Eliminating social stats
-
@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:
@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 It's outdated.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.
Most of these systems can be "coded" without much effort. Or you can just run an IRC server and ban people who abuse the
/nick <namehere>command. A lot of these things can be implemented with surprisingly low-tech methods.@Ghost said in Eliminating social stats:
My vampire beats your vampire, because my vampire's PB is Dolph Lundgren and your vampire's PB is Russell Brand.
I mean, clearly, that seems fair to me.
My e-penis is longer than yours because my mall katana is longer than yours. That's why I autowin this RPG vampire fight.
-
@Ghost said in Eliminating social stats:
I also dislike the argument that these systems arent often used out of fear of players being rolled into unwanted TS.
I didn't intend the TS portion of my reasoning to take over the thread. It's a minor (if still a) factor for discussing the elimination of social stats.
The game I have in mind wouldn't be using any existing system anyway, for the record. I don't want to reuse something meant for a different medium as I believe that's the root of many issues we've had over the years by adopting mechanics developed for table-top into MU*.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
-
My vampire beats your vampire, because my vampire's PB is Dolph Lundgren and your vampire's PB is Russell Brand.
I mean, clearly, that seems fair to me.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:
I didn't intend the TS portion of my reasoning to take over the thread. It's a minor (if still a) factor for discussing the elimination of social stats.
Oh, no, it's a very valid point and I agree it shouldn't be drilled too deeply into, but should also not be forgotten.
Clearly, a system of social combat that allows for such things is NOT the answer, and with rules about what can or cannot be forced with social rolls, in theory, it would cover a lot of rules ground to other corner cases.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost Right. What I meant is that I wouldn't change anything to prevent Bad Players from being Bad at the expense of everyone else. That's historically proven to be the wrong approach.
Let's just say eliminating social systems would have an extra positive sideeffect.
-
@Ghost said in Eliminating social stats:
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.
I don't think rank has anything to do with it (especially since everyone on BSGU is more or less on equal footing rank-wise), although as @Ganymede said, you could model a game where rank mattered. It's more that there's just not much to be gained from social combat. Some character might lie to another, but the impact of any lie in particular is muted by virtue of the nature of the setting.
In a physical combat system we acknowledge all kinds of variables: different effects from different weapons, armor, stances, tactics, degrees of damage, nuanced skills, varied attacks, etc. etc. There are tons of RPG systems and wargames that model these things, so they're pretty well understood. Yet most social combat systems boil down to "Con vs Willpower". It's crappy. It doesn't even remotely model human interaction well.
We also have a fairly common set of boundaries for physical combat. Everyone understands that you can't one-shot a dragon with a dagger or survive a direct hit from a missile no matter how well you roll. That's just dumb. But we lack commonly agreed-upon boundaries for social combat, as evidenced by a long line of creepers trying to abuse social skills in various ways.
To be satisfying, social combat needs to be more subtle. It needs to recognize that a gullible person is easier to con than a skeptical one. That a kind-harded person will fall for a sob story more easily than a get-rich-quick scheme. That a firmly-entrenched political or religious view is probably never going to be changed. That some people just aren't into (men/brunettes/whatever type here). Modeling this is hard because people are complex creatures. A punch, in contrast, is pretty simple.
Personally, I have a basic fundamental objection to having dice tell me how to play my character. By forcing me to base my character's behavior on some arbitrary system output ("you're intimidated and cower in fear"), you're essentially saying that you don't trust me to roleplay my character appropriately. I understand the counter-arguments, and I understand that there are people in the hobby who don't deserve that trust. It's still a deal-breaker for me.
-
@Ghost A lot of the social mechanics used are adapted from tabletop which are primarily cooperative PvE rather than PvP. I really don't put much faith in them for that reason. The other reason is that they usually treat social interactions as just another form of combat with very similar systems and, in the end, they aren't the same and really require different methods for handling resolution, especially in a PvP environment. Just look at D&D 3e Diplomacy rules for a broken mess: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/683/roleplaying-games/diplomacy-design-notes-part-i
-
@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:
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.
Unfortunate. The kind of things you brought up can be done in surprisingly low-tech ways. Just run an IRC server and let people use
/nick <charnamehere>as it's appropriate. Ban people who abuse it based on their IP address. You can do a lot with very straightforward tools.@Ghost said in Eliminating social stats:
@Lain
My vampire beats your vampire, because my vampire's PB is Dolph Lundgren and your vampire's PB is Russell Brand.
I mean, clearly, that seems fair to me.Actually, my epenis is bigger than yours because my mall katana is cooler than yours; that's why my vampire > your vampire tbqh.
-
I'm well known to be on the side of a mechanized social conflict system, and for that system to be rigorously used and enforced throughout the game.
However, that said - if you wanted a political game without social stats, I would suggest instead leveraging resource stats. While you are eliminating the potential for a wider variety of players to play a robust series of concepts (if only highly socially competent players can play highly socially competent characters and be effective while having fun, it will reduce the overall variety of character concepts in your game, and skew the game towards combat competent characters), if you're fine with that as an opportunity cost, that's up to you. But you could attempt to compensate for that more by leaning more heavily on resources - money, land, military might, rare economic goods, and by creating specific systems that moderate the ability to trade and cash in these resources. This allows people to do the 'wheeling and dealing' aspect of politics without actually being good at sweet-talking others - you may not be able to craft a persuasive pose to save your life, but you can probably type "Count Rudolfo has 80 acres and a mule that he'll trade Duchess Tupelo, if she will make the bandits on the southern border go away". Design the domains to be diverse enough that everyone needs something from everyone, and make war risky enough that tromping over and just rolling combat dice isn't enough to steal all other people's shit, and at least some level of political play will emerge.
If someone does retain individual social skills/conflict resolution, I've become increasingly fond of incentivizing losing. Yes, if your character loses a social conflict, they have to do something that might not be in their best interest. But if you the PLAYER receive a reward for going along with that (or committing fully to it), then you have a reason to suck it up. Also, perhaps setting a hierarchy of success and what actions can be compelled. For a political game, you likely don't want huge swings in attitude to be compelled from social skills, because you want to maximize negotiation and intrigue space. At the same time, you don't want social characters to feel like they have to 'grind' someone's attitude IC. So what you might do, now that I'm thinking about it, is have social change/combat be sort of an unholy hybrid of 7th Sea 2E's story system, and CoD's Doors.
Social Character has to declare to the GM a meaningful end goal. This social system would not be useful for 'I want you to sleep with me' or other micro interactions (including fast talking one's way past a door guard, etc.) but would instead focus on larger, political play. So, say, the goal might be "I want the Empress to take her travelling court to a specific lady's landholdings, because I'm repaying a favor that lady did for me, and the Empress always awards a boon to her host."
The GM would then say, "Okay - that's not a particularly risky undertaking, so you'll have to do three tasks successfully to get the Empress to agree. The Empress is a PC, so let's rope her in. Hey, Empress-Player, what are three challenges that PC A would have to overcome to get Empress Tidypants to take her travelling court to Baronness Murzi's lands for the next season?"
Empress-Player might say, "Well, no one's requested it yet, so she's got no reason to fight the idea. First, PC A would have to have a good pitch (a scene with Charisma + Persuasion as a roll, maybe). Oh, and Tidypants loves to stay places with luxuries, so she'd have to know that she's going to be taken care of, if you know what I mean (Bribery, throwing her a party showcasing the exotic goods of Murzi-land, or a successful Intelligence + Fashion roll during a second scene might all be options here). Oh, and Empress Tidypants would need to feel safe moving her court, of course (so maybe an Intelligence + Leadership roll, or lending troops, or hiring mercenaries to protect her, could be a resolution of this)."
PC A might say, "That sounds reasonable," or they might say it's not worth it, or if one of the requirements seems excessive, the GM might step in and say, hey, "Hey, requiring that PC A arranges for the death of a rival's kid in exchange for this seems a bit excessive. How about he humiliates the rival at a public scene, instead?" To reduce GM load, you could also build in character types for players who enjoy doing this sort of balancing - a Negotiator's Order, or something, and helping people design these social maps would be one of their jobs.
But what about conflict and failure? You'd have to restrict it somehow. Perhaps you only get as many chances as you have some level of the Key Social Skill. So, like, if it's a 1-10 scale on skills in the example above, and the GM decides the Key Skill is Persuasion, and PC has 5 Persuasion, then they get 5 attempts to get those three things. If they fail, say, to make the Empress feel safe the first time, but got everything else, then they get two shots to make up for that, perhaps at a difficulty increase. If they don't get it by the end of the next two attempts? The Empress is unmoved - and keeps the bribes, of course.
Likewise, under this system, you're less likely to run into direct PC vs. PC conflict, and more into colliding gambits and plots. Which could be a plus, in a political game. I would generally say first past the post - if two people are competing for a similar goal, then the first person to achieve their goals wins. However, you also might work out a success exchange - perhaps people could take their successful scenes, and instead of applying that towards their end goal, they could instead use it to counter a success someone else has achieved towards their goal. Perhaps with some level of investigation/intrigue system so that characters can discover each other's plots and plans.
It would be a very different way of thinking of social conflict resolution, but one which might suit the slower, more narrative style of MU*s better than the "roll and resolve" system that is used in physical conflict.
-
@Pyrephox uses Wall of Text. It is super-effective.
I worry about how much GM intervention some of the ideas would need. Also, as pointed out, it doesn't address immediate scene issues that require fast resolution, like bluffing a guard.
-
@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:
@Pyrephox uses Wall of Text. It is super-effective.
I worry about how much GM intervention some of the ideas would need. Also, as pointed out, it doesn't address immediate scene issues that require fast resolution, like bluffing a guard.
Yeah, I'm wordy.
Really, there's no way to have a strong political game without either a fuckton of mechanization to track favors/territory/resources/actions/resolutions, or a fuckton of GM intervention, or a slightly smaller fuckton of both.
The very essence of politics is that it's a couple dozen moving wheels interacting all at once, and everything is changing and everything important needs to be tracked so that opportunities can be exploited. You can simplify it down to bare-bones, but then, yeah, you're back to "roll and resolve", and all the whining that comes with it. If you want to protect character agency AND make social skills relevant and useful, then you have to have more of an infrastructure and more oversight than you do for combat.
-
Given how poorly socialized MU*ers[1] are, social stats are kind of worthless. The players don't understand what's being simulated so, naturally, they will misapply any mechanics you supply. Short of somehow encapsulating all of psychology and sociology into a die-rolling mechanism any social stats are going to be a grotesque caricature of real human interaction. Just face the truth and ditch social mechanics entirely; let people play "social" scenes the way they imagine in their head that people interact.
I mean, that's why there's no mechanics for sex in sane games, right?[2]
[3]
[1] Note: I am a MU*er.
[2] This may be a joke. May.
[3] Actually this whole response may be a joke. "Ha ha, only serious." -
I invoke Connor McDavid argument, If he spent all his points on combat (hockey) and must live with failing social rolls then we all must ...
-
Reducing social stats is the opposite of the way we should go honestly, in my opinion, social stats need to be leaned on, and /hard/. That way someone who is an excellent writer/role-player can't just take low social stats and RP like they are the most charismatic individual in the world.
The way we make social stats worthwhile is to make them rolled more often, not less.
Eventually we are all going to have to understand that the character isn't us, and that bad things happen(tm).
Without bad things, there is no conflict, without conflict there is no drama, there is only bar RP and TS.
Hello! Long time listener, first time caller...
-
@Ghost I generally agree with your take on this: that without social combat most systems are pretty sorely imbalanced, and if everything else is rolled for, social probably should be too. I come at it from a slightly different tact, however. I think that if you want social competition to mean anything, there needs to be rules (to prevent Cops and Robbers issues), and if there are going to be rules, there should probably be stats and dice. If the game is focused on pew-pew-combat-all-the-time, you probably don't need social skills, however.
I do, however, also have issues with forcing changes to a character's thoughts. After all, even if you change a character's body (even up to removing a limb), the player still gets to decide how the character responds mentally, but if you change the character's mind (the dice say they really want to trust this person even though the character knows that they're untrustworthy), then the player may have a hard time rationalizing that change of their opinion.
@Rook I "solved" social combat spam for Furystorm by just saying you can only instigate one single social combat per scene.
-
@Lithium said in Eliminating social stats:
Without bad things, there is no conflict, without conflict there is no drama, there is only bar RP and TS.
I think this may be the very first time I've heard a call for MORE drama on a MU*...
-
@WTFE said in Eliminating social stats:
@Lithium said in Eliminating social stats:
Without bad things, there is no conflict, without conflict there is no drama, there is only bar RP and TS.
I think this may be the very first time I've heard a call for MORE drama on a MU*...
There is good drama, and bad drama! Many MU*s could use more good drama.
-
@WTFE said in Eliminating social stats:
@Lithium said in Eliminating social stats:
Without bad things, there is no conflict, without conflict there is no drama, there is only bar RP and TS.
I think this may be the very first time I've heard a call for MORE drama on a MU*...
Can't have an engaging story without drama. IC drama is a good thing, OOC drama is crap.
Hello! Long time listener, first time caller...
-
@Lithium That was the joke. I'm decaffeinated. Sorry.
-
It might well be worth looking at the system from Exalted 3rd Edition for inspiration actually, it does a lot of things right.
Characters have 'Intimacies', these can be 'Ties' or 'Principles'.
A tie might be 'My Family (Love)', 'Evil Prince Bob (Hatred)', 'Duke Jim (Wary Respect)', etc.
A principle could be 'Honesty above all', 'The Faith of the Holy Juggling Balls is the true Path', 'Everyone is only out for themselves', etc.Each can be Minor, Major or Defining. Minor are still significant parts of a character's worldview but tend to only come up if directly relevant, Major intimacies come into play even if circumstances are tangential, Defining intimacies are the foundations of your worldview and the kind of things your character would lay down their life to protect or further.
How does this work mechanically? Well they are tied into willpower recovery as per White Wolf/Onyx Path standard but they are also what social influence is driven by. If you try to persuade somebody of something then you get (significant) bonuses or penalties depending upon how it touches upon intimacies. Trying to persuade somebody to go against a Major, let alone Defining, intimacy is almost impossible, with huge bonuses to their resistance rolls, persuading somebody of something that aligns their one of their intimacies is somewhat easier however (though the modifier this way is smaller).
That said, social influence is rarely about 'making' people do things, it is about discovering then trying to influence their intimacies. So you do not just walk up to Jill, who legitimately loves Bob (Major intimacy), then try to get them to sleep with you. You cannot even erode Jill's intimacy from a blank slate start, you first need to build at least a minor intimacy that would support such an erosion (Or a Major intimacy to try to weaken a Defining one). Strengthening intimacies beyond Minor then has a 'burden of proof', (or at least convincing lies). So you might persuade somebody that the Duke cannot be trusted as a Minor intimacy, after telling them of how the Duke abused hospitality when visiting your castle. To raise this to a Major intimacy you would need something more serious/convincing, perhaps introduce this person to a trustworthy seeming Baron the Duke once betrayed.
Persuading somebody to do something as opposed to trying to influence their beliefs requires you to successfully play to an existing intimacy (positive or negative) and the degree of what they might be potentially willing to do depends upon the level of said intimacy. A minor intimacy could let you persuade people to do something inconvenient but not life disrupting (They Respect Honesty, persuade them to go to the City Watch and give an accurate report of what they witnessed). A major intimacy can be leveraged into more significant actions (Major Intimacy that the Faith of the Holy Juggling Balls is the true path? Join my mob, we are going to to tear down the false temple of the Church of the Holy Bowling Balls!). A defining intimacy could help persuade somebody to join you on a suicide mission, donate a large portion of their fortune to your cult, etc. (You hate Evil Prince Bob? Here, take this knife and stab him during the ceremony.)
Without intimacies directly supporting a social influence effect you have to bribe/bargain/pay somebody, or threaten them. Even if successful a threaten action only gets somebody to do something for that scene and also gives them an immediate negative intimacy toward you along with weakening positive ones.
You can also try to 'Inspire', which lets you say make a crowd angry with a rousing speech or similar, but the target player specifically decides how they act upon this and does not have to drop everything immediately, just be genuinely resolved to action. If you fill somebody with sorrow, they might go away and cry about their dead wife, or they might donate money to charity, or go on a week long trip to visit their grandchildren to cheer up. It is treated on the same level as a Major intimacy for as long as they act on it.
Keep in mind that intimacies can be significant bonuses, they give benefits to furthering them, etc, so this really comes down to most social influence being about persuading characters to do things they already value.
Added: To use the intimidate example, if somebody has a Major Intimacy about not showing fear then that might well make them really, really hard to make back down through threats of violence even if their social resistance stats are mediocre, but it would probably also make it really easy to goad them into accepting unwise duels or similar shenanigans. Also they would need to actually define that as a key part of their character.
