Social Conflict via Stats

[Thenomain]

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Arkandel said in Social Conflict via Stats:

But how?

Enforcing them?

Ever feel like we've been on this ride before?

Mind you, I agree with the OP that one way to "enforce them" is to make a system that is enforced by the enlightened self interest of the players. AKA, make game systems to do so.

@Kanye-Qwest : Have you looked at Fate Core? There is a system where cooperation and failing are both incentivized. It's not a system that fits all game types, but it's probably the most well-known of the systems that do.

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said in Social Conflict via Stats:

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.

And what exactly was the problem? Because I have had zero problems understanding Conditions as written.

[Jennkryst]

Fate does this beautifully, because you can cross-combat. Bring your witty reparte to a sword fight and walk away the victor while doing nothing but pithy quips from Princess Bride.

As for social combat in general, I have very controversial opinions on it that I can go into in a later post that will proooobably make everyone hate me, if we really want to go there.

[surreality]

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

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.

^ This. And it ties in with much of what @Arkandel is saying in the example of the religious person and the atheist, too.

We have much more cleanly quantifiable physical offenses and defenses than social.

The agency issue is key here.

No one would expect to, using one of the physical examples here, chop off a person's arm by playfully blowing a handful of feathers and glitter in their face.

We fundamentally understand that this is a completely broken cause and effect chain that is laughable on its face (unless this is the physical acts to perform a magic arm-lopping spell that weaponizes glitter of some kind, which then becomes a magic system roll, not a physical combat roll on the lopper's part, anyway). If someone attempted this as a direct physical-to-physical means of lopping off an arm, we would rightly say: Hell no, regardless of what numbers appear on the dice, and we would be right to do so. That may take the form of saying, "No, you need to describe this as a plausible physical attack, because that method is not appropriate to the intended results," or it may take the form of a staffer or ST stepping in to say: "That is so ridiculous that none of it happens at all," or any number of other things, but I am reasonably certain that as players, staff, tabletop STs, etc., that would not be permitted to stand as the actual cause and effect chain of a character physically losing an arm in the course of play.

Is it entirely possible that the lopper's physical combat dice roll says, "Yup, I lopped your arm!" A responsible loppee is going to take that without complaint, but a responsible lopper is not going to insist on the mundane blowing of glitter in someone's face to accomplish it, no matter what the dice say.

We're pretty routinely subject, however, to the equivalent of this in social scenes. Someone cooks up an idea they want to use as their method of achieving a specific end, and no matter how implausible or ridiculous, if the dice say it works, it has to have worked. In a social conflict, using the priest and atheist as an example, you can, per the rules in many a system, say that one or the other does a tap dance, and if the dice say 'that totally converted the other guy to your way of thinking', that's what the dice say. And people will fight tooth and fucking nail to strongarm this implausible nonsense as entirely reasonable and fair "because the rules say so!"

Well, the rules also say that if the dice say your arm is lopped off, if somebody says they did it by blowing glitter in your face, you gotta stick with that, too.

Yet, in one instance, the absurdity is almost universally recognized as being absurd to the point of damaging, while the latter? Not so much.

Do people abuse this? Of course. But that's not what I'm getting at here -- people can and do abuse everything. But if we're looking at defining 'who is playing fair' here, which is ultimately the call a staffer may have to make, the physical example of glitter-delimbing is an obvious call: no, it is not reasonable or fair for the lopper to force acceptance of that method on the loppee.

[Jennkryst]

I recall how in cWoD, and maybe nWoD, it lists examples of how proficient any number of dice makes you. And 5 Persuasion involves something ludicrous like 'convince a man dying of thirst to give you his last gallon of water in the middle of the sahara during a drout' or something (shitty example is shitty).

I posit that someone with Persuasion 5 should know how to do this, and can manage to pull it off despite potentially fucking up a line delivery here or there. James Bond delivers absolutely atrocious one-liners, and yet... he is Bond.

While I concur that the glitter example will likely not happen, I propose an alternative: improvised weapon: pencil. Deny their use at your own peril, for the Joker will come and show you a magic trick (tangential idea for Reno: cross-skill specialization to use subterfuge.magic tricks for every roll ever. Must dress as stage magician and have a sidekick to distract people (Let's talk, @Ganymede))

Other silly ideas: limp-wristed fighter who poses flailing in the most un-martial arts-y manner ever (I am looking at you, drunken master style), gangster who shoots wildly into the air and has the bullets somehow still manage to do their parabolic arc to murder folks (based on that one sniper who shrugged, shot a round 45 degrees off target, and still hit), and the hacker who uploads malicious code to places through satellite imagery that scans binary written out via stone message not unlike one might use to write an SOS on a deserted island.

The dice gods are fickle. Why, someone with an incredibly low politics score might even win an election over someone with politics 5 and multiple specializations. Shit just happens sometimes.

[surreality]

@Jennkryst It isn't a matter of whether they are able to do it or not.

The character, yes, would know how to accomplish that end. That means that if the player doesn't know how the character would accomplish that end, they need to work with the other player to find out a reasonable way that it could happen.

"My character knows how this works!" (enactor) is not justification to completely rewrite another player's character (target) and motivations; what the enactor's character actually knows in this context is the information the enactor's player needs to acquire from the target's player to accomplish their desired goal.

It is not, "My character knows how this works, so any zany notion I concoct is what is going to work!"

It is, 'my character can tell what would work, and that is what the character would choose to do to accomplish their goal'.

We know, collectively, the casual glitter blow is not going to cut off someone's arm as a causative action. (As magic, a special other thing, etc. it's not a standard attack any more.) You're hitting on something else that's important here, too: yes, you can use improvised weapons, but there's penalties and costs for doing so, and special merits/powers/etc. are required to use them effectively. (Similarly, there are special magic powers to make an absurd method work for social conflicts.)

Edit, durrrr... lost train of thought there: The difference here is that people don't get far trying to force the absurd on other players in physical conflicts without those additional special abilities or powers and so on to back up how and why, yes, that could actually happen, in mechanical form. That doesn't exist to the same extent and depth in a social system, and while people have come to an understanding that they're not going to let the absurd go without some foundations in a physical conflict for the most part, social conflicts, which have many components that are rarely accounted for at all even if there is a system in place, people try to argue for the acceptability of the absurd in social conflicts in ways that are entirely the opposite of the way they handle physical conflicts.

[Coin]

This again.

Some people want to play their characters; some people want to play the stories; some people want to do both.

In the end you just have to decide what you expect and then play with people who match that; or be willing to put aside your own expectations if the people youd ecide to play with don't.

I love Social dice and I would totally play a game that uses them heavily for shit, like most games use combat dice. But if I am playing in a game as part of a group with, say, @surreality, I'm just not going to go into it expecting my social dice to have much weight with her. Should they? Should they not? Irrelevant. I am forewarned and thus forarmed when it comes to her preferences.

Yes, we play with strangers a lot so we don't always have that foreknowledge to our advantage. That's why games have "default rules". If a game has default rules you are categorically against, it might not be a game for you, or you will need to at least steel yourself against whatever aspects of those rules you dislike, both IC and OOC. e.g. if @surreality plays on a game where the default rule is "players must abide by social combat as per the rules in the book" and the rules in the book make her want to retch, then she needs to 1) not play there or 2) make a character that is damn near immune to the outcome she dislikes, and build that PC around it. And probably try to avoid those situations as much as possible.

That said, while I enjoy the social combat stuff, I think it works best--as with physical combat--when the two players are in agreement as to how the scene can broadly play out.

We're gonna fisticuffs: either I win, or you do. But neither of us is gonna kill the other, right? Great. Let's do it.

We're gonna have a little bit of a seduction-of-a-married-woman match, so I can get information out of her. You're probably not going to want to have your character end up in bed with mine, since she's happily married, but her getting a little tipsy and spilling some information because it feels good to have someone lavish attention on her isn't necessarily the worst. I could also botch the rolls and your character could throw a drink in my face.

See how both examples lack real extremes? That's because the players can come to an agreement.

If someone comes up to you and says, "I'm going to roll to seduce you and if, over time, I win, you're gonna be gobblin' cock for a while," then that person is a fucking asshole that you should not, in any reasonable game with any reasonable behavior rules, have to play with. And I also believe this should stand for random people coming over and saying, "My character doesn't like your characters face, she's gonna kill'im!"

Yes, there are always mitigating circumstances, like: A does something horrible to B and now C really wants to fuck A's shit up; or Z is happily married to Y and X really wants to ruin Y's relationship because Y did something horrible before.

If you find yourself in these situations and they involve people you don't know or do not get along with, I suggest you either 1) involve staff immediately so that it can be sorted with mediation; or 2) (my preferenceº) tell everyone this shit is fucked up and walk away. If they are people you get along with, then make sure everyone is clear on possible outcomes and is okay with ANY of those outcomes. Hurt feelings are worse than lost characters in this hobby and I am so fucking tired of this shit.

Anyway, this conversation, god. Every year, I swear. Rofl.

º Actually, my prefernece is 3) play a psychopath who doesn't give a flying fuck about people's bullshit, and will shoot a fucker if they come at'em, but is otherwise chill.

[surreality]

Y'all are totally missing what I'm saying here. By a mile.

I am not, in any way, saying, "You can't do that."

I am saying: when we look at a physical confrontation, people have an innate understanding that the desired outcome (delimbing, per the example), requires a plausible means of removing that limb, and no one would insist, without some manner of special power or other magical effect, that you can slice off someone's arm by blowing glitter in their face.

We have an innate understanding re: physical conflict that to achieve a desired end (removing someone's arm), we need to rip that arm off or slice it off somehow. The cause and effect of blowing glitter in someone's face is not going to remove someone's arm, and if someone claims it's going to do that without special powers to accomplish this, we're going to consider them completely insane.

This is not the case with social conflicts.

People do not just want their desired outcome, they want their desired method to work.

It does not matter if their desired method is equivalent to blowing glitter in someone's face to slice off their arm.

Outcome is only one factor here.

Very few people will argue about outcomes.

Social conflicts become problematic when people are not focusing on outcome, but on insisting that both outcome and method are spiffylicious, even if the method is as inappropriate to achieving the desired outcome as the example of blowing glitter in someone's face to slice off their arm.

This is not just asking for outcome, it's asking for method: it's a double ask, which is actually asking more than we typically demand out of a physical conflict in this fashion.

Instead, if your stats say you can accomplish your outcome, this doesn't necessarily mean you get a free pass to ignore reality or plausibility or whatever in regard to your method. It means that you are very likely to know what method would work and that's the method you will employ to achieve your desired outcome.

This respects stats 100%, and respects a reasonable interpretation of fellow players' agency 100%. It has precisely zero to do with liking, or disliking, social conflicts.

[Coin]

My only response to that is that two people who can't agree on what method would and wouldn't work are two people who really shouldn't be playing that together, which goes back to my earlier point. Everything I said is just as valid with "method" instead of "outcome".

Anyway, I agree with you. But let's make it more explicit:

I think social combat should take this into account by implicitly giving the person initiating it a broad notion of what may or may not work on their target. Do they like puppies? Is their daughter the most important thing to them? Will buying their daughter a puppy and then saving her from a car accident (engineered, of course) put them in a favorable disposition? Will offering their daughter a full college ride? Will just being friendly to said daughter and having a nice puppy be enough? These are things that should be implicit and somewhat easily acquired by someone with social acumen. You might want to say "only if they have Empathy" (if such a stat exists in the system) and that would be fair. Maybe even add an Empathy or whatever roll to determine what might or might not work on a person (also fine). But this also expects the opposing player to be honest about it. "Oh yes, my character will totally do anything for a hot blonde in a tight dress" can't become "god, you dirty slut, I wouldn't touch you with a ten foot pole" because that's the equivalent of RP entrapment (MUSHtrapment).

Of course, you could do research on your target's daughter and her love of puppies and fail to notice that she was mauled by a dog a while ago, and your research is out of date, or whatever.

But my point is: physical stats get less flak because there's this tacit and implicit agreement in the hobby that you don't need to get along OOC to get into a physical bloody brawl IC, and "oh well, I killed your character, SUCK IT". And it's a shitty position to take as a hobby.

Talk to each other. Figure out what sort of RP you want from your fellow players, play with them.

[surreality]

@Coin said in Social Conflict via Stats:

My only response to that is that two people who can't agree on what method would and wouldn't work are two people who really shouldn't be playing that together, which goes back to my earlier point. Everything I said is just as valid with "method" instead of "outcome".

Definitely.

I have no patience for the kind of person who says they can never be convinced, never be disbelieved, never be lied to, never be intimidated, etc. That is simply bullshit.

I do believe, like the glitter example, that if someone has the stats to <insert one of those things above> someone else, yes, that outcome absolutely needs to be respected.

It doesn't completely strip the target player of their character's real traits, however, and should not.

Just like a high brawl score doesn't make 'blow glitter at someone' a successful means of delimbing, no matter how much the delimber may want it to be the method, a high persuasion score doesn't necessarily mean <method of choice> is going to plausibly work, either.

The stats need to be respected by the target.

The method needs to be respected by the enactor.

[Arkandel]

An issue we're dealing with here, unfairly or not, is that the roadblocks to using social stats convincingly in RP are littered with idiots who've done a fairly good job putting the problems we haven't solved in front of the advantages we'd gain from rolling them more frequently.

Idiots trying to strong-arm people into TS? Check. Fools trying to change someone's entire view of the world in one bar scene? Check. Jerks pointlessly brute-forcing social rolls down everyone's throats just because they can? Check.

On top of that we all have our pet peeves. For example mine has to do with politics, and although I probably shouldn't feel that way I can't separate the words on my screen from the intent of the roll which follows them; someone coming to my character with a ludicrous deal ("if you vote for me against your own interests I'm gonna give you this cookie") and lots of dice irks me. And the reason I shouldn't be bothered by it is that the same crappily posed attempt on the physical plane ("I'm'a gonna punch you good!") wouldn't sound half as bad.

I think what'll make a system work isn't incentives. It will however need to give us something we don't currently have - in other words in any social system we care to propose we - the players - must get toys to play with we don't want to be without. Perhaps an overall overhaul of politics wrapped around the use of such attributes with resources, allies and contacts baked into it. But there must be a reason to make players want this in their scenes, and XP ain't it.

[Seraphim73]

@surreality said in Social Conflict via Stats:

No one would expect to, using one of the physical examples here, chop off a person's arm by playfully blowing a handful of feathers and glitter in their face.
...
Just like a high brawl score doesn't make 'blow glitter at someone' a successful means of delimbing, no matter how much the delimber may want it to be the method, a high persuasion score doesn't necessarily mean <method of choice> is going to plausibly work, either.

The stats need to be respected by the target.

The method needs to be respected by the enactor.

I had not been able to put together a good example of why bad poses in social scenes ruined my enjoyment so well, but you've done it very neatly. Bravo. These entire posts exactly explain my discomfort with straight dice in social scenes without OOC give-and-take alongside it (because we all understand the physical rules of the world, but very few understand the social rules of someone else's world).

That being said, I want to find a way that dice can still be used for social scenes without getting into this problem. Is it as simple as setting stakes before the social combat? Is it as simple as checking methods before rolling dice, so that appropriate penalties/bonuses can be assessed? Is it as simple as rolling before the scene and then working together to craft the arguments necessary to achieve the desired result (this is a whole lot less fun for me, but may be necessary)?

[Lisse24]

There's been a lot of talk of RfK's social system's, but no one's actually talked about it's social combat system. It wasn't used all that often, because social rolls still fail at being normalized, but it remains one of my favorite social combat systems, and was the driving force behind one of the best scene's I've done.

The game's gone, so I have to pull up memories from a year ago, but as best as I can recall, the system consisted of a list of 'actions' that players could take. These actions weren't the end goal of persuade or seduce, but they were the strategies that a person could take to get there. They were actions like 'fast-talk,' 'sweet-talk,' or 'intimidate.' Each of these actions had a different set of conditions as a result. For the most part, these were your WoD 2.0 conditions, but I think there were some game-specific conditions as well. They were mostly small and immediate, giving a +2 dice bonus or a penalty to a roll until the end of the scene, etc. etc. Conditions were also incentivized by getting a beat when resolved and at times, just for getting a condition.

It didn't really slow-down RP, but it did make persuading someone or getting someone on your side a process that involved a lot of back and forth. TBH, it made AJ persuading me to do something fun.

It wasn't perfect, and I would have changed things. I think the actions/moves were sometimes worded confusingly and were over complicated. I think there needed to be a wider variety of actions and conditions, and I would have simplified them to a simple 'method, roll, resist, result.' Also, I would have leaned towards letting the loser of the roll pick which condition they take, so as to avoid the whole 'You can't tell me what I feel!' argument. Nope, you get to decide how you feel, but you lost that roll, so you still get a consequence.

[lordbelh]

@Coin said in Social Conflict via Stats:

But my point is: physical stats get less flak because there's this tacit and implicit agreement in the hobby that you don't need to get along OOC to get into a physical bloody brawl IC, and "oh well, I killed your character, SUCK IT". And it's a shitty position to take as a hobby.

When do people ever do this, on which games?

Because I can't recall coming across it on a MU I played on, ever. Sure the world's full of bluster, but actual follow through of just offing people? It doesn't happen in my experience, and I expect on games where it was the norm I wouldn't be playing.

[ThatGuyThere]

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Coin said in Social Conflict via Stats:

But my point is: physical stats get less flak because there's this tacit and implicit agreement in the hobby that you don't need to get along OOC to get into a physical bloody brawl IC, and "oh well, I killed your character, SUCK IT". And it's a shitty position to take as a hobby.

When do people ever do this, on which games?

Because I can't recall coming across it on a MU I played on, ever. Sure the world's full of bluster, but actual follow through of just offing people? It doesn't happen in my experience, and I expect on games where it was the norm I wouldn't be playing.

I could name a few, thankfully that era is mostly the past however if there is one thing this hobby specializes in is people with long memories who carry mental scars form one game to all future games.
I have to admit being one of them which is why any PvP be it social, political or psychical with someone I do not know always goes to staff mediation as the first step.

[Thenomain]

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Coin said in Social Conflict via Stats:

But my point is: physical stats get less flak because there's this tacit and implicit agreement in the hobby that you don't need to get along OOC to get into a physical bloody brawl IC, and "oh well, I killed your character, SUCK IT". And it's a shitty position to take as a hobby.

When do people ever do this, on which games?

We've gotten much better at it on Mushes. Darkmetal is probably the last time I saw "you're dead because I rolled better" as a common event. I've seen this happen on Haunted Memories, and even as recently as on The Reach, but even in those instances they've become things that create reactionary drama.

On a Mud, you're a slave to the system. If someone coded "you are dead" then you are dead. We don't have many Mudders here, but Evennia is expanding that.

What @Coin's point is, to me, is that most social conflicts don't have even this much. There is no "we are fucking now sucks to be you". Of course that would be an entirely stupid way to do a social system, but the lack of having any system behind it (or to reiterate @Ganymede, a system that isn't enforced, which is as good as having no system at all) is the bulk of this discussion each and every time it comes up.

[Lotherio]

@Thenomain said in Social Conflict via Stats:

What @Coin's point is, to me, is that most social conflicts don't have even this much. There is no "we are fucking now sucks to be you".

Well, they could still lose and not be sucking, depends on the rolls in this social system I guess.

[Bobotron]

So I wanna say, this has been a great discussion, and has been an interesting read with the fors, againsts, and 'things to take into account'. I am working on a few things tonight, the writeup for a 'baseline' of what my goals would be is one of those things, so I will probably post it here to be horribly ripped apart. But a lot of the 'it should guide, and give leads and setups, but not be 'lawl I rolled better we fuck now'' discussion is exactly where I was leaning with it. It all lines up with my concepts of cooperative non-consent that I've talked about before.

[Arkandel]

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Because I can't recall coming across it on a MU I played on, ever.

And imagine if people expect it's okay to do that using physical means which are at least obvious and the intent is right there for all to see - no one will ever think you had the other player's best intentions in mind to make things interesting for them when you decided to make their character a paraplegic or kill them outright.

But we have seen, at least in the more extreme ranges of the spectrum, folks who didn't seem to hesitate for a second before trying to (and insisting they could, for your own good) change your character just as dramatically or make them borderline unplayable by changing their core personality with a roll. What do you mean you're a Carthian? No, I just convinced you - you're a traitor now. See, isn't that more fun than what you had in mind before? You're welcome.

[Kanye Qwest]

@Arkandel That all or nothing permanent social imperative success works in a tabletop setting but not so much in a MU imo. You have to, common sense, have some arbitration. Yes, social rolls should be abided by unless it goes counter to a core tenet of your character, or lasts forever and ever, etc. You're just going to have to mediate some situations.