Eliminating social stats

[Bobotron]

@Thenomain
I don't disagree. I'm the same way; flaws are there to be played out and being a 100% perfect character all the time is no fun.

As far as agency. Acting out your own agency is fine, but there's got to be a balance/point between acting out your own agency and adhering to the mechanical rules of social conflict. If I'm persuaded to give up a secret password to the Computer System of Doom and I've been appropriately placated and rolled no successes on the conflict, it's not fair of me to 'play my own agency' as being 'well I won't give it to you' because I, the player, don't want to.

That's the problem. People don't want to abide by mechanical enforcement of that.

[Lithium]

@Bobotron said in Eliminating social stats:

@Thenomain
I don't disagree. I'm the same way; flaws are there to be played out and being a 100% perfect character all the time is no fun.

As far as agency. Acting out your own agency is fine, but there's got to be a balance/point between acting out your own agency and adhering to the mechanical rules of social conflict. If I'm persuaded to give up a secret password to the Computer System of Doom and I've been appropriately placated and rolled no successes on the conflict, it's not fair of me to 'play my own agency' as being 'well I won't give it to you' because I, the player, don't want to.

That's the problem. People don't want to abide by mechanical enforcement of that.

When there is a game system that /has/ social rules, not using them, or just refusing to abide them is tantamount to cheating in my book.

I'm not saying every system needs social stats, one of my favorite game systems of all time doesn't have anything remotely resembling a social stat, but if it's there, and there are rules, the rules should be followed imho.

That's part and parcel to deciding to play on the game that is using the system.

Or it should be. You see it a lot though, especially in CoD/WoD because people buy things where they get social power from it, but everyone just ignores it, even going so far as to flagrantly not abide the rules of the merit/power/skills being used.

To many people just want to be super heroes.

[Thenomain]

@Lithium said in Eliminating social stats:

When there is a game system that /has/ social rules, not using them, or just refusing to abide them is tantamount to cheating in my book.

Except that one of the key rules of WoD and some other systems (notably The Strange) is "only use the system when it's interesting". These games were made for The Table, where The Table is a group of people who can spend quick bursts of time deciding what they want to play. There are very few RPG systems out there that are suitable for "do this always no matter what". They exist, but we tend not to play them.

[Ganymede]

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

Such is similar with players who want to use some subtle emotional ploy with their Manip 1 Persuasion 0 character. It almost definitely doesn't work. This is precisely why we have rolls. So yes, you can RP the specifics how you want, but if you fail the Manip + Persuasion vs Resolve + Composure roll, you are obligated to make your character say/do something stupid. Something unpersuasive. Something mildly embarrassing or just cringey. Why? Because he sucks at this.

I get what you're saying. Now, go ahead and enforce it.

Basically, every pose calculated to arouse something in someone is going to need a roll, and that just doesn't happen. Do I personally care if a person rolls to check if my PC is lying? No, I don't, but I'm pretty easy-going. That said, if I'm interrupted every freaking pose, I'm going to get a bit testy.

I would love it if everyone RPed their stats, but that's nigh impossible. People take fucking Presence 5 that can't pose their way out of a box. Should staff step in and cut down their Presence to 2? Because that's where I see this going, taken to the extreme.

[SunnyJ]

My opinion is: Social skills and attributes will not be missed. Good riddance.

The only social system I would ever use in a game again is Green Ronin's Intrigue system for Game of Thrones.

[Arkandel]

Just some thoughts here.

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:

Basically, every pose calculated to arouse something in someone is going to need a roll, and that just doesn't happen. Do I personally care if a person rolls to check if my PC is lying? No, I don't, but I'm pretty easy-going. That said, if I'm interrupted every freaking pose, I'm going to get a bit testy.

If there was a central issue I find with social stats this is it; for one reason or the other they don't get used for the most part. I've often part of mixed (public and private) scenes for entire weeks, beginning to end, and saw maybe one dice roll on a specific lie - and all the other social attributes were just plain filler. When's the last time you saw a Socialize roll in a nWoD game versus how often your character socialized?

But a few more comments.

Although @Ghost is of course correct in that you can't just take a system and gut it by removing social attributes from them... that's not the intention. It's to create a system from scratch, made for a MU*, in which we're not just taking a chunk out of something and cross our fingers. Would it have the effect that good roleplayers will have an advantage? I'm inclined to agree - supplementing the edge they already have - but to be honest here if the worst sideeffect of such a change is "charismatic, good players are even more successful" then it's something I can live with.

Another note: Plots. It's a fact, not an opinion, that it's easier to run a physical challenge than a social one as a plot's foundation; in the time it takes to introduce the principle agents of a threat that a socially savvy character can defuse one could run three plots about beating the shit of the Orcs threatening the village. The practical effect of this discrepancy is simply that more combat plots are ran than social ones. So by natural selection we already cater more to one set of attributes than we do another, forcing players to choose which they are good at - not making them pick sounds like it could mitigate the issue.

Finally, I can't agree more that in the absence of social traits more tangible non-physical assets become essential for politics. There would absolutely need to be an economy of some sort (information, land, currencies, stuff that you want and which can be offered/withheld) to introduce consequences and entice deals, alliances and rivalries.

It really isn't an easy choice to make. In many ways it's easier to just leave Charisma in, tell your players 'hey, I got you a damn system, just use it!' and declare anyone who's not using it a borderline exploiter even though it's not very usable. That's the mentality I'm trying to avoid here, misplacing the burden of both effort and blame on players for systems which weren't ever designed to cover the use case they are expected to use them for.

We might be able to do better if we can shift the paradigm in a different direction.

[Thenomain]

@SunnyJ said in Eliminating social stats:

My opinion is: Social skills and attributes will not be missed. Good riddance.

The only social system I would ever use in a game again is Green Ronin's Intrigue system for Game of Thrones.

That is an amazing system! I like Fate Core’s stress tracks for mental/social, too, but requires much more player agreement.

Maybe if we can stop being such nerds for ten minutes and just enjoy the company.

[Pyrephox]

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

It really isn't an easy choice to make. In many ways it's easier to just leave Charisma in, tell your players 'hey, I got you a damn system, just use it!' and declare anyone who's not using it a borderline exploiter even though it's not very usable. That's the mentality I'm trying to avoid here, misplacing the burden of both effort and blame on players for systems which weren't ever designed to cover the use case they are expected to use them for.

We might be able to do better if we can shift the paradigm in a different direction.

It might be worth building from the ground up. Ask yourself, as the game-runner, what is it, EXACTLY do you want players to be able to do with a social system. This is gonna be different for different games, and that's okay. But once you know what problems you're trying to solve, or opportunities you're trying to create, you're on a stronger design footing. Don't ask yourself "what should a social system do", but rather "what do I want the social system on my game to allow players to do?" And think through that, fully. You may not want PC to PC manipulation to be covered at all, but rather only broad based NPC influence.

[Arkandel]

@Pyrephox I quite agree. To paste from my ever-expanding design document, politics is the meat and potatoes of everyday RP, generated between players with as little staff intervention as possible (none is ideal) as they squibble over limited resources, work on conflicting goals or strive to improve their personal gains. By discouraging final (lethal) solutions then simultaneously ensuring any such gains are dynamic and reversible we are urging them to reach out to each other as both allies and antagonists at the same time; working alone they will lose to others who are not, but if their allies are met with greater success than their own they are similarly limiting those gains.

In other words I want to encourage cooperation but not universal alliances. Players are encouraged to be greedy - I want them to be - since they are in competition and cooperating with each other. Alliances and clashes are designed from scratch to be fluid.

What I'm banking on (and that'll be the main challenge) is to not need social stats because there'll be more to convincing others to strike deals than rolls. The reason for that is I've been dissatisfied with how games have handled this before since there were no consequences; sure, I convinced the Lady to grant me access to her trade routes (or whatever) but so what? She lost nothing from it. Where are the stakes?

The plan is to have limited resources to play a constant, self-perpetuating series of (near?) zero-sum political games. That's where the stakes should be.

Which isn't to say I know just how, yet.

[Ghost]

Idea: Hidden social rolls.

This idea is like something I started doing in my tabletop group. Basically, I stopped letting my players roll their own perception checks, sense bullshit checks, and danger sense checks.

I found that when they rolled their dice by their own hand, something odd happened.

1. if they knew the target number to beat before they rolled, they would know if they had failed the check.
2. if they knew if they failed, they would usually not act as if they'd naturally not seen the thing, but instead act as if they failed to see the thing but still felt the need to inspect something as if their gut told them to do so.
3. The players who knew they'd passed the check would then tell everyone the correct answer, and the PCs would all automatically believe the PC who passed the check because the players knew it was correct. No one ever questioned whether or not seeing nothing at all was the correct answer.

So I've started to fight against PC hive mind by keeping track of their social/perception stats and rolling WITHOUT ANNOUNCEMENT behind a GM screen and using those results to generate RP.

THE ACTUAL IDEA: Code social/social awareness/perception rolls (or assist via GM) to be handled entirely out of sight from the players so that the PLAYER ELEMENT doesn't pollute the process.

Theoretical Example:

• Player A wants to lie to Player B
• Player B wants to know if they're being lied to.
• Player B initiates a specialized, hardcoded (or string) roll for their perception stat vs target's social stats.
• The screen returns a prompt to all players that Player B's explanation is convincing.

Not appears to be true or a lie, but that the writing/acting queue spits out that whatever Player B has said is convincing and plausible.

Then...the game lists an expectation that to avoid metagaming these queues are expected to be honored.

Late addition: So no one in the scene would know who won or lost the roll, but that from Player A's perspective, B appears to be genuine.

[bored]

@Arkandel

I'd say either your version or the @Salty-Secrets option below (usable vs NPCs only) are your only realistic choices. Rolling generic skills for PvP social is never going to work in a MU environment. We can (and have) argue circles around why it SHOULD work, how people who don't honor dice are bad, awful people, how people who can't pose good social stuff are pathetic RPers, etc, but in the end its just empty sound & fury. It never works, and we know that from experience. That said, I'm not sure powers are in the same category, since they tend to have more defined effects.

Some version of the NPCs-only approach is what many mainstream games embrace (D&D and all its inheritors, Pathfinder, 13th Age, etc) with a pretty self-evident record. They do still have some powers that can control other characters but typically they're very straightforward in the parameters, and where there are glitches in these systems they're usually confined to individual spells/class abilities making it much easier to narrow things down and ban/patch. Otherwise, dice are there to shortcut NPC interactions and work pretty well for that. You can always hand out some bonuses for excellent RP, but the game doesn't hinge on it and it works reasonably well satisfying various player types.

[Pyrephox]

@Arkandel Hm.

With those goals, you might want to build from the domain up - note that this means there might have to be a lot of staff involvement in building domains for OCs, if you have any. But you might need to, essentially, use modules to build equivalent domains - divide resources out into common, uncommon, rare, (and possibly magical/unique), and stock each domain with much but not all of the resources they need to meet their upkeep requirements for food, steel, etc. Now, the downside to this is that you're going to select out people who absolutely do not want kingdom-sim in their political game, and you're probably going to have to do a fair amount of playtesting to balance things, which will (or should) mean wipes and resets during beta. Which will tick people off.

What kind of game is it? Fantasy, SF, historical?

[Ghost]

Double post but a followup afterthought to above post.

Back in my Vampire LARP days there was this concept I talked about a lot called playing the player. It's basically a metagaming tactic where despite the hobby's intention to be about playing a role and being in-character, I found that people were using their understanding of other players to thwart or outmatch them IC.

• If Brad always plays sneaky characters then despite his new character appearing as an honest character, I will never trust his character and always triple-validate everything he says...because BRAD
• Jane always smiles when she's lying.
• Nick always plays power combat characters so I'm not going to involve his new character in my role play scene because NICK

MU suffers from a lot of this. Many people take their queues from existing OOC knowledge of the other players and apply it to role play, rather than let the characters speak for themselves.

I feel the post above would help mitigate some of this.

[Salty Secrets]

@Ghost I don't think that's always a bad thing.

If my desire is to tell a tactical espionage story and I know that Nick only plays power-hungry combat monsters, or that he only enjoys fighting role-play, then using that knowledge to prevent my story from going astray the moment it starts is pretty standard story-teller behavior that I would expect from anyone.

There's really no excuse for meta-gaming though! It's one thing to avoid people whose role-play you know you won't be able to work with, it's another to meta-game.

[Arkandel]

@Pyrephox It's fantasy - I would elaborate but I'm on a phone atm.

[Thenomain]

@Ghost said in Eliminating social stats:

Theoretical Example:

• Player A wants to lie to Player B
• Player B wants to know if they're being lied to.
• Player B initiates a specialized, hardcoded (or string) roll for their perception stat vs target's social stats.
• The screen returns a prompt to all players that Player B's explanation is convincing.

I'm going to assume the last line is that 'Player A's explanation is convincing', since Player B isn't explaining anything in this example.

I don't see a situation where one of the two doesn't know what's going on. Eventually, the code has to ask Player A if their character is lying, which means you must absolutely trust Player A's honesty.

I don't think trusting Player A is going to be difficult; I think most players want to be honest until there's a point where they will obviously lose out if they are honest.

I like it, though; it's a Player-to-Player version of the Secret Doors check. See, in D&D, you must initiate the check for secret doors; you roll and if you succeed, THEN the DM tells you yes or no. It does have a minor downside that you know if you failed, but that's easily countered by not being able to try again until something reasonable triggers it.

I also like it because it does something that code can do well. This would, frankly, be easier than coding a tabletop system.

--

I don't like that everyone gets the benefit of Player B's roll, or that Player A knows that Player B succeeded/failed, but can be part of the fine-tuning, being a theoretical example and all.

[Salty Secrets]

@Thenomain I think any such system that doesn't take into account whether Player A put any effort into his lie at all is doomed to failure. Failure might be a strong word, actually, let's say doomed to be the same as all other social systems.

If social combat is to exist in a player versus player environment, there needs to be a third party who can impartially judge the situation and say things like "Player A, your lie is poorly constructed so you get -5 to your roll" or something along those lines.

There has to be a line that social stats can't cross. In order for a social roll to succeed what you use it to propose should at the very least be possible and reasonable. No amount of social stats should swerve an astronaut into becoming a Flat Earther.

[Arkandel]

@Salty-Secrets said in Eliminating social stats:

If social combat is to exist in a player versus player environment, there needs to be a third party who can impartially judge the situation and say things like "Player A, your lie is poorly constructed so you get -5 to your roll" or something along those lines.

If you need a third party to handle social interactions it's already too late.

This stuff isn't like physical PvP; it's not once-in-a-blue-moon stuff, it's every day and even pose to pose. Once you have to consult tables and call in the elusive impartial judges to rule over the encounter (who need to read what's happened so far and quite possibly have the context explained to them since they weren't present since the start) the roleplay is over.

I could handle this when my PC is finally getting into a big punchy showdown with Bob's since... how often does that happen? But if you asked me to do it every couple of scenes - as characters lie, manipulate, try to convince each other to do things etc way more often than they punch each other - I ... well, I wouldn't.

[Thenomain]

@Salty-Secrets said in Eliminating social stats:

@Thenomain I think any such system that doesn't take into account whether Player A put any effort into his lie at all is doomed to failure.

A system is more than its code. It's up to the same player negotiation that all interaction on every MU* ever in the history of mankind relies upon. The best code can do is have a way for one of the two players to call out the other for reasons of bad faith effort.

No code is going to solve this issue, and it's the kind of thing that you either leave to faith or leave the hobby.

[Lain]

@Salty-Secrets said in Eliminating social stats:

If social combat is to exist in a player versus player environment, there needs to be a third party who can impartially judge the situation and say things like "Player A, your lie is poorly constructed so you get -5 to your roll" or something along those lines.

Here's why that doesn't make sense: it would be like expecting someone who wants to play Walter White to actually know how to make methamphetamine.

Player: "Alright, so I cook the meth."

GM: "How?"

Player: "Well, I uhm. Actually I don't know how to make meth."

GM: "..."

Play: "Alright, fine, I'll try. I mix bleach with ammonia."

GM: "... that's... not how you make meth. You can roll for it, but you're at a -5 disadvantage."

This is comparable to what you're suggesting by demanding that players make "believable" lies before the die roll is made. Expecting players using a specific social skill to know how to use that social skill in real life is like expecting every player with a high-Science character to personally have high-Science in real life. It's an untenable position to hold, since the point of roleplaying games is to pretend to be someone other than yourself. This might include someone with different -- or superior/inferior -- social skills to oneself.

Here's a better solution: you have an impartial judge help come up with the specifics of the outcome after the die roll. So when a player who already won the bluff check writes a stupid pose, the GM can go, "Come on, that's oh so silly, try this line of thought instead maybe." The character isn't robbed of their victory, but the player is instead robbed of their ability to force the character to make unpersuasive arguments when we already know for a fact that said character made a persuasive one: see the dice. Maybe the player of the winning PC can straight up ask the player of the losing PC what kind of argument their character would find persuasive, and then write a pose to that effect. Whatever the case may be a persuasive argument was made and the narrative must bend to that. Modifiers are for when the situation itself -- not the player's persuasiveness in real life -- make persuasion either easier or more difficult.

This way you retain a degree of autonomy about how your character wins (or loses), while not being able to evade that they won (or lost). When your roll to seduce the hot chick at the bar fails, you're free to autonomously choose how the spaghetti falls out of your pockets, but the result is going to be the same: she blows you off and tells you she has a boyfriend, or whatever.