Eliminating social stats

Meg

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

@Meg said in Eliminating social stats:

I think, if you are only selling physical stats and skills, you are giving a big, big advantage to players who are just good roleplayers.

I can't think of a better endorsement than that, even if @Meg didn't mean it that way.

'Good' roleplayer is subjective in this circumstance and I should have clarified. Good being, I am charming and I can write the pretty words. Good being, people tend to like me OOCly. Good being that I have no social issues that might prevent me from realizing how to play people ICly.

Good does not include people that might be awesome people that are struggling to find hooks. Good does not include people that add to the game, even if not everyone likes their pose style. Etc etc.

Lain

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:

@ThatOneDude said in Eliminating social stats:

But couldn't you /deprive agency/ with physical stats? IE: I grapple you and force you to stay when you want to leave. Or using force/violence I could make your PC do something they normally wouldn't. That's why to me it just makes sense to have a like for like system, that has like attack/defense. Then follow up with the "if you don't feel good with what's happening then fade to black or whatever."

By "agency," I mean intent and thought, rather than actual ability. As mentioned by another, grappling me is different than using some power or social ability to prevent me from resisting. You could physically force me to back down, or do it via power. I personally don't mind someone depriving me of agency, but it is a sticking point for others due to past histories, creepers, etc.

I think part of the point of social stats is to deprive targets of the exact kind of agency you describe, though. Let's say I want to use Intimidate in a WoD game. My character is annoyed with someone, so they decide to rob them. He pulls out his knife, waves it in the guy's face, and says, "Gimme all yer money!" with the intention of compelling him to do just that.

We do our roll of dice, and my guy wins; the target is intimidated. Now, obviously, the point of intimidation is to compel someone to do something -- or refrain from doing something -- they otherwise wouldn't because they're scared of you. In this case, the point would be to make him fork over his cash and then act scared and maybe piss his pants or something. It would be to make him bend the knee, so to speak, and act like he's scared of getting stabbed.

However, by giving players "agency" over their characters, you allow them to cop out of the real outcomes of the dice rolls, by coming up with cute and interesting ways to evade the point of the rolls at hand, and ignore the context that their characters are put in:

"Oh, my character is just soooooooo intimidated by this that his fight-or-flight response triggers and he comes at you. Roll initiative."

Arkandel

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:
I think part of the point of social stats is to deprive targets of the exact kind of agency you describe, though. Let's say I want to use Intimidate in a WoD game. My character is annoyed with someone, so they decide to rob them. He pulls out his knife, waves it in the guy's face, and says, "Gimme all yer money!" with the intention of compelling him to do just that.

We do our roll of dice, and my guy wins; the target is intimidated. Now, obviously, the point of intimidation is to compel someone to do something -- or refrain from doing something -- they otherwise wouldn't because they're scared of you. In this case, the point would be to make him fork over his cash and then act scared and maybe piss his pants or something. It would be to make him bend the knee, so to speak, and act like he's scared of getting stabbed.

That's one of the major reasons I'm considering eliminating social stats.

Sure, you roll, the other guy rolls, you win... and then what? Did you scare the target shitless? Is the way they're responding adequately scared? What if you think they're kinda meh about it but their player thinks that's just how the PC shows fear? What if they recover in the next pose, is that too early? Are you supposed to scare the Elder by glaring at him, you neonate? What about in the next scene, should there be a lingering effect?

Sure, various systems and mechanics attempt to address the scope of social stats but I've just...never been satisfied with them. The primary issue is that they're typically pretty complicated - but unlike punching (which happens rarely since violent confrontations aren't an everyday thing), social interactions take place constantly, so if it's not easy to use such a system then it won't be... which may be worse than not having one at all.

Misadventure

For politics how will you measure political astuteness, procedural knowledge, and the ability to gauge the public and the leaderships attitudes and moods? How about the ability to wrangle a deal that matters to the person more than to their represented interests, or more one set of interests over another?

These are all social skills in my eyes. They all come under Ganymede's Guile, representing knowledge of options, and the ability to assess which approaches will be most likely get you want you want the most effectively.

To me politics are all about external interests, effectively a ton of markers, some of which are mutual exclusive, some of partially exclusive (such as which port gets the trade deal), and many are just little things that are the base currency of doing your job representing the people/assets you do.

It can't all be cold hard math. There has to be more need than resources, which forces choices, which can enable tradeoffs, which can cause people and places to rise or decline. So its people, and that means social skills.

Ganymede

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

However, by giving players "agency" over their characters, you allow them to cop out of the real outcomes of the dice rolls, by coming up with cute and interesting ways to evade the point of the rolls at hand, and ignore the context that their characters are put in.

I know. I recognize that this is a possible outcome. But if it happens, would you ever play with that person again? Would you report them to staff? I would.

Maintaining a player of "agency" is negative when used like this, but it is positive and important when you have a player trying to use Intimidate or Dominate to get into someone else's pants or skirt. And for all the times I've had some player punk out of a legitimate social roll -- which happens regardless of whether the stats exist -- I'd rather that happen than to hear that someone rolled to seduce an unwilling player's character, and then had that enforced by staff who were "just following the rules."

As an improv performer, I'd frown at the douchebag who acts inappropriately to intimidation, but I'd seriously beat the fuck out of anyone breaking the cardinal rule of "don't be a fucking sexual predator."

Arkandel

@Misadventure said in Eliminating social stats:

For politics how will you measure political astuteness, procedural knowledge, and the ability to gauge the public and the leaderships attitudes and moods?

If that's the course the game takes, I won't. The game won't. Its players will be the ones to determine how their characters are perceiving these things.

Misadventure

If the players have to perceive, then they need all the information like a sim. That's not doable.

Abstracted information needs abstracted ability to assess it.

And the abstracted system needs to respond in a reasonable though not always predictable way. Otherwise all this deal making may as well be people exchanging MLP stickers for vegetable scraps and saying they control the world.

Ganymede

@Misadventure said in Eliminating social stats:

These are all social skills in my eyes. They all come under Ganymede's Guile, representing knowledge of options, and the ability to assess which approaches will be most likely get you want you want the most effectively.

To be fair, I boiled it all down to Guile because the game's supposed to be a war game, mostly, with a lot of pew-pew-pew and a lot of boom.

Ghost

I'm a strong supporter of social stats and social combat

I think physical and mental skills (more physical than mental) get a regular pass because most physical is up to a roll of the dice and stats which can be optimized. Many players like to base the mental knowledge of their character based on their OOC knowledge or ability to Google, but neither really require much panache on the user-end.

In roleplaying or in MU (prose-based roleplaying), the expectation is that your words, actions, and intentions matter when getting your character's personality out there. It is a CORE element of the hobby that needs to be in place, but also, like GooglingKnowledgeSkills, replacing it with a quasi-meta agreement system and diceless pass/fail is a step in the wrong direction.

Really, the core of this topic is winners and losers, and when it comes to social combat, it doesn't matter how convincing the player feels their argument is. THEY are not the character. They are feeding lines to their character and rolling to determine, all dialogue validity aside, how convincingly deceptive, persuasive, or impressive their character translates those lines to their IC audience.

Many of these games are an ever-present source of stalemate due to entire crowds of players avoiding each other due to an inability to concede loss or victory because both sides want to win those situations, and doing away with social stats, dice, and social combat will solidify said 'You win when I say you do' approach as a standard.

It is my opinion that, instead, we work the other direction and start enabling people to have more IC social victories at the cost of leveraging IC risk, and one way we can achieve that is by letting dice aid in that process.

And, of course, never allow dice to justify things that are banned behaviors on the game.

Rook

Interesting thought. It came up in a conversation once about balancing RP-vs-RollPlay by doing some sort of MMO cool-down mechanic on social skill rolls. It was intriguing, and if I recall, we couldn't think of a good way to balance things properly code-wise, but the idea was this:

Goal: Player with tendency to rollplay a lot needs to be curbed. Solution: Each use of a "social skill" kicked a timer, and outside of any sort of timestop/combatstop scene, is tracked. Every subsequent usage of that "social skill" incurred a penalty until the "cooldown timer" reached zero once more.
Goal: Players that only use rolls sparingly (with the assumption of 'correctly', whatever that meant) would instead build a buffer between long RP droughts of that usage. This is where we ran into logic issues on how to figure that out, mind you. But on first usage, that bonus would indeed be manifested as a +2 bonus (or equiv).

The whole idea was exciting to think through, and while certainly gameable (what mechanic isn't), it was impossible to come up with a way to code it that didn't just end up being fruitless in the end.

The idea was kind of cool, though. Bob never uses intimidate, even when given a chance or three to do so... instead saving it to that One Time when he really pulls it off to high character effect and story impact: browbeating the detective to let them go.

Ghost

@Rook Interesting idea.

I often joke that Social Manipulation skills are often more dice worthy than a shotgun in your inventory, because technically a well placed lie can recruit cops with shotguns to shoot at the bad man with the gun who is chasing you...because you just robbed him.

I hate to see that stuff overused, but it's all risk vs reward and if people don't min-max, they should have some dice to use in defense.

One thing I HATE seeing is min-maxing and ignoring social skills because nobody uses them anyway, unless theyre needed for some kind of Vampire power.

Rook

Someone pointed out that these little boosts were why Willpower expenditures were around in WoD, that pool slowly refilling over time. I think that is when we sort of abandoned the idea. There was also the idea of using Luck Points as roll boosters, and those only being refilled by giving back to the game, the story, something... not just XP votes (though we were allowing people to buy Luck Points with XP).

Ghost

One more quandary to bring to the table:

If social skills/stats are eliminated from sheets, then games and characters can become sorely imbalanced.

The reason these game systems, from D&D to WoD, ALL include social stats and the need to spend points in them that you'd otherwise spend elsewhere, is to result in a standing example of what that character is or is not good at. It lets the players and GMs know the strengths and weaknesses of a character.

Cut social out:

I spent all of my points in combat skills, and since I didnt have to buy socials, since I can make convincing arguments, my soldier with zero social experience is every bit as deceptive and clever as Littlefinger from GoT

If both social and knowledge skills are handwaved based on OOC attempt:

I put ALL of my points into combat skills, so my soldier character is primed for all things combat, but due to my Google-skills and ability to form OOC explanations, he is an adept spy and understands the engineering capability of long range ICBMs because I understand these things...but didn't want to spend the points I wanted to put towards combat for him to know these things.

It becomes a Mary-Sue formula, and removing the need to declare strengths and weaknesses by means of chargen only makes it more of an issue.

Ganymede

@Ghost said in Eliminating social stats:

If social skills/stats are eliminated from sheets, then games and characters can become sorely imbalanced.

Unless the game's setting and structure makes social and intellectual skills secondary or unimportant. Example: BSG: Unification, where having a particular secondary skill may make it easier to do a task or two, but actions otherwise revolve around a core of action skills relevant to combat.

@Meg's point is probably the most compelling. Eliminating social stats would give savvy players like @HelloRaptor an advantage over players that couldn't persuade Madonna to give it up for a bag of Peeps.

Rook

What if you DID cut out all social interaction skills? What if you just replaced it with another system instead of +roll?

Give players a pool of, I dunno... Influence and Resistance (marketing team working on a better pool name, TBD). From that pool of points, players can exert pressures of any social sort. Resistance is spent equally from the same pool, but here's the trick: Comparisons on spends are not revealed until both have decided, so it is a blind system.

Bob wants to intimidate the Detective, so after his amazing pose, he +spends 5 Influence points. This spend is NOT echoed to the room, just Bob. He has to give a reason and a 'target', Jane.

Jane the detective has a <Feat|Merit> that grants her +2 to resist any sort of Influence. But, reading Bob's pose, she realizes as a player what he is doing, and she decides to spend 5 points, because she knows that if Jane gets caught doing what he is demanding, she'll get prison time. So, with her +2, she has a 7.

The two players, having done their spends, get a reveal showing that Jane withstands the attempt. Now, Jane the detective proceeds to smirk at Bob and reach for her radio to call him in... <or whatever>.

This pool refills after a scene, every day, however works best.

EDIT: The key to the mechanic here is that the spend by Bob is silent. Jane only resists because her player cleverly reads the pose in question and realizes that he is likely doing some sort of Intimidation on her. If Jane's player missed that nuance, then she wouldn't resist... and only her +2 would apply and Bob catches her off-guard.

Of course, this would require a social contract on poses matching expenditures... but I think the community can sort that easily enough.

Ghost

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:

Example: BSG: Unification, where having a particular secondary skill may make it easier to do a task or two, but actions otherwise revolve around a core of action skills relevant to combat.

I think BSG:U is a great example of where it works well, but I wonder if the existence of rank aids it. The military structure and existence of rank may very well eschew(WORDSMITH ALERT) the need for social skills because the theme has a built-in construct for rank, expected IC behaviors, and ramifications if they are sent to extremes.

It's smart. Really smart.

The military doesn't lend super well to social skills since the game is task based, which leaves a lot of the social interaction to either team-based efforts or interpersonal relationships and if those get out of hand...in comes military regulations.

And the decision of who is right or wrong, who wins the social rolls, can come down to a matter of rank and/or who follows it and doesn't.

Ganymede

@Ghost said in Eliminating social stats:

The military doesn't lend super well to social skills since the game is task based, which leaves a lot of the social interaction to either team-based efforts or interpersonal relationships and if those get out of hand...in comes military regulations.

Politically, no, but a military game could include espionage against enemies, which might require social rolls against NPCs. We could talk about how genius BSG:U is until the cows come home, but it is what it is: very well-crafted to a particular kind of game.

I'll go ahead and say it: socially-savvy RPers get by very well in any game, but even better in ones where there are no social rolls or social combat. They will figuratively and literally get their way because they are good at what they do. You can always check them by requiring a roll where a system exists, which will at least make them honest in how they construct their PCs.

Ghost

@Ganymede Hells yes you and @Meg are 100% spot on, here.

He/She who sways the GM, sways the game

If you're charismatic, ingratiating, fun to play with, and able to reasonably construct an OOC argument with panache, you can unlock GodMode.

Which, personally, IMO...is a point in favor of dice.

Lain

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:

Maintaining a player of "agency" is negative when used like this, but it is positive and important when you have a player trying to use Intimidate or Dominate to get into someone else's pants or skirt. And for all the times I've had some player punk out of a legitimate social roll -- which happens regardless of whether the stats exist -- I'd rather that happen than to hear that someone rolled to seduce an unwilling player's character, and then had that enforced by staff who were "just following the rules."

As an improv performer, I'd frown at the douchebag who acts inappropriately to intimidation, but I'd seriously beat the fuck out of anyone breaking the cardinal rule of "don't be a fucking sexual predator."

I definitely see where you're coming from, with players having an interest in being able to avoid entering some weirdo's magical realm, but wouldn't it be preferable to just ban magical realm shit without suppressing the import of social roles in basically any other context, than it would be to handwave social stats completely?

EDIT:

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:
I think part of the point of social stats is to deprive targets of the exact kind of agency you describe, though. Let's say I want to use Intimidate in a WoD game. My character is annoyed with someone, so they decide to rob them. He pulls out his knife, waves it in the guy's face, and says, "Gimme all yer money!" with the intention of compelling him to do just that.

We do our roll of dice, and my guy wins; the target is intimidated. Now, obviously, the point of intimidation is to compel someone to do something -- or refrain from doing something -- they otherwise wouldn't because they're scared of you. In this case, the point would be to make him fork over his cash and then act scared and maybe piss his pants or something. It would be to make him bend the knee, so to speak, and act like he's scared of getting stabbed.

That's one of the major reasons I'm considering eliminating social stats.

Sure, you roll, the other guy rolls, you win... and then what? Did you scare the target shitless? Is the way they're responding adequately scared? What if you think they're kinda meh about it but their player thinks that's just how the PC shows fear? What if they recover in the next pose, is that too early? Are you supposed to scare the Elder by glaring at him, you neonate? What about in the next scene, should there be a lingering effect?

Sure, various systems and mechanics attempt to address the scope of social stats but I've just...never been satisfied with them. The primary issue is that they're typically pretty complicated - but unlike punching (which happens rarely since violent confrontations aren't an everyday thing), social interactions take place constantly, so if it's not easy to use such a system then it won't be... which may be worse than not having one at all.

I think it's pretty self-explanatory what a social roll entails in most cases. If your character loses an Intimidation roll, that character just got punked, and is going to act like a little bitch in the most relevant capacity. Putting his hands on his face, taking up less space and kind of curling into himself, resorting to de-escalation methods, appeals to sympathy and maybe even outright begging. They go into damage control mode.

If some player can't make their character respond appropriately to losing a social roll they're just bad at roleplaying and should probably be consequenced if not outright banned.

WildBaboons

I'm wary of any Roll that supersedes the Role. I don't like Dice deciding how my character would react to a certain situation or person, especially if it's against the grain of the character. I think others have given the example of someone rolling a high manipulation roll against something and forcing them to confess to being a spy or some such. That's just silly. (magic abilities like mind control, etc are a different matter)

Against NPC? Hell yeah. Social roll it up. Get that social character to manipulate the detective into suspecting Ganymede's character of murder.