@Lisse24 said in Social Conflict via Stats:
Maybe this is why I enjoy playing ghouls and thralls on vampire games. I like being the underdog that has next to nothing going for them (except the one thing if they can figure out how to leverage it), and then seeing them rise above their circumstance. It's a good story!
Losing control and having to fight your way back is a good story. This is why I don't understand the resistance to social combat. No one likes to have a character pulled from them, but allowing a system to mess your character up (without dictating how your character thinks or feels about it) is a really good dynamic to add to a story and something seen in almost every piece of fiction.
Of course, this runs on the assumption that people are on MUs to tell character-driven stories and not just look cool, and evidence tells me that assumption may be mistaken.
The dictation of how your character thinks and feels about it is what this is ultimately about though isn't it? In a robust social system your characters emotions and opinions would need to be codified and open to manipulation the same way your limbs are in physical combat and you'd have to be willing to accept the result of that.
Further to actually be meaningfully robust, this would have to be used for all non-trivial social scenes the way the combat engine has to be brought out for all non-trivial combats in order to be reasonably consistent. So instead of simply posing out a social scene in the local coffee house, you'd now declare each characters purpose and then use their social stats to determine if they develop friendship or let slip an accidental insult or what have you.
This wouldn't necessarily need to be overly cumbersome for individual players as long as it was all coded but it would like combat probably involve atleast one command per pose.