Eliminating social stats

[Lain]

@bored

To a point you're right, taking out the systems comes down on the side of people who prefer RP.

You're conflating "RP" with "social RP." The two are not interchangeable, even though you may think so.

Anyway, I don't mean to overly single you out for hostility other than to point out the at this point comical ludicrousness of people having this argument seriously the number of times they do. Sorry you got to the party late, but you really aren't adding anything.

Actually, writing poses after social rolls wasn't suggested in this thread at all, and everybody was speaking in terms of posing your attempt first and rolling to see if it works. In the context of this thread, that is new.

I agree that it's a tough thing to get into. But I just get the impression that there's also a psychology of "autonomy," where people are much more comfortable admitting that their character might not have a particular skillset or domain knowledge than they are admitting that their character quite legitimately can be deceived, manipulated, or intimidated. People tend to believe that they are "above the bullshit" and, by extension, so are their characters.

I think a great deal of why people are opposed to social dice mattering much is because it not only acknowledges, but rubs the player's face in, the reality that in some cases their characters are decidedly not above the bullshit, and are in fact subject to it like the rest of us.

@Salty-Secrets

@Lain I like this idea a lot but having a third party present for every social roll who knows enough about what's going on to make suggestions like that might be a bit harder than just having a third party who can spot and penalize absurd uses of the code. I have to yield to @Arkandel and @Thenomain when they say having a third party at all isn't feasible if social conflict is an every-day thing.

You'd only need a third party when someone tries to cop out of the roll outcomes or overplay their hand on them. "I get so intimidated it triggers my fight instinct" is one such example. You can even incentivize playing nice and not calling on the GM/Wiz/ST to babysit you by saying that if you get called out, and then the babysitter comes, and you're found to be in the wrong, then you lose XP or something. You get punished for wasting their time.

@Arkandel

So this is a real issue with these skills - politics, lying, manipulating, etc - when the roleplay points in one direction and the skills in a different one. If a guy comes to my PC, makes a fucking dumb proposal while insulting my woman in the process and he's caught at a lie but has high social stats then apparently I'm supposed to ignore the roleplay and just go with the results of a roll? Yes. That's... basically what MU* systems say. If I don't then I'm not playing right.

This is actually why I brought up roll-first-pose-later earlier. I agree, expecting dumb poses to yield positive results is dumb. But if you lose the roll, and the player is a bit awkward, the player can ask you, OOC, "So what kind of thing would persuade your character to do X for him?" You answer OOC, he writes a pose to that effect, and you go on your way. Sure, there's an extra step, but it allows one character to be subordinated to another with less opportunity for stupid shit.

@faraday Highlighting your name because my response to Arkandel is basically my response to you.

@Salty-Secrets

Cooking meth would in most role-play I've ever been a part of be handled by saying, "My character cooks meth." and then rolling. The same goes with hacking, cooking, hunting and sometimes even combat with a simple "I swing my sword" or "I fire my shotgun". You can also google most practical skills like that and make a convincing pose if you had to.

Maybe my experience with this sort of thing is different, but I hang out with STEM people. If you say "I cook meth," and then you follow it up with something that's incorrect to the end of cooking meth (like my "mix ammonia with bleach" example), they'll call you on it. Even if a non-STEM person wouldn't be able to pick up on it, the people I spend my time will. So @faraday's expectation of a Hollywood-esque explanation wouldn't cut it because I spend my time with a pharmaceutical manufacturer with a background in chemical engineering, and he'd call you on it fast. I spend time with people who know what they're doing on a wide variety of topics, and if I get into even slightly incorrect specifics, their suspension of disbelief will be undermined dramatically.

That's why I can say "I cook the meth" and it will fly because I'm not specifying how. Basically, I think you're presupposing that the only thing that can be held to realistic standards is social interaction.

Lying, impressing, manipulating people is on the other hand almost always role-played out fully and responses to it must be role-played out fully as well.

I've seen people in my group say that they lie to the town guards and just roll a bluff check. They leave it at that. This is considered acceptable. I understand the desire to write elaborate poses to the effect you desire, but this can be accomplished with roll-first-pose-later without expecting people to be who they roleplay as.

[Thenomain]

@Lain

You may be running into an interesting community conceit: That we RP for immersion. Tabletops, as we know, RP for many reasons but mostly for sitting around playing a game.

I'd like to hear how your friends would do in a LARP or other situation where personal actions are more to the fore, and not 'I lie <clatter of dice> and win!'

[faraday]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

Maybe my experience with this sort of thing is different, but I hang out with STEM people. If you say "I cook meth," and then you follow it up with something that's incorrect to the end of cooking meth (like my "mix ammonia with bleach" example), they'll call you on it.

Sure, there are players like that. Those are the same people who will refuse to watch Breaking Bad because they got some silly detail wrong. But most people are used to fiction not getting things exactly right. That's why we have the tern "suspension of disbelief". The trick is to suspend the disbelief and not beat it into a bloody pulp. That line varies by individual, but somewhere in the middle is the "generally acceptable" Hollywood zone.

There is a spectrum between "story" and "game". If you fall more on the "game" side of the spectrum, you'll be totally fine with a pose saying "... and then Cate treats the patient" followed by a Medicine roll. But if you fall more on the "story" side of the spectrum, that's going to be wholly unsatisfying. It would be like reading a James Patterson novel where the meat of the investigation was... "And then the detectives found some clues". Good writers have to do their research. In my experience, the best RPers do too.

[Sunny]

I cannot imagine playing tabletop with people like that. I'd do it once with that group and NEVER AGAIN. It sounds terrible and miserable.

[Lain]

@faraday So if you can suspend disbelief for factual inaccuracy, why not for low interpersonal skill? I think it really does come down to not wanting to have it rubbed in your face that your character is not "above the bullshit." So even though people fall for obvious lies both in real life and in fiction all the time, if a player's bullshit detector goes off, then there's this illusion that it must also go off for the character in order to maintain suspension of disbelief.

I'd go as far as to call it an IC/OOC conflation to the extent that it indicates a floundering theory of mind in the person doing the RP. I wouldn't mind spending a ton of my IC points on things like Resolve/Composure in the interest of making my character actually "above the bullshit."

EDIT:
@Sunny

I cannot imagine playing tabletop with people like that. I'd do it once with that group and NEVER AGAIN. It sounds terrible and miserable.

I have a great deal of fun with these people.

[bored]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

Actually, writing poses after social rolls wasn't suggested in this thread at all, and everybody was speaking in terms of posing your attempt first and rolling to see if it works. In the context of this thread, that is new.

No one has Godwinned the thread yet, either. That doesn't making bringing up Hitler a novel argumentation strategy.

But if you think you just invented 'roll then pose' vs 'pose then roll' and are introducing some great ray of enlightenment here... I don't know what to tell you. That's cute? You're cute!

You still are not adding anything, and you will not add anything. You can continue to write great treatises on this subject, but your content has 100% been covered before. We've been grappling with this for decades, and it's been the same conversation almost every time. You're by all means encouraged to argue for arguing's sake to convince people who have entrenched their positions over said decades, just be aware that's all you're doing.

People tend to believe that they are "above the bullshit" and, by extension, so are their characters.

And this is why the argument will never go anywhere. I'm glad you at least comprehend the futility!

[Sunny]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@faraday So if you can suspend disbelief for factual inaccuracy, why not for low interpersonal skill? I think it really does come down to not wanting to have it rubbed in your face that your character is not "above the bullshit." So even though people fall for obvious lies both in real life and in fiction all the time, if a player's bullshit detector goes off, then there's this illusion that it must also go off for the character in order to maintain suspension of disbelief.

I'd go as far as to call it an IC/OOC conflation to the extent that it indicates a floundering theory of mind in the person doing the RP. I wouldn't mind spending a ton of my IC points on things like Resolve/Composure in the interest of making my character actually "above the bullshit."

This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.

[Lain]

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

You still are not adding anything, and you will not add anything. You can continue to write great treatises on this subject, but your content has 100% been covered before. We've been grappling with this for decades, and it's been the same conversation almost every time. You're by all means encouraged to argue for arguing's sake to convince people who have entrenched their positions over said decades, just be aware that's all you're doing.

If I'm not adding anything, then neither are you, or anybody else for that matter. Which raises the question of, why are you getting so butthurt at me in particular?

[Lain]

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.

No more than people insisting that if you are bad with people IRL then by extension so must your character. If "it's just personal preference" can justify abolishing social but not mental skills, then logically, the inverse can also be true. I'm in favor of neither, mind you.

[faraday]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

So if you can suspend disbelief for factual inaccuracy, why not for low interpersonal skill?

Various folks have tried several times to explain why, but since it was buried in other walls of text, I will pull them out for emphasis:

1. Because social ability comes up in literally every pose, whereas those other skills are not "in your face" as often.

2. Because what (most of us) are griping about is not the borderline "I can suspend my disbelief" zone, but the "OMG really?" cringe-worthy stuff like in @Arkandel's recent example.

ETA a recently-made point:

3. Because dialogue is, by convention, not abstracted in MUs.

[Lain]

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

So if you can suspend disbelief for factual inaccuracy, why not for low interpersonal skill?

Various folks have tried several times to explain why, but since it was buried in other walls of text, I will pull them out for emphasis:

1. Because social ability comes up in literally every pose, whereas those other skills are not "in your face" as often.

2. Because what (most of us) are griping about is not the borderline "I can suspend my disbelief" zone, but the "OMG really?" cringe-worthy stuff like in @Arkandel's recent example.

1. I'm not sure if you've ever read a combat pose.

2. Bleach-and-ammonia analogy. It's so obviously wrong that your cook meth roll should autofail. And further analogously, this thinking says "I cook meth" should not cut it.

[Sunny]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.

No more than people insisting that if you are bad with people IRL then by extension so must your character. If "it's just personal preference" can justify abolishing social but not mental skills, then logically, the inverse can also be true. I'm in favor of neither, mind you.

There's a huge, very significant difference, actually. I can see why you would be in favor of rollplay instead of roleplay where it comes to social skills, if you seriously equate these things out to the same sort of thing. Apples and rocks.

[faraday]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

1. I'm not sure if you've ever read a combat pose.

LOL. I'm not even going to respond to that one.

2. Bleach-and-ammonia analogy. It's so obviously wrong that your cook meth roll should autofail. And further analogously, this thinking says "I cook meth" should not cut it.

So then that one is cringe-worthy. Somewhere in between would be the Hollywood zone.

[Thenomain]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

You still are not adding anything, and you will not add anything. You can continue to write great treatises on this subject, but your content has 100% been covered before. We've been grappling with this for decades, and it's been the same conversation almost every time. You're by all means encouraged to argue for arguing's sake to convince people who have entrenched their positions over said decades, just be aware that's all you're doing.

If I'm not adding anything, then neither are you, or anybody else for that matter. Which raises the question of, why are you getting so butthurt at me in particular?

Not just you. He got pretty butthurt at me too, but he has the added benefit of being able to accuse you of being a newbie and therefore ignorant, either to your benefit yet insulting the discussion ("you don't know better") or to attack you ("you came in here thinking you can change things").

At this point I think it's just safer to ignore his polemic against the discussion of alternative solutions, which is his true goal. This isn't too uncommon here. Welcome to Soapbox.

[bored]

@Lain I am participating in the thread to support @Arkandel's general notion that the best solution to this whole thing is probably to throw it in a flaming hobo garbage can fire. Ditch social skills so the argument doesn't even exist about what they can do, or reformat them into appropriate NPC-oriented tools for games where that is relevant (it wont always be).

To an extent, part of that means also giving up these stupid arguments where people think they know the One True Way of how social dice ought to work and will keep talking about it until the heat death of the universe. You are coming in as a very amusingly zealous version of that, so, I dunno, convenient target?

[Lain]

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.

No more than people insisting that if you are bad with people IRL then by extension so must your character. If "it's just personal preference" can justify abolishing social but not mental skills, then logically, the inverse can also be true. I'm in favor of neither, mind you.

There's a huge, very significant difference, actually. I can see why you would be in favor of rollplay instead of roleplay where it comes to social skills, if you seriously equate these things out to the same sort of thing. Apples and rocks.

The difference isn't that huge depending on how the game pans out, though. Since I spent time with engineers and scientists, entire sessions have gone by with us trying to figure out how to fortify Sanctums and stuff like that.

One time my ST, during an Investigation/Academics session when we were trying to figure out how one of our enemies worked, said that each success on a roll would yield one relevant book on the topic from the library. When we got three successes, he literally pulled the three books off of his shelf and handed it to the party. This represented a number of hours of IG "study." That session, and the one following it, was about finding out exactly what within these books held the relevant details.

It wasn't very social at all. To make the game not entirely about that, we've done things like have someone roll Politics when it comes to dealing with Consilium bureaucrats if they come around to give us shit about what we're building.

So yeah, it's literally a matter of personal preference. I think you're invalidating Mental-heavy players in favor of Social-heavy ones because you think the latter is "real RP" and the former simply is not.

[Pyrephox]

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.

No more than people insisting that if you are bad with people IRL then by extension so must your character. If "it's just personal preference" can justify abolishing social but not mental skills, then logically, the inverse can also be true. I'm in favor of neither, mind you.

There's a huge, very significant difference, actually. I can see why you would be in favor of rollplay instead of roleplay where it comes to social skills, if you seriously equate these things out to the same sort of thing. Apples and rocks.

I feel like the "rollplay vs. roleplay" thing ought to be the RPG equivalent of Godwin's Law, complete with the "and the invoker automatically loses".

Personally, I've never once had anyone be able to coherently explain to me what is WRONG with "rollplay". I, at least, am here to play a game. It's a game where you play a role, yes, but I've always been perfectly clear that it's a game where you play the interesting parts of a character in a world that is perceived, in part, through the abstracted framework of mechanics and rules, which also includes rolling dice to add an additional element of tension and chance to the game. I can accept that for hit points, for magic powers, for montage mechanics, for PC auras and every other silly, unrealistic, and often counterintuitive part of RPGs, and I can accept it for social mechanics, as well.

Because I'm playing a game. Games are fun, and I'm definitely not ashamed of playing one.

[faraday]

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

Personally, I've never once had anyone be able to coherently explain to me what is WRONG with "rollplay".

I think the mistake people make is equating it to "right or wrong" instead of calling it what it is: a spectrum.

ROLL <---------------------------------------> WRITE

Or to put it another way:

GAME <---------------------------------------> STORY

Different people have different preferences and fall on different parts of that spectrum. Different games do too. But I think that MU*s in general fall more to the right side of the spectrum, whereas MUDs and MMOs in general fall more to the left side.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is somebody saying that someone whose preferences fall on a different part of the spectrum is an idiot or playing MU*s "wrong". (Not saying you were; just saying in general.)

[Thenomain]

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.

No more than people insisting that if you are bad with people IRL then by extension so must your character. If "it's just personal preference" can justify abolishing social but not mental skills, then logically, the inverse can also be true. I'm in favor of neither, mind you.

There's a huge, very significant difference, actually. I can see why you would be in favor of rollplay instead of roleplay where it comes to social skills, if you seriously equate these things out to the same sort of thing. Apples and rocks.

I feel like the "rollplay vs. roleplay" thing ought to be the RPG equivalent of Godwin's Law, complete with the "and the invoker automatically loses".

Personally, I've never once had anyone be able to coherently explain to me what is WRONG with "rollplay".

I completely agree with you, but I think that my earlier comment explains it for me:

You may be running into an interesting community conceit: That we RP for immersion.

I do think that it is a conceit, a presumption, something that may not need to be true but a lot of people and a lot of games push. Writing is the foundation of what you do when you have a text-only environment so it's not unreasonable that people would float over to a kind of "it's either writing or it's in the way" philosophy. The problem being that it's not always easy to decide how to work with other people's styles.

I think it's critical that people do so, but people play for so many reasons I wouldn't even know how to begin.

Maybe some kind of coded system?

--

(If you can't figure out that's a joke, that's a joke.)

---

edit: Ninja'd by @faraday, but she makes the point much better than I did. She states what are probably truisms reflecting on not just us, but the entire RPG industry.

[Pyrephox]

@faraday Nah.

Putting it as a continuum suggests that you can't have or want both. I do. I value good writing, I value good mechanics. I value good story, I value good game. It's entirely possible to do both.

Moreover, I think it's a false dichotomy and has little to do with the behavior observed. I don't want people to follow the social mechanics of a game because I value "game" over "story", I do so because value congeniality among players, even if I don't always live up to my own standards. Which means recognizing and not punishing other players for wanting to take a walk on the wild side and play something outside of their comfort zone or their personal capabilities. Sometimes, that means rolling your eyes at your computer, and then letting something go so that someone else can have as much fun being badass and awesome as you (presumably) do. Sometimes it means compromising on your Grand Writing Vision of your character and sucking up a loss or a setback that you didn't meticulously plot out in advance. Sometimes it means reaching out OOC and just saying, "Hey, I see you're trying to get my character to do X, and you rolled really well, but that strategy isn't going to work. With Empathy 5, you'd probably know that my character would be far more susceptable to bribery than bluster. Would you like to rewind and try a different pose?"

As a side note, that's why I've always appreciated games where it was accepted/allowed to note on a wiki/desc/whatever when someone had exceptionally high social skills. That way, I can give more emotional information to people with better empathy, I can pose being routinely more charmed by charming people, or edgy and wary around intimidating people. I consider doing those things to be my side of making the game a fun and enjoyable experience for everyone. If I want to just be in charge and decide all the factors of the world, then I write books.