Eliminating social stats

[bored]

Shockingly a new poster is arguing about this as if we haven't read literally everything they just typed dozens of times before!

Regardless of what is good or sensible, what is reasonable, it doesn't fucking work. Option 1: You can trust people to just use dice and negotiate. The result is well explored: it's your average WoD game, where people regularly argue and fight over these things, get angry at people for daring to roll social interactions, lie or refuse to honor them, use them to try and enforce TS, etc. Option 2: You create code to enforce the dice! Your result is Firan, where people abused the social imperative commands with little RP, the code had no ability to deal with any relevant situational modifiers, and staff was frequently called in to arbitrate/invalidate the results anyway because they were frequently abused and/or people didn't like the outcomes. Oh, and people still used it to try and force TS.

It will never work.

It will never work.

It will never work.

[Thenomain]

@bored

Then I'm going to fail as greatly as possible on my own terms and try to take as many people with me into the land of Pretendy Fun-Time Games.

[bored]

@Thenomain Cool story. Let us know when you've out-coded all MU social problems, which is basically what you propose in every thread, and has obviously gotten super far in all the years you've been doing this.

[Thenomain]

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

@Thenomain Cool story. Let us know when you've out-coded all MU social problems, which is basically what you propose in every thread

This is a serious question: Are you high, drunk, stoned, or all of the above? Because I am an advocate of code not solving social problems. I am the advocate of code not solving social problems. I'm going to more legitimately guess you have me confused for someone else.

[bored]

@Thenomain I dunno, weren't you arguing for a ton of different coded solutions (some of which have been tried and didn't accomplish much) in the other thread about whatever, discomfort and boundaries etc? +warn? rp prefs? Color codes changing in the rooms? And a few posts back here you were supporting Ghost's secret rolls, which would essentially be another code solution.

How am I confused here? These are both largely attempts at code solutions to people being dicks.

[Thenomain]

@bored

As tools, sure.

As solutions, no.

[bored]

@Thenomain And much like you seemed bewildered there that anyone would criticize a tool (surely they can only add options and are thus purely good, how could anyone doubt this?!), I don't think much of them here. We've seen it, over and over. These things tend to be placebos and ways for staff to absolve themselves of responsibility, not solutions, not even parts of solutions.

So you have to look at the social side. But in this case, you're never going to resolve the split between people who think 'punching is the same as lying is the same as meth cooking' and the people who think 'you better be able to RP charm if you want to be charming.' This is basically the Israel-Palestine of our hobby. We will have this exact, verbatim argument repeated into infinity on every game that tries to wrestle with it, and no one will ever agree, nor will any code ever fix it. In fact, I made a joke a bit back (apparently a mere 4 days ago!) about how often we have this precise stupid argument, and by speaking its name evidently summoned it into fucking existence once more.

This is why I'm very much with @Arkandel on 'nah, fuck it, just toss the shit out.'

[Lain]

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

This is why I'm very much with @Arkandel on 'nah, fuck it, just toss the shit out.'

But how does this differ from

'you better be able to RP charm if you want to be charming.'

Or

'you better be able to RP cooking meth with chemical accuracy to cook meth'

?

[Thenomain]

@bored

I am baffled that someone would yell at a tool for not being a solution, absolutely, but otherwise you have some salient points. Kudos.

I still believe that you have mistaken me for someone else, but I'm far more interested in the game theory than banter. Theory ahoy, sir!

[Salty Secrets]

@bored I'm not sure your hostility there was totally warranted, even if I agree with some of your points about WoD games in general, having played on well over twenty and story-telling on one right now. It's why I warned that I don't think it's possible to have player versus player social combat that ends in anything but the usual we're already used to.

@Lain I like this idea a lot but having a third party present for every social roll who knows enough about what's going on to make suggestions like that might be a bit harder than just having a third party who can spot and penalize absurd uses of the code. I have to yield to @Arkandel and @Thenomain when they say having a third party at all isn't feasible if social conflict is an every-day thing.

Perhaps the best idea I've seen so far is to make social rolls require consent, and to make both parties arrange both outcomes of the roll before the dice are thrown at all. Surely this won't eliminate player conflict over the rolls but if players must agree beforehand about what happens when the dice land, it would eliminate conflict about that much, and prevent people from springing wild beliefs onto other characters, or for that matter TS.

I think expecting players to cooperate in writing a story in a cooperative story-writing environment isn't the craziest thing that's been pitched.

[Arkandel]

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

Shockingly a new poster is arguing about this as if we haven't read literally everything they just typed dozens of times before!

It's irrelevant whether they are a new poster or not. He (or she) who's never beaten a dead horse before can cast the first stone.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

This is comparable to what you're suggesting by demanding that players make "believable" lies before the die roll is made. Expecting players using a specific social skill to know how to use that social skill in real life is like expecting every player with a high-Science character to personally have high-Science in real life.

That is kind of a main point against social skills though. See, unlike making meth (or hacking into the FBI database, repairing a car, etc) we actually play out the socialization parts. No one walks into a scene and goes "OOC: Hey, my character says hi and hangs out with y'all. +roll presence+socialize". No one, ever, and that's a good thing since that's basically ... well, the roleplay. People pose what they say, articulate what they want, tell others how it is said in as much detail and conviction as they care to go into.

So this is a real issue with these skills - politics, lying, manipulating, etc - when the roleplay points in one direction and the skills in a different one. If a guy comes to my PC, makes a fucking dumb proposal while insulting my woman in the process and he's caught at a lie but has high social stats then apparently I'm supposed to ignore the roleplay and just go with the results of a roll? Yes. That's... basically what MU* systems say. If I don't then I'm not playing right.

Well, I think that's a bad way of doing things. It just doesn't make sense. This social stuff is not the same as everything else, it cannot be safely and easily abstracted like everything else. Poses cannot be abstracted, they are explicit so we can't just separate their content from the mechanics.

[faraday]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

Here's why that doesn't make sense: it would be like expecting someone who wants to play Walter White to actually know how to make methamphetamine.

Well, as @Arkandel and @Ganymede have pointed out, social skills apply in literally every scene on the game. Expecting every social interaction to be handwaved through a roll: "I say something charming... +roll Charisma" seems pretty untenable.

Also, while nobody expects someone to be a RL doctor just to play an IC doctor, you have to at least be able to fake it to Hollywood-esque levels of plausibility. If you can't do that, you probably shouldn't play a doctor. If you can't be bothered to do the slightest bit of research about how meth works, you probably shouldn't play Walter White. And by that analogy, if you can't fake being Charming McCharmer, you probably shouldn't make up someone with Charisma 5.

This is a game, sure, but it's more importantly a story.

Side note to @Arkandel's point about going many scenes without seeing a roll: You say that like it's a bad thing. That's my ideal. Rolls are for when players can't agree on which way the story should go. If nobody ever rolled a single stat on my game I'd be perfectly happy. That doesn't absolve them from the responsibility of RPing according to what's on their sheet, though. And that much is true for social stats as much as it is for not RPing like you're Dr. House when your sheet says Medicine: 1.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

Side note to @Arkandel's point about going many scenes without seeing a roll: You say that like it's a bad thing. That's my ideal. Rolls are for when players can't agree on which way the story should go.

Damn, did I come off like I meant it was a bad thing?

I hatedislike rolling outside of providing resolution paths (aka the Cops and Robbers scenario) or to introduce randomisation when an action could go either way.

[Salty Secrets]

@Arkandel This is generally my viewpoint on it as well, and why I cannot stand when people compare "I expect you to play a good liar" with "I expect you to know how to cook meth".

Cooking meth would in most role-play I've ever been a part of be handled by saying, "My character cooks meth." and then rolling. The same goes with hacking, cooking, hunting and sometimes even combat with a simple "I swing my sword" or "I fire my shotgun". You can also google most practical skills like that and make a convincing pose if you had to.

Lying, impressing, manipulating people is on the other hand almost always role-played out fully and responses to it must be role-played out fully as well.

Unless you know of a game where people can say "I lie to you" and then roll without explaining anything, comparing these two things is trying to compare apples and oranges.

[faraday]

@Arkandel Well unless I misread, you said it like a negative against social stats... like, they were useless because they never got rolled. I've never rolled my BSGU char's Dancing skill either, but her skill (or rather, lack thereof) has come up in several scenes. The problem isn't them not getting rolled, IMHO, the problem is when someone has Dancing:1 but RPs like they're going to win So You Think You Can Dance (or conversely has a char with Dancing:5 but their dance poses are cringe-worthy). Short of coding everything, I don't know how you ever really fix that problem (and even that probably won't work either). You can mitigate it somewhat with open sheets and letting players keep each other honest, but that only goes so far.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

@Arkandel Well unless I misread, you said it like a negative against social stats... like, they were useless because they never got rolled. I've never rolled my BSGU char's Dancing skill either, but her skill (or rather, lack thereof) has come up in several scenes. The problem isn't them not getting rolled, IMHO, the problem is when someone has Dancing:1 but RPs like they're going to win So You Think You Can Dance (or conversely has a char with Dancing:5 but their dance poses are cringe-worthy). Short of coding everything, I don't know how you ever really fix that problem (and even that probably won't work either). You can mitigate it somewhat with open sheets and letting players keep each other honest, but that only goes so far.

The problem I was addressing in this part of the thread wasn't whether people were roleplaying being better at a skill than they are, it was a comment by (I think) @Lain who said there are just those who can't play out a skill convincingly but that's okay because we're just roleplaying having such skills anyway. So it's the opposite of that - people who have a high IC social skill but can't match it through their poses.

And the root of that problem is that skills like dancing can be very safely abstracted even by people with little knowledge of how they work. I can't dance my way out of a paper bag (although that'd be amusing) but I could probably put together a pose that sounds like my character has some moves, but if I suck at being persuasive then I can't just abstract all that with the Persuasion skill because at some point my PC is gonna have to open his mouth and actually say things, things that you are going to have to read. There will be non-persuasive words involved. It will make you sigh.

That's what I meant.

[faraday]

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

I can't just abstract all that with the Persuasion skill because at some point my PC is gonna have to open his mouth and actually say things, things that you are going to have to read. There will be non-persuasive words involved. It will make you sigh.

I gotcha. And I agree - some skills are easier to fake than others. All I meant was that the problem you're describing is not unique to social skills. We don't do persuasion rolls on the sorts of games I play on, but I've seen just as many sigh-worthy medical or military poses. I think it's just more pronounced with social skills because they apply literally all the time.

[Salty Secrets]

@faraday Social skills are definitely more applicable but another thing to consider is easy access to misportrayals of skills in fiction.

I think it's fair to assume that the average role-player's medical knowledge comes from watching movies, TV and anime, where medical skills may not be presented with utmost accuracy. A medical roll pose that looks off, if not entirely wrong, probably draws from sources like that for inspiration because the player doesn't know better but still wants to pose something other than "I heal you".

Conversely there's no easy access to social rolls in fiction like that because social rolls are so highly context sensitive that they can't be transferred from their source. If you watch Game of Thrones you surely have a lot of knowledge about political ploys, but that knowledge isn't any useful outside the Game of Thrones universe and in most cases, outside of dealing with very specific characters.

[faraday]

@Salty-Secrets I'm not talking about strict accuracy. That's a pretty high bar for a RPG. I'm talking about cringe-worthy stuff in the same vein as some of the social examples.

[bored]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

This is why I'm very much with @Arkandel on 'nah, fuck it, just toss the shit out.'

But how does this differ from

'you better be able to RP charm if you want to be charming.'

Or

'you better be able to RP cooking meth with chemical accuracy to cook meth'

?

To a point you're right, taking out the systems comes down on the side of people who prefer RP.

Part of that is because they win by default, in most cases. As much as we have this argument over and over again, unless you're one of the very small minority of games that heavily enforces social dice and consequences (see Firan social imps) you... can't control how people RP to any meaningful degree. People who don't like how the dice fall can always subvert them (see a corollary to this argument we've had 1000000 times is the classic 'I get angry from losing an intimidate roll'). Very few games even succeed in promoting a scenario where dice are even frequently used, let alone enforcing them to any degree.

The other part is that the argument itself is inspired/encouraged by sticking to systems that do the weird thing of putting a fair degree of social dice into the game (encouraging people to buy and use those stats) and then not really supporting them. nWoD might have made a vague, half-hearted effort at it, and the... CoD or whatever we're calling 2.0 further than that, but these systems still pale compared to the number of pages devoted to combat. Doing away with them removes this incentive. This is useful because it stops encouraging people to build 'social gods' and then expect that to be an actual thing. Without them, people can still play socially minded characters, possibly focusing on mechanics other than combat (like resource-oriented skills or sheet options) so they have capital to trade on in social interactions.

Anyway, I don't mean to overly single you out for hostility other than to point out the at this point comical ludicrousness of people having this argument seriously the number of times they do. Sorry you got to the party late, but you really aren't adding anything.