Social Conflict via Stats

[Ominous]

@Arkandel

I would rephrase what I said to "Once the details of what your goal is known, then you have that discussion, make the rolls, and RP it out." The doors system might work if we can trust people to offer a fair number of doors.

[Ganymede]

@Ominous said in Social Conflict via Stats:

I would rephrase what I said to "Once the details of what your goal is known, then you have that discussion, make the rolls, and RP it out." The doors system might work if we can trust people to offer a fair number of doors.

Many people have argued that OOC discussion of RP should not occur, for a variety of reasons. How do you have any discussion where one side refuses to engage in OOC conversation about goals?

[Kanye Qwest]

I'm confused as to why social combat should not use social stats.

Physical combat uses physical stats. If you build your pc as a combat beast, the understood tradeoff is that things relying on the OTHER stats, the ones you shanked to become a combat beast, are going to go much less great for you.

Conversely, if you spend your cg points to pump up social stats, why in the world would you not use them? If you don't use them, what is the incentive, ever, to pick up those mental/social stats?

[Seraphim73]

@Kanye-Qwest Because some players are not comfortable having the thoughts/desires/beliefs of their PCs dictated to them by the dice. I admit that I have been strongly in this camp myself in the past, although I think I've come to feel that it might not be the end of the world, so long as exactly what can be accomplished by social dice in a single roll (or even a single scene) is limited.

[Ominous]

This post is deleted!

[Arkandel]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:

I'm confused as to why social combat should not use social stats.

Physical combat uses physical stats. If you build your pc as a combat beast, the understood tradeoff is that things relying on the OTHER stats, the ones you shanked to become a combat beast, are going to go much less great for you.

The argument isn't why they shouldn't be used - I don't think anyone is saying that - but how. And some of the reasons that complicate the matter are these:

1. Even combat scenes are annoying; they take too long. In the nWoD a fight can easily take over an hour, often considerably more than that. There are all sorts of tables to look up, rules to argue, the roll-then-pose sequence is time-consuming, etc. Now consider how far more rare they are than social encounters, which account for most of the scenes in a game. If the system isn't super streamlined to use it'd be a huge pain in the ass.

2. It's not as easy to quantify social damage compared to physical damage. You have 10 hit points so if I inflict 11 hit points I knock you out... but what about your alliance to Bob? How much do I need to inflict to make you change your mind? How much changing does that accomplish? Do you hate Bob now that I scored a critical hit or just have doubts? It's far more of a gray area.

I agree on the premise that social stats need to matter as much as physical ones, the question now is how.

[Thenomain]

I'd like to reiterate how there is a large difference between "conflict" and "combat".

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Short-term interactions are those off-the-cuff attempts to talk your way past a guard, or get someone to follow you into that dark alley, or get someone to rethink drawing that knife on you.

Combat.

Long-term interactions are things that involve lasting or major shifts for a person

Conflict.

I'd add medium-term maneuverings to Pyre's long-term for "conflict". Spending an evening pretending to be a Marquess at a party could fall into a series of short-term goals or one more long-term, depending on how you approach it by the system, but in my mind it falls into the latter.

[Ganymede]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Conversely, if you spend your cg points to pump up social stats, why in the world would you not use them? If you don't use them, what is the incentive, ever, to pick up those mental/social stats?

Ending combat. It's like whipping out the Majesty card in V:TES. You can effectively end a combat scene in moments with a few easy rolls.

A good game takes this into consideration, though, and makes social/mental characters useful.

[Pyrephox]

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Conversely, if you spend your cg points to pump up social stats, why in the world would you not use them? If you don't use them, what is the incentive, ever, to pick up those mental/social stats?

Ending combat. It's like whipping out the Majesty card in V:TES. You can effectively end a combat scene in moments with a few easy rolls.

A good game takes this into consideration, though, and makes social/mental characters useful.

And that is where, IMO, a lot of games really fall down. Social stats/skills don't need to work on PCs, IF they work on NPCs and work in meaningful, predictable, usable ways. And in my experience, a lot of staff balk at even letting PCs use social skills/stats against NPCs in any meaningful way. You're far more likely to get a "no, you can't do that" regarding social maneuvering against NPCs than you are if you say, "I'm going to beat him up." Which renders social skills doubly useless.

[Ganymede]

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Social stats/skills don't need to work on PCs, IF they work on NPCs and work in meaningful, predictable, usable ways.

And this is why I have yelled, up and down, that a successful game is going to need some sort of off-screen system that allows the players to directly affect the setting. That's where Social/Mental skills come into play. RfK did this well, and that's why it was so kick-ass the first time around.

[Arkandel]

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

And that is where, IMO, a lot of games really fall down. Social stats/skills don't need to work on PCs, IF they work on NPCs and work in meaningful, predictable, usable ways.

Then they need to be cheaper, because physical skills work on both NPCs and PCs juuuust fine.

And in my experience, a lot of staff balk at even letting PCs use social skills/stats against NPCs in any meaningful way. You're far more likely to get a "no, you can't do that" regarding social maneuvering against NPCs than you are if you say, "I'm going to beat him up." Which renders social skills doubly useless.

That's a staff failure, not a systemic one.

[Pyrephox]

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Social stats/skills don't need to work on PCs, IF they work on NPCs and work in meaningful, predictable, usable ways.

And this is why I have yelled, up and down, that a successful game is going to need some sort of off-screen system that allows the players to directly affect the setting. That's where Social/Mental skills come into play. RfK did this well, and that's why it was so kick-ass the first time around.

They fell down a bit - namely, they had a GREAT system for the long-term, big influences, but not the small-term, immediate influences, particularly where NPCs were concerned. They were, however, one of the few CoD games that made a real effort at adapting Conditions and embracing the changes that the system made to social interactions in MU*s. The "bargaining" aspect of gaining Conditions in exchange for doing certain things was very cool.

[Ganymede]

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

They fell down a bit - namely, they had a GREAT system for the long-term, big influences, but not the small-term, immediate influences, particularly where NPCs were concerned.

Every system needs a tweak, RfK included. However, the game demonstrated the utility of having a system.

[Kanye Qwest]

yeah, I'm not feeling that. Physical skills can and are used to 'arbitrate' pc/pc conflict, thus social skills need to be at least that effective.

[Arkandel]

@Kanye-Qwest Yes, we all agree on this!

But how?

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said in Social Conflict via Stats:

But how?

Enforcing them?

I mean, nWoD 2E has a very robust system. People just choose to ignore it sometimes. Most players go along with it, but some do not. If staff would step in and mud-stomp the cheaters, that'd be great.

[lordbelh]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:

yeah, I'm not feeling that. Physical skills can and are used to 'arbitrate' pc/pc conflict, thus social skills need to be at least that effective.

While I believe that social skills and mechanics do need to be important, in fact they should have more metaphysical weight than physical stats/skills, they're not equivalents of each other. They do very different things.

They can't be handled the same, because they aren't the same. The consequences aren't the same, either.

Being beat up is a temporary setback. Even if its not temporary, even if you have a limb chopped off, you're still playing the same character (minus a limb). You decide how you handle the loss. Death is permanent, of course, but at least you played your character to the end. Physical combat is the result of two players' agency coming to a head, and arbitrates the physical result.

In my experience people would much rather be beat up, than have dice tell them that a year of scenes and friendship with character X is now at its end, and you have to play out a betrayal that will branch out and disrupt every story and every scene you were looking forward to. Social combat results in one player seizing the agency of another player, and rewriting it. Often with very little thought to the internal conflict and wider consequences of that rewriting.

Acknowledging that, and thus ensuring that your systems have a decent amount of give and take is imperative. You don't need to cooperate to create a plausible scene and story through physical combat. In social combat, its an absolute necessity.

To the mention of RfK: while valuing social stats, it valued them primarily through giving characters with an emphasis of social stats immense extra resources at their disposal. Those resources then became leverage that they could use in their social scenes. To me that's a great way to do it. The power was indirect, thus side stepping the mine field of player agency. The social character had mortal pull, could destroy your territory, could leave you without blood and a million headaches if she played it right. That in itself was where the leverage came. In addition they had rolls to augment the scenes, in which if you accepted the social dice loss you got benefits, and if you didn't you were punishment.

[Arkandel]

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Enforcing them?

I mean, nWoD 2E has a very robust system. People just choose to ignore it sometimes. Most players go along with it, but some do not. If staff would step in and mud-stomp the cheaters, that'd be great.

Read up, though!

The problem isn't enforcement - you can have players perfectly willing to use social conflict rules and it's still inconvenient to do so, unclear how it works (the last time I asked on the vampire channel with multiple staff there how a basic thing worked it took a while going through books to come up with 'it depends'), and slow.

These things need tweaking if we ever want it to be common place enough that it becomes part of gaming culture and a natural thing people do in their everyday scenes.

[Kanye Qwest]

I want a system where cooperating, where going along with what's happening and 'taking the loss' is incentivized. I like the idea of entering a social conflict, and letting people have 'rounds' where they can reinforce their initial positions by leveraging social resources. Then..I'm not sure, here's where feedback might be good.

Then, maybe whoever gives in first GETS the social resources that were 'bet' during the conflict? And in our game in particular, there's no way we'd be able to let someone use a player on player social conflict vehicle to make someone do something permanently binding - such as swear an oath or sign a writ.

[Arkandel]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Then, maybe whoever gives in first GETS the social resources that were 'bet' during the conflict? And in our game in particular, there's no way we'd be able to let someone use a player on player social conflict vehicle to make someone do something permanently binding - such as swear an oath or sign a writ.

Alright, fair enough... let's keep going though!.

So for example you're saying players can't go too far in claiming ground after winning a social encounter, and that's fair, but how do you quantify how far they can go?

And how do we quantify social 'defense'? For example if I'm a boxer everyone has a roughly equal chance of punching me - my defense is about equal, it's only their offense that matters. But maybe I'm playing a religious person meeting with a known atheist, how is that handled?

And speed. That must be a given. @Bobotron mentioned it earlier and I really liked the idea. We're in a scene, I don't want us to take fifteen minutes between poses just to figure out if my asking you something IC will succeed or not, or its momentum has already gone to hell at that point (especially if on your next pose you make a counter-offer and... fifteen minutes again).