Another Thread About Social Combat

[MGuy]

I pass the job of determining what that means to the groups.

So otherwise basically the infinite sized list of infinite sized modifiers pulled out of ass space.

I've seen you say this over the years and I do not know what you're talking about. In this case, as well as others, I have seen no one suggest anything like 'infinite lists' or what your problem is with lists (I guess?) in general is. I assume it's hyperbole but even if you are just complaining about people having a list of modifiers I do not understand your exact issue with this is.

I really am having a hard time even understanding the thrust of most of your criticism following this line. So I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from this. Nothing I've described thus far inherently limits player agency, makes it more difficult for shy people to speak, or requires/prevents extra negotiations to take place. I'm not even sure how you get there from what I've described.

The criticism that's the clearest to me is that you don't think context should be that big of deal and I can't say I agree with that. The only concern I'd have with making contextual modifiers matter quite a bit is that it would might short change people who invest in being more capable at conversing with people. In that case it would make investing in the skill seem like a waste of time. I plan to avoid that by having players who decide to invest in the skill benefit in ways outside of numbers. Though this might be a concern similar to the tricking people into doing something lethal to themselves issue you brought up before. If it's that, then I just fundamentally disagree. That kind of thing doesn't bother me.

[PhoneLobster]

I've seen you say this over the years and I do not know what you're talking about.

The core of your system is contextual modifiers. An unlimited number of them. Maybe you write a list, maybe you pull them out of your ass on the spot. I hope you both do the second and are prepared to admit that here.

Because traditionally, people instead don't admit that and say, yes the list IS real it really is going to be decided and written out at design not plucked out of asses in game play, or rather, it will be trust me, it just needs some figuring out, I WILL totally have a list covering all the social contextual modifiers I you could possibly imagine with fixed fair and usable ratings for all of them in all situations any minute now.

And that is why the list is infinitely long. My criticism of the infinite length of the list is, well, the list never fucking shows up does it? Because, obviously, it can't. You CAN ass pull infinitely diverse arbitrary numbers at the table. But no one wants to admit that because then they have to admit that any given number they pull will suffer all the potential weaknesses of something you just put maybe upwards of five seconds of thought into.

As for the infinite SIZE of the modifiers, you are throwing away the basic structure of RPG character power progression to prefer, well, again, a number you pull out at the table that you maybe put upwards of five seconds of thought into, or alternatively far too many minutes of discussion and bargaining (for someone who hates haggling you DO know your current design direction is a real life haggling generation engine right?).

It's like approaching physical combat and deciding that a flowery description for a physical combat action should be potentially capable of producing a bonus that completely trumps character power levels and the dice roll at the same time, and that the potential for such a description modifier applied on EVERY SINGLE action AND on EVERY SINGLE potential modifier to an action, like every minor circumstantial modifier will apply more often and at any time might, or might not, be wildly larger than usual because of "context".

The criticism that's the clearest to me is that you don't think context should be that big of deal and I can't say I agree with that.

Do you sit down every sword attack action, and have the attacker describe their sword technique in detail, then negotiate a modifier of a potential size to maybe guarantee a success or failure independent of character level or random number generators based on how you feel about the description? And also which way you decided the wind was blowing and whether the stars were aligned, and defnitely never any personal bias, but also your counter description, your counter description was ART it deserved a WAY bigger bonus and... yeah.

You don't do that with swords.

So don't do it with charm. You. Will. Regret. It.

Nothing I've described thus far inherently limits player agency, makes it more difficult for shy people to speak, or requires/prevents extra

When I try an social action with my methodology it targets a character (or group of them) if it's an informal or semi formal ass pull social Action and those targeted characters belong to other players EACH PLAYER gets a say as to whether they accept it period, not a negotiation which I can use (real world) social pressure to negotiate and haggle on. The trigger to go to formal rules or GTFO is arbitrary but also unilateral. The player independantly decides. They don't have to consult me, or the group, it's their character they and they alone decide what's acceptable for the unbalanced trivial rules get to change about it's actions. No justifications or explanations required.

Then either I give up the social action, or we go to the formal rules, it's all standard combat like stuff, the equivalent of character level DWARFS any contextual modifiers, just like in regular combat, and just like in regular combat there are multiple methods for them to retreat, retaliate, even win.

Your system however is a group negotiation over the size of several arbitrary modifiers and whether they should apply, and the size of those modifiers can be bigger than everything else combined including each other.

And you explicitly have decided that there aren't abstract lies, abstract charms, abstract terror. They have to describe in flowery detail the specific way they are befriending or scaring some sucker, and I presume, you have to hold a straight face and try not to laugh while they fumble through that one, and at the end you will probably give it a score out of 1 to "your character level and roll will not matter", and then, explicitly, the group will negotiate and say "we want a different number" and you will say "eeeerm" and then the haggling starts...

and they will say "Only a 2? OK so what IIIIF Barry's character instead of just smiling and being nice sorta, puckered his lips a bit and cocked his hips while twirling a flower, does that get us a bigger number?" and Barry will be all "um guys..." but doesn't matter, Gary is taking over now, because Gary has ideas, Gary always has ideas, Barry meanwhile just hit peak Barry idea with "um, maybe I smile at them?". Anyway next up Gary is... "no wait, not a flower, a golden locket of high enough value to get an even bigger additional bonus!" and Barry will look sadly at his golden locket in his inventory list and say nothing and well... you spend the next 10-30 minutes mostly talking to Gary, and maybe sometimes to Linda, but Barry mostly just says yeah Ok, and at the end "everyone" has negotiated the optimal action for Barry to take and all the actions for all the characters go like that especially once Gary and Linda are on a roll.

It's the typical co-operative board game thing. It's taken a while, but people are now starting to understand the inherent weakness in games like Pandemic. Not everyone actually makes the decisions. And since you are adding in Role Play negotiations, have you not noticed that when you get to complex planning negotiations of any kind in a role playing game it rapidly becomes the case that some players are clearly more engaged than others?

Putting those both together would, for me, be a problem, and even probably be a bigger problem than I suspect it is for an average group. But I think it would still be some sort of problem for an average group, same as I think entire groups that don't encounter the fundamental problem with games like Pandemic are much rarer than the two guys who enjoy playing it in each group think.

I mean, that's if you aren't trying to prevent negotiation and instead have an amateur theater contest where the group acts as judges that provide a score in the form of a modifier. That will never be biased or even unfair for that guy with limited imagination and acting ability.

A system where the action that has an unknowable modifier is fully committed to before the player can even know the chance of their action succeeding, ooh, that's wince inducing. I suppose judging as a group instead of a GM makes it a little less cringe, but in the end at that point you are basically playing one of the endless knock offs of cards against humanity at that point, your success or failure judged by how a random audience randomly feels.

That could be fun too. But not fair. And also. Those are mostly novelty joke games...

Still, I'm guessing your sticking with actual group negotiation and not the panel of judges model.

[MGuy]

I've seen you say this over the years and I do not know what you're talking about.

The core of your system is contextual modifiers. An unlimited number of them. Maybe you write a list, maybe you pull them out of your ass on the spot. I hope you both do the second and are prepared to admit that here.

I don't think this is the hurdle you think it is. Or rather, I don't think this is a big deal. I made a sample list for Charm a few years ago (2 I think, I lose track of when I started some of the documents) and that list is actually just 4 conditions with differing degrees within them to apply to a roll/TN. The target's disposition toward the player, apparent personal benefit/cost of the request, apparent personal risk, and apparent personal effort. I do not think I need much more than that and even if I go bonkers and come up with maybe 5 (or 6 if I decide to split benefit from cost) more things I want considered on an individual roll then that's well below 'infinite'.

Then there's the inevitable point in time when a situation so specific comes up that the modifiers I have won't be enough. Well there're a few possibilities I can imagine would happen at the table. Either the context in question gets ignored because the rules don't allow for a benefit/penalty or the GM applies a modifier for this unique thing. Likely the modifier will be in line with other modifiers that already exist. Neither of these break the system even if ill considered at the time and I do not know why you think it would.

As for the infinite SIZE of the modifiers, you are throwing away the basic structure of RPG character power progression to prefer, well, again, a number you pull out at the table that you maybe put upwards of five seconds of thought into, or alternatively far too many minutes of discussion and bargaining (for someone who hates haggling you DO know your current design direction is a real life haggling generation engine right?).

Character progression and what it means in any given game depends on the game. If, in my game, character progression works like X then that's just how it is. If in another game it works another way then there's that. I don't believe I've thrown anything away. I am going to make a decision about what I want the progression to be and that will be that.

As for the other issue, I don't imagine there would be much haggling. At least not any more than there would be under normal circumstances. I believe I covered this earlier but players could end up arguing about anything, any roll, any decision made in a game at any time whether there are concrete rules for the interaction or not. Most of the time, they don't. If I tell someone their sword swing missed, I don't get questions about what the AC of the target is. When I've decided a lie was far-fetched I've not gotten any push back for it over the years. If you're in a group that has bought into the fact that the GM generates the numbers for things then most of the time I believe they will not argue with that GM.

For my part what I can do on my end is make rules that are agreeable, give players the tools to understand what choices they have and the potential outcomes of their actions are, and let the groups run their games. Worrying about what if the GM makes all the gaps too large for players to jump across is beneath my concern. If you have a GM that is going to make every NPC you run into unmovable then that is a problem rules cannot solve.

It's like approaching physical combat and deciding that a flowery description for a physical combat action should be potentially capable of producing a bonus that completely trumps character power levels and the dice roll at the same time, and that the potential for such a description modifier applied on EVERY SINGLE action AND on EVERY SINGLE potential modifier to an action, like every minor circumstantial modifier will apply more often and at any time might, or might not, be wildly larger than usual because of "context".

Do you sit down every sword attack action, and have the attacker describe their sword technique in detail, then negotiate a modifier of a potential size to maybe guarantee a success or failure independent of character level or random number generators based on how you feel about the description? And also which way you decided the wind was blowing and whether the stars were aligned, and defnitely never any personal bias, but also your counter description, your counter description was ART it deserved a WAY bigger bonus and... yeah.

It seems like you're complaining about the fact that I'm choosing to use a different method to handle talking to people than I am using to handle sword swings. This is true. I think I explained earlier in this thread why I would be doing so. If you wish to make an argument about my reasoning I'd be happy to have it but I don't know what to do with you pointing out that I'm doing a thing I said I'd be doing for reasons.

I do not think I will regret making this decision, mostly because I've done it whenever I've ass pulled numbers and TNs thus far for social encounters. I think formalizing it will actually be less work on my ass.

When I try an social action with my methodology it targets a character (or group of them) if it's an informal or semi formal ass pull social Action and those targeted characters belong to other players EACH PLAYER gets a say as to whether they accept it period, not a negotiation which I can use (real world) social pressure to negotiate and haggle on. The trigger to go to formal rules or GTFO is arbitrary but also unilateral...

I'm not sure what this means. I guess I'd have to know more about what you're doing with your system to parse this part.

Your system however is a group negotiation over the size of several arbitrary modifiers and whether they should apply, and the size of those modifiers can be bigger than everything else combined including each other.

This bit is a bit of a mess to me. There are contextual modifiers that exist. Ones that are relevant (as determined by the GM) are considered when the action goes down. Different contexts have modifiers that may be bigger and smaller than other contextual modifiers. Some contextual modifiers are bigger than the unmodified RNG. There will likely be things a character can say and/or do to make certain some modifiers apply and others don't. If I end up giving benefits to people who invest in charming people and such (and I intend to) there will even be ways for players to get to glean modifiers they normally wouldn't know about.

I'm not sure what "group negotiation" you're talking about. I also still don't understand why you put a lot of emphasis on players making individual decisions. Nothing about what I've presented so far suggests that players aren't allowed to act individually or instigate social encounters.

And you explicitly have decided that there aren't abstract lies, abstract charms, abstract terror. They have to describe in flowery detail the specific way they are befriending or scaring some sucker, and I presume, you have to hold a straight face and try not to laugh while they fumble through that one, and at the end you will probably give it a score out of 1 to "your character level and roll will not matter", and then, explicitly, the group will negotiate and say "we want a different number" and you will say "eeeerm" and then the haggling starts...

This is also a bit of a mess. I'm not sure what you exactly mean here by abstract lies/charms/terror and I have to be careful about guessing at what you could mean here because the way you're describing this exchange makes me think we are not on the same wavelength about what's going on. If someone tells a lie to an NPC I want to know what exactly the lie is. I don't really need flowery prose, gestures, or anything like that (they are welcome but unnecessary) but I think it's pretty reasonable to have a player tell me what the lie is. Are they lying about who they are or are they lying about whether the sun is out. The context that matters in this case is that if they are lying about who they are there will be different things the target will have to consider than if the character is telling them the sun is up at midnight. If they're doing the latter I think it's a safe bet to say that the GM will likely have the target find that hard to believe under the moonlit night sky. If they're doing the former then contextual things like 'does the guard know what the person in question looks like?' and 'does the character appear like that person?' will matter. The way you're characterizing it makes me think you believe this is unreasonable. I think this ties back with the suit case thing. If you legitimately believe the potential lethality of the move should matter more than the context then we fundamentally disagree here.

[Harshax]

I think once you establish a shared culture, you can add as many relevant inputs as you want to inhibit the sort of hyperbole PL is talking about. This person’s point of view is suspended in a vacuum and less than helpful.

[Foxwarrior]

Barry will look sadly at his golden locket in his inventory list and say nothing

I like that turn of phrase... but I think you would probably be wise to hold off on your next rant about this until after a playable "list of modifiers system" has been posted, I'm getting rant fatigue and I think some of the other people here have lower tolerances than I do.

Oh, I don't think I said here yet: your Social Combat approach reminds me a lot of Ends of the Matrix. Ends of the Matrix was actually pretty fun in play, but when reading it I was thinking "this isn't that much like hacking" a lot of the time.

[merxa]

3: A full on social encounter. This is going to be when important discussions happen. Arguing in the king's court to try to broker an alliance, interrogating an important suspect during a mystery or investigation, anything that is substantial and important enough for the GM to decide that they want to stat out an NPC for it. This is where you get your social combat minigame.

For kitchen sink fantasy, I feel the most interest for rules is here, these scenarios that are full on scenes and can last as long as combat.

One way to go is to replicate combat with cheeky named abilities like Flirt or Bald-Face Lie, have people roll seduction attacks vs chastity ac but that doesn't seem right to me, it seems too artificial.

I guess one question is what sort of gameplay do you want from players here? In my opinion you want something approximately LARPing, people acting and speaking in character pursuing their desires and interests. When a player breaks character, it will be presumably to bring into effect some game ability, and I am inclined to design these abilities as 'just working', it could be sans rolls. I think you want to encourage people taking turns making narrative contributions, so perhaps have a meta currency that people expend as they bend the social encounter to their will.

So you may show up to an encounter with the King and his advisors, you see his Hand with two points, and the King himself has 4 points, PCs presumably have some currency as well, but may have expended some to create the meeting, and of course maybe certain abilities have trigger conditions to regain the meta currency to power your social abilities.

As for the other items on that list, I think 4 lines up with a DOMAINs system, something that passes over seasons and ties into mass combat, making decisions for large groups of people (like Kings decreeing laws).

I think rules for 5 get tricky quickly, especially as every group has its own dynamic, any interparty conflict rules should get clearly labeled as optional. That said, Burning Wheel has an artificial but somewhat interesting system of debate to forcing resolution. I do like it provides room for creating an outcome but forces concessions (minor or major).

[PhoneLobster]

You know MGuy, there is a point where "I don't understand" and "No way would my group do this thing that is absolutely bog standard human behavior" becomes... tiresome.

I think you pulled both those cards a bit too much on the last post. I could understand if you missed just the one point here or there, or if you disagreed on basic player behavior on a few things.

I guess I can sit down and pretend that you don't understand the value of abstraction and why we normally keep the importance of contextual modifiers low compared to character power level in RPGs. I mean, I'm pretending, because I'm pretty sure you do understand that and how it does apply to social mechanics equally, but if you are asking for that much credulity for your claims, I can give you that.

But seriously. You don't grasp the word "unilateral"? The longer description that the individual player decides for any reason at all, at any time at all, all on their own, when bullshit FTP shouldn't be able to make their character do something is too hard to understand??

And you really don't think you are creating something that will see you spend large amounts of time haggling with players? A method based explicitly on group assessment of a value what might as well be the very definition of haggling?

Really?

And you have never noticed how parts of an RPG that rely exclusively on creative thought and real life social persuasion of the GM tend to be dominated by a minority of players?

At some point I have to ask, have you seen a TTRPG in play before?

As for waiting for the infinitely long list. OK. But, I will have to put that onto the ever growing list of people who I'm waiting on to give me that list. Like I've said before. People who promote this approach stall out somewhere during the process of implementing it. I'm sure MGuy has the stamina and insight everyone else lacked right?

Except. Before being told to wait MGuy did the thing I joked about earlier in the thread and presented a laughably inadequate sample list (even called it a sample list), for Charm only this time, that is, yes, less than six entries long and claims to provide close enough to universal coverage. I'd address it, but frankly I think MGuy might be smart enough that just telling him no, that clearly isn't ready for the light of day, should do. Or in otherwords the same as my approach for the rest of this post.

Which is, "Really MGuy?"

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

How do you feel, Adventurer's Almanac, when PhoneLobster and MGuy argue in generic and abstract terms about whether PhoneLobster is scaring you away from posting?

Well, first off, I don't really like it when people try and attribute motivations to me. Rubs me the wrong way. Second, I actually like PL. Even when I don't agree with what he's saying, I'm always amused by his posts. I wasn't scared off at all, and actually agree with a decent amount of his points so far. I've just been writing up a post since yesterday and been really slow about it, so give me a bit and I'll give this thread a shot in the arm.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

My problem is that PL's posts are a bit rambly at times and I'm never sure how much I'm actually understanding here. Ergo, if I post the rules I have, then we can see how much I've picked up from reading like 5 years' worth of social combat arguments, and you can ramble at them and we can go from there and hopefully have something better than the rough, untested draft I currently have, and we can all feel good for having made some concrete difference. For me. And my game.

So now it's my turn to ramble.
LET'S FUCKING GO!

THE BASICS

I have 16 skills total, grouped into 3 categories: Body, Education, and Social. Every class grants automatic skill boosts by category, but players can also spend skill points they get from leveling up to further boost their skills. Skills rank from 1-8, with 8 being ultra super badasses.
Because I'm a madman, you roll 1d6 per Skill rank you've got when making checks. I like it since it scales nicely.

Character levels go from 1-20, which are broken up into 4 Tiers of 5 levels each. Your skills have a hard cap based on what Tier you are. Tier 1 can't go past Rank 4, Tier 2 can't go past Rank 5, Tier 3 can't go past Rank 6, and Tier 4 is fully unleashed and miles better than you, going all the way up to Rank 8.
Here's an important note: All Skill Ranks start at 2, not 1. Characters have to start with 3 Skills at Rank 1, but even if they pick ONLY Social skills, there's still 5 of the fuckers, so they have to be socially competent at something. By the way, the 5 Social skills are: Charm, Guile, Intimidate, Intuition, and Command. Still with me?

Now, the last part: Every skill check has ranges of success. It goes from Critical Success (rolling 6 over the DC) to Moderate Success (rolling 3-5 over the DC) to Success (rolling 0-2 over the DC), then flips over to Failure (rolling 1 or 2 under the DC), Moderate Failure (rolling 3-5 under the DC), and Critical Failure (rolling 6 or lower under the DC). This actually has mechanical effects that will be detailed below, so it isn't entirely the GM deciding what it means.
Yes, I am aware that the numbers aren't perfectly symmetrical, but I'm fine with it.

Oh, the actually fun part: Humans and Pokemon have full access to all skills, because fuck you my Jigglypuff should be able to Charm people without GM fiat.

THE POWER

Every single Skill has a multi-page list of powers you automatically become capable of doing as you increase in Rank. I'm just going to focus on a single one, which seems to be the most relevant: Charm. I'm just going to go through it from top to bottom, for maximum nitpicking.
My added commentary will be in this nice red color.

• Rank 2 (Untrained):
  Push Agreement [Social] (You can tell this is a tag, right?): You may push an agreement onto one target, if you have at an Extended Action (S) (1-30 minutes, basically not during combat) to speak to them. This time is in addition to whatever time was required to offer the agreement in the first place. Once you have presented an agreement and spent time pressing it, you make a Charm check against a DC of 3 + Target Level (1-20) + Target’s Charm ranks (1-8) + Target’s Attitude (+4 to -4). Their acceptance of and feelings toward the deal are indicated below. If you fail to live up to your part of the agreement and the target learns of your violation, they may also break the agreement regardless of the time that has passed. They may attempt to convince you to comply, depending on their temperament and the severity of your violation. (This should probably involve a roll or something)
  Agreements you push fall into one of three categories: Favorable, Tolerable, or Repugnant. A Favorable agreement is one the target would happily accept, but has some minor reason not to do so immediately. A Tolerable agreement is something the target would consider agreeing to, even if it’s not something that would make them happy. Most compromises are Tolerable, and it cannot involve the target knowingly doing something self-destructive or against their nature or values. Repugnant agreements are obviously self-destructive, against the target’s nature or values, or is something else they would strongly object to. If you wish to push an agreement onto multiple targets, you must make a check for each individual. If both parties accept without pressing or falsehood, no checks are needed. If you know a target is lying about their intent to uphold the agreement, you may push them.

  Critical Success: They agree to the deal and feel good about it, sticking to the terms unless given new and substantial reasons to break them. Moderate Success: They agree to the deal for a minimum of 1 day and feel good about it for a while, and may break, distort, or attempt to re-negotiate the deal if they have reason, such as the deal being Repugnant. Success: They agree to the deal for a minimum of 8 hours and feel good about it at first, and may break it if they have reason. Their Attitude towards you drops by 1 degree if you pushed a Repugnant deal. Failure: They agree to a Favorable or Tolerable deal for a minimum of 1 hour and feel okay about it at first, and may break it if they have reason. Their Attitude towards you drops by 1 degree if you pushed a Tolerable deal, and they refuse outright if the deal is Repugnant. Moderate Failure: They refuse the deal and new terms must be proposed if a deal is to be reached. Their attitude towards you drops by 1 degree if you pushed a Tolerable or Repugnant deal.

  
  
• Rank 3 (Novice):
  Improve Person’s Attitude [Social]: As an Extended Action (S), you speak with a person (or a Pokemon, if you are one) uninterrupted, or otherwise share an activity with them. If this activity is interrupted, you must start over at a later time. At the end of the action, you make a Charm check with a DC of 3 + Target Level (1-20) + Target’s Negative Attitude (1-4). If you are attempting to improve your standing with multiple targets, you must spend time with and make a check against each individual’s DC. If you succeed in getting a portion of the group to like you, the rest may accept you more readily (This should probably actually do something). You may not retry this check on a creature during the same encounter, but you may use it on someone multiple times over multiple meetings. If you use this on someone who remembers you in a later encounter, their actual Attitude modifier is replaced by a +2 DC penalty. If you spend a lot of time with someone and get along well with them, no check is needed. If you can tell they are faking their growing rapport with you or aren’t liking you quickly enough, you may use this power. If you mistreat or disappoint someone while their attitude has been changed, they are likely to respond more negatively than before. You can never bring someone beyond Friendly (the second highest Attitude, behind Devoted) with this power, nor does this power work on the same person more than once per 24 hours.

  Critical Success: You positively shift their Attitude with you up to 3 steps. Moderate Success: You positively shift their Attitude with you up to 2 steps. Success: You positively shift their Attitude with you up to 1 step. Failure: Their Attitude does not change. Moderate Failure: They take it the wrong way and negatively shift their Attitude 1 step, but no farther than Hostile (the second lowest Attitude, behind Murderous).

  
  Winning Smile: Whenever you are affected by an Intimidate power, you may make a Charm check as a Free Action. If your check exceeds your opponent’s check, your opponent resolves the power as if they had rolled the worst result. You may also add half your Charm rank to saves against [Fear] effects.
  Flirt [Social, Charm]: As a Standard Action, you may attempt to charm a target with your wit or good looks. The Base DC for this check is 6 + Target’s Level + Target’s Negative Attitude.

  Critical Success: The target is Charmed for 1 round per 2 points your check exceeded 6 over the DC. (1 round = 10 seconds) Moderate Success: The target is Mesmerized for 1 round plus your Tier. Success: The target is Infatuated for 2 rounds plus your Tier. Failure: The target is not impressed. (Each Status is explained in THE STATUSES, below)

  
  
• Rank 4 (Adept):
  Delay Aggression [Social, Charm]: As a Standard Action, you may try to delay a hostile creature from attacking you and your allies. Make a Charm check with a DC of 3 + Highest Opponent Level + Leader’s Intelligence (1-5) + Worst Negative Attitude Within Group. You affect members of the group based on your check result, starting with those members of the lowest level first. A creature who has been attacked by you and your allies is immune to this power for the rest of the encounter, although they still count as part of the group for determining the DC of this power.
  Affected targets pause their aggression for 2 rounds and will not approach within 10 meters (or come closer if they are already within this distance) or take offensive actions on their turn, although they may take defensive or supporting actions. If you wish to delay them after that point, you must succeed on the opposed check again or give them some other reason not to attack, such that they change their mind on their own. Any obvious attempt at escape or aggressive action automatically ends this effect, leaving the group free to do as they like.

  Critical Success: You affect all creatures of a Tier 1 higher than your own. Moderate Success: You affect all creatures of a level no greater than your own. Success: You affect all creatures of a level no greater than yours minus 2. Failure: You affect all creatures of a Tier below you, and only for 1 round. Moderate Failure: You affect no one and probably get attacked.

  
  
• Rank 5 (Expert):
  Push Group Agreement: When you use the Push Agreement power, you can try to push it onto a group instead of an individual. This functions as the Push Agreement power, except that the DC instead becomes 3 + Highest Opponent Level + Leader’s Intelligence + Worst Negative Attitude Within Group. A successful check binds the entire group to the outcome, and will prevent any unconvinced members from trying to sabotage or obstruct the agreement.
  Improve Group’s Attitude: When you attempt to Improve Person’s Attitude, you can do so with an entire group rather than an individual. This functions as the Improve Person’s Attitude power, except that the DC instead becomes 5 + Highest Opponent Level + Leader’s Intelligence + Worst Negative Attitude Within Group. A successful check adjusts your rapport with the entire group as indicated in the check results.
• Rank 6 (Master):
  Purge Aggression [Social, Charm]: When you successfully Delay Aggression, any creature you affect that is a Tier below you ceases any desire to fight you at all. They won’t stand aside and let you do what you like if they have reason not to, but they will resist fighting with you and may stop others on their team from fighting as well.
  Push Suicidal Agreement [Social, Charm]: You may push agreements that would result in serious harm or death to a creature. These are still considered Repugnant agreements. If they are a member of a group that you are trying to push the agreement on, the bonus is added to the DC.
• Rank 7 (Grandmaster):
  Serene Voice: As a Standard Action, you can make a Charm check to suppress [Morale], [Rage], [Confusion], and [Charm] effects on other creatures within a radius of 2 meters per your Charm Rank. Effects that you benefit or suffer from are excluded from this, but otherwise all effects in range are targets of this power, including friendly effects. Each effect has a DC equal to 6 + (Three times the Tier of the status) (which also range from 1-4). You make a single check and compare it to each DC to determine if and how well the effect is suppressed.

  Critical Success: You dispel the effect completely and the target may not suffer it again for 3 full rounds. Moderate Success: You suppress the effect for this round, and may suppress it for 2 more rounds without another check, provided you spend an Interrupt Action to do so. Success: You suppress the effect in your target for this round. Failure: Nothing happens, but you may try again. Moderate Failure: You cannot attempt to suppress this instance of the effect in the future.

  
  
• Rank 8 (Virtuoso):
  Purge Enmity [Social, Charm]: When you successfully Purge Aggression, any creature you affect that is a Tier below you has their Attitude shifted positively by one degree, to a maximum of Comfortable. They don’t necessarily become your ally, but may try to convince any remaining hostile members of the group to just let you go about your business. All [Charm] effects you inflict last ten times longer than normal.

THE STATUSES

As you may have gathered so far, Statuses also have their own tiers. For the sake of organization, I've divided them into Status Categories, each of which has up to 4 statuses in it which grow cumulatively more powerful. Certain Pokemon types are immune to entire Status Categories that they're associated with. For example, anything with the Fairy-type is completely immune to any Charmed status. Whenever someone of a higher Tier hits someone of a lower Tier with a status effect, that effect is a Tier higher per difference in Tiers between the two, meaning high-level creatures can basically enslave your mind with otherwise basic effects. I'll show the Charm category today.

Tier	Charm Category
1	Infatuated
2	Mesmerized
3	Charmed
4	Enthralled

Always taking name suggestions, by the way.
Now, the thing to remember is that whenever you suffer a status, you also suffer the effects of lower-tier statuses in that category. So being Mesmerized merely adds more nastiness on top of being Infatuated, and so on. But how do you get rid of them? I'm waffling on that, honestly. Currently, whenever your turn starts you're allowed to make a Skill check to see if you lower your status to one less nasty, but obviously this is stupid if you seriously want effects to last longer than a fucking minute or something. At the same time, it seems annoying to put how long an effect lasts before you're allowed to make a check for it in the text for the effect. Maybe something like Charmed (8 hours) or something? Taking suggestions on this one.

Infatuated - The creature that Infatuated you becomes your Crush. You do not apply your attacking stat when damaging your Crush. You deal -5 damage to all other targets. Can be cured with a DC 6 Intuition check. If your Crush damaged you within the last round, you gain a +2 bonus to this check.
Your Crush gains a +2 bonus to Charm checks against you. (I kinda shat this last part out yesterday after thinking about this thread for a bit, so it may be a stupid fucking idea)
Mesmerized - You can only take a Standard OR a Shift Action this round. Can be reduced to Infatuated with a DC 9 Intuition check.
Your Crush gains further +2 bonus to Charm checks against you, for a total of +4.
Charmed - Your Attitude towards your Crush is Friendly and you perceive their words and actions in the most favorable way. They can try to give you orders, but orders you wouldn’t ordinarily agree with must be pushed with the Push Agreement Charm power. If you follow their orders, you may take Standard or Shift Actions as normal. Can be reduced to Mesmerized with a DC 12 Intuition check, but you may only make this check once per day.
Your Crush gains another +2 bonus to Charm checks against you, for a total of +6.
Enthralled - Your Attitude towards your Crush is Devoted and they may give you commands, which you automatically attempt to follow, to the exclusion of all other activities not necessary for survival. Self-destructive orders are not carried out without the Push Suicidal Agreement Charm power. Can be reduced to Charmed with a DC 15 Intuition check, but you may only make this check once per day.
Your Crush automatically succeeds on all Charm checks against you.

This is a heinous amount of information, but I felt it was the bare minimum necessary to provide context without just vomiting out the whole fucking game or something. It has been broken up for you to read at your convenience.
Please yell at me about how stupid or great it is.

[PhoneLobster]

Please yell at me about how stupid or great it is.

I only skimmed it, and I'm sure that with that sort of mechanic and structure somewhere in there are exploitable or broken individual modifiers or DCs, that's a trivial thing. I can also see things you didn't address that are important.

Your outcomes for actions, or at least a enough of them seem sufficiently useful. Well. Meh... kinda... useful. Look. I've seen worse. MGuy's proposal, at least on the outcomes of actions front, is probably marginally worse.

Your difficulties and resolution mechanics seem to adequately favor character level and ability abstraction ahead of whim based context junk. But I could be missing something and that dice mechanic probably isn't helping.

Your duration and action costs are all over the place for a bunch of actions which I largely see as pretty much the same action in terms of fluff, and perhaps should be the same or at least less (or better) actions mechanically.

Your action costs suggest some actions happen in sensible combat times frames, sort of, but other actions which (ostensibly) ask for less take amounts of time designed for no other reason than to exclude them from combat time. The divide seems particularly silly but is never a good thing to see. You should probably have a think whether you should be spending time writing any overly formal rule for any action if it might take 17 minutes of non-combat game time to execute even if it isn't social. That's too long for combat and too short and oddly shaped for sensible out of combat formal time frames. It takes sensible combat turns/actions or it takes days/weeks i don't want to know about how long it takes to style your fancy hair do in the mornings.

One of the things the time divide brings up is something you don't seemed to have addressed, which is what sort of encounter structure these actions are intended to occur in. If Push Agreement cannot occur in combat time what is everyone else even DOING while a wild Charmander spends three hours repeatedly trying and failing to convince the party to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords?

Does this mean there is a whole additional "1-30 minute" social turn structure just for Push Agreement encounters and a whole set of interactions that provide the Risk/Reward structure to turn that into engaging and fair game play. Or does that just work like it all too often does and exist in a vague miasma of indeterminate poorly adjudicated time frames and the GM just sort of decides the Charmander gets one try (but for free at no risk which is still bad) or worse, just keeps trying until it succeeds or the GM gets bored of the rerolls.

Why is it that degree of success for most of the actions changes the degree of effects, but for some reason Delay Aggression degree of success effects what tier of target it effects, even though target levels are already incorporated in the difficulty of the roll. And isn't it sort of weird that it can effect some targets when it fails. And it's not like the 2 point margin for bare fails is that big I mean you'll be rolling

Also, OK so attacking a target cancels delay aggression... but how does that interact with whatever initiative/turn system you have, because you might already have negated their actions... and if you go first next turn you might do it again... and it works on creatures below your tier even on a fail...

Flirt durations are annoyingly short.

Why does Enthralled exist if you cannot achieve it game mechanically?

Why does Devoted exist if you cannot achieve it game mechanically?

If you can achieve either game mechanically with some sort of rare ability, why isn't it here, and aside from that, why does the core mechanic for the socials not have a means of doing it? Also then I have additional questions regarding the kinda messy looking means for characters acquiring game ability text.

Critical failures are also things that exist that none of these things have. That's actually probably fine, it looks like you were already stretching it for filler entries in your degree of success tables... but I mean, I hope Critical failures do something somewhere often enough to be worth existing...

Is it just me or is Winning Smile far too effective for the company it is keeping on that list of abilities? Pretty sure it at least walks all over Serene Voice as something you will both use and succeed at.

Why are fairies immune to charm? Especially skill based non-Pokemon move charm? "Fairy pokemon are immune to feelings of friendship or love?" that has got to be SO not cannon. And I don't care if it is. Why would someone want a game where your trainer is allowed to charm Weezing but CAN'T charm a Jigglypuff? No one want's to charm Weezing. Make Weezing immune to charm, it's not like it will notice more suffering in its "life".

Remove the word person from Improve Attitude and you can just say target instead of elaborating to include pokemon.

When is "while has been"?

I feel like something went horribly wrong in this sentence "Characters have to start with 3 Skills at Rank 1, but even if they pick ONLY Social skills, there's still 5 of the fuckers, so they have to be socially competent at something." and I am no longer sure whether you were trying to say one thing or the complete opposite thing.

Your modifier for "repugnant agreements" is probably at least loosely within tolerable bounds (haha). But if you are using that methodology your push agreement mechanics will never be complete without knowing about your deception, concealment, intuition, perception etc... mechanics. It could be loosely kinda fine if they are loosely kinda similar.

Wait a minute I might take that back. Push Agreement works on failure? Also all it's degrees of success are duration so they are pretty much meaningless if you are asking for something you immediately get. And most demands are explicitly tolerable? And tolerable ones are among the ones that work on failure. And will avoid a penalty. At some point here I'm wondering not just what this is going to do, but what that text was meant to do. Look this was always the weak link for a lot of reasons, but, what was it even trying to do? I see attempts at limitations, in weird random ways that do weird random things, but it exists outside of the structure of anything else on the list and just... why?

Anyway broadly speaking I've seen worse. And on the "decisions about social" parts, more offensive. But this still looks rife with minor trivial flaws (some mildly entertaining) and just a few what the why evens.

If I were to pick out anything to actually yell about it would probably instead be the basic roll mechanics (...ew) and the messy structure of of the ability text in rank advancement table. There are also things I don't like about your degrees of success mechanic. I have doubts about margin sizes but mostly it just seems like you were running out of ideas for a lot of margin of success results and just shoving in whatever to avoid saying "look it just succeeds ok?".

[Foxwarrior]

Sorry AA, I don't think that's a winner. I just read Push Agreement and the basics, so I'll be talking about Push Agreement here. You've got the intense bookkeeping problem of the reputation system PL hates so much, as well as the whole negotiation being reduced to a single die roll and the suspicious phrasing that makes me think it doesn't work on players. But also on a success there's no difference between "hold my briefcase" and "use this lit dynamite to kill your family (in under 8 hours)". In this world used car salesmen persuade you to give them money without getting a car in return.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Well hey, I'll take "I've seen worse" when it comes to shit I haven't even tested yet. Hopefully I can get it steered in the right direction.

Lots of quoting though, so I'm going to stick it under a spoiler.

Your difficulties and resolution mechanics seem to adequately favor character level and ability abstraction ahead of whim based context junk. But I could be missing something and that dice mechanic probably isn't helping.

That's my goal here. If there's anything I can do to explain the dice mechanic more, then please let me know. It's not very complicated in practice, just in setting DC's, which is something the last Pokemon game I played sorely lacked. So I figure if there are actual math-hammered out DCs baked into the skills themselves, it makes things easier for GMs and players.

Your action costs suggest some actions happen in sensible combat times frames, sort of, but other actions which (ostensibly) ask for less take amounts of time designed for no other reason than to exclude them from combat time.... It takes sensible combat turns/actions or it takes days/weeks i don't want to know about how long it takes to style your fancy hair do in the mornings.

Well, kind of. Here's the thing - I've got all your typical combat action times, but also 3 non-combat times as well: Extended Action (Short), which is 1-30 minutes, Extended Action (Long), which is 30-60 minutes, and Downtime Actions, which take 2-4 hours. I think there's value in having each of those be distinct and different from one another, and I've got plenty of things to do for each, too. However, I must mention that I was a huge asshole and forgot to include something in my last post! You can rush the use of certain powers (Improve Attitude, in this case) to be able to do it with a Full Action instead of an Extended Action, at the cost of a penalty to your check. I hope that explains things. I really can't see why actions have to be 10 second intervals or day-long affairs with nothing in the middle. I did this to avoid including a lot of specific time lengths.

If Push Agreement cannot occur in combat time what is everyone else even DOING while a wild Charmander spends three hours repeatedly trying and failing to convince the party to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords?

I don't understand where you're coming from with this. You need, at the very least, 60 seconds to pull off Push Agreement, or 30 minutes at most. And a wild Charmander can't even speak to people? It might try and convince a player's Pokemon or something, I guess?
I think I get what you're going for, though. What if some merchant comes out of the woods and uses this on one person but doesn't have the Charm to do it for the whole group? A half-hour negotiation with one guy? That would be weird and undesirable.

Does this mean there is a whole additional "1-30 minute" social turn structure just for Push Agreement encounters and a whole set of interactions that provide the Risk/Reward structure to turn that into engaging and fair game play. Or does that just work like it all too often does and exist in a vague miasma of indeterminate poorly adjudicated time frames and the GM just sort of decides the Charmander gets one try (but for free at no risk which is still bad) or worse, just keeps trying until it succeeds or the GM gets bored of the rerolls.

I don't know about "social turn structure" or the second half of that sentence, but sort of, yeah. There's at least 2 dozen things you can do with Extended Action (S) at the moment, and I do plan on adding more as I add meat to the bones of my skeleton. Let's say that Charmander does try to Push Agreement on someone and fails. In this case, the deal still goes through as long as it's Favorable or Tolerable, but the second party will be a bit miffed if it's only a Tolerable deal. If the Charmander completely eats shit and gets a Moderate Failure, then it can't try again unless it has new terms for the agreement, AND the second party is pissy at them. That doesn't sound like "for free at no risk" to me? I'm very much trying to avoid that sort of thing.

Why is it that degree of success for most of the actions changes the degree of effects, but for some reason Delay Aggression degree of success effects what tier of target it effects, even though target levels are already incorporated in the difficulty of the roll. And isn't it sort of weird that it can effect some targets when it fails.

I don't think it's that weird. Is it? I see what you mean the success effects. My idea is that you should possibly be able to get something that's stronger than you to not want to kill you for a while. But if I understand what you're saying, to be more consistent it would need to extend the duration of something not wanting to kill you rather than how strong that thing is. I agree that would be more consistent, but I think it's more important to not get completely fucked by not being able to social at dudes that are higher level than you.

Also, OK so attacking a target cancels delay aggression... but how does that interact with whatever initiative/turn system you have, because you might already have negated their actions... and if you go first next turn you might do it again... and it works on creatures below your tier even on a fail...

I hate to be that guy, but did you read it right? If you attack something, then it would cancel Delay Aggression and stop you from using it on that person for the rest of the encounter. You couldn't do it again. Fortunately that is not a scenario that can happen. And I'm not sure how you could have already negated their actions before you use the power? I'm missing something.

Flirt durations are annoyingly short.

Fair enough.

Why does Enthralled exist if you cannot achieve it game mechanically?

Why does Devoted exist if you cannot achieve it game mechanically?

You can, it's just that Devoted is difficult to come by. For Enthralled, first - I haven't written any attacks or special powers that would totally let you Enthrall people, and second - If a Tier 2 guy hits a Tier 1 guy with Charmed, then remember that it would cause Charmed to increase to Enthralled. Or if a Tier 4 guy hits a Tier 1 guy with Infatuated... that also gets increased to Enthralled.
Keep in mind that Skills are available to everyone. You aren't going to find a power in here that lets you immediately Enthrall people, because that would be found on the Pokemon's move list or a Trainer's class or something. Don't worry, I totally want people to be able to do it, because that's cool.

Critical failures are also things that exist that none of these things have. That's actually probably fine, it looks like you were already stretching it for filler entries in your degree of success tables... but I mean, I hope Critical failures do something somewhere often enough to be worth existing...

Don't worry, there are still 15 other Skills I haven't posted. Social skills generally don't have critical failures. And now that I go through and look at it, neither do most Education skills. Or Body skills.
Oh, fuck, I have literally one thing that makes use of Critical Failures. I guess I mostly included it to counter Critical Successes, which do pop up a lot. Generally speaking, Failure means you didn't do what you wanted to do, but can try again, while Moderate Failure means that you don't do it and fuck up so hard that you can't try again. Not immediately, at least. This is actually quite the oversight! Maybe? Would it just be padding at this point to go back and add it to everything?

Is it just me or is Winning Smile far too effective for the company it is keeping on that list of abilities? Pretty sure it at least walks all over Serene Voice as something you will both use and succeed at.

Also a good point. It probably doesn't help, but Intimidate has its own counterpart at the exact same Rank, so Charm and Intimidate can sort of counter one another. It may be too effective, but I have to say that I like the idea of some guy trying to bully you and you deflect him with a quip or something, and vice versa. What would be a good way of toning it down but keeping the concept?

Why are fairies immune to charm?

Because most types are immune to various status effects and it felt most appropriate. Weezing's already immune to poison. It's not really supposed to be "friendship and love" but more active manipulation. Charm effects are not the same as the Charm skill. I could probably make that more clear. You can use Push Agreement on a Jigglypuff if you're capable of speaking to it, no problem. You cannot use Delay Aggression on it, because it has the [Charm] tag. I mean, the second lowest status effect is mesmerization. That is not "feelings of friendship and love", man.
I even took MORE liberties! Ghost-types can't be Cursed or Slowed, Dark-types can't be Blinded, and Dragon-types can't be Feared. Goomy does not give a FUCK that you are trying to Coerce Assistance on it.

Remove the word person from Improve Attitude and you can just say target instead of elaborating to include pokemon.

Nope, sorry. Improve Pokemon's Attitude is a Pokemon Education power. Because humans can't fucking talk to Pokemon. Except I'm including a way for that to happen.

When is "while has been"?

... what?

I feel like something went horribly wrong in this sentence "Characters have to start with 3 Skills at Rank 1, but even if they pick ONLY Social skills, there's still 5 of the fuckers, so they have to be socially competent at something." and I am no longer sure whether you were trying to say one thing or the complete opposite thing.

I hope I can clarify: Even if a character decides to play a COMPLETE social buffoon and dump AS MANY OF THEM AS POSSIBLE, they will still maintain a bare minimum competence in at least 2 social skills. Some characters are better at this than others, but nobody is bad at interacting with people in every possible way.

Your modifier for "repugnant agreements" is probably at least loosely within tolerable bounds (haha). But if you are using that methodology your push agreement mechanics will never be complete without knowing about your deception, concealment, intuition, perception etc... mechanics. It could be loosely kinda fine if they are loosely kinda similar.

Well... all that's for a different thread, no? Intuition is also a Social skill, so I guess I can post that one if you want. It literally lets you make rolls to get vague hints from the GM.

Wait a minute. Push Agreement works on failure? Also all it's degrees of success are duration so they are pretty much meaningless if you are asking for something you immediately get. And most demands are explicitly tolerable? And tolerable ones are among the ones that work on failure. And will avoid a penalty. At some point here I'm wondering not just what this is going to do, but what that text was meant to do.

Excellent points! If you just say "hey lemme have your sword" and you roll that the guy you take it from is going to be fine with that for a few hours, then he's fucked if you just make off with it. Which PCs will definitely do. I definitely agree that this section could use some more work and definition. As it is right now, it's probably too easy to convince people to do things, which ties into what Foxwarrior also seems to be saying. Because I definitely think there should be a difference between "hold my briefcase" and "use this lit dynamite to kill your family (in under 8 hours)", and I thought that's what I had done.

And on the "decisions about social" parts, more offensive. But this still looks rife with minor trivial flaws (some mildly entertaining) and just a few what the why evens.

Not sure what you're getting at with the first sentence, but please tell me what my most entertaining flaws are! As far as I'm concerned, trivial flaws are fine at this stage. I'm more concerned about structural problems.

There are also things I don't like about your degrees of success mechanic. I have doubts about margin sizes but mostly it just seems like you were running out of ideas for a lot of margin of success results and just shoving in whatever to avoid saying "look it just succeeds ok?".

I actually could've added more, but I thought it would've been padding! So if I add more, then it's fine? Should people be eating MORE shit when they fail? I can do that.

Sorry about going through this line by line, but I cannot thank you enough for going into this much detail about it. I actually feel validated for taking the time to format all that shit now.

[MGuy]

You know MGuy, there is a point where "I don't understand" and "No way would my group do this thing that is absolutely bog standard human behavior" becomes... tiresome.

If you are at all feeling tired, I'd suggest you stop engaging. Considering the thrust of what you've been complaining about have been either non issues that you've been insisting are real issues, pointing out that I'm doing a thing I said I'd do (for reasons I pointed out earlier), or in this case making a big deal out of the word unilateral as if, after all I wrote "that" word was what I didn't understand about your response I'd say you're spending more time in your own headspace than trying to understand mine.

Hell you don't even talk about the things 'I' want or that 'I'm' seeking in your response. Just what you think should be with an added air of how bothersome it is for you to reply. In the same post you say:

I could understand if you missed just the one point here or there, or if you disagreed on basic player behavior on a few things.

and

And you really don't think you are creating something that will see you spend large amounts of time haggling with players?

It is pretty odd to me that you pine for me to disagree about behavior than question me disagreeing with you about player behavior. Asking me 'really' is not exactly helpful. Nor is saying things like:

A method based explicitly on group assessment of a value what might as well be the very definition of haggling?

and

And you have never noticed how parts of an RPG that rely exclusively on creative thought and real life social persuasion of the GM tend to be dominated by a minority of players?

and

As for waiting for the infinitely long list.

Which is something I specifically said isn't a part of the system.

Now I'd normally when someone doesn't seem to get what I'm saying I make another effort and just try explaining myself again because perhaps I used the wrong words or maybe I just need to use better analogies or something. I suspect though that this isn't really about what I'm doing specifically because after either misunderstanding (being charitable) or mischaracterizing what I've talked about so far we get

I'd address it, but...

Over something concrete I actually provided. This coupled with everything else makes me think this isn't an attempt to actually be helpful.

So instead of going back and basically repeating all the points that I made that weren't addressed I'm going to instead assume that there is no actual counter argument or point being made here worth addressing and I am going to wait until advice, criticism, etc that is actually relevant or useable is produced.

It should be obvious but using my name as much as one can, verbal flourishes about how exhausting it is to even spend time complaining about something, paragraphs spent continuing to fight strawmen, and excessive use of the word 'really?' are not helpful or interesting. So PL, specifically for you, any future posts that are not helpful I will point at it and tell you it's not. I will do so because so far I've answered you point for point and you're rapidly exhausting the goodwill I've been trying to meet your comments with even when they are clearly wildly off course.

[MGuy]

3: A full on social encounter. This is going to be when important discussions happen. Arguing in the king's court to try to broker an alliance, interrogating an important suspect during a mystery or investigation, anything that is substantial and important enough for the GM to decide that they want to stat out an NPC for it. This is where you get your social combat minigame.

For kitchen sink fantasy, I feel the most interest for rules is here, these scenarios that are full on scenes and can last as long as combat.

One way to go is to replicate combat with cheeky named abilities like Flirt or Bald-Face Lie, have people roll seduction attacks vs chastity ac but that doesn't seem right to me, it seems too artificial.

I guess one question is what sort of gameplay do you want from players here? In my opinion you want something approximately LARPing, people acting and speaking in character pursuing their desires and interests. When a player breaks character, it will be presumably to bring into effect some game ability, and I am inclined to design these abilities as 'just working', it could be sans rolls. I think you want to encourage people taking turns making narrative contributions, so perhaps have a meta currency that people expend as they bend the social encounter to their will.

So you may show up to an encounter with the King and his advisors, you see his Hand with two points, and the King himself has 4 points, PCs presumably have some currency as well, but may have expended some to create the meeting, and of course maybe certain abilities have trigger conditions to regain the meta currency to power your social abilities.

As for the other items on that list, I think 4 lines up with a DOMAINs system, something that passes over seasons and ties into mass combat, making decisions for large groups of people (like Kings decreeing laws).

I think rules for 5 get tricky quickly, especially as every group has its own dynamic, any interparty conflict rules should get clearly labeled as optional. That said, Burning Wheel has an artificial but somewhat interesting system of debate to forcing resolution. I do like it provides room for creating an outcome but forces concessions (minor or major).

3 is probably the most ambitious part of what I'm doing. What I posted for 1 is easy enough. It's just tweaking some numbers that come up passively. With 2 I think I can get to a place where I will have something that has satisfactory enough inputs and outputs that will be able to handle those single roll encounters. 4 is probably going to mesh into a bigger effort to make downtime it's own minigame. I just have to decide whether or not politics/intrigue is something I want to lean into because while I think organization building is probably desirable I don't think a political game will fit well beside the adventurer game. Right now it feels like that's a no. The social combat minigame I definitely want but I'm of multiple minds about what I want it to behave like in play.

It's a different beast than combat and I want engagement with it to reflect it. I'm just having trouble filling the image space inside my head with something I might find more fitting. Sometimes it feels like I'm 'stuck' thinking of it in terms of swinging words in place of swords. Sometimes I get odd ideas like having it play like a card game where the 'moves' are things you've collected up to this point that you play against the 'deck' the opponent is using. Sometimes I think of the Phoenix Wright games where maybe it should be constructed more in a puzzle format where through investigation, pulling favors, etc you can get what you need to assure victory and performing in the big arena is a matter of just using your collected tools correctly. And by correctly I mean in a way that would generally 'feel' correct.

[norms29]

I feel like something went horribly wrong in this sentence "Characters have to start with 3 Skills at Rank 1, but even if they pick ONLY Social skills, there's still 5 of the fuckers, so they have to be socially competent at something." and I am no longer sure whether you were trying to say one thing or the complete opposite thing.
.

Here's an important note: All Skill Ranks start at 2, not 1. Characters have to start with 3 Skills at Rank 1, but even if they pick ONLY Social skills, there's still 5 of the fuckers, so they have to be socially competent at something. By the way, the 5 Social skills are: Charm, Guile, Intimidate, Intuition, and Command.

so the default skill rank is 2, and characters can only have 3 skills below that default, and there are five social skills. So even if all of your 1 rank skills are social you still have 2 other social skills at 2 ranks, that is the absolute minimum which the proposed system will allow.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Oh, shit, someone else can make sense of what I wrote! Validation!

[MGuy]

So now it's my turn to ramble.
LET'S FUCKING GO!

After doing a quick skim I'd say this is similar to what I'm thinking about in terms of how individual rolls for social encounters go. Inputs determined by players, language that have the GM determining a lot of how this is all processed, degrees of success that (as clearly as one can expect) tells players what they can expect out of their attempt should they succeed or fail. All good stuff and more.

I just have a few initial questions.

These abilities at the higher ranks. Can they not be performed by people at lower rank? For instance Improve Attitude is rank 3. Does that imply that this can't be done by a lower ranked person? Does the fact that pushing an agreement for multiple people at once appears at rank 5 mean that people of lower rank can only convince one person at a time to do things?

Second is there a way to bypass the system? If I do a quest and return a farmer's wife safe and sound from goblins does that improve their attitude toward me? I assume this is a yes but I just want to confirm. I know I've had to consider if there was anyway people might be able to leverage favorability with NPCs in ways which might be disruptive or too effective for my tastes which pushed me to formalize some restrictions on how and when a player can call in favors.

Speaking of which is there any favor trading? Can you take a favor on credit where you do a thing for some unspecified aid in the future? I would imagine it'd be difficult to adjudicate that since the GM can't weigh how an NPC might value an unspecified favor or even doing a favor for a PC 'now' with the expectation that they can call on them later. What I did was make it a function of 'risk' where this kind of action would push increase the intensity of the risk category for applying a penalty to the request.

Lastly, and this one isn't about the rules you've listed so far, but this is for a pokemon themed game clearly. I know you've been talking about it for a while. However, I think I missed it, or at least I'm not sure anymore... but are players the pokemon themselves or trainers?

Edit: One more thing actually. Are there any benefits to multiple people participating in one of these social exchanges? Or is it going to be just one person with the best numbers, doing all the talking? Is it better to make sure people diversify which social skills they get since there doesn't seem to be any benefit to multiple people getting charm?

[PhoneLobster]

Over something concrete I actually provided. This coupled with everything else makes me think this isn't an attempt to actually be helpful.

I was being charitable about not addressing it. Because providing "pull a number out of your ass for just short of no clearly defined reason up to 4 times in a row" is lets just say. Not something especially concrete.

I thought that pointing out it wasn't something to be proud of or to present for review might have been a more polite way of prompting you to go back and work on it at least a little bit.

In the mean time, if you want me to actually "address" what little of any substance at all your "sample" holds... well... again, really? Look at your list one more time. There is... maybe something wrong with it? Maybe a few things? Even aside from the tragic level of vagueness? You can't anticipate... anything... I might say about it?

You couldn't maybe. Put a bit of polish on that list, knock off a few of the more problematic corners? Not at all? You don't actually want a chance at that before I rip into it? You don't want to maybe define some of the things that list is referencing at all before I take your deliberately vague language and define it to my convenience? You are seriously happy with categories defined by as little as three, by the looks of things almost randomly selected, words?

You don't think you might like to spend oh, a sentence on each even?

I don't understand where you're coming from with this. You need, at the very least, 60 seconds to pull off Push Agreement, or 30 minutes at most. And a wild Charmander can't even speak to people? It might try and convince a player's Pokemon or something, I guess?

Actually you said that Push Agreement takes from 1-30 minutes on top of another period of unspecified time to offer a deal. So the Charmander trying to warm the globe could possibly be making less than 2 checks an hour if he can keep trying do overs. Also didn't know not talking was a problem especially since you specifically singled out that pokemon get access to these skills. Of course since this is the Charm skill the go to pokemon example was the Charm-ander.

I'm assuming it says "Char char Mander!" and the players say "Well that's not convincing climate science at all." and that takes about 17 minutes for no reason.

Also you say you have a 30 minute time scale or something but how does a 1 to 30 minute +? long action fit into that?

Anyway, point is this 30 minute time scale. Is this a reciprocal thing where people take turns, how many attempts does the Charmander get before the party gets to try... anything... what can the party try... shouldn't the Charmander risk something other than a fail? I mean the fail costs are super weak and the Charmander COULD be demanding your pokeballs.

Effectively, what even IS a 30 minute time scale social encounter incorporating Push Agreement actions? What else is happening does anything other than the charmander getting a specific fail result end it, etc...

If you attack something, then it would cancel Delay Aggression and stop you from using it on that person for the rest of the encounter.

But still. How does it interact with the initiative system? It's the kinda thing that will come up.

You can use Push Agreement on a Jigglypuff if you're capable of speaking to it, no problem.

You may need to actually mention this speaking the same language thing somewhere at this point. I was just going to communicate using my faith in the heart of the cards deep spiritual connection as a slave driving animal torturer trainer.

please tell me what my most entertaining flaws are

"While has been" is my personal favorite. I respond strangely to mixed up tenses. They make me do a suppressed little smirk like a mischievous school girl, which is odd since as a bearded man in my forties I can no longer even remember being a school girl in the first place.

So, the place where this exciting new combination tense occurs is "If you mistreat or disappoint someone while their attitude has been changed"

There are a lot of other assumptions there that probably need specifying, like changed by what or who and positively or negatively and towards you or just anything?

But the tense thing at least could probably be fixed by "has been" to "is" or "remains" though perhaps the whole sentence just needs a rework.

As it stands it's just sort of weird and COULD mean "while it is changed" but could also mean "if it has ever been changed" and is just sort of an odd mash up of both.

[MGuy]

I sense that what I said before wasn't sufficient so I'm going to make an effort to be more clear about how unhelpful these responses are.

You can't anticipate... anything... I might say about it

No I cannot. Or rather I could but your response would necessarily have to be unhelpful because of the position you built for yourself. The reason I highlighted how short the list actually was, was to counter the narrative that I was going to need infinite stuff. Sure enough your response had to. be: "Either you have infinite of the things or you will never have enough therefore you're doomed from the start." I predicted this might happen so I outlined the worse case scenario about what I foresaw happening if what I'd written indeed didn't cover everything. I would then expect you to adjust based off of that part of my response but you didn't. I was being charitable.

If I were a PL and I wanted to convince someone of my position I'd give an example of how the thing would fail based off of what I can assume about what I've seen. It would be a situation that demonstrates that what's presented isn't enough and it'd be with an example that isn't edge case. If there wasn't enough information I'd ask questions. I am not PL though so while I assumed you'd go 'a'ha but you see there are less than infinite things here and therefore you've done exactly the thing I predicted!' I was being charitable and pushing forward in the belief you wouldn't do that.

I do not think PL's goal with these responses is to actually be helpful. I also don't think PL is doing any introspection here considering multiple broad assumptions and a lengthy example of play that was asspulled have been revealed to be a complete misread of what was being described. As far as I can tell no attempt is being made to even understand what I'm cooking up. If charity is being extended here then I'd like it if you either actually try to figure out where I'm headed and help me get there, or if you sincerely can't because there's not enough for you to chew on then you can refrain from saying anything until there's something of substance you can criticize.

[PhoneLobster]

Oh enough tone trolling excuses MGuy, defend on content it's disappointing to see you pull this.

The reason I highlighted how short the list actually was

But your list is shit. I've refrained from going into it, I've offered to go into it, you complained about both so... if you want it neither way then I don't know if I need to do anything other than assert that.

Now if you presented a GOOD short list. You'd prove your point. But just presenting a list that's short isn't enough.

"Either you have infinite of the things or you will never have enough therefore you're doomed from the start."

You, don't think you can design your self into a corner where you are faced with impossible design dilemmas like that?

The whole point here is that this dilemma doesn't seem to have a workable solution or viable compromise point. More people than you have put, wow a lot more actual effort, into trying to find a compromise point, and haven't. You need to bypass the dilemma with a differing design strategy. Or you won't achieve anything of value, if the history of previous attempts can be trusted to repeat again, you probably won't manage to produce anything at all.

I could be wrong... but I haven't been so far and what's special about your version?

Group negotiation of the value of social actions that you can't decide to promote as a feature because of your appropriate humility in deciding the value of social actions as others would understand them or deny even exists because it's inconvenient to admit you are obviously proposing to sit down and haggle with your players to hash out what it all means when someone tries to social?

Something I think is a net positive with notable drawbacks, but, you seem think only exists at your own convenience for an argument on the internet.

Are players being asked to help out in evaluating the effectiveness of social actions or not? Fucked if I know now, you've muddied the waters on your design now to the point I can no longer tell almost anything about it. Good work there. Can't disagree with something as elusive as that can I, argument won I'm sure.

If I were a PL and I wanted to convince someone of my position I'd give an example of how the thing would fail based off of what I can assume about what I've seen.

First of all, your endless patronizing "advice" is not a good look. Yes. That sentence was itself patronizing "advice".

And how can I do that? I refrained once. You complained. I told you I had refrained, and I could go ahead, but did you want a chance to elaborate first... and your answer is to whine, complain and accuse. Something that is neither an elaboration nor an invitation, in fact it looks like poisoning the well to prevent a response.

Screw that shit. Are you forgoing a chance to elaborate or not? Are you honestly asking me to criticize what you have or are you spraying me with bile?

It looks like the second thing.

If there wasn't enough information I'd ask questions.

Like oh, I don't know. The line you quoted. That you removed the question mark from. For some reason.

Better yet, like "You don't think you might like to spend oh, a sentence on each [category] even?".

Did you think that was rhetorical?

Seriously, even a sentence on each category could prevent you from spewing even more bile and complaining I misrepresented you in some "obvious" way.

I was trying to avoid that, well so much for that! Since you already pulled it on Group Negotiation/contribution to valuing social actions!

Oh hey, I even proposed an alternative interpretation and asked if that's how that worked too.

But hey. Don't let what I've said get in the way of having a freak out.

[MGuy]

But your list is shit. I've refrained from going into it, I've offered to go into it, you complained about both so...

Demonstrate how it is shit or don't say anything. Asserting it is and lying about why you haven't demonstrated it yet (because you need me to tell you after I've explicitly said that's what you need to do) is not worth posting. This is how you make posts useless.

"Either you have infinite of the things or you will never have enough therefore you're doomed from the start."

You, don't think you can design your self into a corner where you are faced with impossible design dilemmas like that?

I went over the worst case scenario already. I predicted your 'dilemma' and addressed it. I offered that you actually posit a situation where it wouldn't work. You haven't. I am done with this point until you get new material or deal with what I've addressed you with. The fact that I have to explain this to you more than once is how you make your posts useless.

I could be wrong...

You've been demonstrably wrong and I pointed out where.

Group negotiation of the value of social actions

And you still are. Which is a big reason why I told you your posts have been useless.

Are players being asked to help out in evaluating the effectiveness of social actions or not?

No. And I already explained as much.

First of all, your endless patronizing "advice" is not a good look. Yes. That sentence was itself patronizing "advice".

This speaks for itself.

And how can I do that? I refrained once. You complained. I told you I had refrained, and I could go ahead, but did you want a chance to elaborate first... and your answer is to whine, complain and accuse. Something that is neither an elaboration nor an invitation, in fact it looks like poisoning the well to prevent a response.

I'm not interested in your persecution complex. I asked you to be helpful. I don't really care why you don't want to be. I do not care about how much charity you think you're giving me or how you are interpreting my language. Either you're here to say anything helpful or at the very least don't take up time in this thread airing out your personal feelings.

Did you think that was rhetorical?

I explained exactly what I thought of what you are posting.

[PhoneLobster]

Group negotiation of the value of social actions

And you still are. Which is a big reason why I told you your posts have been useless.

Then seriously, I know you are melting down and apparently have become allergic to elaborating on a point but do please explain what this was all about...

One thing that I'm sure is going to be a part of every response is context. Well then I just leave it at that. I don't need to figure out myself. I pass the job of determining what that means to the groups.

What I think my job is from there is to decide how likely 'I' think someone telling a believable lie is to succeed in fooling their mark (sans other modifiers). This might be a little trickier. When I assign a number, a percentage chance, that a believable lie is accepted I am making a decision that has to work for everyone. This will then be compared to every other contextual factor I add. Now maybe, that isn't so bad. If someone thinks a lie is believable, and the table more or less agrees, then having that work often isn't so bad.

... because as little as that was it seemed like a striking development, the only remotely positive development to latch onto and evaluate.

If that isn't group negotiation of modifier values... what is it? If it doesn't look like every other creative group negotiation at the table, what DOES it look like? Is it the panel of judges plan? Is it you just doing GM fiat and having them explicitly re-affirming group approval of your GM fiat each time for no reason? What IS this in reference to.

All you've given is angry denials. What is this about?

Demonstrate how it is shit or don't say anything.

So much for offering you a chance to explain anything then, THAT went well.

Lets grab the only text you deign to provide...

I made a sample list for Charm a few years ago (2 I think, I lose track of when I started some of the documents) and that list is actually just 4 conditions with differing degrees within them to apply to a roll/TN. The target's disposition toward the player, apparent personal benefit/cost of the request, apparent personal risk, and apparent personal effort. I do not think I need much more than that and even if I go bonkers and come up with maybe 5 (or 6 if I decide to split benefit from cost) more things I want considered on an individual roll then that's well below 'infinite'.

Lets try and be excessively thorough since this has become well over hyped by now.

We don't have any numbers. We can forgive this... a bit... I mean, the broader claim here is that this is achievable at design, so... it kinda doesn't help to lack numbers... but this is sorta hypothetical too we can get around the lack of actual numbers.

However we also don't know basically anything else about how the "differing degrees" are going to be represented.

We do know this, the biggest value of the differing degrees for at least some categories, and maybe not all categories, and we don't know which ones COULD be enough to "make context king" and trump the entire rest of all the game mechanics. Trumping bonuses like that are a problem in and of itself, but it's also now mildly worse because we don't know when or where it is happening. Lets just assume that it could be any of the categories. But that also any of them could be suddenly retroactively excluded.

The OTHER important thing about the structure of the descriptions of these "differing degrees". Which is problem, because there is a good way and a bad way of describing them for basic utility. The bad way would be attempting to put together "examples" for a series of values. The good way would be to ignore examples and give game mechanical impacts basically "big bonus/small bonus" sort of stuff.

The lack of information on differing degrees also leaves us in the dark on important possible interactions with the Group Negotiation of modifier values "...passing the job of determining what that means to the groups." whatever that means er... means.

Lets skip over the categories themselves for a little bit and assess the basic claim that this is a small finite number of entries on a list, and ideally not something that needs to keep on growing or IS already showing signs of keeping on growing.

Lets start with the claim that it's just 4 "conditions" (nitpick, categories is a much more naturalistic term here). Actually... did you not use the term categories and say "categories of modifier" because it would have made it more obvious that the "differing degrees" were a bunch of individual modifiers in 4 groups? No... wait you did remove that question mark, while quoting a question I asked and accusing me of not asking questions, on a quoted question from a paragraph of questions, followed by two more paragraphs of questions... can I be that generous in my reading of this anymore... look, no this CAN'T have been deliberate.

Either way, it's less a list and more a two dimensional table, one axis is 4 categories, the other is an unknown number of modifier values broken up by ? and described by ? that go to "enough to trump the other game mechanics". So the table is possible short but very wide, or who even knows.

Also it might not be 4 categories, or maybe 5, probably only 5, surely not more than five, six, six and most... and I mean that's almost comedy there. But point is, eh, 4 is not yet committed to.

But also while the broader social system proposed explicitly claims not to "do everything" it also claims to do "enough of everything" and we know it has several categories that all use this same methodology and that Charm is just one sub category of this mechanic in play...

... and so a more honest representation of the full size of the "its really a very short list" is that also it adds a bunch more entries for Deception, and for Intimidate and maybe other things but at least them. We can hope that maybe they are the same number of categories of modifiers each, so now our table of modifiers is probably at least 12, if not up to 18 categories of modifiers wide.

And maybe generously a modifier category might overlap, and also hopefully not need any changed text or values (hrm...iffy but possible) and apply to more than one, well I guess they are subtables? So lets say it adds up to like 10 to 15 categories of modifiers split to 3 subtables that are also unknowably wide.

I mean it's finite, apart from the part where we don't seem to be decided if it has stopped growing yet, but it's increasingly not all that small.

Ok, now lets assess the utility of the actual categories.

They were...
The target's disposition toward the player
apparent personal benefit/cost of the request
apparent personal risk
apparent personal effort

Let's start this section with a very very basic point on why the fuck this wasn't ready for prime time criticism and why very very basic elaboration was REALLY required.

One entry. ONE category on that list. That's how many "categories" TELL US WHO IS WHO.

The rest just raise questions. WHO is it apparent to? WHO is the benefit/cost applicable to? WHO is taking the risk? WHO is making the effort.

These aren't minor technical quibbles. Social mechanics are complex they incorporate numerous fictional and real individuals there actually ARE reasons why they could be talking about the active character, the target character, or even third parties. There are damn good reasons to believe that some of them could actually be referring to the actual PLAYERS not the characters.

Now lets move to another broadly shared criticism of the categories. What are they in practice? I would largely contend, they are pretty much bullshit. By which I mean the completely arbitrary and not really rational or justified decisions of the GM (or maybe the players too, but maybe not...FFS) on both value and what fits what category.

To the point that I feel what we basically have here is "AND ANOTHER fairy tea party modifier" written down 4 times. If they ARE that, this isn't a system it's fairy tea party again. And fairy tea party is always bad, almost exclusively when it pretends it isn't fairy tea party. I mean "just add a FTP modifier" while bad, would be better than this IF it really is just fairy tea party pretending to be real rules.

But, the contention is they are more than that. That the, very few, very vague words, about things apparent to... someone about something about someone else... are communicating categories of contextual element that are easily identified and then (somehow if we knew about the differing degrees) evaluated by the GM (or maybe the players, god damn it) to a degree that if not Objective, is at least, close enough that hey. Everyone will definitely agree and also it won't do stupid shit.

Which is especially difficult, because I would contend that even if you, fuck knows how, achieved genuinely objective categories and ratings people would still disagree and it would still generate stupid shit. But I think we get the idea, or perhaps the better word is the "ideal".

And we really need to look at each of these categories of modifiers individually for a bit.

The target's disposition toward the player
The first one might be the odd one out. It is of course impossible to say. We don't really have the information.

But lets start with the obvious "this wasn't ready for prime time" flaw.

The target's disposition toward the player the ONE god damn category that tells us who is who, and it picks almost the ONE pair of who is who that is CLEARLY a fucking error. So lets assume that meant "character" or better yet "active character" and move on. But not before remembering, the author was given REPEATED CHANCES TO POLISH THIS TURD.

But anyway, back to the other odd one out aspects of this, to me, the assumption I have been invited to make is that this entry is a failed reference to what will inevitably be the usual trash "Reputation" mechanic. Or at least incorporate that, and who knows maybe a "Fame" and/or "honor"mechanic or who knows what pretty sure MGuy dropped more than one synonym for these things and I've lost track of which and how many but know there were several. I don't know if it was just coincidental common use language, one Reputation mechanic with "name pending" or several distinct actual planned things. I think it will probably end up being one Reputation mechanic, but we don't know if it's going to be one of those bad ones where a million NPCs all track the Reputation they feel towards the PCs, or one of those bad reputation systems where the PCs track the million Reputations that NPCs feel towards them, or one one of those other bad ones where the PCs just have one single reputation based on a global intantaneous kharmic gossip network. Or what.

Meanwhile. This is on the list for Charm. That might be friendship, that might be seduction. From what I would remember on MGuy's preferences, it is probably both. And if it's "also" seduction, that predisposition could be "romantic predisposition".

Also. Knowing the vague mess this almost certainly really is. It probably actually is, or incorporates, "the past history between/current feelings between" the target and the active character and EVEN if it incorporates a Reputation or similar mechanic almost certainly FURTHER accommodates for history/feelings between them and that MIGHT be why this isn't just called "Reputation".

So. For a start. This could be like easily three DIFFERENT modifier categories. Based on prior trends and my assumptions based on MGuys other material... I'm assuming it is pretty much ALL THREE. I lay a god damn bet that this "single category" on the list of 4 is actually like THREE things and represents the character's broader reputation (as known to the target) AND the target's romantic preference for the target or not (when it's being seduction charm) AND further feelings and past history between them (when its being friendship charm AND when it's being seduction charm).

If so, that small list continues to grow. Also if so, it's sort of a mess. But lets face it, it opened with a character having feelings about one of the players, it wasn't going to be well thought out.

apparent personal benefit/cost of the request
OK. So first thing on this one. This is for the CHARM social action. The, CHARM, social action has a cost benefit analysis on the list of kinda only 4 things that can modify it. Yes. That's a cost benefit analysis on Friendship, and maybe Seduction.

Fuck knows there are problems right there.

But then again, this brings to light another oversight that ANY elaboration might have provided us here...

...um, we don't know what the Charm action IS.

Not the slightest fucking idea. Are we making friends and having people fall in romance? Or is this some idea where every single social action is boiled down to a transactional bargain and we just get differing flavors of how the social pressure is applied?

You want my personal bet? It's a fucking lazy cut and paste. MGuy has mentioned a few times his distaste for haggling, but has also mentioned a few times the topic of bargaining and favor trading. In ways that suggests he might want to do one or both, somehow, who the hell knows how, on top of all these other things.

So maybe we add another subtable of list to the definitely not growing forever list of "Bargain". Then he was looking for categories for the charm action and was like "this looks generic as fuck CUT PASTE job done nailed it".

Alternatively, though I'm not sure it's more charitably, he thought that he could just sprinkle this specific category all over several of his flavors of OTHER social action and it would make each one into a magical transform that could do the thing it does and then ALSO do bargaining!

Now lets try and figure out who is who. OK so it almost certainly means the cost benefit to the target, apparent to the target.

You could however readily rationalize that it actually means the cost benefit to the active character relevant to the GM/Panel of judges, dammit an answer there would be useful.

You could even make a line of argument that it could be the Cost/benefit to the on going campaign/game experience in general as apparent to the GM/dammit.

Now lets assume he is just doing designing "that bad mechanic they always do". So it's definitely the cost benefit to the target as apparent to the target, because of course it is, it always is.

And of course that means this alone means we are layering all the usual dependency on the deception/stealth system we also know nothing about, requiring that even without deception/stealth at all we have any idea how, both personally AND game mechanically, the target determines the value of ??? in terms of what? Currency, personal happiness, character levels, abstract final modifier?

We don't know those things, if this goes like the usual bad design then we might get an answer on stealth/deception but actually the rest of it tends to be answered with "you FTP it" IF you get an answer at all.

apparent personal risk
Yep. The Charm action. Apparent personal risk. WHAT IS THIS ACTION?

OK. Again. Probably this is risk to the target as apparent to the target. This is probably another generic as fuck cut and paste job.

I'm assuming there is no accommodation or even slight acknowledgement for targets that enjoy risk taking.

You could argue that risk to the active character as apparent to active character could be a negative modifier though. And risk to the character as apparent to the GM/three pigeons in a trenchcoat might also be usable as a modifier.

But it's risk to the target as seen by the target isn't it because we are writing that same fucking bad design again aren't we?

Lets just move on.

apparent personal effort
This one. This category. Just wow. Personal effort. This is a gold mine.

Why is this here?

Someone is befriending, MAYBE seducing me. Or, maybe they are simple trying to turn fuck knows what into a transactional risky bargain but are being super friendly or handsy about it.

Why the FUCK do I care about effort?

It can't be my, the target character's effort. THAT would be a cost.

This is almost certainly the effort of the active character. It is PROBABLY as apparent to the target. WHY DOES THE TARGET CARE?

But, fair enough it might not be the effort of the active character. It COULD be worse.

It could be personal effort put in by ANYONE. It could even be a GM/squad of labradoodles rating of the personal effort the PLAYER put in!

Lets just say its the personal effort put in either by or on behalf of, the active character and/or anyone assisting them.

So, for instance this is a charm action right. So putting on make up. I note that presentation and appearance are NOT categories of modifier. For Charm. But EFFORT is. So. Put that make up on SUPER damn hard. Put on ALL of it, and it helps if you have never done it before because that means it is more effort. And more effort is better.

And how adjacent or relative to the action does this effort have to be?

Do I get bonuses to my social actions if I hold them on a cliff face and hold on with my fingernails in order to talk?

Effort... FFS You god damn clown you asked me to rate this as is. Effort.

The missing categories
You know we can make these up all day. Lets not. Lets just point out that Charm, CHARM, had no accounting for "apparent personal appearance".

How many similarly sized oversights do you think we could find? I think just one that big is enough to call this iteration of the list a dismal failure. Especially WHEN "EFFORT" MADE THE LIST.

We can leave looking for other oversights for later, I fucking tripped over that one without trying and this is enough effort for one post about one fucking sentence of material.

I mean leave it for later assuming an actual elaboration or alteration to the list that was definitely ready to be criticized actually happens.

It can also have "specific scenarios" left for later, I have opinions on how to properly use them and how not to properly use them to critique or test this sort of thing. But this doesn't demonstrably doesn't need the additional step.

Did you think that was rhetorical?

I explained exactly what I thought of what you are posting.

That's not how you answer questions or elaborate on rules.

Oh and whee... posting it without a summary check and edit... spelling away!

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Alright, time to catch up. Let's see...

I'll reply to Mguy first, since I like chronological order.

These abilities at the higher ranks. Can they not be performed by people at lower rank? For instance Improve Attitude is rank 3. Does that imply that this can't be done by a lower ranked person? Does the fact that pushing an agreement for multiple people at once appears at rank 5 mean that people of lower rank can only convince one person at a time to do things?

Yes, correct. If you don't invest in Charm at all, you'll have the ability to make agreements with low-level creatures, but if you want to gain rapport with someone, you have to do it the hard way through roleplaying since you aren't good enough to make most people your buddy after a 5 minute chat. I had the Group stuff at Rank 5 since that's when players should be hitting level 6 or so, and that seemed like an appropriate time to be able to bind entire groups of people to your will for a while with a single roll. I am thinking maybe it should be lowered. If I had more Charm powers, then I would feel safer moving things around.

Second is there a way to bypass the system? If I do a quest and return a farmer's wife safe and sound from goblins does that improve their attitude toward me? I assume this is a yes but I just want to confirm.

Oh yeah, totally. I haven't written that down yet since I think that would be best left for the actual adventure/campaign design section, but that sounds like an appropriate part of a quest reward.

Speaking of which is there any favor trading? Can you take a favor on credit where you do a thing for some unspecified aid in the future? I would imagine it'd be difficult to adjudicate that since the GM can't weigh how an NPC might value an unspecified favor or even doing a favor for a PC 'now' with the expectation that they can call on them later. What I did was make it a function of 'risk' where this kind of action would push increase the intensity of the risk category for applying a penalty to the request.

Nope, that isn't even something I considered when writing this up. Perhaps that could be part of adventure design, too? A possible reward could just be an IOU from some NPC you finished the quest for, and it's a tangible thing that you can cash in later? It could even tie into downtime systems. And probably other stuff I'm not thinking about.

However, I think I missed it, or at least I'm not sure anymore... but are players the pokemon themselves or trainers?

You know, I'm not sure anymore either, man. As I was going into this I thought it would be impossible to reconcile playing as both of them, but as I create more and more systems in which both of them can participate in at around the same level... it's making me think otherwise, you know? I haven't ironed any of that out yet, but I don't want to discount the possibility either, since it has precedence in Pokemon lore and it's clearly something that a not-insignificant number of players want to do. I need to finish more systems and pin down character progression before I can really answer this.

Are there any benefits to multiple people participating in one of these social exchanges? Or is it going to be just one person with the best numbers, doing all the talking? Is it better to make sure people diversify which social skills they get since there doesn't seem to be any benefit to multiple people getting charm?

I've got ways for people to help each other out with skill checks. I think. Hang on.
Well, not explicitly, but that's an easy fix. I have 2 kinds of skill checks for groups: Team Skill Checks and Assisted Skill Checks.
Team checks don't involve a primary actor, and typically has a ludicrous DC that nobody could achieve alone, like in the 30s or 40s or something. Everyone just makes the skill check and adds it together.
Assisted checks do involve a primary actor and are probably what you're looking for. The DC's set as normal and the primary actor makes the Skill Check. In order to assist this person, someone needs at least Novice rank in a skill. If they do, then the primary actor adds half their Skill Ranks to their check. I don't really have a limit on how many people can help each other.
Just for completion's sake, either of these can be made into Extended Skill Checks, in which the DC is multiplied by how long and complex the task is. You make these checks with an Extended Action (S), and a person can only contribute to Extended checks a # of times equal to half their Skill Rank. Maybe this makes numbers funky, I'm not sure yet. I'll see.
But anyway, yeah, just do an Assisted Skill Check whenever you're using Push Agreement.

Onto PL!

Actually you said that Push Agreement takes from 1-30 minutes on top of another period of unspecified time to offer a deal. So the Charmander trying to warm the globe could possibly be making less than 2 checks an hour if he can keep trying do overs.

You're right. I'll just remove the unspecified time.

Also didn't know not talking was a problem especially since you specifically singled out that pokemon get access to these skills. Of course since this is the Charm skill the go to pokemon example was the Charm-ander.

I should've specified that in my initial post, my bad. That is specified elsewhere in the game, just not here. I've never made a game before, so my text could definitely be tighter and less confusing. A Charmander can totally use Push Agreement on anything it can talk to, which 95% of the time is just going to be other Pokemon. It is possible for humans to be able to talk directly to Pokemon and vice versa, but those are fringe cases. A human that can talk to Pokemon can totally use Push Agreement on them. I suppose that means they could use either Improve Pokemon's Attitude OR Improve Person's Attitude on them, depending on if their Pokemon Education or Charm is higher. But that's a decision 99% of players are never going to make.

Also you say you have a 30 minute time scale or something but how does a 1 to 30 minute +? long action fit into that?

You mean an Extended Action (Long)? Or a Downtime Action?

Is this a reciprocal thing where people take turns, how many attempts does the Charmander get before the party gets to try... anything... what can the party try... shouldn't the Charmander risk something other than a fail? I mean the fail costs are super weak and the Charmander COULD be demanding your pokeballs.

Reciprocity is a good thing to bring up here. Let's say a Charmander comes up and talks to 1 person for 30 minutes. What is everyone else doing? Well, since it's not an opposed roll, they can't really help their friend out short of attacking the Charmander. That's not good. I guess that means anyone not involved would just fuck off for a while to take their own Extended Action (S) while the first guy is stuck being yelled at by a lizard.
I really should specify that the target should be willing to hear you out, huh? I admit that I failed here by mainly thinking about the PCs making NPCs do shit and not vice versa. Which is dumb.
If I can nitpick, I'd argue that "giving up your Pokeballs" is a pretty Repugnant deal, as it seems blatantly self-destructive to me. But you're right, even then the Charmander would have a slim chance of success, which is... not good.

Effectively, what even IS a 30 minute time scale social encounter incorporating Push Agreement actions?

That's a very important question. I don't think I know right now. I want the difference in levels between the two parties to matter, but I was averse to having it be an opposed roll due to someone with higher Charm completely skullfucking people with lower Charm. I am fine with opposed rolls for plenty of checks, but more hesitant to use them for social stuff.
I think the target has to be able to do something in response that changes the DC of the check. Or something.
Perhaps whether the agreement is Favorable, Tolerable, or Repugnant should affect the DC moreso than the check results? I'm spitballing here, I've really gotta go think about this.

But still. How does it interact with the initiative system? It's the kinda thing that will come up.

Okay, good point, let me explain initiative, then.
You have a Speed stat. You might have bonuses to it, but either way, you have it. This determines your Initiative. Turn order goes from highest to lowest Initiative. So the ways to change where you are in the turn order is to raise or lower your Speed; Delay your turn and reduce your Initiative to a specific point in combat/wait and act whenever you want, setting your Initiative to that point for the rest of combat; or Ready an specific action with trigger conditions - this action would happen right before the triggering action, although the other action would still happen if possible. I wonder what kind of shenanigans people can get up to with this.
Generally speaking, if something is Hostile towards you and headed in your direction, you should really start combat and ask everybody for their Initiative order and shit, so Delay Aggression is intended to be a combat power. Let's say you're unlucky and they all get the jump on you and start mauling your friends, and then it comes around to your turn. You use Delay Aggression and since none of your friends have retaliated yet, it can affect all enemies. You get lucky and score a Moderate Success on it and can affect everyone in this suspiciously level-appropriate encounter. Now all your friends go and hopefully start figuring out ways to assuage, scare away, or plan an escape route with their own Skill powers on their turns. Now that they're done, the round is over and it's the enemies' turn, and because you used Delay Aggression on them, they don't come any closer or try and hurt you, although they may start using status moves to beef themselves up, try to flank you from afar, or whatever. This happens once again before you need to renew Delay Aggression.
Does that help?
It just occurred to me that I should probably differentiate between "Hostile", the Attitude where someone wants to hurt you, and "hostile" where someone is actively trying to fuck your shit up in the combat minigame. That would help.

"While has been" is my personal favorite.

Yeah... tenses have always been one of my weakest points as a writer. That and my fondness for the shakespearian comma. I just need an actual editor or something.

There are a lot of other assumptions there that probably need specifying, like changed by what or who and positively or negatively and towards you or just anything?

Especially since an editor wouldn't have the assumptions that I do. Thanks for the catch, man.

Not gonna lie, when I was skimming I thought PL's latest post ranting about overhyped Charm statuses was directed at me. I'll make another post later talking about MGuy's stuff so far, because I am hungry and tired of staring at a screen right now.

[MGuy]

I'll make another post later talking about MGuy's stuff so far, because I am hungry and tired of staring at a screen right now.

You should wait up on that. I'm probably going to give my old notes a read sometime tonight and post some thoughts on them. I'm sure it'll be interesting to see how my current perspective effects my opinions on my own work. I'm glad to find that I'm not the only one who got confused about whether humans or pokemon were gonna be the PCs.

[MGuy]

So most of the reason I had TAA put a hold on what he was going to say is that haven't really posted 'a system' at this point. What I'm doing is thinking my way through the design process. I have a good excuse to take a little detour and look over some old notes of mine. This isn't the first time I've thought about how to do diplomacy. Since what I'm doing here is a kind of exercise to build toward a good foundation for making this thing happen at some point this won't be the last. I don't think I wrote anything other than notes in the time between when I drafted this stuff and now. Rummaging through even older documents shows me that I was consistent with some of the basic steps I was taking. Looking through more recent notes I have little bits and pieces of things I wanted to keep in mind next time I worked on this. There are things from the threads like the a bit from a while back where having argumentative styles were more or less effective against other argumentative styles. And stuff from other places like if mental states should effect interactions (a good thing to think about later). With time and stress having fuzzied up my memories it'll be fun to look back on old notes.

So, starting off, the small amount of categories I have were definitely meant to cover a wide variety of possible considerations using as few lines as I could manage. I used broad language in order to allow for moment to moment calls I'd have to make. This is a different time in the miserable future and a lot of things have changed. I did not have this 'less is more' attitude toward drafting these so keeping it lean and simple using descriptors to guide me was done more out of only needing the scaffolding in when using them. I also was only interested in using them in minor scenarios because I had even less of an idea of what I wanted to do with diplomacy back then. So let's see what I have to say to myself about my old work.

So as I said, these rules were meant to be used for general one off rolls on diplomacy. Well now that I'm taking time to really order up my thinking it'd be good to start there. It's still my intent to cut down on unnecessary rolling.

Well when do I want the roll to happen?
Where I feel they are most appropriate. This is as good a time as any to work out when I feel they are. A good starting place is looking at that I want to resolved or represented in other ways.

Best left as a passive modifier to something else.
1) Things that involve wealth. Haggling of course as I mentioned earlier. That's obvious but pretty much anything involving money being earned or coerced out of other people I think should be a passive thing. This will definitely include: Rewards for doing a job, things involving your side gig (so if you're a merchant you could get more out of being a charismatic person), bribes (if I go into something more political)
2) Carousing with friends/family/etc. I want to encourage players to treat their characters like people and there are all sorts of festivities and holidays and whatever written in books or even as starting stages of adventures/campaigns but players have no reason to get involved with these things! Presumably characters have birthdays. Just in general I think that there should be something for characters doing things in their off time. Figure I might as well make a note that I'm doing this and tell myself no rolls.
3) Gathering Info or legwork or anything similar to that. I don't think that rolling to get fluff info is at all valuable. If players have invested in the right things they should just know the things. Right now I'm imagining it just being a binary thing where you have an ability to get yourself all the info. I may have to walk this back a bit though to facilitate more complicated things like if players want to gather info but not let some figure/faction know they are.

Things I don't think should ever be rolled
1) First meetings/determining how people/pcs are going to react to finding out that people exist. If the GM decides that a hostile NPC decides to attack on sight let it be that. What I intend to do will explicitly cover what happens when players decide to take social actions and not before.
2) When the target already wants to do/believe the thing the players want to them do/believe. If the GM has decided that the person will just do the thing then that's whatever. It just happens.
3) The players have a bonus high enough that they can't fail. I don't foresee myself having any kind of auto fail on 1 thing so if the players have put themselves in a place where they can't fail the roll the GM should just tell them it just happens.

Things that are likely going to involve another resource.
1) Calling in favors from allies. Characters can have people that are family, friends, partners, etc to them but I don't want them being used as resources for things that matter. this is a decision I made a while ago but there is just no way to keep having allies from being one of the most absolutely gamebreaking things that can happen. Getting a permanent ally is the best defeat state you can possibly put a former enemy in. It is usually better than just killing them. Even just in combat if you can get an enemy to fight other enemies or spend their turns helping you. This can conceivably be a problem if groups start going around 'collecting' allies and actually making good use of them. This hasn't happen all that often but I've had it happen a few times and it can be problematic.
Of course any GM can say 'no don't do that' or I can rely on gentleman's agreements. This is a thing that I am personally going to formally say 'no' to. There's nothing wrong with leaving some things up to group cohesion and certain unspoken or softly spoken agreements but I feel like I want to snipe this one in the rules. So instead there's going to be a thing where you can call in favors from people that are ally/friendly/whatever status with you. Currently my mindspace says this is going to come from reputation. Since a resource is being there's of course no need for a roll.
There are a lot more considerations I'll have to make for this. Guidelines and restrictions to keep people from just asking friends to straight up kill themselves or something ridiculous (though not ridiculous in some cases like fanatics or soldiers).
2) Getting people who don't want to interact to interact with you. This won't necessarily require resources for every interaction. It will be used for times where the players want to entreat people who are higher status than they are, are hard to find, or otherwise don't want to interact with them for one reason or another. There can be cases where players can force someone to talk to them (like if they kidnapped them or the situation clearly allows for it). This doesn't guarantee a positive interaction, just allows the players to demand it essentially.
3) Advance your status in a faction/grow your new faction. I feel this is better done just through resource expenditure at worst. I'm still figuring out what position I want organizations to take shape in within my game. Right now I'm leaning toward keeping it as a background thing, like having a gig on the side, to keep it from not fitting with the rest of the game. I like kingdom building but I'm not sure if the change from playing adventurer and using your downtime to fund your adventure/tend to the adventurer's needs so they are ready to do more adventuring can handle being a king and doing army stuff at some point. It seems too big to ignore and I think might only work in a campaign that specifically focuses on it.
Whatever the case may be, no rolls, use resources.

Times when I think a more in-depth social encounter is going to take place.
This will pretty much up to the GM to decide when this takes place. I do not know what shape the actual minigame will ultimately take yet but I do know that it should be used for 'big' encounters. Convincing the assembled heads of state to take up arms with the hated elves against a bigger menace, convincing the assorted countrymen that the monster is in fact not the misshapen man who hides in the bell tower but a demon masquerading as the high judge, or interrogating the butler to find out where the old timer hid the jewels. Essentially it is for 'big' moments and since I can't map out every case where an adventure might end with or have a crucial social encounter that'll be left to the person who's going to stat up the opposition.

So what does that leave me with?
1) Anything that can happen in combat. This is an easy one. Combat is immediate and any social maneuver that can be done in combat needs to be done with a single roll (if a roll is necessary).
2) Brief interactions that aren't 'big' enough to qualify for the lengthier minigame. As I wrote the last bit above I thought about an assumption that I was making without even thinking about it. In 'big' and dramatic scenes there's an implication that the entire party is going to be involved. Any lengthy minigame like whatever I fill in the blank space for 'that' definitely should have all party members present (if possible). It's an issue I've worried about before, with how diplomacy usually goes, some people get left out because their presence doesn't help. Whatever I come up with for big social combats everyone should have a reason to be involved.
In cases where this isn't necessary and what's being decided is something relatively small time I think using a single roll is fine. Things like distracting a guard, bribing that same guard (this isn't background bribery. The bribery I talked about skipping earlier was more for background/political dealings), rallying the troops before a battle, trying to pass a forged object as something real (like an ID or something similar), trying to get a friend not to believe/do something that they really want to do, catching on to a lie, etc. Stuff that can happen, have degrees of success/failure, but probably won't involve the entire party and that can happen in like a random event or as part of doing something else like infiltrating a place.
There are times when a quick single roll is appropriate and I think that these instances can be set when the players or the GM decide to trigger them. When I think about the times I feel a single roll is appropriate that's what comes up. A player decides to lie to an NPC or vice versa. A player is trying to pass themselves off as someone they aren't. An NPC is about to do something stupid and a player would really they not do that thing. Highly individual, spur of the moment, events that are triggered by someone at the table. i feel like these are the times best covered with one off rolls.

I haven't thought of anything else at the moment so we can get on with what is best used to modify the roll/TN for times like those. At least for Charm, or in the case of my notes 'Diplomacy'. I'll take some time working through all the other bits later but right now I'd like to just focus on what I have for this bit.

Disposition!
So as I mentioned the categories I made were written a couple years ago so there are going to be things that I've had some additional thoughts about what I'm going to do. They'll all be updated and adapted in some way I'm sure but they are in a good place I'd say. Disposition is how the person a character interacting with feels about them. This can be how they feel in general about a specific character or a group if the person views them as a collective. I don't think this needs much explanation. This kind of thing is in the srd and I didn't even bother to change the name when I did a write up for it. Probably because I was using it for a pathfinder game to test it out and see how my players felt about it. It ranges from levels of hate to levels of favorability and all that and I have a short explanation of what each level means and a general description of what kind of things you can expect characters at the given ranges to do. I changed some of the names and added a few I think because I wanted to separate certain things. A quick rundown includes:
Arch Nemesis This person has reached a level of fanatical hatred. The kind of person who wants you and everything you've ever loved to suffer and will go through great lengths to make it happen.
Nemesis This person is an enemy and dislikes you significantly enough to recognize you as there's specifically. They want to see you fail but won't destroy themselves in pursuit of it.
Foe This person does not like you but not for personal or significant reasons. Most opposition will likely fall into this category.
Unfriendly This person has a negative impression of you. They will deal with you only as far as they are socially obligated to but otherwise will avoid you.
Neutral This person has no strong feelings for you one way or another. They will interact with you as if you were a random stranger or at best as an acquaintance.
Friendly This person has a positive impression of you. They might seek out your company when it is convenient and socially appropriate.
Ally This person sees you as an ally. They are willing to work with you and can be helpful but are likely not personally involved with you.
Trusted This person is a trusted confidant. A longterm friend, close family member, or intimate partner. They recognize you as a valued person in their life and will help you.
Devoted This person selflessly adores you. They will likely do much of what you want them to do on a whim. They want to what's best for you and will make personal sacrifices in your name.

I'm not going to bother with the numbers for now because without the rest of the framework they'd mean nothing. Based off of my notes though Devoted and Arch Nemesis were meant to be special dispositions not achievable through normal means. I'm guessing I intended these to be things that were generally off the table except as a plot point. I have some things written down about what actions you might expect at each step similar to what's on the srd. So your nemesis will work against you when convenient and your foes will fight you but won't work overtime to see your demise while ally's will work with you but may not jump in the way of bullets for you. The one word heal, aid, attack, didn't feel thorough enough so while I was splitting the difference between people who are your enemies by circumstance and people who actually hate your guts specifically I went into a bit more detail about what you might expect in an interaction with each. So each disposition was given a 'bit' of a blurb before I stapled it into the pathfinder game I was running to give it a bit of a field test.

This isn't anything all that new but I'll probably give them a second pass sometime in the future.

Cost/Benefit Analysis
The rest of the categories are similar, with ranges, associated bonuses/penalties etc. I use the word 'apparent' for each of these and that's because appearances can be deceiving. I know I added it in to leave the door open for trickery. I don't spend as much time fleshing them out in my notes and just use general terms with a considerably shorter blurb. Where there's a few lines of text that explain that an Arch Nemesis might want to wipe out your entire bloodline the "life-saving" benefit level I think is probably self explanatory. As one might guess this category applies to requests where the target character would stand to benefit and/or pay some cost to perform an action. This is about material cost, like assets and wealth, and not time and energy. It's not explicitly stated under it but that is what's factored into effort according to my notes.

The weird thing is, I'm not sure that putting Benefit and Cost on the same scale was a good idea. I think I figured if the benefits outweigh the costs or vice versa then the net benefit or cost would be all that mattered and since I would associate them both closely in my head I put it on the same scale. Well for the moment the Benefit/Cost scale goes:
Life-RuiningThe request will cost the character their livelihood.
Substantial Loss The request will likely decrease the character's standard of living (perhaps permanently)
Significant Loss The request will likely result in a major setback for the character and take time to recover from.
Minor Loss The request result in a tolerable loss of assets.
Even Trade/NA The request will not substantially effect the character's bottom line.
Minor Profit The request will result in an appreciable gain for the character.
Significant Profit The request will likely result in the character seeing major financial returns for their investment.
Substantial Profit The request will likely increase the character's standard of living (perhaps permanently)
Life-Ascending The request will change the character's life completely for the better.
The numbers don't matter much yet but I will note that the numbers for this category are the same as what I have down for Apparent Risk. So something that might ruin one's livelihood I rated just as unfavorable as something that might risk one's life. There's not much to this part and this is getting a bit long so I'll push on through the rest.

Risk
This one is another curious one. I clearly was shooting to have it represent not just a risk to life and limb but in places status. It makes sense but the status risk doesn't also go down to the lowest amount. I don't know if this was an oversight of mine at the time or I lacked the imagination to think that people would consider risk of severe public embarrassment the same as risk of losing a limb or dying. I'll probably have to consider changing that. These also work as positives for Intimidation checks made to coerce someone into doing something. So if you're threatening someone's life they risk death by not doing what you say. Oddly I didn't write a similar note for the cost thing. Since 'this' category is about bodily harm and status then you it stands to reason that you can threaten someone's finances and assets. Well that's an oversight that's easily fixed and another reason to separate cost from benefit. Anyway the scale goes:
DeadlyThe request puts the character's or a loved one's life at risk.
SevereThe request puts the character at risk of permanent bodily harm or risks their very freedom
ModerateThe request puts the character at risk of bodily harm or significant loss of status
Minor The request puts the character at risk of incurring a few bruises or mild public shame.
There's not much more to say about this. The pattern here is clear so I'll run through the last one.

Effort
This is time and energy. People are less likely to do something for you when the task is more difficult to actually perform. The numbers don't matter right now but of note is the numbers for effort are half that of Risk and Cost/Benefit. I'll have to think over that one. In one sense I can understand why I'd do that. Risking even loss of limb can be a powerful motivator that would dwarf the effort it took for you to avoid it. Of course this is very often not the case if you think about it but I'll get to that after this. So the scale goes:
Substantial Commitment Can take upwards of months and years to complete. This is akin to taking on a long term project and will likely result in a number of sleepless nights.
Significant Commitment Can take about a few weeks or up to month's time. This is akin to taking on a short term project that will likely prevent the character from following other pursuits
Minor Commitment Can take about a week or two. This is akin to taking up an extra daily chore that can be performed at reasonable intervals.
Trivial Commitment Can take about a day or two to complete. This akin to taking on taking a day long trip.
Negligible Commitment Can be performed immediately without much effort.
There's not much more to say about this one. Considering the timescale referenced this was definitely written with longer term or major requests in mind.

Final Notes and Tidbits
All of these first and foremost assumes the GM has determined that NPC is resistant to whatever is being asked of them. If for whatever reason the NPC is already on board you don't roll. You also have to have time to begin the conversation, needing to be able to initiate it with at least a minute and going on as necessary from there. I didn't make a concrete time frame this had to work in and I said "negotiating the request goes on as long as necessary" so I wasn't too worried about setting up a limit on that end.

What do I think overall?
It is clear that when I wrote this I was looking to make it a minimalist adjustment to what already existed. I know at the time I just wanted to 'make 3.5 with less levels the game' so I was trying to avoid anything I couldn't easily latch onto what I was already familiar with. There are some ideas I was clearly working with at the time I'd agree with even now. Broad terms and examples for for each portion of the scale. I clearly thought more needed to be said about disposition than the others. I don't think I was wrong there. However DnD already basically does this so it's likely just a byproduct of sticking to what I knew than me actually getting there by thinking through what might be necessary. I explicitly note that if bonuses get high enough that an attempt can't fail or can't succeed don't bother rolling which I'm still saying. That's not a big revolutionary idea but hey it's there. I have a few lines about the differences between getting someone to do something through Diplomacy versus using Intimidate. The differences are mostly in the degrees of success/failure and what happens after you leave. Which is also something I'm still planning to implement and probably expand on more than I did. It's good to see that I was thinking about these things even back when I was working them.

After a Successful Check is made the Target will attempt to perform the action(s) requested of them. The Target’s Disposition toward the Character may change depending on the consequences of performing the action. If the consequences become too high before the request is completed then the Target will break the deal. If the Target benefits from the request after it is completed their Disposition toward the Character increases one Grade (up to Ally). If the Target significantly from performing the request their Disposition toward the Character decreases one Grade. Both of these changes might increase depending on the severity of the consequences or boons.

This was a note I made for Intimidate:

Special Note – It should be noted that Intimidation is largely about getting Targets to bend to your will quickly and easily. Many Characters may go straight for threatening a Target’s life in order to immediately place the Incentive high enough such that the lesser Apparent Risks are much smaller by default. This strategy may work well in that most demands will not compete with the Target’s life being threatened (though this will not always be the case). However the cost can be steep as such an Incentive will make the Target’s Disposition plummet toward the Character and will likely invoke a negative response or even cause the Target to act against them. Additionally Targets that are intimidated into service will do whatever they can to get out of it, fleeing when they think they can, performing the task in the worst way they can safely, lying to the Character or any other action that may sabotage or relinquish them from the demand. So while Intimidation has its benefits it comes with its own set of risks.

Things have changed with time. I'm not sticking as closely to 3.x these days. I've got a lot more plans that have to do with downtime and some sort of reputation tracker. I've got a better idea about exactly where, how, and why I want things rolled up. With these changes in my mindset there will of course be changes in what I think I need and how I'd want it implemented. There are new things I might want to cover like personality types. Earlier in the thread there was a mention of what happens when a diplomancer attempts to seduce a loyal and married shopkeeper.

In my mind this could be resolved by the GM deciding that considering the way the shopkeeper feels about the sanctity of their partnership the potential boon the player is offering is negligible at best or represents actual risk at worse. Even the offer might mean that they drop to being unfriendly what with the character being clearly loose with their morals. Another GM might judge it a different way. So it might help if an array of personality types were made and could be rolled up or given to NPCs when the GM decides to care about it. That way a savvy character might be able to take actions prior to their attempt to figure out the person has a pious/puritan personality and wouldn't react well to casual flirtation. This would greatly help consistency and transparency on both sides of the screen. I probably wouldn't give the individual personality types their own bonuses but instead have them reference the bonuses that I'd already have written.

Speaking of which...

Is there anything is their any categories I would add?
I will probably need to add a few more in the future. For one it might be worth splitting up Benefit/Cost and creating a second category so that actual physical risks are separate from potential hits to status. I can see why I would've bundled these things together. Less discrete numbers to consider. Hell I can even see why I would hesitate to consider that someone might consider the risk of becoming a social outcast as harrowing as potentially losing a limb. That would be on the table though. As mentioned, I could add personalities that can help guide GMs to making more consistent calls and allow players insight into what those might mean so they can better play around it. It wouldn't be an extra category though. In any case I don't think I'd need much more than what I have. Looking at Effort 'that' one seemed like I was stretching to make a consideration for something that doesn't really come up a lot and if I was already stretching to find categories back when I wrote this I doubt I'll be eager to find more in the future.

Are there any other things you would want to add?
I don't think I would need much more to make single roll instances passable. They are supposed to just be short and sweet and not really get tied up into anything complicated. So even if there is something I missed or hadn't considered whatever the player is trying to do is necessarily small time and shouldn't have a great impact on the game as a whole. The thing players should be doing to make any request work is setting up a situation where what they want seems reasonable to increase their chances at success at the roll. More time should be spent (if it is ever important) in creating conditions that guarantee success rather than trying to 'just' brute force it by having the biggest numbers.

Just for fun though I want to entertain one of the things that I'm supposed to be afraid of. Even as I sit and think about if I would want more categories that might be applied to a roll I have yet to come up with anything new. But that's ok because instead of having infinite categories I'm going to go on the bold path of having infinite TRAITS! The repeated talk about infinite this and infinite that has made me sit down and actually think about what I'm supposed to be afraid of where this is concerned. The thing I am being pressed to worry about is what happens if a GM decides that what exists isn't enough and they feel that they have to generate numbers for this special circumstance. This ill considered decision could potentially break the game after all... right? When I game it out in my head though this seems like a hollow concern.

If I were to say: Hey GMs, each time you make an NPC give them a handful of social traits [3 to 6 depending on how complex you want them to be] that define their personality. You start with a single word (or word pair) and give and two ways this trait effects social interactions with them. So the shopkeeper in the prior example would be Married - Can reliably be influenced by significant other and Seeks to maintain or strengthen bond. Puritan - Increase disposition with those who share their views by a single step (maximum Ally) and decrease disposition with those who commit a perceived sin (minimum Foe). Miserly - Resists requests to give discounts increasing apparent cost of such requests by a single step and increase disposition lost if they've suffered a previous loss due to a deal with the character. This would be inoffensive to me.

I'd have a sample list of traits I label 'Personalities' that come prepacked with descriptors and what they mean for potential checks. Then I went further and made a guide for GMs who want to generate their own if they want. This would be the feared 'infinite lists' boogieman incarnate. But... there're monster manuals. They have sample creatures and abilities and guidelines to create new monsters, adjust ones that exist, and the GM is always free to create their own without these guidelines. This is not an issue. I don't think it would be an issue here.



Alright. I think I've explored this enough for right now. It was a good opportunity for me to look at things I did before and see how they hold up to where I'm headed now. The criticisms I've received so far include:

There's not enough information to actually meaningfully judge what I'm doing. As far as weaknesses go I'm ok with that because hey... this is a process. If there's not enough info it'd probably be better to take the option to wait until there is.

That which modifiers might or might not apply will depend on the inputs. Multiple inputs in fact. That multiple things might be considered when the GM decides how much someone likes you at the moment. Yea... That's indeed the case.

That personal appearance didn't make the list. Yup. It didn't. The assumption for games I run is that player characters are generally attractive unless they specifically say they are not. Since my philosophy up to this point is that I don't do diplomacy at players, players can decide whether or not NPCs are attractive and if they care. Attractiveness isn't a thing I care about quibbling over, nor is sexuality. All NPCs are pansexuals unless it really matters that they aren't.

That's all for now. I think the next conversation with myself will revolve around transparency and what kind of results players should be able to gauge when they do the social things.