Posting this here because I was an unintentional jerk and accidentally kind of participated in derailing an advertisement thread with this... and besides, it's relevant to far more than just one game.
Social combat is one of those things that has always been a huge headache for games, and I've been looking more and more seriously at trying to design a solution for that.
In particular, physical combat is easy. There's no "I found your sword-strike unconvincing"; you got hit, you got hit. Social combat, though? That's harder to define.
Let's say you're holding a secret that could get someone you care about killed; a mother, an uncle, a lover, whatever. I suspect you're hiding something, so I +check a given stat and succeed highly, and go "Are you hiding something?" Let's say you say yes, so I immediately roll a 'manipulation' check and then say "Great, I convinced you: tell me the secret." At which point you go, "I don't want my character to die just because you rolled high manipulation", and call staff in.
This is a giant headache for staff, and often leads to bitterness. Either the person who suddenly had to give up their secret is bitter, or the person who has amazing manipulation dice and yet didn't get to use them to learn a useful secret is bitter.
Moreover, while physical combat usually only needs to encapsulate ranged and melee combat, social combat needs to cover a variety of things. The ones I see are:
- Logical arguments (debate, from the head)
- Manipulative arguments
- Insulting/satirical arguments
- Maybe also passionate arguments ('how can you stand by and allow...')?
Given that, what I keep meaning to do somewhere someday is actual combat, but with various 'methods' as weapons. So just like you have big weapons that use 'huge wpn' as the skill, daggers that use 'small wpn', etc., you would have satire, logic, manipulation, etc.
When you started a 'social combat', you'd set some sort of goal from a list of 3 or 4 'types' of combat, and the 'hitpoints' would be based off things accordingly. Are you trying to convince your opponent? Base it off willpower+perception. Or maybe you are trying to humilate them, in which case you base it off of reputation.
Then you'd get to wield 'manipulation' (works off of charm + manipulation, countered by the higher of willpower for resistance or perception for "I see through you"), 'logic' (works off of intellect and whatever, countered by intellect), 'satire' (works off of charm and entertainment/riddles/whatever, countered by... I don't know, but something), etc.
And you'd do 'damage' to the hitpoints—the resistance—of the other person. When someone is 'knocked out', your argument has convinced them.
It has the benefit of reusing a lot of a given game's combat code, so social and physical combat can share a lot of functionality. Not to mention you have the fun of trying to figure out someone's weak points. High intellect, but low willpower? You want manipulation rather than logic to try to win them to your opposing viewpoint, clearly.
And while you might STILL run into the problem of "I don't want to give up the secret that will get my loved one killed", it's less likely to be a bitter point than it is off of a single set of rolls.
Plus, I think those sort of social combats would just be FUN to watch and to play.
I don't know what others think, though. Since I am kind of trying to build a toolkit for stuff like this, I'm curious whether others think this would be fun...