@ShelBeast Exactly.

Just imagine if it was acceptable in this hobby to say "your emote about shooting my character was retarded and also betrays your lack of firearms knowledge; what you just did would make the gun jam. Therefore it does just that and you deal my character 0 damage in spite of your eight successes."

Or

" If you reject my emote where I shoot your character in the head and therefore likely kill them just because I failed to get even a single success then you're not acknowledging my creativity as a writer and are just being a butthurt rollplayer."

Just imagine if this psychology about social rolls got applied to anything else.

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

Personally, I have a basic fundamental objection to having dice tell me how to play my character.

Here's the thing: unless you also want to get rid of Mental stats, they already do. As an example of someone who wants to crack a neighbor's WiFi password, if they have Computer 0 in game but Computer 2 out of game, they might know OOC to download Kali Linux. This, by no stretch of the imagination, grants the player license to tell the ST, "Okay, so my guy downloads Kali Linux."

Should a player decide to do this with their Computer 0 character, they are pretty much already in the wrong. However, the ST can choose to be magnanimous by allowing the player to roll to see if their character knows this information. If they fail that roll, they don't know how to go forward; and no, you don't get to reroll. Also if you get a dramatic failure due to your -3 dice penalty your character downloads and runs definitelynotmalware.exe onto his Windows 10 Botnet Edition installation and it destroys it, rendering the machine unusable until the operating system is reinstalled. Finally, he doesn't know how to do this reinstallation because of his already-failed Computer roll on this exact topic.

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. No, you don't get to evade it. You don't get to find some cleverly tactful way to make spaghetti fall out of your character's pockets. They just fuck up or sperg out. Period.

Similarly, your Resolve 2 Composure 2 character doesn't get to go on some ride-or-die shit when someone points a gun in his face and he loses the Intimidation roll. What actually happens is he crumples. He puts his hands up and his eyes go wide. He gives the thug his wallet and begs to be allowed to keep his ID. If it's a dramatic loss (the thug gets 5+ successes on him), he might literally shit himself. He doesn't teleport behind you, and he doesn't unsheathe his katana. He just acts like a weak-ass bitch, in public.

If you want more autonomy over your character you're just going to have to spend your finite point-spend resources on making them more behaviorally resilient. If you want them to be able to make other characters do what he wants, you'll have to also spend your finite point-spend resources on extroverted social skills like Persuasion, Intimidation, etc.

Saying that your socially awkward character can make some Tyrion Lannister power play is like saying my Firearms 0 character can snipe your Tyrion Lannister character from 3mi away. The correct answer is: just no.

@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. :^)

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:

Maintaining a player of "agency" is negative when used like this, but it is positive and important when you have a player trying to use Intimidate or Dominate to get into someone else's pants or skirt. And for all the times I've had some player punk out of a legitimate social roll -- which happens regardless of whether the stats exist -- I'd rather that happen than to hear that someone rolled to seduce an unwilling player's character, and then had that enforced by staff who were "just following the rules."

As an improv performer, I'd frown at the douchebag who acts inappropriately to intimidation, but I'd seriously beat the fuck out of anyone breaking the cardinal rule of "don't be a fucking sexual predator."

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?

EDIT:

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ganymede 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.

We do our roll of dice, and my guy wins; the target is intimidated. Now, obviously, the point of intimidation is to compel someone to do something -- or refrain from doing something -- they otherwise wouldn't because they're scared of you. In this case, the point would be to make him fork over his cash and then act scared and maybe piss his pants or something. It would be to make him bend the knee, so to speak, and act like he's scared of getting stabbed.

That's one of the major reasons I'm considering eliminating social stats.

Sure, you roll, the other guy rolls, you win... and then what? Did you scare the target shitless? Is the way they're responding adequately scared? What if you think they're kinda meh about it but their player thinks that's just how the PC shows fear? What if they recover in the next pose, is that too early? Are you supposed to scare the Elder by glaring at him, you neonate? What about in the next scene, should there be a lingering effect?

Sure, various systems and mechanics attempt to address the scope of social stats but I've just...never been satisfied with them. The primary issue is that they're typically pretty complicated - but unlike punching (which happens rarely since violent confrontations aren't an everyday thing), social interactions take place constantly, so if it's not easy to use such a system then it won't be... which may be worse than not having one at all.

I think it's pretty self-explanatory what a social roll entails in most cases. If your character loses an Intimidation roll, that character just got punked, and is going to act like a little bitch in the most relevant capacity. Putting his hands on his face, taking up less space and kind of curling into himself, resorting to de-escalation methods, appeals to sympathy and maybe even outright begging. They go into damage control mode.

If some player can't make their character respond appropriately to losing a social roll they're just bad at roleplaying and should probably be consequenced if not outright banned.

@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.

@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.

My parents were both members of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is more a religious cult than it is an alcoholism treatment program. They indoctrinated me with that crap until I started seriously questioning it at around age fifteen or sixteen.

AA has its own theology man. Shit is nuts. One thing I was taught is that if I had one beer I'd immediately turn into the most over-the-top degenerate caricature of an alcoholic. Turns out, not really. I've never shown up to school or work drunk or fucked up, I've never gotten blasted on a night before I had an obligation like work, etc.

I had a rave/drug phase in my early to mid twenties but that has come and gone. Good times, don't regret it. Today, I will have a drink or two and smoke a bowl once per week or so while I watch a movie/listen to music. I would like to drop some acid again in my lifetime but I'm not going to go out of my way to procure it unless it's for a special occasion.

I'm an atheist now.

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:

@ThatOneDude said in Eliminating social stats:

But couldn't you /deprive agency/ with physical stats? IE: I grapple you and force you to stay when you want to leave. Or using force/violence I could make your PC do something they normally wouldn't. That's why to me it just makes sense to have a like for like system, that has like attack/defense. Then follow up with the "if you don't feel good with what's happening then fade to black or whatever."

By "agency," I mean intent and thought, rather than actual ability. As mentioned by another, grappling me is different than using some power or social ability to prevent me from resisting. You could physically force me to back down, or do it via power. I personally don't mind someone depriving me of agency, but it is a sticking point for others due to past histories, creepers, etc.

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.

We do our roll of dice, and my guy wins; the target is intimidated. Now, obviously, the point of intimidation is to compel someone to do something -- or refrain from doing something -- they otherwise wouldn't because they're scared of you. In this case, the point would be to make him fork over his cash and then act scared and maybe piss his pants or something. It would be to make him bend the knee, so to speak, and act like he's scared of getting stabbed.

However, by giving players "agency" over their characters, you allow them to cop out of the real outcomes of the dice rolls, by coming up with cute and interesting ways to evade the point of the rolls at hand, and ignore the context that their characters are put in:

"Oh, my character is just soooooooo intimidated by this that his fight-or-flight response triggers and he comes at you. Roll initiative."

@bored

To a point you're right, taking out the systems comes down on the side of people who prefer RP.

You're conflating "RP" with "social RP." The two are not interchangeable, even though you may think so.

Anyway, I don't mean to overly single you out for hostility other than to point out the at this point comical ludicrousness of people having this argument seriously the number of times they do. Sorry you got to the party late, but you really aren't adding anything.

Actually, writing poses after social rolls wasn't suggested in this thread at all, and everybody was speaking in terms of posing your attempt first and rolling to see if it works. In the context of this thread, that is new.

I agree that it's a tough thing to get into. But I just get the impression that there's also a psychology of "autonomy," where people are much more comfortable admitting that their character might not have a particular skillset or domain knowledge than they are admitting that their character quite legitimately can be deceived, manipulated, or intimidated. People tend to believe that they are "above the bullshit" and, by extension, so are their characters.

I think a great deal of why people are opposed to social dice mattering much is because it not only acknowledges, but rubs the player's face in, the reality that in some cases their characters are decidedly not above the bullshit, and are in fact subject to it like the rest of us.

@Salty-Secrets

@Lain I like this idea a lot but having a third party present for every social roll who knows enough about what's going on to make suggestions like that might be a bit harder than just having a third party who can spot and penalize absurd uses of the code. I have to yield to @Arkandel and @Thenomain when they say having a third party at all isn't feasible if social conflict is an every-day thing.

You'd only need a third party when someone tries to cop out of the roll outcomes or overplay their hand on them. "I get so intimidated it triggers my fight instinct" is one such example. You can even incentivize playing nice and not calling on the GM/Wiz/ST to babysit you by saying that if you get called out, and then the babysitter comes, and you're found to be in the wrong, then you lose XP or something. You get punished for wasting their time.

@Arkandel

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.

This is actually why I brought up roll-first-pose-later earlier. I agree, expecting dumb poses to yield positive results is dumb. But if you lose the roll, and the player is a bit awkward, the player can ask you, OOC, "So what kind of thing would persuade your character to do X for him?" You answer OOC, he writes a pose to that effect, and you go on your way. Sure, there's an extra step, but it allows one character to be subordinated to another with less opportunity for stupid shit.

@faraday Highlighting your name because my response to Arkandel is basically my response to you.

@Salty-Secrets

Cooking meth would in most role-play I've ever been a part of be handled by saying, "My character cooks meth." and then rolling. The same goes with hacking, cooking, hunting and sometimes even combat with a simple "I swing my sword" or "I fire my shotgun". You can also google most practical skills like that and make a convincing pose if you had to.

Maybe my experience with this sort of thing is different, but I hang out with STEM people. If you say "I cook meth," and then you follow it up with something that's incorrect to the end of cooking meth (like my "mix ammonia with bleach" example), they'll call you on it. Even if a non-STEM person wouldn't be able to pick up on it, the people I spend my time will. So @faraday's expectation of a Hollywood-esque explanation wouldn't cut it because I spend my time with a pharmaceutical manufacturer with a background in chemical engineering, and he'd call you on it fast. I spend time with people who know what they're doing on a wide variety of topics, and if I get into even slightly incorrect specifics, their suspension of disbelief will be undermined dramatically.

That's why I can say "I cook the meth" and it will fly because I'm not specifying how. Basically, I think you're presupposing that the only thing that can be held to realistic standards is social interaction.

Lying, impressing, manipulating people is on the other hand almost always role-played out fully and responses to it must be role-played out fully as well.

I've seen people in my group say that they lie to the town guards and just roll a bluff check. They leave it at that. This is considered acceptable. I understand the desire to write elaborate poses to the effect you desire, but this can be accomplished with roll-first-pose-later without expecting people to be who they roleplay as.

@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

B-but my character would never fall for that! She's above the bullshit, just like me!

You could provide a reward to characters that use social combat, only to have the targets refuse to comply based on agency. If in nWoD 2E, give them a Beat.

You could provide a reward to characters who give in without a roll, or where they knowingly accept a negative consequence as a result of going along with the desired result. Give them a Beat.

Cap the beats, and people will still play the social combat game.

Lots of ways to make it work for as many people as possible.

I think the players who bitch about muh agency would have such a high time preference that they'd pass on the Beats just to pout about how their character would totally respond to successful intimidation with violence instead of just putting their head down. They think about nothing but right now.

That Muslims are so insufferable even fucking Buddhists want to genocide them. Like it or not, this is comedy gold.

@Ominous said in World Building: What are the essentials?:

@Lain If the writer is a lazy, a set of "commandments" would work. Just a bullet point list of thou shalts and thou shalt nots.

• Thou shalt rise when any noble enters the room.

• Thou shalt always be on hands and knees when the emperor is present.

• Thou shalt not look at the emperor, lest his guards behead you.

• Thou shalt always give Duke Biganmighty a 20 stroke handicap on his golf game and let him have a do-over when he hits the ball into a water hazard. First round at the bar is on him.

That's not laziness. That's just good style in the 21st century. Just imagine if it were written in a more "literary" fashion:

There are a handful of rules that must always be followed in order to function in Not-Medieval-Yurop. First, whenever nobles enter the room that you are currently occupying, you must rise reverently. Secondly, physical displays of prostration, a la hand and knees on the ground and face pointing downward, are necessary in the presence of the Emperor. Thirdly, the minimum golf handicap for Duke Biganmighty is 20, and he gets to start over whenever his golf balls find themselves in the water. Finally, he will pay for the first round at the bar every time.

Which one is more comprehensible? I'm going to lean heavily on the bullet points.

@Roz said:

@icanbeyourmuse said in World Building: What are the essentials?:

One thing I REALLY dislike is the just spamming a link or help file (or for things based on books or what have the book/page number/whatever). If someone is asking they were, probably already looking at the aforementioned thing and does not understand.

As someone who is a habitual question-answerer, it's really not my experience that this is the case the majority of the time. (And people who have already checked the available resources tend to be fairly clear about that in their initial question.)

I will say that if the introductory help file is a 10,000 word wall of text I likely won't read it unless I really like the concept of your site. You get one thousand words of content to give me before I just start asking questions on the help channel shamelessly.

There's no shame in using modern use of language like bullet points or even very modern use of language and iconography like infographics. In fact, it's more shameful to try to describe it entirely in verbiage these days; it's not the nineteenth century anymore, so purple prose is unnecessary even when you're trying to be "deep" or detailed.

@Ominous How would one go about describing cultural mores in ways that are easily consumable?

As a player, what information do you want and need about a game world to effectively play the game (ex: be able to formulate a character you feel fits the world and knows what the characters should know about it)?

A genre, plus any details about the world that are atypical for that genre. Putting them in bullet points is ideal, with the option to go to another page to read more when it becomes relevant. Wikis are great for this purpose.

Basically, give me broad strokes that get progressively more specific as I delve deeper. The specific information is less relevant than the granularity of it, and that the broadest stuff comes first while the most specific stuff comes last.

As a player, what kind of information do you find gets in your way more than it helps you accomplish this?

Fifty thousand word historical accounts of events from the perspective of an NPC who I will never deal with in game. I should not have to spend an afternoon to find out that it's basically generic fantasy setting, except the elves have blue hair that gives them magic powers this time. You should just come out and say, "It's like an R.A. Salvatore novel except the elves have blue hair that gives them magic powers."

Not the broad strokes, either. Everybody knows you have to cover basic history, basic setting, or include a writeup of what factions are present and what they represent. This is about specifics.

The specifics don't matter, really. What matters most is how they're presented. First and foremost, you should tell your potential players what the fucking point is, i.e., what your setting is fundamentally about, as opposed to every other setting out there; "Arkadia is a fairy tale setting with dark fantasy/horror notes" is way more important to know than "King Leopold XXIV hated coconuts so much that if he smelled coconuts on a suitor for his daughter he'd have them beheaded." You want both in your setting information, but you want to get that latter detail way, way down the line.

Is it important to you, as a player, to have information available that distinguishes 'what locals would know' vs. 'what out of towners/new arrivals' would know?

Depends on if you're going to be running the game exclusively in one city or locale.

@deadculture Crafter characters are always where it's at fam

First lecture in biology, professor recommends The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker.

RPI is so based.

@Misadventure said in General Video Game Thread:

@You may need to ask others if they think so. To me the answer is yes. You reach level 70, and then start accumulating Paragon levels which you get to assign points to a set list of 16 stats. That pretty much caps out at paragon level 800. You can destroy Legendary items and save a copy of their unique power, and run one armor, one weapon and one jewelry legendary power at a time. Every power has lots of Runs to change how the power functions and what element it does if its an attack. There is a ton of potential ways to play, but there are synergies that are shared, and reinforced by class sets. They also introduced Primal Ancients, but that isn't customization.

I was thinking more along the lines of taking an already cool item and then putting a socket in it, then taking one of your socket accessories and putting it in.

Or putting in some amalgamation into your horoadric cube and having it spit out something more useful than what you put in. You could do a wide range of things with that.

It was really fun. I like crafting stuff.

@Misadventure said in General Video Game Thread:

@lain D3 with Reaper of Souls is fantastic. I believe the Battle Chest for it is like $19.99 now. It is a loot and FX piñata.

Did they bring back Diablo II's openendedness? That's part of why it was so fun for me. You could customize your items through various means. Was really cool tbh

@Misadventure said in General Video Game Thread:

Hardcore works for me because I have a seasonal group who will power level any character, and take you along to get some gear in very high greater rifts. So losing something isn't so bad, and I have peeps to play with sitting next to me.

Hardcore was pretty based since it added that roguelike effect. At least, in Diablo II. I skipped Diablo III.