Another Thread About Social Combat

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Hmm... it sounds like it's probably best to start with NPC design before you can really define social mechanics. Or at least it seems easier to make the former framework than the latter. NPC design should probably be on par with or better than "the scribbled notes the GM wrote 10 minutes before the session", but also something that can be done on the fly.
If an NPC can have a nice little stat block for beating the shit out of people, then... maybe they should have nice little stat blocks for conversing with people? It's dumb and basic, but sometimes I have to spell these things out for myself. Hopes, Fears, Ambitions, Anathemas, whatever they are, they should be consistent across NPCs in the same way that every NPC has a fucking health bar.

[PhoneLobster]

Hmm... it sounds like it's probably best to start with NPC design before you can really define social mechanics.

I would call an obvious no on that one.

The idea that just having some personality notes on a bunch of characters. Hell a "monstrous manual" worth magically solves anything to do with your actual social rules is ridiculous.

Even more so as a starting point.

In the end it's just "infinite list of modifiers" in a hat and a funny mustache.

And as always, you need a design goal, not an infinite list. Starting an infinite list isn't a substitute or a way to get there.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Well... apparently I did have some sort of goals written up. They're so sparse I wouldn't even call them "guidelines", but fuck it, I'll post them anyway so we can maybe get to the root of the issue. Just to get into the spirit of things, I shall also yell at myself. In red.

[*]Obviously, most social interactions should be roleplayed at the table… but sometimes you may want to accelerate the outcome you want. Why go through the ‘proper’ channels when you can lie or scare your way around it? Making a friend often takes more time and effort than most journeying Trainers can spare. Many characters have ways of skipping these drawn-out social interactions, and as a result, these people tend to have a lot of friends. Or enemies. Either way, people take notice of them.(This sounds less like a 'social system' and more of an 'anti-social' system, am I right? I think my idea here was that you can skip MTPing conversations by using your Skill Powers, but I'm being charitable.)
[*]Charming characters are good at making deals and friends in quick order to meet their goals. They can defuse angry brutes trying to intimidate them and even cause groups of creatures to temporarily back off from a fight, potentially turning their moods positive if they have enough time.
[*]Guileful characters get results quickly through lies and deception, but often leave a poor impression on people who learn of their wiles (which is not always everybody). Their wit allows them to mock people being nice to them or their friends, and eventually become unidentifiable to other creatures, leaving people guessing as to their true capabilities. They can also bypass many obstacles by disguising themselves as others, blending into their social surroundings.
[*]Intimidating characters force help from people and terrify them at the same time, though this earns them few true friends. They can stare down friendly charlatans speaking to them and eventually give orders to people that they follow for a time. This can get you results even quicker than lying to people, but is poor for long-term relations. (In order for this to actually mean anything, there need to be long-term relations...)
[*]Intuitive characters excel at seeing the truth in social situations and gaining insight into various situations, to degrees that are almost improbable. They can eventually coax the truth from unwitting targets and learn things about people that even they don’t know. While they don’t positively or negatively influence others, they still learn useful information about people and groups.
[*]Commanding characters are mostly reactive - actively yelling at someone to get what you want falls under Intimidate. (But... why? Might as well have different ways of forcefully getting people to do what you want. This is more of the "Pokemon commanding" skill, but there's no reason it can't extend to general force of personality.) However, they can still break others out of mind-altering effects and counteract the social wiles of other people to keep their friends clear-headed.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I had an idea while I was out brainstorming on my walk today. I doubt it's very good, but I thought it would be interesting to talk about.

Most proposed social systems have some way to determine how an NPC feels about a PC. Most of these lean towards the 'love-hate' spectrum of emotion, probably because of how quick and simple it is. Is there any value in having PCs define their feelings towards NPCs in the same manner and having abilities tie into that? Things like 'your PC is in love with this NPC and your Intimidate abilities are less effective on them because of it'? Obviously you would need rules and guidelines so PCs don't just say "yes I do want to murder everyone on sight so I get big Intimidate bonuses against everyone". I've seen this in rules-lite games like Blades in the Dark, but I'm curious as to how workable it is for a heartbreaker.

[Omegonthesane]

The only instance I've seen of players getting agency over their feelings towards NPCs and having that affect the mechanics is the social combat rules in the official tie-in RPG that Green Ronin did for A Song of Ice and Fire.

Basically being hostile to someone increased your defences and gave you a slight bonus to Deceive them, while being friendly with them reduced your defences but gave you a large bonus to Persuade them. There was a level of scaling in both directions and you could shift one step per round in a direction of your choice with respect to the other participant.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Have you ever actually played it? That sounds mildly interesting.

[MGuy]

I'm of the belief that there are a lot of mechanics you can take from games like BitD to implement in a heartbreaker. If you wanted the "infinite traits" thing I outlined earlier could be used to just attach modifiers to players to determine how certain things about the character effect them in social situations. If a player is 'devout' to a certain religion then that probably effects what they would be geared toward believing and how they might react to members of an opposing faith.

I'm still of the opinion that there's a lot of risk in having players be subject to direct influence by NPCs. If you wanted to have players subject to it then whatever modifiers you have available for NPCs would just be chosen by players. It'd be pretty much as simple as that.

[Orion]

There are already penalizing conditions in D&D that could plausibly be inflicted by social actions, like Shaken. You could add or a revive a few more, like Distracted, Conflicted, or even Besotted, and mke sure all the conditions offered both physical and social penalties. It would be reasonable to have NPCs be able to inflict those conditions on PCs through social action and this could be a good bridge to tie social actions in with the rest of your system. If you penalize actions that don't go along with the condition then you can guide role-playing without taking away control of the PCs.

I don't like the idea of giving out bonuses based on a player's declarations about a PCs emotions or attitudes because I think it drives a wedge between the player and character in a way that undermines role-playing. When the mechanically important decision is "what does my character do," you don't need to metagame. You and your PC are both trying to figure out what to do. But when the question you need to mechanically optimize is "what does my character feel," you're making a meta-game choice that your character isn't making, and you become more conscious of piloting the mech. I think you can get pretty much all the benefits you would get from letting players declare moods by letting them pick "social stances," (or demeanors or approaches or something). If you're "guarded," you're harder to lie to and less likely to give information away, but more likely to accidentally give offense. If you're "sociable," you're better able to learn gossip and make friends, but more vulnerable to being influenced by the people you talk to, and so on. Instead of giving the player a bonus for saying they hate the Baron, give them the bonus for taking a "fierce" demeanor because they hate the Baron.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

There are already penalizing conditions in D&D that could plausibly be inflicted by social actions, like Shaken. You could add or a revive a few more, like Distracted, Conflicted, or even Besotted, and mke sure all the conditions offered both physical and social penalties. It would be reasonable to have NPCs be able to inflict those conditions on PCs through social action and this could be a good bridge to tie social actions in with the rest of your system. If you penalize actions that don't go along with the condition then you can guide role-playing without taking away control of the PCs.

Great idea. I've already got, uh... 74 statuses (jesus fuck), so it shouldn't be too hard to make some more of them dip into both penalties. Some do, but the vast majority do not.

I think you can get pretty much all the benefits you would get from letting players declare moods by letting them pick "social stances," (or demeanors or approaches or something). If you're "guarded," you're harder to lie to and less likely to give information away, but more likely to accidentally give offense. If you're "sociable," you're better able to learn gossip and make friends, but more vulnerable to being influenced by the people you talk to, and so on. Instead of giving the player a bonus for saying they hate the Baron, give them the bonus for taking a "fierce" demeanor because they hate the Baron.

Oh no, this is also a great idea! Guess I'm running with both suggestions, then. Thanks, Orion!

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I hate to turn this into a "TAA talks about his game" thread, but something else struck me. If I've already got Loyalty mechanics in play for Pokemon to represent them growing closer to a PC over time... is it much of a stretch to just adapt that to NPCs in general? My problem with most systems that involve a creature's attitude is that it tends to be very quickly malleable, which implies to me a short-term change in the level of trust/hostility they feel towards a PC. But if you have something for long-term changes on top of that, then can't you include more powerful social abilities for the PCs that can only be used at certain levels of long-term love/hate?

[PhoneLobster]

What you are talking about there is a pretty standard "Reputation" mechanic.

it will work absolutely fine if you simply never ever examine it closely or try to do anything remotely difficult with it.

If you ever put it under slight scrutiny or strain the problems are very straightforward.

1) A single axis numeric rating is utterly inadequate for the task of describing what people feel about each other. You ask someone how they feel about someone else and its all to often like "it's complex" no one says "4". How much you like them doesn't say how much you fear them, respect them, or find them disarmingly cute, or a dozen other factors that cannot ever fit on one axis.

2) It's pretty much a fairy tea party mechanic. The numbers you will be using, probably mostly pulled out of the ether by the GM, same with changes to them. Some such systems have mechanics or guidelines but in practice those are either completely non-binding non events, or they end up just being the poor design decision that makes stacking a dozen individual apples to trade in for whole castles a thing.

In my opinion you CAN make a mechanic like that work, sort of, but the best way to do so is to acknowledge that all it is and can be is a form of short hand note taking for how the GM arbitrarily feels about something and that it perhaps shouldn't be treated like an especially fair, balanced, or important number.

Ideally for instance, I would recommend you never actually let it be a number you add to a roll.

It shouldn't even be treated as a number that accurately represents the GMs inner feels right now, because another problem is that its often a number the GM had feelings about a week, or a month ago that has been forgotten about since.

[Orion]

I feel like you're throwing implementation questions at me that I don't know how to make sense of without way more context. I think you're asking whether it would make sense to give individual NPC a "bond" or "loyalty" or "affinity" number towards the PCs (or a PC) that would build up over time and could be used a pre-requisite to trigger various high-end social powers? I don't know, what are these high-end social powers, who gets them, why do they get them, what are they supposed to add to the gaming experience? How do long term social conspiracies fit into your intended campaign arcs? I recommend starting with some very concrete ideas like "I think it would be cool if (character type) could do something in (situation) that would give them an alternative way to solve (type of problems) that would distinguish them from (other character type); or, "I think players should be able to pick out some long-term goals at the start of a campaign including social ones like obtaining (rank or status) or changing (element of political status quo), or solving (mystery) and the rules should give them explicit tools to pursue (kinds of objectives that are appropriate to the genre I'm aiming for). Once you have that you can figure out what kind of mechanics you need, without that I don't really know where to start.

I might recommend taking a look at username17's game design flowsheet if you haven't, or looking at it again with social stuff in mind if you have.

[OgreBattle]

Was After Sundown's categories for types of Arguments ('contentions of reason' and 'appeals to rhetoric') based on some existing categorization or an original work based on that stuff out there?

Is there anything really glaringly missing from it?

[Kaelik]

Is there anything really glaringly missing from it?

Suffers from some real 3.5 diplomacy "one roll that isn't very hard and you have can make anyone your mindslave" because of static difficulty.

Has absolutely no rules for who gets to make arguments when, so either everyone runs around with their ears blocked shouting everyone else down or you make it so that everyone starts fights whenever someone starts trying to convince them of anything. Also since there are no rules, the table will disagree about which of those things should be happening.

[Foxwarrior]

Hey, at least it humorously makes Charisma worse than Willpower even in nonmagical conversations.

[OgreBattle]

Oh I mean if it was based off of some real world "types of arguments" thing, but I've been reading up on that regardless