Social Combat: Reusing Physical Combat System?

[Seraphim73]

@surreality I like linking abilities/attributes/whatever with similar ideas by alliteration. It's nice for a homebrew system.

I don't know what your attribute ranges are, and I'm probably only even focusing on this because mine go 1-10, but I'd be curious to know how many Ideals you'd be looking at for each character. I think that once you get higher than about 2-4 of them, you're going to have issues with people spreading them out to try and make them cover as many situations as possible (not most players, but most problem players).

I've been coming back to the Principles (Core Principles? I like single-word mechanics names, but Core Principles is more specific), thinking on it further. I think that I would suggest/require that they be in a general form for my own system:

My character will <always/never> <verb> <subject>.

I want them direct, specific, and precise, to leave as little wiggle-room as possible for problem players. Now, obviously, the Principles wouldn't just be those three things, they can have a little embellishment. For instance, I would consider the following to be acceptable Principles:

My character will always defend his family.
My character will never betray her Queen.
My character will never put someone ahead of himself.
My character will always uphold her oaths of office.
My character will never cheat on his significant other (of the moment).
My character will never harm a child.
My character will always get paid for work.

The idea being that you don't want anything too general or broad ("my character will never lie," "my character will always do what's right", or "my character is evil"), and that a format will help people be specific. It will still, of course, require a great deal of Staff oversight, not just at Chargen, but also in-game, to make sure they're not being over-applied. I'm mostly of the opinion that these Principles should be inviolate (barring player choice), simply because of dice--sooner or later the dice are going to make your character break one, and some players really, really, really don't like that.

I do very much like giving bonuses to social combat attacks that align with one of the Principles, however. I think that's a great idea, and will undoubtedly steal it if Principles make it into my system (please consider imitation the sincerest form of flattery).

[Bobotron]

@Arkandel
This is entirely a culture thing too, I think. The Transformers/M3/etc. circuit, we never had social stats. We never had a problem, but these were also not non-consensual death games, and speaking from experience, it wasn't until a few years ago that I ran into 'I CANNOT BE INTIMIDATED!' 'I CANNOT BE DESECRETED!' and such. You can't make social combat work without changing the culture, and for that you need to be willing to kick people in the teeth if they are asshats and not abiding by policy.

EDIT TO ADD: One thing that popped into my head since I'm basing my Social Combat idea of the ASoIaF system. Instead of disposition towards the person, perhaps the 'defense' is based on disposition towards the idea? In SIF social combat, your disposition towards that person factors into your social defense. Instead of basing it on just how well you like the person, you set your social defense based on the idea that they posit in the beginning, and much like I'm planning on Offensive/Balanced/Defensive combat stances, you can change your disposition on the fly, as well as one of the options for the 'social attacker' being Change Disposiiton (and yes, they can fuck that up and damage their OWN social HP).

[surreality]

@Seraphim73 Seriously, please, use anything you find useful. If I ever get this thing done, I'm going to hand it out freely; it's all being developed for creative commons usage intentionally as it is, just in case it works/is liked/can be a tool for people to quick-start something of their own somehow.

There's a 1-5 standard range for humans, with some other races being able to get as high as 8 in certain things. It's WoD cloney that way, with the 1-5 and 2 as human average. So even if I ended up going with Identity + Willpower, that leaves the average human with 4 core motivations, which vibes right to me for the average person, who might have something like 'I will never cheat on my spouse', 'I will protect my children from bodily harm', 'I will <something relevant to job>', and 'I will never <something related to faith/faction membership/social status/etc.>' and feels like a typical standard normal person conceptually.

So long as they're properly specific, I don't mind people having a big pile, especially since the more of them they have, the more likely there will be a conflict that starts cancelling them out back and forth if they try to cover too much ground.

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said in Social Combat: Reusing Physical Combat System?:

To be honest after discussing these things at length in threads like this I'm inclined to agree with an earlier approach @Ganymede suggested; just not have social stats. I'm not satisfied with it, it reduces the number of different niches and 'builds' in games, but it still seems better to what we're coming up with so far.

To be clear, I didn't say you shouldn't have them. I said that you shouldn't have them if you don't plan to enforce the results when called upon. I see nothing wrong with social combat, social stats, or anything like that, but I'm pretty easy going and don't really care much what happens with my PC if someone manipulates or steers them ICly.

[Lotherio]

Just a quick two cents.

In a physical combat both sides have something to lose, the fight. Most social combat systems of detail are one sided, attack is after something from defender. I think for it to be social /combat/, the attacker should have stakes too. IE John goes to get the code for the vault from Laura, after a series of loses, Laura is clearly the victor, John not only fails to get the code, he reveals why he was after it and give her a clue to what use the contents are for his backers. I probably missed someone say this, if so, I support their post.

That said, I don't mind social combat. I have had TT players at my tables too shy to talk and act in voice, who can just summarize intents and its easier to roll the character they want to play and stated without being amateur impromptu actors. For me though, I prefer simply (ie, old rule of 2 for circumstances, +2/-2 to change target numbers or rolls versus more rules). In social, I'd just prefer a modified chase scene. You set a gap of 2-5, a success closes the gap, a failure widens the gap. X turns to complete the social engagement before target walks away or scene is interrupted by other parties; context between two players, they can easily set gap by agreement. Losing 'speed' after a failure requires a change in tactics. Anything that sounds plausibly good, refer to rule of 2. Works for any system without having to memorize or know a bunch of rules.

[surreality]

@Lotherio That's a really, really good point.

Physical attacks can/do often have modifiers for stealth, or 'attack unseen', but that often requires additional modifiers, preparation, or in some cases, special powers to escape a target from detecting that some kind of attack has occurred, or the source of that attempt, whether the attempt succeeds or fails, and that does create a risk to the aggressor.

The only time I've seen socials called out as 'the attempt and failure is detected' is in WoD/CoD, and that's on a dramatic failure. Even if a normal failure allowed, by default, an attempt on the part of the target (an appropriate roll) to notice that an attempt was made to deceive, charm, or manipulate them, it would allow for the opportunity for more potential consequences here. That otherwise the consequences (barring a dramatic failure) just vanish into the ether aside from the failure itself is definitely not in balance with the risks and consequences of physical combat. The target may not know why the aggressor is attempting to <thing>, but providing a chance to know they've attempted to <thing> is definitely relevant.

Depending on the system, and how much automation is employed, something like +roll charm vs <target> could, potentially, automatically +roll detect charm <initial aggressor> for the initial target on a failure, and if the target makes the detection roll, it could alert them that '<Aggressor> has attempted to charm you.' or similar.

[SparklesTheClown]

You can detect attempts in d20 stuff too 0_o. There's literally a skill called "sense motive" in D&D.

[surreality]

@HelloProject I haven't played anything d20, but it's good to know it's a thing. Helps strengthen the relevance.

Is it something automatic on a failure? I think that's relevant here, since it seems like social attempts default to stealth mode in most failures, while physical attempts you need to take additional measures to allow failures to go undetected.

[Arkandel]

I mean theoretically you could do these things in any system. An empathy or intelligence/wits roll on nWoD could let you know a probable cause why this weirdo is asking all these questions for example, before or after the fact.

The attacker's successes have nothing to do with it. A used car salesman might charm you into buying a piece of shit rustbucket for a lot of money, and you can fall for it while he's doing the talking, but figure out what happened once you go home and sigh at yourself.

[surreality]

@Arkandel It isn't the number of successes, though. It's that the only consequence of failure, typically, in a social roll in most systems is 'you didn't get your way'. There's no inherent consequence there, as there absolutely would be if you just saw someone try to punch you and miss, in which case 'you didn't land your punch and now JoeBob knows you want to punch him'.

This dramatically lessens the potential consequences of a social roll if it fails as compared to a physical one if it fails.

[Arkandel]

@surreality Yeah, some amount of flexibility might be a good thing anyway even if it increases complexity, for very specific cases.

For example you might want to have two rolls - a Persuasion one to convince Molly you it's okay if you just go into her boss' office for a minute to drop off a memo and a Subterfuge roll to make it sound like you'd be in trouble if she told on you ("sighs I forgot to do it last night, I'm so dumb!") to keep her quiet. Failure on either could produce different results - not being allowed into the office, or letting you in but telling her boss afterwards to cover her ass, or both.

[Coin]

@Arkandel said in Social Combat: Reusing Physical Combat System?:

@surreality Yeah, some amount of flexibility might be a good thing anyway even if it increases complexity, for very specific cases.

For example you might want to have two rolls - a Persuasion one to convince Molly you it's okay if you just go into her boss' office for a minute to drop off a memo and a Subterfuge roll to make it sound like you'd be in trouble if she told on you ("sighs I forgot to do it last night, I'm so dumb!") to keep her quiet. Failure on either could produce different results - not being allowed into the office, or letting you in but telling her boss afterwards to cover her ass, or both.

This is kind of what the Doors system tries to represent in its short-term version.

Convincing her to go into her boss's office to drop the memo is one Door, and convincing her not to tell ony our for "forgetting" is another Door.