Another Thread About Social Combat

[PhoneLobster]

Strategies that are "in theme" for the setting and characters should be more effective than strategies that are out of theme, or your game will become a disjointed mess.

Strategies that are not in theme for "your game" are not up for discussion. Period.

If it's in the discussion, about a hypothetical game, especially since you introduced it, it gets the free assumption that it must be in theme for the hypothetical game, otherwise... why the hell would you use it as an example of a thing in the game only to reject it based on tangential thematic elements YOU introduced that you didn't have to and don't relate to it's functional role as a mechanical example?

So yeah, fine, declare that cartoon dynamite which I didn't ask for isn't in "the game". Bomb in the bag is just a hypothetical example YOU used. The point is, lies can kill. Pick a lie that kills that you feel is thematically allowed.

We will all sit here waiting while you deal with your own quibbles with the fluff text you brought in along with your own examples and then we will continue after you settle that with yourself.

And similarly for MGuy's angle on the bomb in the bag. As I went into plenty of times in prior threads years ago. Bomb in the bag is a just a stand in, not even that, a casually mentioned single example from a dozen years ago, for killer lies in general, indeed killer social in general, other, many other, lies kill, friendship with the wrong character kills.

If a game mechanic can force a character to believe or do a thing and "a thing" is sufficiently open ended "a thing" includes death and more besides and should be priced accordingly. And that stands generally. I don't care if you strap the word "social" to the front of it or not. Open ended consequences get priced by their most valuable outcomes. The end. Design 101.

[Dean]

I cannot imagine a more obvious demonstration of a failed social system than one where telling someone to kill themselves was as likely to work as getting someone to hold a briefcase if, and only if, that briefcase was the sign for an assassin for who to kill. And would switch from DC 39 to DC 3 depending on if the assassin was watching or not.

The Bomb Briefcase example was actually made to demonstrate why such a thing is obviously stupid. Arguing that it must be included and is a priori a part of a good social system is an absolute brainshit.

You're talking about making a social system effect-based. Modeling it that way is obviously wrong because the entire conceit of the social game is being able to make a result easier to achieve with differing narrative circumstances. It is easier to get someone to hold a briefcase than to get them to kill themselves. It IS easier for Bond to get some action if he gets a girl a martini and smooth talks her first than if he said "Have sex with me in this field" to someone he just met. The entire desire for a social game is to make achieving results easier based on who you are and what you do and how you present yourself. Like, for instance, if you hid a threat in a briefcase rather than if you tell someone to blow their own brains out. Obviously.

[OgreBattle]

If the mechanics are rolled and then roleplay justifies the roll in an abstract rather than blow by blow way, I can see that working. Like the roll to make them hold the bomb briefcase also involves defeating their detection defenses so you could've put a death snake in their toilet too.

[PhoneLobster]

Ok lets see if I can clear up the last main points I wanted to cover.

The little extra formal social rules
Hey so, remember when I said that if you were looking at some extra edge case social mechanic and it looked like it could be represented by a unique but simple rule that would cover a broad category or be regularly used?

So you know how physical actions, or more specifically physical attacks, have "special" attacks like disarms and trips?

So. For a second. Imagine the potential of the social equivalents. A small rule, that does a simple thing, that you expect to see a fair bit of, but it's socially themed instead of some sort of agility brinkmanship.

I don't think there are any specific universal right answers on exactly which things it might be best to represent like this but I'll give you a couple of mine that I think have been working out pretty well.

Distract - Instead of using your social attack to do the whole social combat thing, use it to draw attention away from someone else's stealth action and to whatever you are doing instead. A tie in with the stealth rules that lets someone cooperatively contribute by using their social option to remove observers from an allies stealth action.

Social Setup - Instead of directly working towards a social defeat just convince a target you are non-threatening enough that you can on a success next action qualify to use the surprise attack rules on them. Like you could if you were just some guy on the street they didn't know anyway or if you had spent this action on an equivalent stealth action.

Social Parry - Oh no your friend is being stabbed. You could use a physical parry and make an attack forgoing damage contributions towards physical defeat to simply attempt to cancel the attack that is stabbing your friend. OR you could forgo social damage contributions towards a social defeat and make a social attack that knocks the attacker off target with socials instead of fencing. And since you yelling at someone to interrupt their attack might be an option when they are physically out of reach for the fencing, it's pretty nice even if there are some penalties for socials in combats.

Anyway, I hope that's enough to get the idea. A mechanical social action can be an undamaging special action, you can certainly have SOME highly defined and narrow special case formal mechanics and benefit from it.

What you cannot do is expect to have a comprehensive (or even adequately close) social system built exclusively out of this sort of thing.

More on social defeats
So anyway. I've made it clear I think "social combat" is a pretty reasonable idea. I don't think it needs that name, I think that name is a problem for some people, but dammit, it's an accurate name because you DO want a mechanic about as complex, about as fair, and that uses the same sorts of metrics and balance points centered around outcomes and derived from character power levels.

And, like other combats, it ends in defeats. Characters removed as immediately dangerous opponents. At the very least.

A mildly clear definition of a social defeat state and it's implications might be in order.

Social defeats clearly need to, at a minimum, remove victims as dangerous opponents.

A social defeat that simply renders targets knocked out or helpless would be an entirely acceptable variant of social defeat. You could represent a sleep spell or a hold person entirely acceptably in this sort of system a social defeat state reached with social attacks against social defenses.

Social defeats could reasonably also do more than that. Granting you influence or leverage over the victims actions, ranging from themed and conditional to mind control. Because actual mind control could readily be represented within such a system as just another flavor of social attack just like sleep spells.

But really most social defeats are going to be conditionally themed like "friendship" and "terrified" and "this guy entirely believes the crazy story I told him".

Now, it's important to note that social influence can be conditionally themed isn't precisely a clear limitation on the power of that influence. Just because the influence is going to need some negotiation about how it's based in trust and friendship or a specific lie being believed, it can still achieve very powerful things. It should be weighted accordingly. Your friendship defeat isn't the same as a mind control defeat, but it can achieve things of similar impact and should probably be costed at an approximately equal value, everything else is really just little better than fluff text.

But, no one ever said that that little better than fluff text differentiation was bad to have, just that "friendship man" doesn't get to pretend he is meaningfully mechanically weaker than "mind control man" at the same level.

"Sleep man" however might be weaker than "reliably makes them into allies man" so there is that to consider. And feel free to weight that like you would any non social action that replaces enemies with allies. I presume some sort of undeath attack for instance.

Ending Defeat States
People long since noticed that social encounters need end states. Opponents need to be removed from combats at a minimum. Simple stuff.

But defeat states also need to reach end states. All too often physical defeat states lack adequate elaboration on this themselves. Many just sort of assume, well, defeat is dead the end! But actually it would probably be better if KO was the more common assumed default for physical defeat states, and also it would be good if we knew when and how the KO might be expected to go away.

And social defeat states certainly can set targets up for fatal consequences but also they do not have to kill them and actually if you have social leverage over a character if you are being sensible you very probably do not actually want to kill them since you can probably derive all the value of doing so out of them, and possibly more by not doing that and society frowns on killing people so yeah...

Point is. Characters in social defeat states probably aren't dead and that means one day they might recover and we kinda care about when and how.

Natural recovery times, healing interventions, attempts by the social influencers to maintain or extend a defeat state, they certainly should be considered and should in some form probably exist... but they can probably just be pretty much whatever you like.

What I think is interesting is the concept of cancellation or expenditure of social defeat states.

A friendship defeat state can be very useful for a social influencer that inflicts it on a target. The friendly victim is going to treat them well, help them out, give them stuff, all sorts of things, but probably, within some fairly arbitrary limits.

A friendship defeat state ALSO makes the victim incredibly vulnerable to betrayal, robbery and murder from the social influencer, all things that could have a lot more impact or value than the "ongoing" benefits within the normal limits.

But just because you put someone into a state that makes them incredibly vulnerable to an act of betrayal AND then you betray them, doesn't mean you need to be mechanically entitled for that defeat state to now continue.

If your betrayal doesn't kill them... it is not unreasonable for them to maybe not want to be friends anymore.

So yes, some more extreme exploits of a defeat state can and should be possible but should also END THE DEFEAT STATE. And this is one of the areas you can use to differentiate defeat states from each other.

Friendship defeat state is ended by betrayals. Lies defeat state in ended by evidence. Scary defeat state is ended by demonstrations of weakness. You will want to be more specific and detailed, but you get the general concept.

Continued agency within defeat states
I think, it's not really unreasonable to suggest that just because some sort of limitation or requirement has been placed on a character's beliefs or actions that doesn't mean that all remaining choices and agency have to be removed from that character.

If Bob the Elf Fan really likes elves and acts accordingly this influence his actions, and decides some of them, but doesn't fully determine ALL his actions.

And that remains true if Bob is an elf fan because his player arbitrarily decided it, or because Bob is suffering an ongoing social defeat state than makes him into a huge fan of elves.

Now, there is no particular reason that if Bob is socially defeated that the player who owns Bob needs to stop playing the game outright. Bob the character does not have to be handed over to the GM, or if the defeat state inexplicably comes from another player, to the player that owns Egon the Elf.

The player that owns Bob still gets to play the game and still gets to make a bunch of decisions. They just now have the instruction "just keep in mind, your actions should be consistent with the fact that you now really really like elves".

Also, generally also "and dammit try and act in some good faith with that and don't twist everything into an attempt at being the bad faith interpretation wish genie."

Not that I think you should create a situation where players NEVER try to use their remaining agency to rebel a bit against the social defeat guidelines placed on them.

I just want them to try to most of the time be less shitty about it than the bad faith genie.

If you tell a pretty reasonable and convincing story about trying to help your new friend in all good faith but oops that wasn't what they wanted at all as long as it's not a wild stretch that's kinda OK. We can let a BIT of that happen.

We ALSO can let a character be a genuine "Bad Friend" or something. We can sit down and define them as someone who CONSTANTLY ends up being that person that actually you don't actually WANT to think they are your friend because being their friend is a bad experience.

But. That is essentially the same as having an immunity, resistance or even retaliation to a specific defeat state, and as such should probably have some sort of a cost or limitation.

At the very least it should probably be somewhat formally described, not something a player just decides on the spot, and hopefully excludes also having other similar immunity options so someone doesn't just collect the "bad friend" equivalent for all the social defeat states and run around being a dick to everyone in the universe no matter how they interact with them.


Anyway, I'm sure I'm missing something but that now IS actually all the social mechanics design basics I can think of off the top of my head right now, though, yeah I AM kinda tired I guess, the generally ramblyness of these posts should be a big indicator on that one.

[MGuy]

I'm hesitant to write rules that have players/GMs doing diplomancy 'at' other players. Not because I think it is wrong but because of the things I have experientially got push back where implementing rules is concerned any kind of influence that isn't direct, hostile, mind control seems to upset players the most. Magical influence, orders from a patron/authority figure, being lied to doesn't upset them but having another character 'charm' them in a way that gets them to do what someone else wants when they were initially resistant seems not to sit well with quite a few players. They seem to only be comfortable with agreeing to something when 'they', the player, are convinced. This seems to be doubly true with Intimidate.

I'm not against the idea inherently but I just have to note how distasteful most players I've met seem to view the idea.

As far as defeats states go the long term consequences of a social interaction, as well as the short term consequences, can be different things. Intimidate, or threatening someone to do something in general, has to be considered. There are ways to weave veiled threats into a more general attempt to get someone to do something but direct, hostile threats, are probably what people think of most of the time when considering what Intimidate looks like. Your goal when threatening someone can be about as varied as your goal when you charm someone but a lot of the outcomes and considerations are going to be different. The long term consequences to charming, bluffing, and intimidating someone I think can be simplified by just using reputation. People remember when they've had good and bad interactions with people and while time may cool positive relationships it might not be that easy to repair a less than positive experience. I find that people can be a lot less forgiving to strangers even over small slights.

In any case after intimidating someone your relationship to that person is probably not going to be good. So along with charting the immediate results of whether or not a person you threatened does what you told them in the immediate sense there're the long term effects to consider. Chances are after you've had to go as far as threatening someone your relationship with them is likely soured going forward. This wouldn't be a 'defeat' state in the sense that PL has outlined. I think that would be the initial thing where they do the thing you want (if successful). After that the target will probably not like you very much and there should be a fairly clear explanation of what this means for the player.

There's also the good cop/bad cop routine. You can have situations where the actual intent is for one person to aggress against a target so that the non aggressive charmer has an easier time coaxing the target to their side. It might not even be a thing that's coordinated as an opportunist can seize the opportunity to act as the lesser of two evils when one of the other entities involved are making themselves out to be a considerably worse option. This is just something you might want to consider if your system is going to involve interrogating people and/or intrigue.

[OgreBattle]

Come to think of it the Good Cop Bad Cop routine fits into the Hopes & Fears concept, one generates a hope and the other generates a fear that doubles to push someone to the desired action.

[OgreBattle]

Come to think of it the Good Cop Bad Cop routine fits into the Hopes & Fears concept, one generates a hope and the other generates a fear that doubles to push someone to the desired action.

[PhoneLobster]

I just have to note how distasteful most players I've met seem to view the idea.

Before I implemented my mechanics I would have half agreed with you on anecdotal experience of player reactions to social mechanics etc... Certainly internet poster reactions easily match that description.

And only half because the intimidation bit wasn't nearly as much the case for me, I'd just chalk that up to the eccentricities of anecdotal experience.

But, when running my social mechanics this has not been so much the case. I would say actually, I've hardly gotten any push back at all. I won't say NONE, but I will say come to think of it, I was expecting a lot, and I got so little I struggle to count anything I experienced as push back at all. I think like, one guy looked quietly disapproving about it on first description and then was pretty fine with it in practice. That is... not the level of push back anticipated.

In fact looking back and remembering... but actually... I've experienced a lot less push back and angst about social influence effects at the table than I did when using 3.x D&D style social effects (so say, Fear, Charm Person, Bluff, Diplomacy, and for some reason no so much Intimidate).

It's not hard evidence, it's anecdotal, it's small sample size, it could easily be biased memory. It could be purely down to me refining the revolutionary non-rules related GMing technique of "trying not to be a dick about stuff" something I will never master but have gotten a lot better at.

But what if I've actually hit on something successful? I mean I'm pretty safe to agree, people are... passionate about social mechanics and generally hate them, and generally experience them in traditional D&D rules terms.

Then at least according to my flawed and biased memory, that... doesn't seem to have happened with the approach I have used.

I think, maybe, I'm guessing here myself, my system is more participatory, more open for players other than the GM to manipulate, oppose, even understand in the first place.

3.x social influences were generally save or dies or skill checks. Usually a single roll that might just totally screw you. One that could easily target something you had poor or no defense in. And one that could easily exist in a field of abilities you had no similar equivalents with personally to retaliate.

For that matter even if some sort of "pure social" encounter might happen... maybe only one or two members of the party would have relevant stats, skills, or spells to allow them to even participate meaningfully.

For all too many groups I remember at best social mechanics were basically just "Bluff that the PC rogue keeps annoyingly trying to negotiate into destroying the universe somehow in extended sequences everyone else twiddles their thumbs through"

By making clear cut offs and escalation points for my social mechanics players can feel safe dabbling in the shallow end. Then, they can feel like they have a fair and participatory chance if thrown into the deep end, or if they themselves choose to take the risk of entering it.

They have actual options to retaliate with, and equivalently themed options to feel like maybe you are actually equal to the task. The "bad" social outcomes require more than just a single unfortunate roll and instead require a social combat victory, and your allies can help you out just like in regular combat.

I did most of this intentionally but, yeah, you forget some of the details when you do this long enough, and some of it just turned out that way by luck now that I look back at it. But yeah. Maybe, one of the far distant inspirations for me to try this out years ago MIGHT actually be true.

Maybe if you make a fair and participatory social system that actually empowers players as well rather than just endlessly extending GM's contextual modifier dick they might not actually hate social mechanics like they all to often do.

Unfortunately I'm never going to have the evidence to be sure. But what little excuse for it I currently have says hey... maybe that actually worked.

Fuck.

Still feels pretty good though.

I think can be simplified by just using reputation.

Depends on what that even is. Since the word might mean anything but in my experience "Reputation" is usually basically just social favor currency only substantially less ambitious while still somehow almost equally broken because of the exact same issues.

I find that people can be a lot less forgiving to strangers even over small slights.

For no other reason than to point out an example for how ridiculously hard trying to rate and evaluate these things as endless contextual modifiers is...

Thinking about it, I think I find the direct opposite. It's probably just random, but, yeah. Pretty sure.

So now. Lets say we sit at the same table and are negotiating over the sign to put in front of a modifier for that. And, oh it's also for an important roll.

That's an argument now. At the very least far too much earnest introspection into the very nature of human empathy. If other players have opinions. And they do like to have opinions. Especially when they notice an important roll is on the line. I give it... half an hour for an average group that actually means well and wants to be broadly cooperative.

Why invite that?

There's also the good cop/bad cop routine.

That just works fine by default as long as you don't do silly things like oh I don't know splitting your damage tracks for nice and nasty social damage. Like a stupid person might do like I did that one time.

Essentially this is one of those things that unless you design in an obstacle it should just be fine. Good and bad cop both contribute cooperatively to the encounter until they win, as long as your system lets both contribute, and it should already anyway unless something is wrong with it, then... well... they both contribute.

If you have to use it on a single roll mechanic, lets say you are doing it with the semi formal roll vs number the GM pulled out his ass. It's just a co-operation modifier, however you choose to handle that.

And cooperation modifiers to single roll skill checks on rolls that don't especially matter against target numbers the GM found stuck to his shoe are not so much a bad mechanic as simply a really boring one.

[Blade]

Just two additional points for the discussion:

1. Persuasion is rarely something instantaneous. Influencing someone is something you do over a long period of time, which rarely fits your needs in a RPG.

2. Characters in RPG often have talents that go beyond human abilities. Even the dumb melee fighter is often capable of stunts that's out of reach of real-life athletes. Your social mechanism might need to handle the social equivalent.

[MGuy]

If I were to go by online discussions I'd get the impression that a great deal of rpg players 1: don't like using rules that exist and 2: definitely don't like rules that cover social interactions. This doesn't hold as true for people that I actually game with. Most of the people I run for don't mind having and following rules. I don't have any current plans to make something to appeal to a broad audience so I tend to lean toward making things I think are going to be usable in a practical sense for both me and the small group of people I still have time to run games for. I'm trying to consider them when I think about what might work. It might very well be that the issues I've experienced so far are because most of what I've run for people are d20 variants (as that's what my core group of friends feel the most comfortable with). Other systems either had similar one roll to decide the entire interaction schemes or had no rules at all. It could be, now that I'm thinking about it, that the reason I've gotten a lot of pushback over the years at trying to allow for players to be influenced is that it's not something they are used to and/or have yet to have had a good experience with. Maybe that's what's missing. I'd just hate to pour in the time to implement it and have it roundly rejected by the people I'm running for.

I'll probably give it some thought later. Maybe ask them about it over the weekend.

When I say 'reputation' I am also thinking social currency/rapport/leverage/social standing/whatever. I'm referring to the idea of a framework that tracks your general relationship with NPCs. While I am working on certain skills and abilities I'm purposefully avoiding the social ones for the time being. So I don't have any concrete meaning behind what 'reputation' means. I think having a tracker for the PC's relationship with NPCs is going to be necessary no matter what I come up with though.

Lastly, I think inviting an argument on an important roll is inevitable. Players will find reasons to object to bad things happening to them. I'm speaking in general terms here. I once had an argument with someone running a shadowrun game over if I should've been injured in a low speed fender bender after I had to make a sudden turn. If you allow the GM to make up anything, chances are that GM is going to end up making a decision that doesn't gel well with a player at some point for one reason or another. I, as the designer, can only help in a few ways. I can come up with modifiers/conditions/protocols for the GMs to follow that are transparent and known to everyone. I can try to be as exact in my language and intentions as possible so all the participants get the best understanding of how things are intended to work. I can have a meta currency that players can spend to relieve some of the tension that arises from having relatively little control over their character's destiny. And I can give advice to GM's about how to make agreeable decisions that tend to work for most groups in my experience. If that doesn't work well I will only do so much of the lifting on my end. I hope mind caulk, gentlemen's agreements, and those deep bonds that hold the gaming group together can do the rest.

[PhoneLobster]

I'm going to try this. I'm going to present a vile strawman version of Reputation, which is in the end, everything that mechanic name brings to my mind when I hear it, then I'm going to present something else you could do instead, not something I'm using or likely to, just an idea.

Reputation systems as they exist in my head
When I see Reputation mechanic I think something like this. Every character has a number called reputation and they have one of these numbers for every single other character in the world and also maybe for some groups , factions, or adventuring parties of characters too!

That's a lot of numbers. But that is OK because actually you only ever use the number for them and the PC adventuring party, or maybe the numbers for it's members. Which is odd because if it was really all that useful you might care about all the other numbers. But at least it reduces the total amount of these numbers from basically infinity to still basically infinity.

The number represents the NPCs feelings towards the PC/s which is a thing that is definitely a single axis scale with no further complexity than that, apparently.

High is good. Low is bad. It probably isn't a big number but who knows what sort of scale someone who thought this was a good idea put it on. It might even go into the negative when it is bad. The important part though is that the scale will somehow manage to be too small to be useful for multiple increments of long term progress, but also at the same time way too large when the designer inevitably forgets the number is just something you look up to see an attitude description next to it on a table and ends up using it as a target number or modifier to an actual roll that it has no earthly justification for participating in.

It has every imaginable complication and issue that social currency has. Apple stacking exploits, no real capacity for dealing with fearful respect vs loyal respect, confusion over reputation lending/transfer/theft etc... It probably can't make a clear and useful decision about how it goes up or down but IS sure that it does that, somehow, and it probably also does the d20modern money dance for no good reason at all as a side gig because that's just how these sorts of systems roll.

It pretends it's a complete and formal system. But basically just sometimes barely manages to be fairy tea party but less coherent and when you look up the bit on an NPC character sheet that tells you their attitude towards the PCs instead of getting immediate human readable information you get a numeric reference to look up on a table of descriptions that are deeply inadequate if for no other reason than the shallow single axis business, though inevitably that is just the beginning.

I'm going to propose a direct alternative system that I think is both simpler and wildly superior to the point that it also might beat Reputation mechanics that DON'T think they are laughable strawmen.

My proposed alternative is the REGARD system.

The Regard System, definitely not just some words on paper
Your NPCs have REGARD for other characters, they have a Regard for every other character, and group but again instead of tracking all the infinite regard we probably only track it toward the PCs. Except this time we will take the time and suggest that SOME NPCs should definitely track one or two other key regards vital to their character role or background, and they will do so, in their background using the same method and wording that they track it for the PCs.

This will fit smoothly into their backgrounds because Regard is NOT just a number. It is HUMAN READABLE TEXT. It appears in the blank bit on a line in between "This NPC's name"....."the Party/PC/Other guy's name". And it is a short, ideally one word description of how they feel about them.

For example... *
"Bob...Hates...Larry"
"Barry... Loves... Larry"
"Jenny... Respects... Snooky"
"Kevin... Does Not Know... The Great Gamboozler"
"Princess PrinceKing... Owes lifedebt to... a Zebra"
"a Zebra... Seeks Revenge on... Larry"

Regards are not fixed. Because of game events they can change. This change is utterly arbitrary and the GM and players just decide it seems like a good idea and it happens.

When the GM or PCs want to know how an NPC feels about them, they can just refer to the Regard entry, and they know without looking up any additional tables or trying to remember if it was 5 or 6 that mentioned coming round with their van to help move furniture.

Regard is also, not a number that might accidentally turn into a modifier. You might negotiate modifiers based on it if that's a kind of thing you do, but, should you do so, there is never a SPECIFIC number attached to it that becomes the relevant negotiated modifier.

Regard is NOT a single axis progression. What people think about people is more complex than single axis progressions and cannot be represented by them. Single word or close text is also fairly limiting, but might as well be infinitely complex in it's potential for delivering and storing information compared to a number between -5 and 13 or whatever other stupid thing a Reputation system might decide to do.

Importantly Regard probably does almost everything a Reputation system might hope to do. Better. Quicker. More flexibly. And more transparently. And that... probably still applies to the best possible versions of any numeric Reputation system too.

Some scurrilous liars claim that the Regard system is just a primitive inexplicably limited shorthand form of what other people might call "Keeping notes". They are however wrong, because Regard has a name, and all the pretension associated with that.


Anyway. Point is. Whatever your doing it needs to not be the ghosts of Reputation past in every way you can manage, and while it doesn't need to be the awesome Regard system... it also cannot let the Regard System be better than it. Otherwise you should just use the mighty "Regard system" instead, which definitely isn't just a bad way to take shorthand character notes.


...
*edit: in retrospect based on the number of times it came up and the position it came up in on the example list. It is clear that the adventuring party is named "Larry".

[Omegonthesane]

Haven't caught up with the thread yet, but it doesn't seem hard to justify a higher TN for "Finger of Death, flavoured as lies" as opposed to "Confusion, flavoured as lies". One would intuit that it takes greater emotional control to keep your poker face on while trying to get someone to take actions that will end their life than it does to trying to get them to take actions that will lose them money.

EDIT: Have now read the thread. One other thought occurred while going through:

It IS easier for Bond to get some action if he gets a girl a martini and smooth talks her first than if he said "Have sex with me in this field" to someone he just met. The entire desire for a social game is to make achieving results easier based on who you are and what you do and how you present yourself.

That isn't one lie though, that's Bond taking several different actions previously. Getting the girl a martini is a social action that exhausts some of her HP-equivalent. Smooth-talking her first is a social action that exhausts some of her HP-equivalent.

The combat comparison would be that it is easier to defeat an enemy with 10 rounds of greatsword damage than with 1 round of greatsword damage.

As mentioned already by others who have put more thought into this than me, comparisons to combat are apt because it's the other system where there is extensive complexity, extensive agency, and extensive acceptance of grave consequences for the participants.

[Harshax]

A lot of thoughts, some ramblings ...

1) Meeting a stranger, deciding if you fight, team up, or pass each other. This also applies to stumbling in on the dragon in his horde.
2) Negotiating your rewards for quests and/or buying shit at the store.
3) Uh Oh, we doing politics now, convincing the king he should definitely abandon the city or stop cutting down the dryad's trees or whatever. This would also be less Kingy where you convince some not actually extremely political figure to do something they wouldn't otherwise do.
4) Still doing politics, Favor Trading, where you are on some council or working for someone on the council and you fucks are all working towards lots of shared and unshared goals and trading off shit.
5) Convincing a crowd to take your side on some issue with a rousing rhetorical speech and/or manipulating public opinion in some other way by spreading rumors.
6) Interrogating/investigating for information, where you either don't want the person to know you are looking for the info or that it is important to you, or where they do know and don't want you to find out and you have to anyway.

I'm not sure I agree that a social combat system must include all of these scenarios.

1. Meeting a stranger is relevant to the adventure outline or it isn't. If you're playing a hex-crawl or no-prep session, then random encounters deserve a random Reaction Table, which has been a thing since the 80's. While I can't imagine a dragon's lair not being a set piece, if that's how you roll, then I think a Reaction Table works. You can make up all kinds of modifiers to your heart's desire. Get all racist and say Orcs have a -2 reaction from strange dwarves because of reasons.

2. This should be a fixed value and not role-played. If you have a Charisma of 13+ you get a 5% discount or some shit because you're so damned fuckable that everyone wants to hit armor class crotch. Nobody should be coming to the table to roleplay this stuff beyond some hand-wavery by the MC. If your game is about mercantile ventures, then economics should have much more robust rules about supply and demand. The social aspect of trade is secondary to expenditures, time, market manipulation and the like. Most of those manipulations don't invole social interactions at all. You buy up all the stuff in the city, you waylay merchants. You buy out local vendors. Social combat is only here to bend or break the status quo of how economics work. Stuff is expensive, but I have dirt on a vendor so he will buy my stock for higher than the benchmark for market supply. In other words, mercantilism is combat with rules and manipulation of those rules through devious means is just the "Dirty Fighting" feat. I don't think this needs to be included in actual social-combat rules.

5. There are already rules for bardic influence on crowds, mass-charm and the like. Why can't this be handled the way spells are handled?

3, 4:
What should a social system look like:

First, let's start simple.

If social-combat is going to be a thing, then Players have to accept that their PC is going to be compelled to do something the player doesn't want to do. You can't have social-combat be meaningful in any way if the PC can't get metaphorically wounded or killed.

Social-combat requires Patrons of importance to the campaign: Faction leaders, Ministers, Important Merchants. Even if you're using social combat against a Ministers agents at a party, those agents are just proxies of the Patron and don't need to be tracked in detail. If you want to reintroduce an agent, hell-bent on revenge because of past shenanigans, that's just flavor for a Patron's attempt at retribution.

1. Every participant should have a stated goal. "I want to convince the king." "I want to guard this treasure."

2. Every participant (NPC) should have individual needs. We can use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I'm no psychologist, so I don't know how robust or valid this is, but it is a good starting point. The guard wants to keep his head on his shoulders. The guard is addicted to cocaine. The guard secretly hates his captain.

3. The Participants have different approaches and defenses to social combat: Deceive. Provoke. Rapport. Command (and Intimidate). However many you think covers non-lethal interaction. The stated goal determines which approaches might be best for a situation.

4. PCs and Patrons should have a known quantity of Influence. It could be their character level, or their Honor or their Prestige or whatever.

5. PCs pit their Influence against the Influence of their Opponent. Proxy's use their Patrons Influence. So, in the case of the guard, PCs pit their Influence against the King's.

6. PCs should have opportunities to discover their opponent's motivations. Maybe they Sneak around the neighborhood and see the guard going home to a hovel full of hungry kids. Maybe the game has a meta-currency, where the PC can invoke a flashback to make skill checks that try to learn about their opponent's needs.

7. A PCs attempt to use Influence should be measured negatively against an Opponent who is being asked to do something at odds with their needs. Walking away with the treasury will get the guard's head lopped off. So the influence attempt should have some severe penalties.

8. Patrons should have regular checks to discover intrigue by the Players and act accordingly.

Degrees of Success
An unmitigated success should let the PC achieve their goal. Patrons will have a reduced chance of learning about this intrigue.
A success should let the PC achieve their goal, but King might find out.
A failure might mean the PC achieves their goal, but the King is definitely going to find out and extort the PCs later.
A critical failure might mean the PCs don't achieve their goal. Their Influence is permanently damaged. The King finds out and they get extorted later.

[Kaelik]

A lot of thoughts, some ramblings ...

1) Meeting a stranger, deciding if you fight, team up, or pass each other. This also applies to stumbling in on the dragon in his horde.
2) Negotiating your rewards for quests and/or buying shit at the store.
3) Uh Oh, we doing politics now, convincing the king he should definitely abandon the city or stop cutting down the dryad's trees or whatever. This would also be less Kingy where you convince some not actually extremely political figure to do something they wouldn't otherwise do.
4) Still doing politics, Favor Trading, where you are on some council or working for someone on the council and you fucks are all working towards lots of shared and unshared goals and trading off shit.
5) Convincing a crowd to take your side on some issue with a rousing rhetorical speech and/or manipulating public opinion in some other way by spreading rumors.
6) Interrogating/investigating for information, where you either don't want the person to know you are looking for the info or that it is important to you, or where they do know and don't want you to find out and you have to anyway.

I'm not sure I agree that a social combat system must include all of these scenarios.

Well that is why I said "a social system" and talked about genres and how different genres don't need all of those possible encounters to be resolved mechanically (But that kitchen sink fantasy does try for that), and then explained which ones I think a Social Combat System can address and which it can't.

And "why can't this be resolved like spells" is a social system. Whatever rules you write to resolve social encounters are parts of your social system(s) even if those rules are "you can't influence crowds at all unless you use MTP or you have a specific spell or class ability that says you can and then that spell or ability will say what you can do."

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Are we just speaking in hypotheticals here or is it alright if we actually start tossing rules and shit around?

[Foxwarrior]

Personally I think coming up with concrete examples gives clarity to abstract discussions, please toss some rules around if you're inspired.

[PhoneLobster]

Are we just speaking in hypotheticals here or is it alright if we actually start tossing rules and shit around?

Personally I'd just like people to try to come to terms with some of the underlying design constraints.

The reason people keep utterly failing at social rules is things like going back again and again to the pitfall of subjective difficulties and single roll social save or dies with unlimited GM whims attached then hurling themselves in face first.

IF people can just bring themselves to stop demanding that their social rules cater to impossible or deeply counterproductive demands there is a huge range of potential functional and interesting rules they could generate.

If you ask people to just write rules without accepting any of that we will only get the usual laughable brain farts.

Hell I could write the most common rule you will get from that for you, here...

The Bad Social Mechanic They Always Write
Social interactions are resolved by a single roll (but must occur out of combat and take about 100x the in game time of a combat action). Active party rolls "Social" vs defense "Social". On success they convince them of a single thing.

The single thing is anything at all. Ranging from a thing that doesn't achieve anything, to a minor favor or getting a bonus gift item, to transforming the target into a loyal ally, to the certain demise of the target, to the key event that will change the course of the entire campaign.

But none of those things really influence the difficulty of the roll. Unless the GM feels like it. But he probably won't because outcomes aren't what games care about, apparently.

Instead the GM decides how they feel about the context of the event, the inner feelings and personalities of the characters involved, and any other secondary or tertiary factor they can imagine and derives a modifier to the roll from that.

The net modifier (or even individual components) can be so huge that the roll can be an auto success or fail. Even though it might be a very very important roll. But don't worry this isn't the GM just deciding to screw everyone, that never happens, but even if it did this is a FORMAL and FAIR game mechanic because there IS a look up table of FIXED modifiers for every factor discussed or imaginable.

These fixed modifiers are determined by secret personal galaxy brain science at the design stage, ensuring they that are MORE relevant to the context of an event at the table and MORE fair in any and all imaginable situations and also couldn't possibly be wrong because an arbitrary number pulled out of the ether about a complex poorly understood concept at a design stage has none of the weakness of the same thing at the table.

But also you should ignore this talk of the superior nature of arbitrary modifier decisions at the design stage and just go do this at the on the RARE occasions the predetermined list lets you down.

Right NOW there is only a sample list of predetermine modifiers 6 entries long which already has highly disputed entries. BUT the list WILL one day cover everything imaginable with objective and indisputable values for all possible scenarios. Just trust us on that, unlike the last 13 times we promised this it IS going to be delivered any decade now.

This is the ONLY social mechanic you need, it will cover ALL situations and all social, no one will think it's wildly swingy or unfair and players won't get angry when you tell them that a single roll wildly biased by GM whim just made them do the terrible thing they didn't want to do. And no, the thing where it takes 4 hours to make the single social action and it cannot happen in or near the main focus of game activity in no way limits this mechanic and in no way prevents it from being a universal solution.

You might expect this mechanic to then have more rules or some elaboration of durations or even a discussion of how it might interact with multiple targets but for some reason it never does and basically always just suddenly ends somewhere well before this point.

[MGuy]

I'm going to reject this idea that any person in this thread gets to determine the value of someone else posting their ideas. What I want people to do is post their ideas. If there's a problem with them, if there is some weakness, exploit, or whatever then people can judge it once it's there. If a handful of people come in and make the same mistake then it can be commented on as many times as it appears. I do not want people to hesitate to put their ideas out because someone doesn't think their idea is worth looking at in some random corner of the internet.

I'm going to also reject this idea that people are stuck only using a single die roll as the only mechanic for all social situations. I talked about this in my very first post. Multiple people have concurred. Multiple people have pointed out you don't need your mechanics to even cover 'everything' and you'd be better off focusing on certain interactions. I believe people here are thinking about prior failures and either leaning towards completely alternate solutions or make attempts to make a refined version of what's been done.

If your position is "Social Mechanics are too hard, don't bother with numbers/modifiers/etc, just let GM's asspull all numbers from the aether so that players haven't the foggiest idea of what might be factored into a given social encounter" that's fine. It's not where I'm going to go but I'm just as open to considering free form systems as I am ones that have actual mechanics.

[PhoneLobster]

I don't think putting forward pretty much the most terrible version of a commonly presented terrible idea and saying I would like to see something other than that is a particularly controversial position to take. And it definitely isn't "determining the value of someone else posting their ideas".

I also don't think I need to acknowledge the limited positive values of single roll fairy tea party social mechanics when used correctly, as I have already done that in this thread. I do think pointing out it's limitations and common misuses is a very important thing for any social mechanics thread and even if I had NOT already talked about how to use the same mechanic in more productive ways I think the negative aspects certainly very much need to be covered, pretty harshly at that.

As for suggesting that people are not stuck using a single die roll mechanic... I think historically they are, and when you are talking about "propose a new mechanic we can discuss" that's exactly what we have seen proposed most of the time. I can think of other examples, and I can see people moving in other directions here, but then, saying I don't want to see this very familiar single FTP roll technique and it's vaporware modifier table that trumps everything proposal, it's not talking to the people with other proposals is it?

Nor is expressing what I want to see in any way a binding rejection, a strident demand or in any way a bad thing. If someone STILL wants to express what I described as a dumb idea, or if someone has, finally, come up with a defense, or a permutation on the methodology that actually makes it NOT a dumb idea, or just that they THINK does so, what I would like to see isn't stopping them is it?

And, I don't think "social is too hard, it is just fairy tea party" is a perfectly fine solution, because I think too much of exactly that is why social rules have so many reputational and practical problems. Even more broadly than social mechanics people need to understand the practical limitations of fairy tea party and the ways it can cause failure points and acrimony in games. "Social mechanics are FTP mechanics the end" is I think a solid contender for a poster child prime example to discuss even if your entire discussion was instead exclusively about the limits and downfalls of FTP style mechanics.

[MGuy]

I felt that saying you can't do X well without acknowledging Y, before you seeing the potential proposals gives the impression that you don't want to see what some others have to post or are expecting it to be bad. Even if ultimately you're open to the idea that someone might surprise you and you don't view expressing preemptive negativity as bad I think people will see it that way. I want to avoid that. If someone goes through this thread, decides to post something, and seems to ignore all of the advice in it, that'd be pretty weird. Even then I still want people to feel free to give it a shot and I want to give the most positive impression I can to people who might hesitate to go ahead, jump in the conversation, and share their ideas. Even if they might ultimately be rejected, picked apart, or found to be littered with exploits.

As far as FTP is concerned? I'd rather not rely entirely on it. I've spent enough time doing FTP and while it works, and I've had success with it, I want something more formalized. I don't think anyone who's trying to make social mechanics in 'this' thread given this context is going to be anti rules. That being said, I don't want people who are geeked about having a lighter touch on social mechanics think that they shouldn't share their ideas though. There might be something that comes up that's usable. It might be useful to people who are of the same opinion of them.

I just want it understood, as clearly as I can make it, that I am welcome to any input from the wider community and don't want to even hint that anybody's pet idea is unwelcome. I don't think your desire to avoid repeating old mistakes is controversial I just want to encourage more input.

[Foxwarrior]

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?

[Zinegata]

I think the risk in formalizing, or increasingly formalizing, social 'combat', is that humans are incredibly social creatures, our social structure and social interaction is as about as complex as possible, any formalized rules will result in situations where people will want different inputs or outputs or both, inputs and outputs the system just doesn't have or cannot approximate close enough. Humans are incredibly inventive, and it seems somewhat of hopeless task trying to formalize such inventiveness.

Besides identifying your system and genre, I would also want to, at least at first, dramatically reduce the scope and function of what social combat can be used for or result in.

Exactly.

Three thoughts:
[*] If you want to make progress, it'd be best to come up with 1-3 complex social encounters suitable for running as oneshots. Try to fit (enough of) your system into 1-2 pages. Run the oneshots, tweak the rules, try again with a different group, repeat.
[*] Status effects and battlefield control abilities might be a fruitful analogy. The players want the king to fund their crazy plan, but he has a level-headed advisor that'll shut them down. The rogue flirts with the advisor while the party makes their pitch. That is, the advisor is employing a "battlefield control" ability and the rogue is incapacitating the advisor with a "status effect."
[*] Most social encounters are the players engaging in short bad faith arguments with people they'll never see again. A single opposed roll is good enough for these. Does the system degrade to this when things are simple? Or is circumventing simple/easy combats with a single roll just a part of your system?

This also needs to be highlighted, especially point one.

Understanding the practical application of rules in real in-game situations is what creates good design. Again, never forget that RPG rules are simply a template that guide encounter design. If your rules can't be used to quickly adapt to a typical social encounter you'll run in your campaign; then the DM will likely just ignore your more complicated social encounter rules in favor of something simpler like a Cha roll.

[Zinegata]

Giving this its own reply as it deserves more nuance than simple acknowledgement:

Favor Trading

Quite a lot of social interactions can really be boiled down to some kind of bargaining ... but that's why random tables were invented: if it turns out that the party actually wants to seduce the shopkeeper in order to save 5000 gp for some reason, you can randomly determine the shopkeeper's hopes and dreams there on the spot and maybe the ensuing conversation will be funny.

Correct, but that is based on one problematic assumption: That transactional gain is the primary motivator for social interaction. This is not always a good assumption to make. For instance, Neutral Good characters are supposed to be truly selfless. If they're just being nice so they'll get something out of it, then maybe they're not really Neutral Good.

This is why I noted the importance of motivation. What motivates a character is actually what dictates they are trying to get out of a social interaction. A Neutral Good person isn't trying to "gain" anything in a social interaction. Instead, they are trying to make others gain in that interaction; and they are willing to take losses on themselves to make that happen.

Randomly creating motivations can work for simple one-shot encounters with little pre-existing background. However, they must be used with caution because nothing ruins a motivation more than inconsistency. Players and audiences don't like characters with motivations that shift seemingly on a whim.

[MGuy]

I've decided that I'm going to spend a bit more time ruminating on this to see what I can put together. I want to eventually work toward a more stable foundation so that I can build something workable later. I still like to develop ideas in the format where I start with asking myself a few questions about what I want and how I'm going to implement it, then asking myself questions about what I come up with until I've drawn myself a good starting point.

The first question is what do I want my social mechanic to do?
Just as with any other rule I want it to adjudicate interactions between player characters and the world. In this case social interactions between players and NPCs in that world. Also I have to note for myself that the interactions have to go a bit farther in simulating these interactions and do it well enough to get people to use them over making everything up. I want to make my mechanics intuitive in general but it is especially important in the realm of social interactions since people of all stripes interact a lot with people and might then be less tolerant of things that break away from their perceptions of what social interactions are like.

What do players want?
All players who take time to use any kind of social interaction skill ultimately want who they are interacting with to do or feel a certain thing that they are not already wanting to do or do not currently feel. I'd say a hidden penultimate thing players want is for interactions to 'feel' right. Definitely THE biggest concern people bring up with every conversation about social mechanics, and whether or not they should even exist, is the idea that someone will be convinced to do something with the wrong argument. Despite this being the primary concern people talk about with these things it isn't the ultimate thing players want because the flip side of this coin is that they want the right arguments to succeed. So still, people want to convince people to do things and they want to do it (mostly) with arguments they consider "good".

So there's concern about believability on both sides of the screen. How do you know what people will accept as far as social interactions are concerned?
I don't. I don't think there 'is' a way you could reasonably map out social interactions in a way that could even come close simulating how people interact.

So how are you going to possibly make things believable?
By doing as little as possible. I'm an African American male. This, along with many other factors including but not limited to: my socioeconomic status, philosophical beliefs, and how hungry I am at present will determine how I interact with people from moment to moment. I suspect that other people are equally as complex. I'm not the genius that's going to break the code and be able to understand the META for all human interactions for all of time. This is a game though. So I don't need to. What I need to do is come up with something that is functional first, and second, is flexible enough to bend but not break when people with different perspectives than my own start using it.

But still how am I going to do this? Still, by doing as little as possible. Throughout this thread I get the feeling that the best strategy is to cut corners where I can. I don't need to cover every kind of potential encounter. I've already mentioned that I don't even want to. By cutting down on the instances where these encounters actually involve action on the part of the player I can better focus my energies toward making what's left fun and engaging.

I think my position on what the Bluff skill represents is instructive here.

What is it about bluff that it is important to the whole cutting corners thing?
Context is king and the secondary issue that haunts this topic is one that basically is a difference in perspective. If I ask someone "what is a 'believable' lie?" I'm probably going to get as many different responses as there are people that exist who can even understand that question. 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.

What will likely matter more is where I set the numbers for an unbelievable lie. As I said earlier, the thing people are often worried about is someone being convinced with an argument they don't agree with. If this is set too low then you're going to get situations people are going to balk at. So instead I should just set it high. Like probably off the RNG high. If this is what people are worried about (and I am sure they are) just take it off the table as a possibility and thus I don't have to deal with it.

What about if you have a level system or a skill system or some other thing that might put something off the RNG on it?
This is not a universal concern but is one where leveled systems or systems that have a lot of big, growing numbers is concerned. If you want to keep something out of reach of any rolls/bonuses/etc you could make it so that the number is so high that no one could ever reach it but then why would you even include it? You could just say "any attempts at anything unbelievable fail" but that's no good. There are ways you can convince people to believe or at least be curious of things they wouldn't ordinarily believe. There are a lot of ideas that we take for granted now that had to be first imagined by people who believed you could make the seemingly impossible, possible after all. So there needs to be a satisfying way to at least attempt to get someone to believe something that they would ordinarily not believe. Here's where I think just having enough conditional modifiers to lead to a satisfying resolution for this kind of situation.

Reasonably if the person trusts/likes the character enough and/or if they have strong proof of something then it is easier to get someone to at least be open to an idea. The percentage chance of fooling them completely might be still off the table but reasonably you can, in the right circumstances, possibly get someone to receptive to some seemingly crazy notion.

What about people with the big numbers?!
Well I guess I just don't mind it that much if people who are operating at number levels that basically invalidate lower leveled people can pull mind control esque levels of hijinks upon their lessers. This might not be satisfying for people who insist that people at 20th level still be interacting with a 1st level person as if they were equals, just because it's in a social context. To those people I've got nothing much to say. If I am to accept that in this game you can have really big skill numbers that allow you to do the impossible or that are supposed to significantly separate the lowly from the highly skilled then I think it's reasonable to suspect that only the most skilled people should stand to challenge these demi godlike beings.

What if you make enough broad descriptors that give numbers that would invalidate the need to roll?
Just with the introduction of the sky high unbelievable lie TN and the idea that there should be modifiers that make that sky high TN achievable even under a system with a reasonable number of a bonuses provided by skills/attributes I am suggesting that conditional modifiers can pretty much make rolling unnecessary. If you can stack the bonuses/penalties high enough to make rolling unnecessary then wouldn't that mean you should just shoot to get the conditional bonuses instead of relying on your skills?

Yes. And I think that's a good thing. Again I believe that what people penultimately worry about is whether or not the system produces outputs that come from conditions they find acceptable. Reasonably then if the hoops you have to jump through to reliably make a lie work involve actually doing manipulative things (telling a lie in a way that makes it believable, scrounging up fake evidence, and getting a more trusted individual to back the lie) then I believe that's the exact thing I want people doing. If a person that's a less charismatic or a less slick liar is able to match a silver tongued word smith by creating conditions that enable them to compete then that is a good thing. If the silver tongued word smith then does the same thing and thus is able to regain advantage over a competitor then that's good as well and is the game working as intended.

This is all well and good for telling lies but what about the other kinds of social interaction skills?
Firstly I'll probably have similar set ups for attempting to charm and intimidate someone. Some things can probably overlap between these three kind of skills as well. Trust and familiarity can probably effect both charm and bluff. Your social rank or reputation will likely effect your ability to bluff and intimidate (and in some cases charm) a person. They will also probably use conditions and descriptors that are broad enough to fit a slew of things under them like "personal cost of performing favor" which would have the GM weigh what they believe the NPC has to lose from a social interaction and can cover any number of things based off the situation.

Second I will not cover everything.

Dice rolls keep coming up. Is everything going to be dice rolls?
No. There will be dice rolls, don't get me wrong, but I do not think that most things I'm going to deal with are going to be done in a dice roll. I am thinking that social interactions are going to take place on one of four levels.
1: Abstracted and ignored. Things like going to the shopkeeper and haggling is not something I want to cover. I think it's boring. I'll let there be a modifier or something you get from having relevant skills or penalties that change how you're rewarded by other people and let that stand on its own.
2: Brief side encounters: Carousing, maintaining relationships, and other background things will be relegated here where I might have random 'events' happen much like brief random encounters where a roll might be made to determine how well/bad things go but nothing big. Maybe this can happen with haggling so people who really want it to maybe happen in a scene can possibly get their fix but it's not something I'm going to do a lot with. These'll mostly be things I might write on a random encounter table that exist to break up any monotony that may set in during downtime but will be intended to be brief with consequences that are quickly processed. This is also where brief interactions might take place. Distracting a guard, passing a forgery as the real thing, etc. Things that happen in the moment but don't really call for a bigger scene.
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.
4: Long term relationship/status/reputation/etc tracking. A lot of social interactions, arguments, debates, etc take place over longer periods of time. People accrue a kind of 'social credit', respect, and other benefits with other people based off of any number of factors. This is probably where I'd do something like have a system where you can leverage your points for favors, gamble them away when you perform certain big social/political maneuvers, and earn more through doing favors, properly investing and trading them between other groups/persons of status so that you ultimately benefit, and things like that. This is littered with its own issues and might do well with some pruning but suffice it to say that I'm going to need some kind of set up for social maneuvering that takes place outside of any one given interaction and point tracking I think is the best way to go.
Now I said four but there's a potential 5th
5: Interparty I might have something that involves players being able to interact with one another within some kind of framework but I'm less sure that this is a good idea. I do think that if I have a clear way for players to lose more serious social encounters as outlined in 3 then it wouldn't be a big leap to allow players to do important social encounters among themselves. This would work well with Grek's Hopes and Fears idea where part of getting over one's fears and developing new hopes can require other party members. I can think of interesting way to have players having to act out the worst sides of their character while others try to help them overcome it in an interparty interaction. There could even be a chance to fail at it and consequences that introduce risk to even trying.

What are you avoiding by doing this?
I want to use this list because I think it's a good lay out of some things you might definitely expect to find in a game that takes talking to people seriously:

1) Meeting a stranger, deciding if you fight, team up, or pass each other. This also applies to stumbling in on the dragon in his horde.
2) Negotiating your rewards for quests and/or buying shit at the store.
3) Uh Oh, we doing politics now, convincing the king he should definitely abandon the city or stop cutting down the dryad's trees or whatever. This would also be less Kingy where you convince some not actually extremely political figure to do something they wouldn't otherwise do.
4) Still doing politics, Favor Trading, where you are on some council or working for someone on the council and you fucks are all working towards lots of shared and unshared goals and trading off shit.
5) Convincing a crowd to take your side on some issue with a rousing rhetorical speech and/or manipulating public opinion in some other way by spreading rumors.
6) Interrogating/investigating for information, where you either don't want the person to know you are looking for the info or that it is important to you, or where they do know and don't want you to find out and you have to anyway.

I think this covers a good range of things that I might expect to happen in a game.
1) I don't think I need to cover this. The idea that there needs to be some kind random dice roll to determine how people first interact and I have not seen a convincing argument for why having a dice roll to determine anything upon first meeting a person is at all necessary. I only care about dictating what happens when people start talking to each other.
2)That's something I am looking to turn just into a passive bonus so I don't have to cover it.
3)This is likely going to be one of those actual social combats or at least one of those events that'll require a roll.
4)I'm not sure how deep into political intrigue I'm going to get with my game. It's tempting to go all out on it as there are a lot of interesting adventures that involve starting an organization, a kingdom, and the like. In 2E I think it was pretty much expected that everyone did it by default in some way. If I do it that would be where the social status/currency would come into play.
5)Would be a function of either a one off event or a long term thing for mass public opinion.
6) If this is important then it would definitely qualify for social combat. I think the situation sounds intricate and in this case important enough that the GM probably has the target statted up for it.

That's all I have for the time being. This is mostly a conversation I'm having with myself so nothing is set in stone. I have 'no' idea yet how any of the long term stuff is going to look like in the end. I'll have to compile a list of possible failure points and try to find a way to avoid them at some time in the future.

[PhoneLobster]

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.

But I don't want to belittle the important proviso that the ass number pulling is done by collective group agreement. It's hardly a solution for every problem with that methodology but it could be a big enough deal on some of the worst problems to significantly increase the actual playability of the thing in practice.

And I don't think I've ever seen someone suggest it. Then again generally around here I've been one of the only people to heavily promote "try asking the players/group" for anything, but still considering the bullshit over the years people have tried to pull to make the infinite list of infinite modifiers work this is well over due.

I prefer my more individual opposition based form of player escalation of social attempts they "oppose" because I think it's important to keep individual agency and that a group can in some cases both accidentally and deliberately be a tyrant for a single player just as much as a GM can.

But with a well adjusted group with a good personal dynamic it could eliminate basically all the acrimony of picking completely bullshit numbers. It doesn't actually justify feeding in the bullshit numbers in the first place, but it might not really matter anymore.

However, despite my own generally optimistic outlook on player empowerment and the good intentions of gaming groups and their various meta gaming decisions...

...with any groups I play with, or have played with while trying to make social rules work... this would work it just wouldn't work well. Individual players would dominate the socials more than ever, others would feel left out almost as much as they did in rules sets where half the party comes to the table with no social skills at all, and failing anything else the best outcomes would take about 10x as long as my current methodology.

The time cost and annoying additional "negotiation" is, for me, the death rattle of the idea (still interested to hear how it goes), but I think individual engagement is perhaps the more dangerous pitfall.

Even with social abilities on every character people may tend to feel like they don't own those abilities, don't even own their own characters, because it's not going to be the GM asking them individually what they want their character to do and think, it's going to be the GM talking to the same one to two players who dominate every complex negotiated resolution (probably social or otherwise). Effectively, you are heading straight for the big pitfall of co-operative board games. Two or so guys are playing a game and everyone else is a pawn just along for the ride.

Which actually is fine for a lot of groups sort of. There are people out there who play cooperative board games and actually feel like everyone is contributing and having fun. They tell me the groups love it, me, I say just people, and not groups, because whether I'm the one dominating every decision every player at the co-operative board game makes, or I'm not, or I'm even just passing by the table, me? I always see about half the table or more quietly sitting there looking at their hands even on their own turns, while maybe two guys are very animated and engaged even outside of their own turns.

It's even further not fine for me as a personally targeted rules solution because my groups tend to mix some very dominant personalities with some very shy and socially anxious to the point of an official disability ones.

Running a casual "is this OK with everyone?" by the group is quick and as fair a chance as you can really offer the shy ones for the sorts of things which might warrant that. But complex group negotiations always leave them in the dust.

I also have concerns about repeated references to reputation/favors/standing/all of the things. But I'd rather just stick to this point as you haven't said anything about them firm enough to significantly justify criticizing you for falling for some of the old bad pitfalls, yet. You mostly just keep name dropping hints that you are running right for them.

Instead I'd just focus on that one bit, yeah ok, group approval for ass pull numbers, better, maybe even workable, but not solving everything, and mostly solving something you probably should have already avoided by other means and for other good reasons. Like I don't know not ever ever ever falling for this "context is king" crap and remembering you are playing an abstract character power level based game where contextual modifiers are relegated to a minority of the RNG in all things that matter.