Posts made by Arkandel

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

@Arkandel Well unless I misread, you said it like a negative against social stats... like, they were useless because they never got rolled. I've never rolled my BSGU char's Dancing skill either, but her skill (or rather, lack thereof) has come up in several scenes. The problem isn't them not getting rolled, IMHO, the problem is when someone has Dancing:1 but RPs like they're going to win So You Think You Can Dance (or conversely has a char with Dancing:5 but their dance poses are cringe-worthy). Short of coding everything, I don't know how you ever really fix that problem (and even that probably won't work either). You can mitigate it somewhat with open sheets and letting players keep each other honest, but that only goes so far.

The problem I was addressing in this part of the thread wasn't whether people were roleplaying being better at a skill than they are, it was a comment by (I think) @Lain who said there are just those who can't play out a skill convincingly but that's okay because we're just roleplaying having such skills anyway. So it's the opposite of that - people who have a high IC social skill but can't match it through their poses.

And the root of that problem is that skills like dancing can be very safely abstracted even by people with little knowledge of how they work. I can't dance my way out of a paper bag (although that'd be amusing) but I could probably put together a pose that sounds like my character has some moves, but if I suck at being persuasive then I can't just abstract all that with the Persuasion skill because at some point my PC is gonna have to open his mouth and actually say things, things that you are going to have to read. There will be non-persuasive words involved. It will make you sigh.

That's what I meant.

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

Side note to @Arkandel's point about going many scenes without seeing a roll: You say that like it's a bad thing. That's my ideal. Rolls are for when players can't agree on which way the story should go.

Damn, did I come off like I meant it was a bad thing?

I hatedislike rolling outside of providing resolution paths (aka the Cops and Robbers scenario) or to introduce randomisation when an action could go either way.

@Faceless Thanks for the story! That's the text equivalent of kitten pic shares first thing in the morning.

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

Shockingly a new poster is arguing about this as if we haven't read literally everything they just typed dozens of times before!

It's irrelevant whether they are a new poster or not. He (or she) who's never beaten a dead horse before can cast the first stone.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

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.

That is kind of a main point against social skills though. See, unlike making meth (or hacking into the FBI database, repairing a car, etc) we actually play out the socialization parts. No one walks into a scene and goes "OOC: Hey, my character says hi and hangs out with y'all. +roll presence+socialize". No one, ever, and that's a good thing since that's basically ... well, the roleplay. People pose what they say, articulate what they want, tell others how it is said in as much detail and conviction as they care to go into.

So this is a real issue with these skills - politics, lying, manipulating, etc - when the roleplay points in one direction and the skills in a different one. If a guy comes to my PC, makes a fucking dumb proposal while insulting my woman in the process and he's caught at a lie but has high social stats then apparently I'm supposed to ignore the roleplay and just go with the results of a roll? Yes. That's... basically what MU* systems say. If I don't then I'm not playing right.

Well, I think that's a bad way of doing things. It just doesn't make sense. This social stuff is not the same as everything else, it cannot be safely and easily abstracted like everything else. Poses cannot be abstracted, they are explicit so we can't just separate their content from the mechanics.

Paradox brings light to a World of Darkness.

@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.

About the Defenders again, something that occurred to me during a chat with coworkers is that Danny Rand is the only one among them who ought to have his shit together; he's the only one who had a path laid in front of him from a young age, who followed a specific curriculum, and whose job actually is (well, except for fleeing his city) doing exactly what he's doing.

And yet he's the newbie in the bunch who has no clue about how the world works and has to figure it all out. Good job, dude!

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

@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.

@Wizz It wasn't even that deep. That part makes no sense.

But that's fine, magic. Whatever. But they didn't explain so many things about even the basic parts of their own plot - what the Black Sky is at all, why they wanted to get back to K'un-Lun at all if all they wanted was the dragon bones since it's obviously not the only place they can be found, etc.

They don't need to give us all the answers of course, but they explained almost nothing. For what I can tell there is nothing under the surface.

@Coin I think GoT's success was just a perfect storm. Great books (YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH) , casting that just worked from day one (I can't imagine a better choice for Tyrion), producers who care a great deal about the material and stayed the course without burning out or losing their shit, money thrown liberally at the project which shows in the production values, and timing.

Can they recreate it? Who knows, but I do know D&D aren't going to be involved in the spinoffs since they said so.

@Coin

Speaking of prequels, did you hear they're doing one for Game of Thrones? George Martin is involved, but hopefully it won't depend on him to write stuff.

I'm hoping for Dunk and Egg but it could be anything. Freed from the shackles (and advantages) of the books it could go either way... but they really want to keep that massive GoT cash cow goin'.

@Lain It's by far my favorite TV show this season so as far as I'm concerned - yes. But it's okay for people to like different things.

@Coin said in Good TV:

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

@Coin I also don't love we saw Stone for like five seconds back in DD season 1, then never again.

SPOILERS

So if the Chaste are actually all dead (assuming we take Stick's word for that) then I guess they introduced the guy real quick then killed him off screen, which is just awesome.

SPOILERS

Man, I don't even remember Stone.

But basically I think they dropped the ball with the Hand becuase the Hand is SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING and they could do SO MUCH MORE with it.

At least Gao survived.

Weaver's character was ... underwhelming because for all they all said they feared/respected her, she never put forth enough actual power. I would have liked to see her kicking a little ass, myself.

The unlikelihood that we will get an iron Fist 2 means that he'll probably crop up in other shows (Luke Cage and Daredevil, probably) and in the next Defenders. Which means we can probably expect Joy Meachum and Davos in the next Defenders show.

The fact two of the Hand's 5 actors aren't too young (as much as it saddens me to think about it, Weaver is now what, in her 50s or 60s, and Gao's actress is probably up there unless a lot of it was makeup) means they could only do so much when it came to them being part of fighting choreography. They could have at least given Alexandra some more telekinisis or something though.

Speaking of which... Daredevil season 1's choreography was just goddamn incredible for TV. I still remember those amazing long fighting sequences (minutes long) was just revolutionary for TV... but now they've gone back to much simpler quickly edited cuts where sometimes I can barely tell wtf is going on.

That's a shame for most shows but for Iron Fist... if I can't expect amazing fighting from a martial arts superhero then they better deliver in some other superb way, which... yeah, they didn't.

@Coin I also don't love we saw Stone for like five seconds back in DD season 1, then never again.

SPOILERS

So if the Chaste are actually all dead (assuming we take Stick's word for that) then I guess they introduced the guy real quick then killed him off screen, which is just awesome.

My sister pocket-dialled me from overseas... at 5 am. Since there's basically never something good anyone would call at that hour for I freaked out, and by the time it was clear it was an accident ("hey, what's up?" "uh, you called me." "no I didn't." "...") it was too late to get back to sleep.

Meh!

In the Defenders did anyone else think the Hand's end game super-soldier - the Black Sky, who we get very little information about - wasn't that impressive?

Elektra is deadly but she wasn't overpowered at all. We saw several characters hold their own (Danny punches her through a wall through the opening scene), and I kept getting the impression that without extensive plot armor Luke Cage could solo her - hell, he might have soloed most of the Hand.

These dudes aren't going to take over the world.

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.

@tragedyjones Get out.

@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.