Eliminating social stats

[Ominous]

First, I think the easiest solution is to make it a standard rule that social skills can't be used to initiate TS. At most the skills can make a person swoon or get a kiss out of them. Unless your game is some sort of Fantasy or Horror theme that has succubus archetypes that feed on sex, or it's a game about prostitution or something, there really isn't much reason to allow it. That will hopefully ease some of the concerns about people abusing the skills to get their rocks off.

@Rook

That is somewhat similar to my idea of letting social stats grant access to resources. The resources in your example being simple with Influence and Resistance.

@Lain 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.

This is also a good argument for using resources instead of dice rolling. In this case, the knife wielder shouldn't even need to roll. The threat is already mechanically enforced and can be acted on. If the player of the threatened NPC feels threatened (the wielder likely has the advantage in any potential combat), then they will have their PC act accordingly. The issue is that the threatened PC,i f the social sort, needs access to resources to counter said intimidation. For instance, if the threatened PC is the local crime lord, he needs to be able to say 'You better be good enough with that to finish the job, because if you ain't, my boys will find you and give you a personal demonstration on how to finish the job. If you just scram, maybe I will forget that this whole thing even happened.' Then he/she needs access to the resources to be able to back it up - the ability to command NPC thugs, resources he/she can offer to PCs as a bounty to kill the threatener, etc.

[Meg]

@Ghost uhm, then where is my upvote, sir. I am in a race here.

And the 'being honest' about your character construction was also what I was getting at, but @Ganymede said it better. If your character is a social brickhouse of awesome, then you should have to be honest about how you are building that, have your sheet reflect it, /if/ you are doing a sheeted system. If you aren't doing a sheeted system, or doing a game that is entirely PvE, then it doesn't matter nearly as much.

[Ghost]

@WildBaboons said in Eliminating social stats:

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.

Counterpoint: It's about the role not the player.

I'm not a fan of my character dying when they stab a dragon and don't do enough damage to kill it in one hit (and end up dead), and it's not what I'd hoped for the character, but it's the game part of role playing game.

Remember: it isn't about forcing your character to believe something you dont think they would (or want them to). It's about whether or not the NPC or other PC craft a character-to-character argument that seems reasonable enough to pass on a character level.

Social rolls should never be made to force romance or turn a Democrat into a Republican because of a d20 roll, so there also needs to be some reasonable boundaries to what social skills can or cannot be used for.

[Ghost]

@Meg said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ghost uhm, then where is my upvote, sir. I am in a race here

Which page is it on?

#Lazy

[Meg]

@Ghost the first page. now you owe me two, sir.

[Ghost]

@Meg There's one.

[Lain]

@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:

First, I think the easiest solution is to make it a standard rule that social skills can't be used to initiate TS. At most the skills can make a person swoon or get a kiss out of them. Unless your game is some sort of Fantasy or Horror theme that has succubus archetypes that feed on sex, or it's a game about prostitution or something, there really isn't much reason to allow it. That will hopefully ease some of the concerns about people abusing the skills to get their rocks off.

@Rook

That is somewhat similar to my idea of letting social stats grant access to resources. The resources in your example being simple with Influence and Resistance.

@Lain 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.

This is also a good argument for using resources instead of dice rolling. In this case, the knife wielder shouldn't even need to roll. The threat is already mechanically enforced and can be acted on. If the player of the threatened NPC feels threatened (the wielder likely has the advantage in any potential combat), then they will have their PC act accordingly. The issue is that the threatened PC,i f the social sort, needs access to resources to counter said intimidation. For instance, if the threatened PC is the local crime lord, he needs to be able to say 'You better be good enough with that to finish the job, because if you ain't, my boys will find you and give you a personal demonstration on how to finish the job. If you just scram, maybe I will forget that this whole thing even happened.' Then he/she needs access to the resources to be able to back it up - the ability to command NPC thugs, resources he/she can offer to PCs as a bounty to kill the threatener, etc.

The thing is, when discussing IC intimidation we are not discussing whether or not "the player of the the threatened NPC" feels intimidated, but whether or not the NPC (or PC) feels intimidated, which means that there needs to be a system where a player's character can get intimidated even if the player is not. Tying the character's emotional state to the player's emotional state is a terrible conflation of IC and OOC. Tying a character's interpersonal ability to their player's interpersonal ability would be comparable to tying a character's Strength rating to how much that player can bench.

[Ominous]

@Lain I ninja'd you. I corrected my misuse of NPC.

[Lain]

@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain I ninja'd you. I corrected my misuse of NPC.

It's fine, don't sweat it.

[Ghost]

@Lain UPVOTES

I've had issues like this on tabletop night:

The undead tentacle monster roars in your face and you are shaken for 2 rounds
But my character isn't afraid of it
It's a writhing mass of tentacles on a moldy bone frame. It's scary
My character has a +24 attack roll and does 12d400 mega-damage, he isn't afraid of shit.
He rolled over your will save, you spent all your points on combat stats
This is bullshit.

[Ominous]

@Lain To address your actual point, I come from an old-school D&D background where the PC is an avatar of the player, a meeple, to use a board game term, that the player explores and experiences the world through. I personally feel that the easiest way to get a character to feel, want, avoid, like, hate, whatever something is to make the player have that feeling too. Essentially method acting in a MU. Mainly because there will be that sizable portion of players who cannot separate OOC from IC.

However, if we are going to put IC/OOC separation on a pedestal and hold it as the ideal state, then rethinking some basic assumptions of how MUs are designed may be needed in order to increase distance from a player and a PC. One of my suggestions has been to move more towards troupe style play, where no one person controls a PC. Instead they are all on a roster and, when you log on, you can grab any character not currently played and take them out for a few scenes. This would be a completely different paradigm than what we have now, and things like IC secrets also being OOC secrets wouldn't be a thing.

[Lain]

@Ominous

One of my suggestions has been to move more towards troupe style play, where no one person controls a PC. Instead they are all on a roster and, when you log on, you can grab any character not currently played and take them out for a few scenes. This would be a completely different paradigm than what we have now, and things like IC secrets also being OOC secrets wouldn't be a thing.

I love alternative approaches to RPing, so if this were available on a MU* with a real userbase on it, I'd do it. Also, I saw you ninjaing a few things but the content of this response remains.

I'm also aware of the D&D thinking on this matter, where gamism is the thing to do, but this doesn't work as well on any kind of RPG that isn't about killing monsters and collecting loot, and frankly, we have MMORPGs and Diablo for that now. IC/OOC distinction is important in spoken/written RPGs like tabletop RPGs or MU*s because they caulk a hole that World of Warcrack simply cannot: the literary-narrative one.

[Ganymede]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

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?

Some people just don't want any such rule or controversy, really. Whether it's wise or not is what we're discussing.

I'm on the side of "I prefer a system," but I'm also on the side of "or not" because I do very well on games which don't have a social system. Even on ones where one exists, my social concepts tend to do well because I am able to convince people to see my way (eventually) through text. (It's kind of my job.) I'd like to think I'm not a social power gamer, but some people may say differently.

But I'm addressing @Arkandel mostly here, as he and I have bandied around ideas for a while. I'm not sure if I'd agree with him here, but what may be more interesting is a resource-based system for political combat.

[Lain]

@Ganymede I write software for a living, but I think it would be bad roleplaying on my part to have my Int 2 Computer 0 World of Darkness character conveniently know how to crack people's WiFi passwords just because I do. No matter how useful that would be in certain uhm, circumstances. :^)

[Ominous]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

I'm also aware of the D&D thinking on this matter, where gamism is the thing to do, but this doesn't work as well on any kind of RPG that isn't about killing monsters and collecting loot, and frankly, we have MMORPGs and Diablo for that now. IC/OOC distinction is important in spoken/written RPGs like tabletop RPGs or MU*s because they caulk a hole that World of Warcrack simply cannot: the literary-narrative one.

That problem is that MUing wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want a more narrativist style but keep using gamist mechanics. Rather than using some of the really interesting and unique ideas that have come about in "storygames" like Mystic Empyrean (a game I badly want to base a MU on), we keep using concepts like each character has one player, no shared GMing, the GM controls the world and the players control their characters, etc.

[Lain]

@Ominous I agree. It's outdated. So let's make a MU that breaks these kinds rules, man.

[Arkandel]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ominous I agree. It's outdated. So let's make a MU that breaks these kinds rules, man.

That's the spirit. +1.

[Ganymede]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

I write software for a living, but I think it would be bad roleplaying on my part to have my Int 2 Computer 0 World of Darkness character conveniently know how to crack people's WiFi passwords just because I do.

I get that. So if there were no system check for hacking/computer skills, you'd be totally good to go.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, those skills aren't going to convince someone to drop their panties. And, in my opinion, mental skills get shat on through all of these discussions because they generally come up only in PvE situations.

But, I digress.

[Ominous]

@Ganymede We need more battle to the death quiz shows on MUs.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ominous I agree. It's outdated. So let's make a MU that breaks these kinds rules, man.

My coding is "Baby's First C/C++ Program" level of skill. I can make a tic-tac-toe game that can play 2, 1, or 0 human players, and that is the apex of my skill.

[Ghost]

I disagree that these rulesets are outdated.

I also dislike the argument that these systems arent often used out of fear of players being rolled into unwanted TS.

Let me throw something out here:

1. Making even attempting to use dice rolls to force a character into TS is a bannable offense no one should ever fear.
2. If people are not using the social dice mechanics of hundreds of existing RPG systems to implement control of social conflict, then they would be using these systems currently. No new system is going to spontaneously make people use risk-based social mechanics.

This is about choice.

PHYSICAL skill rolls are accepted because on some level players understand that not every slap shot gets past the goalie

MENTAL skill rolls are accepted because studying is difficult, takes endurance, and players understand that not every experiment or piece of software written works the way we want it to.

SOCIAL rolls are not accepted because players want to choose how their quasi-avatars react to social situations, which lies they believe or don't, and want complete creative control over how their character responds to other players.

This is about choice and control, and that players of these games do not want to have to roleplay a social avenue that they do not wish to. They don't want their characters to believe lies unless their player chooses to, and want to base their character's opinions on social situations based on the player's judgment for their characters.

I cannot say this enough, but I believe in my heart of hearts that the problem presented here is not about finding a worthy system or mechanic, but the approach of players to these games.

• Players trying to use dice to force others to TS
• Powerhouse players with limitless sheets throwing their dice around
• My Story

For whatever reason, ranging from the reasonable to the selfish, this is about the demand to control one's character, or on some level, the player protecting themselves and their fun time against strangers who may use these dice to turn the experience into something less fun for them.

Another new and shiny system for social interaction isn't going to do shit until this issue gets addressed and some people stop approaching these games as ways to be predatory to others or try to wedge their character into being the star of their own show.