of someone's mood when they're already a friend should be rare and should never happen if you're just doing something like exchanging gifts or attending a meeting. Unintentionally turning someone from ally to neutral or hostile should only happen if the dice are really against you AND you're doing something like asking a huge favor or making a big demand.

9.) Favor trades. If you have a very big request like asking the princess to sleep with you the smelly but charming hobo or requesting a detachment of bugbear raiders you can still force certain results at the cost of having to do something in return. If you don't respond reciprocally it'll darken their mood. You of course have the option of promising to return the favor but not.

10.) An in-universe time limit on diplomacy retries contingent to how much your result deviates from the DC. So failing it by too much or exceeding it by too much will increase the time from a day to a week to even years. However the DM can permit a retry whenever he feels like it if dramatically appropriate like getting another chance to seduce the princess if you just rescued her from a dragon; he just can't cockblock you from retrying if the time limit has passed.

[PhoneLobster]

1.) PCs should not be able to be diplomatized by other PCs or NPCs.

Absolutely fundamentally wrong. PCs SHOULD be targetted by the same social effects in the same ways. This is important to generate interesting social situations with PCs like the party Bard being seduced by the evil queen and having a loyalty dilemma. But most of all it is important because it is the most appropriate and elegant way of creating a risk/cost for social actions (so PCs don't just spam them until they succeed). Because if you lose the social interaction... you get socialized. Whatever that may mean in whatever iteration of social mechanics you choose to use.

2.) Circumstantial bonuses should compose...

You appear to be taking the unpopular middle ground between "about the same as a high ground bonus" that I like, and Franks "every circumstantial modifier I can think of needs to be bigger than the entire game".

3.) 1st-level NPC bar wenches...

Why? Really? You can't imagine how the behavior you want here cannot be generated by either A) Wenches LOSING at social encounters. Or B) Not using social mechanics for piddling bullshit like beggars and small change?

4.) Under normal circumstances, two parties acting peacefully and not openly displaying threats should not provoke a violent reaction.

Well that rules the social credit system right out. But again, this is a big reason why 1 cannot be the way you want it. If PCs are immune to social and they start socializing an NPC. It is only rational for the NPC, and the GM, to think... hmm, well they aren't immune to SWORDS are they! Your system should have some means by which the appropriate response to social actions are other social actions. I would like to point out I have that, but when you make one side of the equation immune to social you clearly cannot.

5.) There's an automatic reaction roll

I remmember this being very unpopular elsewhere. But hey it's Franks baby so Lago loves it, surprise. But really, I could have it or not, personally I think it is entirely unnecessary so I would drop it the second people got as pissed off as they did last time Frank demanded it and dismissed all critics without justification.

6.) PCs and NPCs can take 10 on diplomacy rolls assuming that they meet the other requires, but not reaction rolls.

This seems like a small but bad idea.

7.) The diplomacy system is made in such a way that it's a lot easier to get someone to hate you

This seems like a flavor choice. And one which you seem intent on setting the dial to "insanely frustrating and railroady". If players want to make friends with the drow it should really be doable in some way. Making it arbitrarily off limits to make friends with random groups is just dick waving assholery.

8.) Unintentional darkening of someone's mood when they're already a friend should be rare and should never happen...

OK again point 1 comes back to bite you in the ass. Because now with it VERY hard to have poor consequences on failure you just removed the OTHER potential risk/cost of social actions, and made them free. That is a bad thing. That is "Can we have your kingdom yet? What about now? What about NOW?" territory.

9.) Favor trades.

Time to write up that additional infinite sized list. No, but really, favors lack objective value. The problem with an abstract mechanical representation of them is that really, the King didn't ASK for your damn favor. He didn't WANT to give you his bugbears, and he never asked for a free holiday to Hawaii. The "concession" mechanic already offered here is a prime example of this not working.

10.) An in-universe time limit on diplomacy retries

Is not a valid solution to the risk/cost scenario. Especially since you seem to have effectively made the limit entirely arbitrary at the GMs call. If it's free it doesn't matter if the retry limit is set to a hard "Once ever for everything". Because then players will just spam every single once ever chance they encounter because it is, after all, a once ever chance to get something for free.

Now let me add a few points for you guys, not necessarily ones I agree with, but which I have noticed you seem to want.

11) Rational Decisions
Apparently Frank, and a lot of folks want big modifiers for rational decisions. Apparently you want to assume that characters are rational actors, and players are also rational actors, and everyone can agree on what rationality is. I think you can see MY problem with this, but it DOES appear to be a primary demand being leveled against diplomacy mechanics.

12) Subjective Knowledge
Rational decisions however require perfect knowledge. The thing is knowledge is imperfect. You need a means of handling and measuring knowledge, and accounting for it's subjective nature. You basically need to be able to handle appropriate modifiers (whatever you decide those are) for the "here hold my bag" scenario even though one or both parties may not know what is in the bag, or may have wildly incorrect ideas of what the consequences may be.

13) Deal Breakers
Here is an idea I like and have in MY system, but which I have seen no notable mention of elsewhere. AFTER you have succeeded in your socializing and changed an attitude you will frequently need some way for that state to END and revert (or change entirely) based on future events or inputs. If you DO make a new friend or gain an alliance that needs to end when you backstab them later, and it needs to be clear what conditions are ending conditions.

[Stubbazubba]

5.) There's an automatic reaction roll

I remmember this being very unpopular elsewhere. But hey it's Franks baby so Lago loves it, surprise. But really, I could have it or not, personally I think it is entirely unnecessary so I would drop it the second people got as pissed off as they did last time Frank demanded it and dismissed all critics without justification.

That was this thread, I think.

[icyshadowlord]

1.) PCs should not be able to be diplomatized by other PCs or NPCs.

Absolutely fundamentally wrong. PCs SHOULD be targetted by the same social effects in the same ways. This is important to generate interesting social situations with PCs like the party Bard being seduced by the evil queen and having a loyalty dilemma. But most of all it is important because it is the most appropriate and elegant way of creating a risk/cost for social actions (so PCs don't just spam them until they succeed). Because if you lose the social interaction... you get socialized. Whatever that may mean in whatever iteration of social mechanics you choose to use.

I can see that being abused by some. I mean, if the players are equally at risk of being affected by Diplomacy, they might develop the same kind of reactions to NPCs as they do to traps. Also, GURPS has the same system that you cannot influence PC behaviour with checks similar to Diplomacy. If it was allowed, I would have gotten the party Wizard killed because he attacked me and I wasn't able to finish him off myself.

[Swordslinger]

Scenario 2: Bardy's twin brother Bardtholomew McBardPants uses Diplomacy on the king. This is a normal thing that people do to each other and almost nobody gets murderously angry over it. He is rolling for the exact same results as Charm Monster, but without the risk. That makes for boring gameplay and a weak story.

And I'm even assuming risk is the only problem: the king is some throwaway NPC, and it's OK to force a fight for control of that character using only social abilities he may not even be built for. Do we use this same shit if the king is a PC?

I think that social systems should apply to PCs the same as NPCs, because they're systems. PCs aren't inherently immune to being seduced or swindled, so anything that potentially could happen to an NPC should be allowed to happen to a PC as well.

As for diplomacy and the zero risk element, that's exactly why you don't want diplomacy to be too powerful. It has to be limited in the sense that you're running around creating a potentially infinite army of mind-controlled servants. Just because the dark elves decide to help you against the lich king doesn't mean you're best buddies. It may just mean that they'll wait till the lich king is dead before trying to off you.

[angelfromanotherpin]

A number of social systems give a successfully-affected social target a choice between going along with the persuasion or taking some kind of meaningful penalty (representing inner turmoil or some such). So if a PC is successfully seduced by a barmaid, the player can declare that their character is gritting their teeth and walking away at the cost of (e.g.) a -2 blueball penalty to everything for a day or so.

[codeGlaze]

1.) Not down with it being impossible to use it in some fashion. Maybe the DM chiming in and saying 'his argument *does* sound solid...'. Then letting PC interaction move from there.

2.)Circumstantial bonuses could realistically be boiled down to vague descriptors.

3.) If you *wanted* to micro-manage to that extent you could *start* a dip. system with a simple table of 'outlooks' (moods?/outlooks on the situation... I can't think of the proper word). Simple blocks of positive or negative numbers, that would determine a DC needed to persuade party 'B' to do what party 'A' wants. Bar wench is overtly friendly, Skull Knight is open to her advances. Those blocks could be used to determine that, unless she botches, she barely even needs to roll for her suggestion to work. Or take the logical route and the PC could just willingly fail the opposed checks.
Something like Column A: [Perceived (stance toward you)] / Column B: [Your Reactionary 'stance'].

4.) Could use something along the line of that simple table. The PCP tweaked guard would not be displaying a passive Perceived stance. So PCs would describe their reaction to that, and you move from there.

5.) Upon meeting anyone in the world first impressions occur, and matter. Once again first impressions should be trivial to settle... like I said above. It's past the first impression that diplomacy is involved in. If, for more serious situation, you want to add *additional*, more involved, rules for determining first impressions, you could build off the initial table.
*You see a band of men, dirty clothes and faces, carelessly waving daggers about, and gesturing toward you.
*Obviously they are trouble makers, and would start off with an aggressive stance toward you. They want stuffs. Your reaction would probably be defensive in nature.
*Now to add a more involved layer to this first impression the DM could look at a value for being aggressive. Then look to another table and add in any factors that would attract/deter them to/from the PCs. Being aggressive would be a starting number. Do the PCs look wealthy? Do the PCs look like they can handle themselves in a fight? Are there more PCs than thugs? Are the thugs under influence of magic/drugs/something else that would increase their self worth or bravado?
*There are a limited number of items that run through your head when assessing threat. So, that table could be kept pretty small.

6.) Why?

7.) Losing trust is a lot easier than gaining trust. Some people will never trust other people fully... and because there should probably be a "never" in a system like this.. it SHOULD be made *extremely* difficult to win over a person like that.

8.) Unintentional darkening of mood happens all the time in relationships. Women are fickle! But normally you need to do something that strikes the wrong chord with a friend or ally to get them to 'shift outlooks'. So then you just try to cover it up or smooth it over, another dip check. xD
So really, possibly another table, this one with levels of 'sensitivity'? Easy to offend, easy to appease. Easy to offend, difficult to appease. Hard to offend, easy to appease. Hard to offend, difficult to appease. >_>

9.) Favors could just be a static increase or decrease to a dip check. Take a feat for guilt tripping to boost such a modifier. >:P

10.) Isn't a terrible idea. But that's difficult to quantify.
Growing up my guy friends and I would mad at each other, get into a fight, flip each other off, go home... then a few hours get bored, call each other up and ask to go hang out.
So another table? This one representing how long a person is likely to hold a grudge, or hold an offense against you? With modifiers for the level of grievance?

A number of social systems give a successfully-affected social target a choice between going along with the persuasion or taking some kind of meaningful penalty (representing inner turmoil or some such). So if a PC is successfully seduced by a barmaid, the player can declare that their character is gritting their teeth and walking away at the cost of (e.g.) a -2 blueball penalty to everything for a day or so.

That's pretty cool.

[Orion]

The 1st level bar maid seduction is stupid and has always been stupid. If you want player characters to successfully be seduced, why not assume that the towns adventurers use as bases of operation have thriving and extremely competitive service industries? Why not assume that the server seducing the PCs is a 3rd-level expert specialized in Persuade? That ought to give her a fighting chance against PCs of up to 6th level or something.

And let's not pretend that the barmaid needs to be tempting to 20th level PCs. In D&D, sex should scale by level. Everything else does. The Wizard bones summoned succubi, the Cleric gets happy with the celestials, the Barbarian king has a harem assembled from conquered lands, and the Bard woos legendary beauties. The monk and the lich have transcended boning. A 1st level barmaid really shouldn't have anything to offer a 20th level adventurer that they would be interested in.

[PhoneLobster]

Anyway, it's hardly fair to simply point out things like Lago's list of demands completely eliminating risk, cost and basic function of social mechanics. I should really lay out my OWN list of demands.

It is somewhat dramatically different.

1) Social Abilities Describe Characters
"I'm a scary mo fo!" is a statement players need to be able to make about their characters and it needs to MEAN something. Just like it means something when they say "I can kick your ass with my pole arm skillz!". The degree to which it means something can vary, but as with basically every other thing we care about in an RPG the most important thing should be the character ability. This among other things unfortunately means that regardless of actual effects and other demands huge circumstantial modifiers are simply not acceptable as a routine element of the system. Since no one cares if you are a Scary Mo Fo if that is always rendered irrelevant by arbitrary modifiers.

2) There should be some variety and customizability
How much is somewhat up for grabs. But one Scary Mo Fo should not always be completely identical to another Scary Mo Fo in his Scary mo fo abilities, there should be sufficient variety in available scary mo fo abilities for your character that there can be at least SOME variation in scary mo fos. Because you want to have scary mo fo contests with other scary mo fos. And you don't want all of those to be mirror fights.

3) There should be different flavors of socializing
Scary Mo Fo is a nice social role flavor. But we need some others too. I went with what I see as the iconic four, Scary, Friendly, Seductive and Deceptive. These seem to cover a wide range of bases for some "general types" of social roles, and you need to do that because just having one ability called "social" and doing EVERYTHING from scaring pants off to seducing pants off with it is somewhat shallow, simplisitic, and violates demand 1.

4) Socialite needs to be a viable role
Scaring someone, seducing someone, making friends, whatever it is you do, needs to be a viable option. The more you have arbitrary modifiers bigger than the social mechanics the more you undermine this. You can have potentially SOME, but one of the problems with arbitrary is there is no predicting when it comes up, so even some occurrences of "your chosen character abilities are not allowed to be viable to day, because I say so" are problematic, and the sheer degree of such occurrences demanded by the "grognards" on this completely out of the question. Of course the degree to which it then has viable effects can and should vary based on other investments, primarily complexity, but that's a product of other demands...

5) Cannot be a separate mini-game
Even if you DO write your social mechanics as a mini-game, or as a secondary unique mechanic, they need to interact with all the other mini-games you have. Most especially whatever your primary mini game is. Which will be regular combat, who are we kidding?

This means that as a unique mini game/mechanic it will need explicit interaction rules for what happens when it occurs in parallel or serial with regular combat, chases, sneaking, and so forth.

This means that even if its interaction rules are annoying and impractical "no chocolate allowed in your peanut butter BECAUSE I SEZ SO!" you STILL have the issue of the social mini-game/mechanic being a potential alternative to combat. Meaning you need to somehow balance your social mechanics, your combat mechanics, and their various risk, resource and complexity investments against their various rewards and results in an over all reasonable manner so you don't massively discourage one or the other option in a general manner. You can potentially discourage (but ideally never dissallow) one option on a situational basis, but again, not on a general one, and also not on one based on character build, because that last scenario is the worst of all, because...

You cannot have both a separate mini-game AND the OPTIONAL ability to invest in differing amounts in social abilities. Because then you have different players around the table competing to engage in separate and incompatible min-games. If you can at any point build as a "Face" specialist and trade out any kind of combat utility for that, even if you enforce similar combat effectiveness but have variable "Face" effectiveness (presumably because you are trading "Face" abilities for other unique secondary bullshit) you create conflict between players over whether they get to make everyone else twiddle their thumbs with a mini-game they dominate.

Finally a the more separate, the more unique your mechanic the more complexity it brings to the game, the more complex it is the more rewarding it needs to be. This means that having a complex minigame designed to emulate a vast amount of inputs and target actions is completely incompatible with ALSO demanding that that mini-game be capped out to explicitly minimal and/or arbitrarily cock-blocked results. Even a potent and rewarding mini-game appropriately matched to it's additional complexity is still another separate mini-game for players to learn and it is really rather hard to get players to invest in another separate unique rules set in parallel to the primary one.

All in all the conclusion of all this is that social mechanics need to be rolled in to be completely compatible as regular combat/primary mini-game mechanics. They should use the same rules, they should happen in similar action time frames, they should be compatible and otherwise interact clearly with other non-social actions. This gives a clear and simple means of determining parallel and serial interactions of social and non-social actions, it prevents the dreaded "Face Specialist" disaster field, it does not create a tiresome new minigame for players to look sideways at, and it means you CAN actually set your balance point for complexity/character investment/reward pay offs to a number of potential and viable levels.

6) Socialite roles need to be viable on their own
This is a flavor demand. You COULD if you insisted create a game where social abilities are so crappy they CANNOT be anything but a minor extra ability (ideally that works somehow as a combat compatible extra). But frankly thats a shit game to make. Casanova Thunderfist is a Barbarian AND a Romancer, and those roles get equal billing in his name hell, the romancer role gets mentioned FIRST.

There are a lot of cool character partial and complete archetype opportunities in social abilities that are deeply under-exploited. And to make them exploitable those abilities need to form viable roles entirely in their own right. Sometimes Casanova Thunderfist walks into a fight with the hot Amazon Twin Sword Princesses or something and decides, hey, THIS ONE is the fight where he only uses his Casanova powers. More so the hot Amazon Twin Sword Princesses might very well reasonably respond to that by deciding that THIS ONE is the fight where THEY use nothing but "Fuck off we are Scary Mo Fos" abilities. Or they might just try and sword him, because the in combat social vs swording is actually very much a cool in genre thing to do.

Importantly though this means that swording, barbarianing, scary mo foing, and romance all need to be largely equivalent and interchangeable in a broad general sense, just as swording and hammering need to be.

7) Complexity leads to rewards
The demands so far add up to a bit of complexity. You are investing pretty similar amounts of complexity in describing your character as "Guy who uses an axe" when you describe them as "guy who uses Friendship".

This means that you need to give out similar rewards. Charm Person is a good model for rewards relatively in line with the results of regular combat. So that's our baseline here. This is a very reasonable, versatile and beneficial base line to use.

8) Piddling minor crap
Small change beggar scenarios are scenarios we do not care about. They should NOT use your big important rules. Your big important rules should not be warped to account for them, just like you shouldn't break your dragon slaying rules so that you can have them use the same mechanics as you demand be applied every time someone swats a stray mosquito.

If you MUST use mechanics for piddling minor crap then THAT is where you drag out the unique minor secondary mechanic. You know the one, the one made out of arbitrary GM bullshitting sessions of "mother may I", and if you are lucky maybe one relevant number in the "other bullshit" section of your character sheet.

That one relevant number should have some minor correlation to your greater skills. But no more so than say, a bullshit arbitrary Strength check has with your formalized ability to throw 12 lightning tridents a turn.

9) Equivalent Risks
You need to have some sort of risk and cost for social actions somewhat equivalent to their potential rewards. This IS a game, and we cannot have the game broken because someone somewhere thinks that "well making friends is harmless so I guess the guards just let you keep trying!".

The simplest and best means of this by far is to let opponents fight back. And actually thanks to some nice compatibility demands already that COULD easily be done with swords, and that SHOULD be an option.

Unfortunately some retards around here don't understand the difference between "Can happen" and "Always happens!".

A highly appropriate means of fighting back against social attacks is with social attacks. Who gets the upper hand in the charm contest is a GREAT way of handling a pure social encounter risk and cost wise.

And you the only excuse you need for such pure social encounters to occur is for stabbing people to be frowned on by society. The reason the city guards opt for Scare attacks instead of Sword attacks when you break out the Friendly attacks against them is the exact same reason you went with Friendly attacks instead of sword attacks yourself. Because that is the appropriate methodology in the eyes of society and if you run with the swording option instead authorities and the general populace may well be offended and act accordingly.

10) Broad and general social end states
Are a highly functional and versatile result of the social system, they are in the "Charm Person" base line reward level pretty much required of complexity and fairness demands. They make for good risk trade offs. They are general great things to have.

You really want the general target of social mechanics to be a limited number of broadly defined end states, because unfortunately the harsh reality of the demands from Lago and Frank for mechanics tailored to infinite lists of SPECIFIC individual target actions is that there are too many target actions. It's just unreasonable. A "set of guidelines" is workable at the level of piddling bullshit and other second rate secondary mechanics, but it doesn't cut it in major character defining primary roles. And character defining is what social abilities should absolutely definitely be. Indeed you can't get much more "character defining" than social skills.

11) Cashing in end states
Even general charm person type effects don't need to last forever and you need some guidelines about durations and ending conditions. This isn't that hard, even Charm Person itself has such conditions. And it's a way of giving flavor to the different types of broad social defeat status effects to have them end in differently flavored ways.

It is important to note however that ending conditions and even the falvorful limitations of the broad states themselves. Are not a means of balancing the power of those effects. The only means of doing that is in the mechanics that inflict them in the first place.

The long standing "jizz rag" strawman thrown against my social combat mechanics is basically a misunderstanding of this simple point. Social flavor limitations are not effective power limitations. You can "limit" a social defeat status so it's only effects are ones that can be explained as "You do X because you are my friend! And that is what you as a friend would do!". And that is not an objective limitation of the power of the effect. Thanks to imperfect knowledge and player creativity "because you are my friend" CAN seriously get people killed, looted, and generally messed up in ways that while dramatically different in flavor to a simple dominate person are not altogether different in their actual effect.

That however is not a requirement of my system. That is an admission of the reality of the situation. The "social jizz rag" critique, to the limited degree that it exists, holds true for basically ALL forms of social mechanics, even BEYOND ones with the Charm Person model, because characters are not rational actors, character and PLAYER knowledge is imperfect, and ultimately the costs and difficulties of social actions are not and CANNOT be linked to objective value of the results. My system bypasses this by means of rating the objective value of target characters and comparing the objective values of their awesome descriptive social abilities, it does not try to balance according to the objective value of what you might USE your social victory to achieve. Because it can't and more importantly neither can any social mechanic anyone has ever proposed.

12) Strict boundaries between formal and informal mechanics
This is really important. What actual ground does your social mechanic cover? When do you break out the dice and when do you just sit around and play method actor chat party? Because we do NOT actually want EVERY thing EVERY character EVER says to be defined, or even accompanied with a roll. You actually want people to be able to make SOME decisions about their characters actions and statements when they are uncontested. Anything else is game bogging insanity.

But because that line has to be drawn somewhere... it needs to be drawn CLEARLY and PREDICTABLY. If you don't then ANYTHING and EVERYTHING could be held to mechanical ransom, or fairy tea party ransom, at any time.

My methodology, where in the contested or uncontested nature of the action in itself is the line between formal and informal mechanics is the only clear way I have ever seen this boundary defined.

People have full freedom to decide what their characters say in a social situation, and how their characters respond in a social situation UNTIL the very strictly defined situation of another player disagreeing with their action. Then they break out the mechanics and someone changes someone else's decisions about character actions.

One way or another most social mechanics boil down to this, but almost none of them, much less anything my opponents on this topic have ever said, ever ADMITS that ultimately that is what their mechanics boil down to, much less take the advantageous step of formalizing that interaction.

Because they do not recognize the trigger and nature of social mechanics as a means of briefly winning a portion of control of the shared story from another player in a game they produce the rather counterproductive demand that one, or worse MORE than one, player in that dispute should be able to apply "circumstantial modifiers" as they see appropriate depending on how much they personally rate their idea about how the story should progress next compared to the competing idea. This is seriously 4 year olds playing cops and robbers bad territory.

14) Level appropriate challenges should be level appropriate
Your social opponents, or in crazy infinite list world your "specific individually tailored target social actions", need to be actually level appropriate.

It is complete bullshit to cock wave a character around in your story pissing off the Players all over the place and then reveal he is invulnerable to combat or alternatively massively level inappropriate in combat. This is true of other challenges too, like magic locked doors, alert guards watching you sneak around, shopkeepers too reticent to let you interact with the economy, and also, unsuprisingly social challenges

If you are going to present a target or a challenge, defeating it needs to be at the very least within the upper bounds of a level appropriate difficulty.

Doing this with arbitrary modifiers that make your actual character abilities redundant is (sort of) possible. But also completely ass. And also, completely counter to earlier demands.

Fortunately doing this using level appropriate opponent characters who have level appropriate social attacks and defenses. Is very clearly totally doable.

This means that, again, sorry, having modifiers that completely negate the character advancement system and character abilities is basically a big nono because it destroys the most basic concept of level appropriate challenges and enables and encourages bad GMs like Frank to cock wave social opponents and obstacles in front of you that you cannot ever actually defeat.

This is not to say there can't be things that are beyond character capabilities, it just means that those things have to be defined in similar ways to things that are beyond character COMBAT capabilities. There may well be a point where the King, and All His Men, are NOT defeatable social challenges, just as with their role as combat challenges. It's just that, as with combat challenges, if they are going and getting all up in your face and making PCs care about them THEN they had BETTER be level appropriate challenges at THAT point, or at least SOME point ideally the sooner the better.

That is the nature of level appropriate challenges, and the limitations and reasons for level appropriate challenges in social situations are NO DIFFERENT to the reasons we have those concepts in any and every other aspect of RPGs.

I'm sure there are other points, but that should do for now.

[Josh_Kablack]

Thank you to LAGO and PL for presenting lists of what you want out of a social system.

I now have a pretty good idea of why you are never going to come to a consensus on this.

[Orion]

1: There must be a semi-formal "diplomacy system" that describes the way nations, organizations, and individual leveled NPCs who are powerful but have not yet been "on stage" will behave. Each one is tagged with a "relationship status" with the PCs and maybe some other information like how aggressive or suspicious they are or some shit. There are some tables where you can roll a die to see how they behave in response to various situations.

This is like magic tea party in that the inputs to the system come from the MC's ass, but unlike it in that NPCs behave predictably when their starting parameters are known. DMs should outright tell the players what the social parameters of important characters and faction are at the start of the game, and maybe even give the players some input in defining them.

2: These mechanics should explicitly include a way for players to get level-appropriate gear and hirelings from their allies. Doing so should degrade the relationship. What improves the relationship is MC fiat in the same sense that what treasure is found in MC fiat. (If your game mechanics are sufficiently meta that players define the treasure, they can buy relationships with the same currency).

3: There should be character abilities that manipulate this social minigame, allowing them to "freeze" one NPC's attitude despite repeated favors (thus gaining a cohort), increase the rate at which favor is gained, reduce the risk of hostilities commencing, manipulate the die rolls, or gain more information about the setting of social flags.

4: These abilities are basically downtime abilities. They let you get more gear or minions or bypass incidental, trivial threats or get to and from adventure locations. So basically they should come out of the same pool as abilities like item crafting, animal taming, and swimming: conveniences that give you free stuff between adventures and pave the way from fight scene to fight scene.

5: Characters must not be required to take any of these abilities. In my experience a huge fraction of the D&D target audience want to play antisocial lone wolves, and while I feel that that's stupid and they should stop doing it, I know that I won't convince them of that. So they must be able to take crafting or animal training in place of diplomacy.

6: Most social scenes can be kept short so that the non-faces don't get bored. But sometimes there's a war council/throne room scene that has to take a long time. To avoid making non-faces twiddle their thumbs, make the other downtime abilities interesting and usable in the same tiemframe. If the PCs are making elaborate war plans, they should be getting input from their crafter about what devices he can or cannot have ready for showtime, and he should be able to build something useful the same night that the Face secures some allies.

7: There should be combat attacks with social consequences. You really can just spend an action instead of attacking to charm or dominate someone and then exploit them after the combat music has stopped. There must be non-magical social attacks that work the same way. Staredown, Cleavage Flash, Hulk Smash, and other stunts must be able to produce compulsion effects in one round.

8: These social attacks attacks are balanced on the assumption that the enemy is fighting back with deadly force. Therefore, they must all be obviously aggressive, exploitative, hostile, or supernatural.

9: There should also be "slow social attacks." These must be channeled for 3-10 combat rounds to take effect. However, during the channel direction the targets are fascinated without save provided that they or their allies are not currently being attacked by anything else. They roll their saving throws at the beginning of the channel and break the fascination earlier the more they succeed.

10: These will cover seduction, begging, and so on. They're written as combat actions but in most cases the beggar or barmaid will walk up to your PC and "channel" the full move during an unescapable conversation, at the conclusion of which if your PC has not been won over they may respond however they like to the affront.

11: All characters will have at least some SSAs, and they can buy more or better ones from their "noncombat" resource pool, because in most cases they won't be effective during the combat music. Interrogation, Seduction, Oratory, and the like all go here.

[Username17]

• PCs should not spend time diplomacizing each other, but should be diplomacized by NPCs. In Trust & Credit, this is actually fairly easy in that you announce that characters in the same party save each others' lives several times an adventuring day and rack up "maximum" credit with each other on a constant basis. On the other hand, when PCs talk to the vizier about using the kingdom's orb of plot exposition, there should definitely be a non-zero chance that they end up saddled with a side quest. Player characters should definitely be conned into selling their cow for some magic beans.
• People that you meet should have varying reactions to you. It's a game about exploring new continents, and it should very much be up in the air whether the new tribe of reptiles decides to shower you with gifts or arrows. In Trust & Credit, this is handled by creatures that don't already have a fixed level of trust having a reaction roll with huge plusses and minuses for whatever the fuck it is that you and they are doing when you meet them.
• People shouldn't be able to give you an apple every day until they can demand the kingdom in back payment. This is handled by having a gain in Trust have a maximum value that it will add to. This in turn also puts player characters at the level of not having to do accounting because their accounts spend all their time maxxed out anyway.
• The actual level based modifiers to rolls to modify Trust levels should be small enough that people of every level can get every result. I feel this is self evident based on the fact that high level characters have enemies and low level characters have friends. Low level characters should be able to make friends with and seduce high level characters. High level characters should be able to meet people who don't like them and to piss people off on accident.
• On the flip side: Credit ratings should actually be level based. If you do one of the labors of Hercules, you get more Credit than if you mow the lawn. When the King retires, he gives his crown to the savior of the kingdom, not his butler.
• People should surrender when they are defeated, and not before. As such, surrender is a state that has to be bought with Credits racked up during hositilies, and not due to general Trust levels. So you surrender to a herald after your army has been defeated, you don't surrender to a scullery maid who happens to take a cross stance with you and roll well.

I see enough in common with Lago that we could hash out a mutually agreeable diplomacy ruleset. Phone Lobster's set of demands cannot be reconciled with my own and there is no possibility of him having anything positive to say about anything I made or of him contributing in any positive way to such a ruleset's creation. Similarly, any ruleset he made would be wholly unsatisfactory to me and I would not accept it as a replacement for diplomacy rules.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

Note that at no point does Franks "system" ever involve you writing "I am a Scary Mo Fo/Casanova/Friendly Guy/Master Of Lies" on your character sheet and getting ANYTHING productive for that.

This fails my first point, which is why I don't like it. But more importantly that made the first point on my loooong list because that is the most basic test your system will need to pass to make actual players give a shit. If I can't write "Master of lies" on my character sheet, your social mechanics are a piece of boring shit I don't even want to read.

But aside from that unlike Frank I believe that a system and mechanics can benefit from negative criticism and that it's proponents should attempt to face and address that criticism rather than being whiny prima donnas and just running of crying every fucking time about how Phonelobster can never agree with me!

As such let me provide some useful criticisms of Franks short and deeply inadequate list of demands.

People shouldn't be able to give you an apple every day until they can demand the kingdom in back payment. This is handled by having a gain in Trust have a maximum value that it will add to.

This doesn't work. You need to do something to prevent simple additive accumulation otherwise the apple a day scenario is pretty much hard coded into your system, or alternatively the give you the kingdom never happens in ANY scenario. Since you seem obsessed with give you kingdoms scenarios I'm assuming you want it to be an achievable maximum so... you reach it by giving an apple a day, the only question is how many apples and what is the minimum measurable apple size.

PCs should not spend time diplomacizing each other

And they probably shouldn't spend time swording each other either. But they can if they want to, and that probably isn't bad, but most importantly it doesn't make the top of my list of demands for how swording mechanics work.

I AM concerned with the saddled with side quest dealio however. I mean really having NPCs be able to make the PCs do what they want without a check, roll, or level based/character based resistance or action of ANY kind to avoid it, just by means of your credit system? THAT is not going to go down well. I mean I KNOW you hate player agency as shown in WoF and your "Where The Fuck Are We?" positioning system, but this one is SERIOUSLY going to have your players knocking their chairs over in their rush to be the first one at the table to choke a bitch.

I mean really "The vizier gives you the orb of whatever the fuck."... "and earns 100 Credits with you, cashing them in FORCING your PCs to decide to enter the tomb of annoying-evil-you-would-rather-have-done-something-else-instead-of-being-railroaded-into, you know, in gratitude, because that's how gratitude works, your enemies cash it in to make you do stuff against your will.

Players will fucking hate you. The SECOND you pull the "you just got saddled bitches!" the icy cold glares... are gonna be... awesome...

Low level characters should be able to make friends with and seduce high level characters.

You have yet to give any firm example of why this is actually necessary. You just demand it. It seems... a rather edge case scenario, I mean, considering you don't actually HAVE a functional scenario that holds actual water to give as an example. And as such I'm not sure it belongs in your demands list until you CAN actually give a hard example, since maybe then we can figure out what the fuck this demand is even about.

If you do one of the labors of Hercules, you get more Credit than if you mow the lawn. When the King retires, he gives his crown to the savior of the kingdom, not his butler.

Unless his butler is Hercules. In which case Hercules will find the lawn mowing path a pretty easy way to earn a crown under this system. Really, you need to get a better solution to the apple a day scenario.

People should surrender when they are defeated, and not before.

And here was me thinking the whole POINT of surrender was to avoid blood shed.

But actually this is an interesting one. So there is more than one sort of social credit. Or possibly valuable negative social credits. And apparently things bought with negative/surrender social credits... are immune to your low level demands. Which is certainly... interesting... since five minutes ago in the same damn sentence that scullery maid was a level 1 herald and was totally owning everyone for some reason.

Apparent contradictory confusion in your demands aside, it brings up a good point about the difficulty of objectively valuing social credits for actions. Because some actions are worth differing amounts of social credits... depending on the result you are trying to spend those social credits on. And THAT is a mechanical nightmare.

But then, in addressing some points your goals did not address... mechanical nightmare appears to be the name of this game. You still have some serious infinite list issues cropping up, in more than one place, and even assuming everyone can deal with that you have the issue of tracking social credits. This isn't like tracking money on your sheet. Because every single person in the world apparently issues their OWN social currency, and indeed MULTIPLE SORTS OF SOCIAL CURRENCY, and when you get paid multiple characters might get paid, perhaps even for the same action, with the infinitely multiplying currency (even though the value of what you can spend it on, doesn't change) indeed your actions could ALSO earn currency of multiple sorts from multiple different character currency banks!

On top of that the currency is exchangable. You can totally give people 500 dark lord seduction credits in return for 200 orc lord surrender credits, and the exchange rates are going to be fucking insane dude. Hercules, with his much higher maximum currency storage is a savings and loan bank. You visit him in between adventures to put social credits in him for later. Indeed with the whole "max storage by level" thing the level 1 herald situation totally doesn't work, and instead armies of literally half a dozen level 1 heralds rack up their maximum orc lord surrender credits in the battle field and then give those credits to Hercules who stacks them on top of each other inside his mouth and spits them at the orc lords to force a surrender.

And all of that and no one even seduces the Lich Kings daughter with some sort of personal awesome seduction skill.

Social credits as described by that set of goals aren't just not what I want they are a laughable failure as an alternative. All those goals are doing is generating freakishly stupid currency speculation blow outs. And no one is putting Casanova at the front of their character title.

[Draco_Argentum]

And I am rather annoyed that I am expected to deal with criticisms like that when Frank appears to get a free pass on the level 1 barmaids auto-seducing the king into doing things apparently no rational man would want to do (according to Frank, aspiring arbiter of your new Infinite Sized Circumstantial modifier to your next social check).

People might start caring about Frank's system when he actually has one, all he has now are some half thought out ideas. You claim to have a working system. I say claim because its super special secret and you won't post it here so we can see what it actually does. But of course any misconceptions are our fault, nothing at all to do with that utter lack of you posting the actual rules text.

I could ask you about your system but I won't since you aren't posting it, instead I'm just going to tell everyone the flaw. Your system can not generate any diplomatic result other than unconditional surrender of one side. Until you actually post the rules my baseless assertion is as accurate as anyone else's posts regarding your system, including your own.

PS: See your attacks on Lago's WoF threads if you think defending a system where noone else can see the rules is intelligent.

[PhoneLobster]

Your system can not generate any diplomatic result other than unconditional surrender of one side.

Charm Person.

Is it unconditional surrender?

What precisely is your problem with it.

As for my system being secret. I tend to work with pretty simple rules. I've seriously described enough of this one for you, there aren't any tricks or secrets or extra bits. It's attacks. In combat. They deal a type of HP damage that stacks with normal damage. The end state at defeat is basically a flavor based charm person variant. That is seriously pretty much it.

You don't need more. That is really it. It works. You've seen equivalent systems to all the mechanical aspects it uses already in everyday use in major role playing systems. There is nothing there that is alien to you, untested, unfamiliar or unknowable. That is really it. You want my actual fucking messy half written house rules? And you gonna ask like that go fuck yourself?

When someone asks me I almost invariably do actually provide my rules to them, or post them, or if I don't have them completed whatever more detailed information I have. I do so when it is convenient to me. You aren't asking me, you are literally ignoring every fucking thing I have ever told you in excruciating detail already. I have written MORE MATERIAL about the function of the rules I use than the actual rules I use. There is actually genuinely more here about their function than in the fucking rules themselves. I somehow think that providing you with anything extra isn't going to make you honestly sit down and confront your apparent deep seated hate and fear of CHARM PERSON.

And seriously. I have given FAR MORE DETAILS than Frank or Lago on this topic. My details and goals remain internally consistent and are based on tried and tested mechanics, and not tested by just by me in super secret, by everyone, by all of us, by YOU in main stream RPGs all the damn time. I AM rather annoyed that we are told by Frank and Lago again and again that they have what you call a "super secret" solution to the infinite sized list of infinite sized modifiers issue. But really I would be happy with just SOME material ANY material on how they actually plan to solve that. Or, indeed, solve anything.

All I see is your tired old "Jizz rag" attack. Okay fine. How does that not apply to every other social mechanic system ever put into practice or proposed by anyone ever? As described in the fucking gigantic "goals and methods" statement I provided on fucking request from Josh, the social "jizz rag" critique appears to apply to every single social mechanic ever. How does that not apply to Charm Person? How do you even imagine my "secret mechanics" solve it when I don't even fucking claim they do.

[Draco_Argentum]

I have written MORE MATERIAL about the function of the rules I use than the actual rules I use.

If this is literally true then you are one stupid moron. I suspect it isn't though, shadzar could see that writing massive defenses of rules rather than posting the considerably shorter rules is stupid. But please, continue Lagoing about WoF, I mean your social rules.

[PhoneLobster]

If this is literally true then you are one stupid moron.

Hey I'm not the one who can read pages and pages of analysis and description of how some very very simple rules work and not get any actual information from that.

How about I make it easy for you and highlight the most relevant part of what I wrote, on a sane request from Josh for clarification. Since you didn't actually READ any of it.

That however is not a requirement of my system. That is an admission of the reality of the situation. The "social jizz rag" critique, to the limited degree that it exists, holds true for basically ALL forms of social mechanics, even BEYOND ones with the Charm Person model, because characters are not rational actors, character and PLAYER knowledge is imperfect, and ultimately the costs and difficulties of social actions are not and CANNOT be linked to objective value of the results. My system bypasses this by means of rating the objective value of target characters and comparing the objective values of their awesome descriptive social abilities, it does not try to balance according to the objective value of what you might USE your social victory to achieve. Because it can't and more importantly neither can any social mechanic anyone has ever proposed.

Or alternatively Robby Pants who has been reading this thread, could post a quote of what I told him when he actually asked to see my rules instead of going on an insulting paranoid rant about how I am hiding something from you.

[A Man In Black]

So uh.

Can I see your rules, PL? I'm kinda curious.

[Username17]

As described in the fucking gigantic "goals and methods" statement I provided on fucking request from Josh, the social "jizz rag" critique appears to apply to every single social mechanic ever. How does that not apply to Charm Person? How do you even imagine my "secret mechanics" solve it when I don't even fucking claim they do.

The jizz rag complaint does apply to Charm Person. But it doesn't apply to almost any social mechanics. In the social mechanics of virtually every game that has one, characters are in one social condition and making a social check pushes them up or down or left or right or something into another social condition. That means that if someone "hates" you, it's harder to make them be your jizz rag than if they "love" you. Or whatever. This in turn means that you are encouraged to fight monstrous enemies with meat cleavers and fuck sexy nymphs who are basically on your side. This makes intuitive sense to people.

Charm Person has very different logic. It turns people into your jizz rag if it works and antagonizes them if it does not. So you use it on people who already hate you, because the benefits are large if it works and the penalties are ignorable if it does not. That's a fine mechanic for a limited use magic spell or for a last ditch attempt by James Bond to get the villain's sexy assistant to break him out of a death trap - but it's not a replacement for diplomacy. No one wants asking for help from the elves to work the same as going all-or-nothing on getting the Lich King's daughter to fall in love with you.

And that is why if you continue ranting about your objections to the direction I am taking my own diplomacy rules, I am going to put you on ignore for a month. I don't give a fuck what you think about this issue, and you continuing to rant about it is basically spam. I'll make you a deal: I won't comment on your stupid fucking experiment either. Do whatever you want. I disagree with you on first principals, and I will never like anything you could possibly put together with the design goals you have. So I'll just keep that to myself. Just show me the consideration to also leave me out of your continued rantings.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

So uh.

Can I see your rules, PL? I'm kinda curious.

I'll say what I said to the other guy. I don't want to provide the material I have without some revisions and the soonest I can start on that is Wednesday.

In the mean time, no Frank, the Jizz Rag issue is simply that due to imperfect knowledge a small lie (or other social manipulation), can have big consequences. Charm Person is powerful precisely BECAUSE even the small degree of influence it grants is enough to leverage small lies with big consequences.

"Here hold my bag for me" is probably the best example. And that holds in any system where you can convince someone to hold your bag for you. Even with narrow singular actions, indeed ESPECIALLY with narrow singular actions because those actually give you discounts for telling small lies. After all it's not a big deal holding a bag, right?

But in other news. You don't give a fuck. For the nine millionth time you protest that SO loudly. But, uh, how about you I dunno, give us any idea how you intend to solve your potential apple a day and Hercules the Currency Trader issues that I helpfully brought to your attention. Or I dunno, are you plugging your ears and going lalalalalala because I'm so mean with my daring to have differing goals to you. Because you know, me pointing out some obvious flaws you could instead be trying to address is just SO unhelpful of me that you couldn't POSSIBLY respond about them!

I mean really. What are you? Like six years old?

[Username17]

But, uh, how about you I dunno, give us any idea how you intend to solve your potential apple a day...

Uhhh.... that was actually specifically listed in my bullet point list. It's bullet point 3.

[*] People shouldn't be able to give you an apple every day until they can demand the kingdom in back payment. This is handled by having a gain in Trust have a maximum value that it will add to. This in turn also puts player characters at the level of not having to do accounting because their accounts spend all their time maxxed out anyway.

So it's really obvious that you aren't reading anything I am actually saying. Like anything at all. So since you refuse to take my offer of just agreeing to disagree and doing our own things and you aren't reading anything I write, I'm just going to short circuit this flame war by putting you on ignore for a month. Go fuck yourself.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

I'll say what I said to the other guy. I don't want to provide the material I have without some revisions and the soonest I can start on that is Wednesday.

Whenever, it's not like I'm paying you.

So it's really obvious that you aren't reading anything I am actually saying. Like anything at all.

I am reading what you're saying, but I wanted to make sure I had this straight.

You've got a hard cap on how much someone can Trust you, based on how badass you are. Trust-building activities have two measures: how much trust they add, and also how high they can raise your overall Trust. Hercules can't bring the king 1000 apples to win the kingdom despite having a high Trust cap for being a badass, because apple-giving is capped at a fairly low value.

[PhoneLobster]

Uhhh.... that was actually specifically listed in my bullet point list. It's bullet point 3.

I, uh, brought the issue up before that entire post...

Combined with your demand that credits be able to give auto-success on a scale/RNG that you demand be very small...[entirely appropriate insult] ... put that together and you have a seriously problematic scenario of adventurers running an afternoon of errands to auto-succeed at all the things you think it would be bad if they used the entire character advancement system to do in my scenarios.

Very nearly twenty four hours before you called it "apple a day" in your bullet points.

Bullet points in which you proceeded to provide two "solutions" which are, as pointed out not only inadequate but ALSO lead to Hercules, social currency speculator and lawn maintenance butler.

Good work. You noticed the problem I mentioned before you noticed it. You tried to address it, and once again I appear to be ahead of you on pointing out that your solutions didn't work, which you seem to still not have noticed I did.

I'm just going to short circuit this flame war by putting you on ignore for a month. Go fuck yourself.

Ooops. I guess you will never ever solve the Hercules Currency trader thing. Until you give it another shot in 24 hours under a different title and claim you were the one who thought of it in the first place.

[PhoneLobster]

Trust-building activities have two measures

Even if your assume a rather charitable reading of text using the same terminology in the same paragraph written by a man too petty and infantile to manage even one single clarification without blowing his top AGAIN...

You still have the problem where either
A) Hercules STILL brings the king Twenty Five apples. THEN he goes does something else big, and wins the kingdom with a measurably smaller amount of large actions because he performed some small number of small actions first. And it doesn't work in reverse and you ALWAYS ALWAYS give everyone you are about to do large favours for an apple or 20 before (but not after) the real favor to maximize

B) You track all sources of currency not only character by character and type by type but also source by source and you seriously have some of your points labelled "apples" and when you notice you are just a few points shy of that kingdom you don't go and rescue the kings daughter to top it off, you just check if your apples tally is maxed out and give him an apple.

Meanwhile the side effect is more solid motivation than ever for Hercules, or even Harold the Herald to become a currency trader. (edit: and a massive blow out in currency trading complexity, you now HAVE to track sources of all points since somehow some will stack and some won't when traded and this is going to interact with currency trading (as evidenced by the Herald example)... somehow)And is also somewhat inconsistent with the apparently very small RNG/bonuses being used and the whole "you gradually defeat all of the orc armies" thing from the initial examples.

Also it has bad "Jizz Rag" implications because why bother with the "and just hand me your kingdom" when you can just give him an apple and auto succeed at making the king hold your mysterious bag.

[Username17]

You've got a hard cap on how much someone can Trust you, based on how badass you are. Trust-building activities have two measures: how much trust they add, and also how high they can raise your overall Trust. Hercules can't bring the king 1000 apples to win the kingdom despite having a high Trust cap for being a badass, because apple-giving is capped at a fairly low value.

I should have said a cap on Trust and Credit, but it was a half assed list. The idea is that both a small Credit-giving action like "give an apple" would have a maximum amount of Credit it could stack to and also that an action to build Trust would be limited in its ability to be repeated.

It actually seems like a pretty easily solvable problem on both ends. You don't want small gifts to add up to large favor demands very often, so you just put a cap on concessions where a concession of less than X does not add to Credit Ratings in they are already above Y. It could be a multiplier or a chart or something, depending on where you wanted to draw those lines. And then you want people to do different stuff in diplomatic trust building exercises to win over the Drow - so you put a hard cap on repeated gambits.

-Username17