Social Conflict via Stats

[Lisse24]

@Arkandel Which is why it should take longer than a roll. Social rolls should give small victories on the way to larger goals. This is what the door system tries to do, but fails by not being properly integrated. If I want to change something core about a character it should take a ton of work and several scenes of me working with that character.

[Arkandel]

@Lisse24 Exactly, and that's what I meant earlier about having to quantify social 'damage' (and we probably want to shy away from that term if we want to avoid people treating it as a negative thing).

To put it in perspective let's use real life for a second - although obviously there are huge differences between that and depictions on games, I think I can still make my point.

Any given fight can change your life - every single time you get punched someone can poke your eye out, pull a shoulder out of its socket, cause internal bleeding... and that's without counting weapons. With weapons all bet are off, at that point chances are your life is about to change especially if you lose.

But how often have you sat with someone and had a chat after which any dramatic (hell, even significant) changes in perspective took place? You have conversations every day, arguments, debates... when's the last time any of us sat with someone whose political views are different and caused a tangible, somewhat permanent shift? Not that often, right? But maybe if you continue to sit down and have these chats until a different perspective is hammered into you there could be a more noticeable shift - that's how people get indoctrinated into cults or educated at school after all. Not in bursts but in degrees, normalising their behaviour based on their environment and the stimuli they receive from it.

That's what I'd like to see in RP.

I'm an Carthian atheist and you're playing a Sanctified. I sit down with your character and he/she 'wins' the religious argument? The IC result could be some more respect for you people. You win another of those? I understand better the role you play and maybe am a bit more sympathetic toward the overall cause. Another? I could be convinced to take minor action - nothing that could do my causes damage but giving you a freebie piece of information maybe - to help you guys out. And so on - each of those arguments being an entire scene.

If I started out as a devout Catholic already interested in the Sanctified though it'd go significantly faster. You could entice me to help out in the first scene, for instance.

That's how I imagine social stats should be used. There's inertia in people's views, different levels of 'defence' against gaps in opinions - and somehow in all that posing quality should matter. For example we should be trusted to assign modifiers to our own resistances; if you just made a great IC argument I'll give you a +2 bonus against my own character's convictions. If you just threatened I'll burn in hell if I don't help you, here's a -3 for your trouble. That sort of thing.

There must be cooperation from both sides for this to work out. There's no way it'll function if someone is OOC negatively predisposed toward it or is using the system as a sledgehammer ("here's my roll, now you want me!").

Social attributes must facilitate RP if they are to be used in RP. They need to enrich it.

[Pyrephox]

How exactly do we define "posing quality"? Eloquently written? If so, then we have a requirement for "using my XP-purchased skills and abilities effectively as a social character" that we have for NO OTHER CHARACTER TYPE, including the ones who can kill characters from afar without any interaction at all. Earlier in the thread, it was suggested that we somehow police for the social equivalent of not posing that you've decapitated someone by blowing glitter on them...which I assume means that poses should, then, be somewhat accurate to the realities of psychological influencing and manipulation. Who gets to judge that? Should I? I mean, I have a Ph.D. in a mental health field, and I teach theories of personality and development, as well as psychological influencing skills /specifically developed/ to bring about changes in thoughts, feelings, and actions in other people. And most of what people tend to say on MSB about how people's minds and affiliations are changed is just flat nonsense, and tends to completely ignore what would be realistic effects based in appearance, demeanor, apparent social status, in-group markers, and non-verbal communication, as well as the psychological pressure a person can bring in a single moment.

And an accurate system would not be weighted in the target's favor - people are actually pretty easy to manipulate, especially if it's something that they can do in the moment. And if you can get someone to do something in the moment, you can generally get them to do it long-term. You CAN build up obedience in the long term, through small favors that snowball, but you can just as easily do it the other way around if you have the right conditions and skills, and get them to buy in BIG, and then they'll cooperate afterwards even if they hate it, because they feel like if they've done X, they can't back out, or they've invested too much not to do Y as well.

One of the big problems when we start talking about "accurate" depictions of social skill use is that we dump it all on the actor, when one of the major problems is the target. PCs do not act like real people. PCs act like puppets moved around by real people who know that none of the shit in their lives is real. There is no way for an IC actor to authentically recreate the pressure and influence that a good social manipulator can bring to bear, because the target, fundamentally, /does not care/ about the things that a real person in that situation would care about, and don't make decisions as if they do. Instead, the player behind the person is always evaluating on a primary level, "Does this make for fun for me," rather than "would this be compelling for a person who really lived this life". Which is why threats and intimidation hardly ever work in RP - it doesn't matter that someone in that position might actually be terrified of losing their job/life/family, because the PLAYER is more interested in "plucky hero resists" than "cowed victim retreats".

And there's nothing wrong with that. But part of the reasoning of social skill systems is because game designers understand that all that shit has to be abstracted, because it is /impossible to portray accurately/, even assuming that Dunning-Kruger doesn't kick in and suddenly everyone thinks they're an expert in psychology and sociology because hey, they're people, so how hard can it be? What requirements for realism and authenticity are we making on social skill TARGETS, and what is their responsibility for making the play experience of social skill actors fun and realistic? We can't ask everything from one side, and nothing from the other.

[Coin]

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

One of the big problems when we start talking about "accurate" depictions of social skill use is that we dump it all on the actor, when one of the major problems is the target. PCs do not act like real people. PCs act like puppets moved around by real people who know that none of the shit in their lives is real. There is no way for an IC actor to authentically recreate the pressure and influence that a good social manipulator can bring to bear, because the target, fundamentally, /does not care/ about the things that a real person in that situation would care about, and don't make decisions as if they do. Instead, the player behind the person is always evaluating on a primary level, "Does this make for fun for me," rather than "would this be compelling for a person who really lived this life". Which is why threats and intimidation hardly ever work in RP - it doesn't matter that someone in that position might actually be terrified of losing their job/life/family, because the PLAYER is more interested in "plucky hero resists" than "cowed victim retreats".

Yep. This paragraph in specific.

[Arkandel]

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

How exactly do we define "posing quality"?

It would need to be an individual definition. Because there can be no universal one.

The code doesn't know (and can't) how your character is predisposed toward anything. What I presented as atheism/religiousness can be anything - how easily a pretty girl can manipulate him, how she's particularly hostile toward authoritative individuals, how impressionable they are to being complimented, etc.

All of those things can change how you IC react to social manoeuvring. And since only you can know, it stands to reason you should be able to assign modifiers to the attempt - both positive and negative ones - because it absolutely should affect your character's defense - if the other person appealed to one of your weak spots that should count. If they rub your character the wrong way it, too, should matter.

That's what 'posing quality' means in this context.

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said in Social Conflict via Stats:

I'm an Carthian atheist and you're playing a Sanctified. I sit down with your character and he/she 'wins' the religious argument? The IC result could be some more respect for you people. You win another of those? I understand better the role you play and maybe am a bit more sympathetic toward the overall cause. Another? I could be convinced to take minor action - nothing that could do my causes damage but giving you a freebie piece of information maybe - to help you guys out. And so on - each of those arguments being an entire scene.

This is a good description of a normal, mundane situation of influencing others and making friends. It's a bad example because vampires have ways of short-cutting that abruptly.

[Coin]

@Ganymede said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Arkandel said in Social Conflict via Stats:

I'm an Carthian atheist and you're playing a Sanctified. I sit down with your character and he/she 'wins' the religious argument? The IC result could be some more respect for you people. You win another of those? I understand better the role you play and maybe am a bit more sympathetic toward the overall cause. Another? I could be convinced to take minor action - nothing that could do my causes damage but giving you a freebie piece of information maybe - to help you guys out. And so on - each of those arguments being an entire scene.

This is a good description of a normal, mundane situation of influencing others and making friends. It's a bad example because vampires have ways of short-cutting that abruptly.

It's also a bad example within context because we're talking about social (and in a way, mental) stats. So either the PLAYER needs to have a compelling argument, or you can have the dice decide who has the better argument, otherwise, why both rolling? And if you're not gonna roll, why bother with the stat? Just dump it all in physicals...

... and back to square one.

[Arkandel]

@Ganymede I was talking about mundane attributes here. I'm not factoring in supernatural powers which can accelerate or bypass entire stages of social interaction.

Let's get basic stats working first.

[Ganymede]

@Coin said in Social Conflict via Stats:

It's also a bad example within context because we're talking about social (and in a way, mental) stats. So either the PLAYER needs to have a compelling argument, or you can have the dice decide who has the better argument, otherwise, why both rolling? And if you're not gonna roll, why bother with the stat?

I generally don't dice-roll unless I'm trying to achieve a particular result. I think that's a good stick. If you're arguing for the sake of enjoying social RP, you don't really need to roll anything. If you're arguing to persuade someone to do something, then you should probably roll something.

I find this discussion very pointless, as, in my experience, I have had no trouble convincing people with or without rolls to do precisely what my PC wants them to do. Socially, that is.

[Arkandel]

@Coin said in Social Conflict via Stats:

It's also a bad example within context because we're talking about social (and in a way, mental) stats. So either the PLAYER needs to have a compelling argument, or you can have the dice decide who has the better argument, otherwise, why both rolling? And if you're not gonna roll, why bother with the stat? Just dump it all in physicals...

And yet the exact same paradigm exists in many systems for violent encounters. Take the CofD for instance, you have a different negative modifier for brawl than you do against melee and then again than you do against bullets; some characters take more damage from some sources than they do for others.

Notice also that while physical attributes are far easier to quantify and generalise than social ones we still have to consult fairly extensive tables with different modifiers; a broadsword does more harm than a dagger. A rifle does more harm than a pistol but it's slower. Reinforced clothing is worse than body armor but penalises you less.

I don't think then that we're being inconsistent in applying modifiers to social encounters. The only difference is we can't generalise as easily or in advance because there are too many nuances to possibly stick in a table. My assertion is we let the defender do so; if your character is hitting all the right notes I give the attempt a bonus. If they are making a bad offer I assign a penalty.

It sounds reasonable.

[Lisse24]

Because I'm a big believer that there should be a way to use social stats in a game, and if the game is political/non-sandboxy, then you need a way to use social stats against other players, I did a thing.

The attached document is a sample social combat system, written around WoD rules since those seem to be the most prominent. It focuses on effects of social roles, not dictating how a character feels about them. It's slowly escalating, meaning that it takes a lot of work to get someone under your thumb. It gives the defender choice, retains their autonomy over their character, and rewards playing to the situation.

I'm not sure about the 'first to three' rule, but the other option would be imposing a condition on the first roll.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oE0Xw1ydn4o1tgvgdOJOPeTxKwLmhnfaPOuB52gyfSU/edit?usp=sharing

[Arkandel]

I like it, @Lisse24 .

One suggestion: Even if the Initiator's attack fails, the Initiator shouldn't be made aware of it (perhaps not without an Empathy roll); giving people rope to hang themselves should be a valid social strategy.

[surreality]

@Arkandel If I could upvote that a zillion times, I would.

We have a system to buy physical equipment for bonuses, for instance -- armor. It gives us a bonus to resist physical damage.

We do not have a comparable system for social modifiers -- though the same one can 'buy' you positive modifiers (nice clothes, flashy money, though it offers almost nothing for social defenses).

You'd need a much more sprawling system than most things designed for tabletop to really account for some of it properly.

For instance:

• That armor purchase of a bulletproof vest has its armor ratings/etc., but in reality, could potentially give the person +X to 'intimidation by someone with a firearm', too, and be mechanically reasonable.
• Similarly, that gun purchase could give someone an intimidation bonus if it's used in the course of the attempt.
• Some percentage of a firearms stat might be a defense or bonus -- as in, "I know a lot about guns, and he's holding that all wrong; he has a +1 to his roll from his firearms stat, but mine is 3, so I get +3 to my resist, which cancels his advantage out and gives me an advantage," or with reversed numbers, "I know a little about guns, and I can see that guy knows how to use that even better than I do," giving an end result to the intimidation roll on the aggressor's part of +2.

This is a really loose example, but you can probably see what I'm getting at: it requires a somewhat more expansive setup than the kinds of systems we're usually working with, in which things like, say, a weapon's damage rating and durability also now have an intimidation rating and so on.

[Miss Demeanor]

I dislike comparing social 'combat' to physical combat. Even physical combat guidelines and rules are severely dumbed down to make things simple and straight-forward for everyone to deal with. There's plenty of nuance to physical combat, its just been ignored since day one because it would make combat too much of a pain in the ass to deal with. You absolutely could quantify and generalize social interactions, but people don't want to accept what might happen to their characters if you did. Because that would mean you actually could seduce someone away from their significant other, you could be shamed into doing favors for someone else. And people don't like it when they don't have full autonomy over their character. So you will never get that relatively easy ruleset until the players stop bitching about not being in complete control of their character's choices/actions/etc.

[Seraphim73]

@Arkandel What you're discussing is very similar to the system that I'm trying to work out. I very much want coded social combat in the system, but I also want to make sure that no one expects instant-conversions, and to limit the impacts of using the exact wrong argument and still succeeding.

With that in mind I have a section at the beginning of any fight (social or physical) that includes Setting the Stakes. Each of the players involved states what their character intends to do, and the other players state whether this is a reasonable possibility. This is more important for social combat than physical, because we all (or at least most of us) understand and agree upon the physics of real-world physical combat -- the same is not true with social combat, it's more like a Jedi and a Borg trying to agree on whose universe is "right" before beginning a fight between them. The hope is that this will rein in some of the attempts at instant-seduction or instant-conversion or whatever. If the players involved cannot agree, Staff is called in, talks to each individually, and determines the available stakes.

Physical Example One: Player 1: "My character is looking to hit some people to work off some stress, but doesn't want to actually injure anyone." Player 2: "Sure, that sounds good, about what my character wants too." Player 1: "Great, we're agreed."
Physical Example Two: Player 1: "My character wants to rip someone limb from limb and bathe in their blood." Player 2: "Uh... considering you're playing a hacker with a Strength 2, probably not. My character is just looking to escape this attack." Player 1: "Oh, yeah, you're probably right. Well, okay, my character is looking to inflict as much damage as possible with their bare fists." Player 2: "Understood."
Social Example One: Player 1: "My character wants to get a discount of 20-30% on this item." Player 2: "Sounds high, but with some really good rolling, possible. My character wants to mark the item up by 10%." Player 1: "Ouch, over list price? I guess that could be possible with a good argument."
Social Example Two: Player 1: "My character wants to get your character to betray your King and let me in to poison him." Player 2: "Our characters have never met, and mine is a Royal Guard who loves his King. Romantically. Probably not going to happen." Player 1: "Hrm, how about casting doubt on the King's fidelity to crack some of that resolve?" Player 2: "Sounds plausible, we'll go with that. My character is trying to resist this argument and get your character to go away."

The second part is adding a step before rolling, and another before posing for social combat. Yes, this makes social combat more involved, but again, we have to define the world the characters are playing in before poses make sense. The first step is for each character to state (generally) what tact they're taking. The other character then provides a bonus or penalty for the attack based on how effective that argument would be. The second step is where the defender reconciles the attack with their character. If the argument was ridiculous but the roll was excellent (countering the penalty and beyond), then the player has a chance to suggest some ideas to the attacker's player that might explain why it worked. Sadly, it requires rational adults on both sides, so I don't know if it would ever work in a public system.

Example One: Player 1: "Since my character knows that yours just got out of a bad long-term relationship, she's going to suggest that the characters should totally have a one-night stand at a later date." Player 2: "Ouch. Sadly, he's really against one-night stands. Like, really, really against. Probably a -3? My character is going to try to suggest that yours chase after Bobby instead." Player 1: "Oooh, my character thinks Bobby's a hunk, +1." Rolls are made, Character 1 wins despite the penalty. Player 2: "Hrm, wow. Okay, so maybe it's not so much suggesting a one-night stand as simply friends with benefits at a later date? No romantic entanglements, but not something utterly meaningless? Or maybe she plays it cool and just suggests going out for drinks to complain about the bad breakup with the idea that she'll get him drunk and try again?" Player 1: "Okay, that second idea sounds workable, I'll go with that."
Example Two: Player 1: "I'm going to appeal to your character's love for protecting innocents by claiming that the rebels I want him to smuggle out of the city are actually innocents the government is hunting." Player 2: "That's a good idea. I think that's probably a +2. It would be a +3 if your character had evidence that they were innocents. My character's just hanging in there, clinging to his oaths of allegiance." Player 1: "Yeah, no modifier, obviously." Character 1 rolls well, Character 2 rolls poorly. Player 1: "How about noting that a couple of the rebels are women, and one is a teenager?" Player 2: "Yeah, that sounds like a great way to handle that social beat-down."
Example Three: One round, Character 1 tries to straight-up intimidate Character 2, with Player 2 deciding that since their character is tough and nasty themselves, that's a -1 penalty. Character 1 grumbles to themselves, but accepts it. The rolls are mixed, and no one makes much progress. The next round, Player 1 decides their character is going to threaten Character 2's family. Player 2 states that this would never work, and it's a -2 penalty. Player 1 protests, stating that Character 2 has stated how much they love their family in past RP, and in fact has the Quirk "Family Conscious." Player 2 is adamant, because they don't want to lose. Staff is called in, the situation is explained (in individual pages with each player to make sure it doesn't devolve into an OOC shouting match between the players), and Staff declares that the threat to the family is actually a +3 bonus. Rolls are made.

Edit: Formatting is apparently hard, even when it's that simple.

[Arkandel]

@Miss-Demeanor said in Social Conflict via Stats:

And people don't like it when they don't have full autonomy over their character. So you will never get that relatively easy ruleset until the players stop bitching about not being in complete control of their character's choices/actions/etc.

Absolutely. That's why I keep repeating the same thing (so forgive me one more try ) - in order for a social stats system to have a chance of being culturally accepted and actually used, as opposed to being merely forced on people, it must offer something we don't currently have.

In other words it can't just be an addon to the way we already play in scenes. That's a disadvantage then. It's interrupting scenes which already flow a certain way with extra delays for OOC conversations, dice rolls, looking up tables, debating mechanics, etc.

What it must do is make things better than what we are doing now. And not just better because 'whelp, we are using social stats now' - that's the goal, not the means. We must answer the question 'how is this making things more fun than before? convincingly.

[lordbelh]

The problem with the Doors system, to whoever mentioned that, is that it was utterly in favor of the aggressor. With the amount of XP a regular character on a MU WOD game carries, they could fail like 5 percent of the time (not even talking about a fully stacked specialist who just couldn't fail.). Now in 2.0 they've added more defensive merits to try to balance things more, but even now it heavily favors the aggressor unless you've bought said merits. '

Which makes it a bad pvp system, unless you modify it.

ETA: How is this different from combat? If you start a fight you run a serious risk of losing. There's a puncher's chance of even a mediocre combat character giving you a bloody nose and some humiliation unless you're an absolute beast. And you know, there are risks and consequences of throwing your physical weight around, entirely unrelated to how it goes in the actual fight.

Social combat then shouldn't offer the same absolute success, the same visceral 'I win for completely' reward, because it doesn't come with the same 'I could totally lose completely' risk.

[Thenomain]

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

With the amount of XP a regular character on a MU WOD game carries

And so the issue once again comes back to: Most tabletop games cannot handle a persistent 24/7 environment without changing the game.

The problem with solving this problem is often: We don't know what won't work until we've committed to the change. c.f., Reach/Fallcoast's Infinite XP issue. It's too late for them, but it's not too late for you.

Another change, of course, would be tweaking Doors to better defend at higher XP values, making the characters absolute unflappable badasses in the face of the average American criminal system, which isn't bad but may be comedy gold.

[Ganymede]

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

Social combat then shouldn't offer the same absolute success, the same visceral 'I win for completely' reward, because it doesn't come with the same 'I could totally lose completely' risk.

You could always have a buy-out situation, where you can terminate the results through an expenditure of WP or something. That might be a shut-down of a situation, thus ending the "social combat" right there.

[Arkandel]

@lordbelh said in Social Conflict via Stats:

The problem with the Doors system, to whoever mentioned that, is that it was utterly in favor of the aggressor.

See, in a table-top setting that isn't so bad. It works for the same reason combat does - things aren't meant to be too nuanced or realistic, especially since it's written to be used on NPCs; the idea is that physical combat must resolve. You can't have defences too high because then no one would win in a reasonable amount of time, which for combat is a complete downer. You need a winner and a loser! So these mechanics are biased toward declaring an outcome either way.

In social interactions not so much! You can absolutely have debates where it's utterly impossible to change the other person's mind... and if anyone has doubts about this, read this MSB thread. Read almost any thread. Or argue politics with that stubborn old uncle of yours who thinks Trump will fix the world. You can have a great argument, articulate it perfectly and yet still fail to convince the other person... simply because they refuse to budge.

And that should be fine, too. Unlike physical combat there should be topics where you just can't make much progress at all because it's a core tenet of the other character, or they just don't like yours or any number of things. And the opposite of course; maybe my character has Strong Beliefs but he's a sucker for a hot chick, so when she comes onto him he crumbles.