Eliminating social stats

Lisse24

I really don't give a shit. All the "Federalist Papers of RPGs" in the world doesn't change what literally thousands of years of literature has deemed to be a narrative. There is merit as a game to the "let the dice lie where they may" stance. But that merit is not a merit for narrative. Good narratives can emerge from that only by accident in the same way that getting a coherent and decent character out of a character generation system that will kill characters off part-way through can: blind luck.

And note, again, I'm not saying you're wrong for liking the "gamist" approach (as much as I fucking hate that clunky neologism). I'm saying you're wrong for thinking that the "gamist" approach made for a good narrative here. You're not doing wrongfun. You're just factually incorrect about the narrative structure.

Several times in this thread, I've heard people equate using dice as the enemy of creating narrative. I want to push back on that. I'm quoting WTFE just because this is one place where I've read that argument, but certainly, he's not the only person whose made that argument.

Here's the core of my argument: MUers are terrible writers. I don't mean that they're incapable of stringing together 3-5 sentences with vivid language in engaging poses. They can absolutely do that, by and large. No, what I mean is that, for the most part, they don't think long term about themes and beats, and what constructs a good narrative. Ex: "I'm going to have my character lose this conflict so that he can wallow for a bit and then have an awesome comeback," or "The story I'm telling with this character is one of alienation and loss and so, I want to sabotage his own attempt to become Priscus though his inability to connect."

Muers don't think that way. In general, I believe that there are two major stumbling blocks to MUers telling compelling narratives. 1) They don't like losing, and any good story has peaks and valleys. MUers avoid valleys at all costs. 2) They don't control everything. Sure, you can be telling a story of alienation, but that doesn't mean all the other chars are going to play along (I've run into this with my char over at F&L, where I had to rejigger my approach to her several times).

In these circumstances, adding random events, and letting a neutral arbiter, such as dice, determine the outcome periodically, even for social interactions, can enhance narrative. They help a player adhere to their character's nature, strengths, and weaknesses, while simultaneously adding challenges and random difficulty for that player to overcome. The knee-jerk, 'well let's just throw away social dice because players don't like losing that way,' will not enhance the narratives told on that game, it will diminish them.

WTFE

@Lisse24 said in Eliminating social stats:

Several times in this thread, I've heard people equate using dice as the enemy of creating narrative.

You didn't hear it from me, though, given that I said also in this very thread:

Well, yeah. I already said that I enjoy the weird twists and turns (and quick thinking) that dice often bring to games.

This was a callback to another thing I said which I can't be arsed to scroll back further to find.
I then mitigated this with:

It's just sometimes they bring REALLY BAD THINGS to the gaming experience too and a smart GM will curtail those.

And my 2300AD story is a (very) extreme example of the kinds of really bad things reliance on dice and dice mechanisms can do where only an utter fucking ignoramus would consider the result desirable.

I want to push back on that.

So you want to push back on the man of straw that's … standing there.

I'm quoting WTFE just because this is one place where I've read that argument, but certainly, he's not the only person whose made that argument.

Only you didn't read that argument from me. You wanted to read that argument and you skipped over the parts that didn't fit the argument you wanted to hear.

Here's the core of my argument: MUers are terrible writers. I don't mean that they're incapable of stringing together 3-5 sentences with vivid language in engaging poses. They can absolutely do that, by and large. No, what I mean is that, for the most part, they don't think long term about themes and beats, and what constructs a good narrative.

And dice know more about narrative, themes, beats, etc. Got it.

Ex: "I'm going to have my character lose this conflict so that he can wallow for a bit and then have an awesome comeback," or "The story I'm telling with this character is one of alienation and loss and so, I want to sabotage his own attempt to become Priscus though his inability to connect."

Get a better class of co-player. I have no difficulty finding people who do the fail now to succeed awesomely later thing. Or for that matter the tilt at that windmill eternally without making visible progress thing. Or even succeed scene after scene in ways that incense the opposing characters until a spectacular fall.

And given that I tend to play on systemless MUSHes, so there's NO mechanisms of ANY kind, physical or social, that's … pretty weird that you think this doesn't happen.

Muers don't think that way.

And dice do. Check.

In general, I believe that there are two major stumbling blocks to MUers telling compelling narratives. 1) They don't like losing, and any good story has peaks and valleys. MUers avoid valleys at all costs.

Again I'm just going to have to suggest you find yourself a better class of co-player.

They don't control everything. Sure, you can be telling a story of alienation, but that doesn't mean all the other chars are going to play along (I've run into this with my char over at F&L, where I had to rejigger my approach to her several times).

Again, while this is the first of your criticisms that I actually recognize from my playing experience, I must once more point out: nor will the dice play along.

In these circumstances, adding random events, and letting a neutral arbiter, such as dice, determine the outcome periodically, even for social interactions, can enhance narrative.

The operative word being "can". Not "will". They "can" enhance narrative (which I've already said in this thread). They "can" (and "do") also utterly fucking ruin narrative. Which is why relying on dice exclusively is a terrible fucking idea unless you're playing RPGs like they're chess games or board wargames or whatever.

They help a player adhere to their character's nature, strengths, and weaknesses, while simultaneously adding challenges and random difficulty for that player to overcome. The knee-jerk, 'well let's just throw away social dice because players don't like losing that way,' will not enhance the narratives told on that game, it will diminish them.

Except that literally every MU* I've seen they already pretty much do ignore the social dice except for when it turns into an argument like this. Part of the problem is that adhering to the use of social dice doesn't reward shit and, to recite an old mantra of mine: YOU WILL GET THE BEHAVIOUR YOU REWARD.

(I have literally been pointing this out for nearly two decades in various incarnations of WORA/SWOFA/MSB/whatever.)

Using social dice (at least as they are implemented in most games, because most games are designed in such a way that the social skills aren't intended for use on fellow players, but on the world) penalizes, not rewards, the people who can string together a cogent, persuasive line of purple prose:

It penalizes them when they make a gorgeous pose that falls flat because of the dummy dice. The effort and creativity spent on the lead-up falls flat because the die came up snake-eyes (or whatever).
It also penalizes them when someone who is barely coherent makes a ham-fistedly stupid pose and suddenly they have to have their characters fuck.

In the first case one could argue that the narrative improvement might offset the loss, but in the latter case it's just fingernails on a chalk board.

Social dice, as commonly implemented (in literally every MUSH I've been on that had them) do not enhance narrative. They are an unmitigated failure, in fact, at this. They have caused more bitter and not-at-all-enjoyable (except to misanthropes like me sitting in the sidelines and munching popcorn) OOC drama than they have ever generated good IC drama. They suck like galactic core black holes.

I could be persuaded that there might be ways to make such things work. Hints of these exist in the form of Fate's economy of Fate Points or Spark's economy of Influence. I have seen hard-core gamist players of the strongest, min-maxing variety who play super-tactical games to eke out every advantage conceivable in each and every tactical situation accept temporary setbacks in Fate to collect Fate points for when it counts, accidentally creating nifty narratives along the way. I haven't seen this in Spark yet because I haven't played it, but I can see potential for it there as well. Other games with similar mechanisms abound as well and can likely be kit-bashed to do this.

But the key in all of these is that taking setbacks (socially or otherwise) is actively (and immediately) rewarded, which is why you get the behaviour desired. This is not the case in any MUSH I'm aware of.

faraday

@Lisse24 said in Eliminating social stats:

Muers don't think that way. In general, I believe that there are two major stumbling blocks to MUers telling compelling narratives.

I'm going to echo @WTFE by saying that while that may be true on the games you've played -- I'm not here to question your experiences -- it is by no means universal. I have had tons of compelling storylines on MUs with zero dice involved.

I'm also not saying "dice are evil". I mean, I put an immense amount of effort into making a dice-based skills and combat system for goodness sake. I'm just saying there is a natural tension between rolls (which by their nature are random) and narrative (which by its nature is planned), and different people have different preferences on what an appropriate balance between the two is.

saosmash

I can't believe that the response to WTFE's story was to go "well, actually, I'm going to disagree by invalidating your own lived experience as a player".

?????

WTFE

I will not hear anything bad about Ominous, @saosmash! He won that exchange fair and square and put me in my place. I now agree with everything he says anywhere!

Arkandel

You guys.

Lain

@Lisse24 said in Eliminating social stats:

In these circumstances, adding random events, and letting a neutral arbiter, such as dice, determine the outcome periodically, even for social interactions, can enhance narrative.

B-but my character would NEVER fall for that!!

Chet

I find the best way to handle an abstract stat that regards something like con artistry, or manipulating NPCs, would be to make the roll concern the skill at the rolling player's attempt.

If you make a poor manipulation roll, you are not poor at manipulating the target; you have left openings in your own personal strategy (which is what 'skill' implies), that can be then counter-rolled, to indicate the other player's defensive attempt at spotting the holes.

Ganymede

@WTFE said in Eliminating social stats:

I'm not sure how Ophelia and Polonius can be seen as protagonists unless you're going by some definition of protagonist that means "only good guys". (And even there Polonius is a stretch.)

A quick glance at the Wikipedia article for Hamlet says:

The protagonist of Hamlet is Prince Hamlet of Denmark...

This coincides with the definition of protagonist I've always seen used: "the main character of a work of fiction". So which definition are you operating under so we can sync expectations?

I go with the former because I find that approach more useful and interesting in analysis, at least when it comes to context, culture, and themes within the story, especially in Shakespeare's fictitious plays. Going the other way would require someone to look at Iago as the protagonist in Othello: there can be no doubt that Iago is the main character because every scene revolves around him in some way, but Iago is generally considered Othello's antagonist.

Defining the protagonist as just the "main character" is fraught with difficulties, as some of the greatest works do not have a clear "main character," if "main" is used to denote a singular, most important figure in a work. Some theorists hold that there can be only one, maybe two protagonists in a work, but I rather disagree.

Anyhow, not really the point of all this, right? I was just musing with your musing. I don't think social stats are going to help when you're dealing with a player who has the social skills of a mushroom, and I don't think social stats are going to help when you're dealing with a player who refuses to play the character they have. These are player problems, not system problems. And I think I'm on your side on that dispute.

Lain

@WTFE said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lotherio said in Eliminating social stats:

To incentivize, I've been pondering Pace, a 24 game (written in 24 hours). Pips are gained and used to supplement skills (descriptors). To gain pips for use later, a primary way is by accepting a loss. Their example has a dashing character takes a fail at flirting, the loss ends with them wearing a red mark on the cheek for a 2 pip loss in that situation. They can now use those two points for a success later.

Fate and Spark both use mechanisms similar to this. Probably loads more, too. This is thinking that dates back to Champions' first edition with their ham-fisted "get points for weaknesses" attempts.

FATE has proven to be fucking fantastic at incentivizing sportsmanlike behavior in the interest of good storytelling. In a WoD setting, I honestly wouldn't mind handing out WP points or even taking a Beat for accepting a humiliating defeat without the MUH AUTONOMY crap.

Taking a Beat in particular makes sense: you learned the hard way. You got owned, like outright, and if that keeps happening, people tend to wise up to how they're getting owned. Either they learn how to not get owned, or they learn skills that allow them to compensate/retaliate for getting owned.

Ominous

@saosmash I didn't invalidate the experience. WTFE said the situation sucked, and I am sure it did. I said that the choice made was the better story option, because it was unexpected and allowed the story to grow in new ways. It was still a disappointing letdown. I contest that the choice made was the correct choice not that their emotional responses at the choice were not valid.

WTFE gave conflicting information on how far the characters had progressed, making it sound as though they had just created the characters and started playing or that they had already had some adventures that they succeeded at. If the first, then those characters were Ser Weymar Royce, not Jon Snow. If the second, it was a Seven Geases and the book ends on an anti-climax. The key is remembering that your characters aren't Luke Skywalker until the Death Star has blown up. They're random Red Squadron members. Unless you're playing a GM-less storygame where you have greater control over the story and decide from the get-go that your character is Luke Skywalker and this game is going to end with that character blowing up the Death Star and flirting with his twin sister.

This is the outlook that is most helpful for games like D&D and Traveler:
alt text

Here is the fun one to think about. WTFE talks about how awful it would have been if the Millennium Falcon splattered against a rock when it came out of hyperspace, making it seem like the Empire won. Remember that the Empire had no idea where the Rebels were hiding until the Millennium Falcon led them there. No Millennium Falcon means the base's location is still a mystery, and the story goes in a completely new direction. It could become one of a spy thriller as the Rebels try to infiltrate and find some weakness in the Death Star while the Empire is slowly narrowing down where the Rebels are hiding.

Arkandel

@Lain I think the matter of cheating or at least players trying to favor their characters by ignoring inconvenient social attributes is exaggerated in this thread's context; if these traits added value - not XP, but actual fun things that promote and advance roleplay - then they would have caught on way better than they have.

To me the main issue is that instead of helping RP they get in its way. Either they're simply awkward, interrupting the scene's natural ebb and flow to introduce themselves, or they produce mismatching results between poses and dice rolls while trying to cover the very wide spectrum of all human social interactions even in their abstract fashion.

But I really don't think the fix is giving people a reward for using them. Awarding Beats for accepting failures and stepbacks have been part of nWoD MU* for years now and I can't say I've noticed a real difference in the use of social attributes even though arguably there has been one in other areas of those same games.

Lain

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

But I really don't think the fix is giving people a reward for using them. Awarding Beats for accepting failures and stepbacks have been part of nWoD MU* for years now and I can't say I've noticed a real difference in the use of social attributes even though arguably there has been one in other areas of those same games.

Part of why I'm reluctant to just throw social stats out is that there isn't much of a basis for one beyond a reactionary/adaptive argument from people. Also, part of why I am reluctant to accept the loss of social stats is because I've consistently played Manip 1 redneck engineer types on nWoD games, and they were always welcome to all the parties and social events in spite of explicitly being weirdos. Female characters showed sexual interest in them. Frankly, it made no sense.

Engineers, and in particular high-aptitude, low-education, rural de facto engineers, are notoriously "creepy" and persona non grata everywhere they go IRL. It makes no sense that qt3.14s would be on their dick and trying to pry into the mysterious stoic philosophy of Jim-Ray the electrician , no matter how high his Crafts/Science skills are.

They keep these crafter characters around because they're useful in real life, but they rarely display real interest in their thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and these RPG's have offered an escape from the deeply-held alienation that this class of person actually deals with.

I've also seen the exact opposite, where high social stat female characters get blown off as FUUCKKENN WHOOAHHHs when they come onto a guy IC because the player has had a lot of TS on other characters, even though by their profile pic alone actual straight men would bend over backwards to buy them a drink, much less nail them.

Basically, I see people playing their characters as way more rational than actual people are, and whether or not you think the "natural ebb and flow" is important, I think imposing a degree of simulationism in the interest of having the story, you know, make some kind of sense, is important. "Highly emotional" characters that make staid, wise decisions whenever the choice counts are lame characters. Gorgeous straight women who can't get a bf are lame characters. Dumbasses who manage to come up with clever, sophisticated methods of engineering away their problems are lame characters.

The prevalence of things like this lead me to believe that the "scene's natural ebb and flow" is way off-kilter, and that there should be at least some measures taken to suppress the PC snowflake plot armor syndrome we're a bit too used to.

Arkandel

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

But I really don't think the fix is giving people a reward for using them. Awarding Beats for accepting failures and stepbacks have been part of nWoD MU* for years now and I can't say I've noticed a real difference in the use of social attributes even though arguably there has been one in other areas of those same games.

But I think it makes every kind of sense.

I don't know anyone who picks their partners, whether it's for TS/romance or anything else from politics to coteries/packs, based on their social stats. If you want to pick a lover for your PC would you ever choose the average roleplayer with Presence 4 and SL4 over the exceptional one with Presence 2 and no related merits at all?

Ominous

Random crazy thought: what if instead of +vote giving xp, it gave social points that are public knowledge, so that naturally sociable and enjoyable players ended up with characters that have a high social stat as it were. Maybe let these points be used in some auction system during a social contest with the highest bidder winning.

Another random crazy thought: what there was +upvote code much like what this forum has, only you can be upvoting only one person at a given time. It would represent who the crowd thinks is the most dominant presence in the scene. This would only be helpful in larger scenes, but the more upvotes a character has, the greater the bonus to social rolls they have.

Lain

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

But I really don't think the fix is giving people a reward for using them. Awarding Beats for accepting failures and stepbacks have been part of nWoD MU* for years now and I can't say I've noticed a real difference in the use of social attributes even though arguably there has been one in other areas of those same games.

But I think it makes every kind of sense.

I don't know anyone who picks their partners, whether it's for TS/romance or anything else from politics to coteries/packs, based on their social stats. If you want to pick a lover for your PC would you ever choose the average roleplayer with Presence 4 and SL4 over the exceptional one with Presence 2 and no related merits at all?

I think you're appealing to the exact psychology I'm griping about, though. People in reality weigh the physical appearance of their partner above any other thing. People who look good get megalaid, not sure if you noticed. So if the default orientation of PCs is "sapiosexual," there's a pervasive issue of unbelievability, no matter how "natural" the ebb and flow of the scenes all feel to you.

Since one of the main arguments for getting rid of social stats is that depending on them occasionally produces really weird behaviors that defy human nature, it should be noted that not depending on them makes normal human behavior abnormal on these MU*'s. The PC snowflake plot armor stuff is one such example. So is sapiosexuality being the norm.

Arkandel

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

I think you're appealing to the exact psychology I'm griping about, though. People in reality weigh the physical appearance of their partner above any other thing. People who look good get megalaid, not sure if you noticed. So if the default orientation of PCs is "sapiosexual," there's a pervasive issue of unbelievability, no matter how "natural" the ebb and flow of the scenes all feel to you.

I think that's a generalization, come on man. Above any other things? I don't know about that.

Since one of the main arguments for getting rid of social stats is that depending on them occasionally produces really weird behaviors that defy human nature, it should be noted that not depending on them makes normal human behavior abnormal on these MU*'s. The PC snowflake plot armor stuff is one such example. So is sapiosexuality being the norm.

Look at it this way - if a roleplayer is good enough they can make their character appealing no matter what. It's not cheating, I'm not talking about playing the traits up... but simply portraying an unintentionally funny, fascinating character who might not be wealthy, witty, intelligent or attractive but the writing skill of the person behind the keyboard makes them awesome.

There's no RL equivalency for that. A poor, dull, dumb and ugly person iRL isn't that appealing in the real world.

Tempest

@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:

Random crazy thought: what if instead of +vote giving xp, it gave social points that are public knowledge, so that naturally sociable and enjoyable players ended up with characters that have a high social stat as it were. Maybe let these points be used in some auction system during a social contest with the highest bidder winning.

Another random crazy thought: what there was +upvote code much like what this forum has, only you can be upvoting only one person at a given time. It would represent who the crowd thinks is the most dominant presence in the scene. This would only be helpful in larger scenes, but the more upvotes a character has, the greater the bonus to social rolls they have.

This just changes the issue.

Just because you go do a lot of bar rp every day and get a bunch of +votes does not mean you are socially savvy or have a lot of influence.

Arkandel

@Tempest My hatred for +vote burns eternal.

Ominous

Even if you restrict it to something like 3 votes a week? I too hate +vote, but I am spitballing ideas to see if we can come up with a direction we haven't considered before that threads the needle in a way that can satisfy both sides of the debate.