@Apos said in Social Conflict via Stats:
But on the other hand, what about something mostly invisible? A game has a social system that two people in a private scene use, one things it gives authority over another character, the other person is super creeped out but still feels that they would be the bad guy if they don't play along, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth, they log off and never come back, and staff never knows what happens, and the person that even did it probably doesn't even know. Those are the very problematic systems.
But it's not the intent here that I'm disputing. Of course the reason people who want more draconian checks and greater oversight on social rolls are doing it to hinder bad guys. What I'm saying is it doesn't work, and the act of trying to limit these things simply penalizes the good guys.
Look at the worst offenders we've had in our community, the big names, what did they use? Exactly what you mentioned, the insinuation saying 'no' would mean they are doing something wrong. They accomplished that through pages, cherry-picking book passages ("look, Mind 4 means you gobble down that panther dick, it's the rules"), abusing staff connections ("can you prove 100% you were told to gobble down panther dick? No? Liar.") and so on.
In the mean time social attributes in general are barely being used in practice. Sometimes I see social powers, perhaps in certain +jobs for investigations, but their usefulness truly pales compared to their physical equivalents, and part of that is people - reasonable, well-meaning players - are already pretty self-conscious about 'forcing' others to do things, it's being seen as a form of PvP and not creative collaboration using dice to settle outcomes.
That's the real challenge here, I think; the real hurdle isn't to prevent assholes from being themselves because they already have every tool at their disposal to do so. The hard part is to somehow lift the collective cultural taboo we have in employing social rolls in even non-drastic ways (lying/detecting lies, trying to get someone to keep talking and reveal secrets, measure the impact of someone's stern admonishment) during everyday social scenes.
If we go too far in the former direction we'll harm the other too much, IMHO. A system people won't use might as well not exist.