@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.