Best posts made by Lain

@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.

Playing RPGs should be a diagnostic criteria for autism.

@Ominous I agree. It's outdated. So let's make a MU that breaks these kinds rules, man.

I skipped exercise two days in a row. I went to the gym today and it's closed for "maintenance." Feels bad man.

@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:

@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.

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 Americans like to bitch about crazy Christian crap because Christianity is the dominant religion in the region (North America) and as a consequence of that their crazies get a lot more leeway than the crazies of any other religion.

It has nothing to do with the content of the religion and everything to do with the one that is dominant and therefore the one that most of us have to tolerate in spite of their insanity.

@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.

Political ideology supplanted religion in the 20th century. Now people cleave to preconceived notions about how governments and societies ought to be run in the face of evidence to the contrary, instead of explicit supernatural entities.

What is your religion political ideology (definitely NOT religion)?

@faraday So if you can suspend disbelief for factual inaccuracy, why not for low interpersonal skill? I think it really does come down to not wanting to have it rubbed in your face that your character is not "above the bullshit." So even though people fall for obvious lies both in real life and in fiction all the time, if a player's bullshit detector goes off, then there's this illusion that it must also go off for the character in order to maintain suspension of disbelief.

I'd go as far as to call it an IC/OOC conflation to the extent that it indicates a floundering theory of mind in the person doing the RP. I wouldn't mind spending a ton of my IC points on things like Resolve/Composure in the interest of making my character actually "above the bullshit."

EDIT:
@Sunny

I cannot imagine playing tabletop with people like that. I'd do it once with that group and NEVER AGAIN. It sounds terrible and miserable.

I have a great deal of fun with these people.

@Ghost I was being pretty tongue-in-cheek about that. I think political ideology today is a pretty bad deal, and we're seeing it rear its ugly head again this century. Political indoctrination has similar consequences as religious indoctrination. It's basically the same exact psychology copy-pasted but with a secular veneer.

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.

No more than people insisting that if you are bad with people IRL then by extension so must your character. If "it's just personal preference" can justify abolishing social but not mental skills, then logically, the inverse can also be true. I'm in favor of neither, mind you.

There's a huge, very significant difference, actually. I can see why you would be in favor of rollplay instead of roleplay where it comes to social skills, if you seriously equate these things out to the same sort of thing. Apples and rocks.

The difference isn't that huge depending on how the game pans out, though. Since I spent time with engineers and scientists, entire sessions have gone by with us trying to figure out how to fortify Sanctums and stuff like that.

One time my ST, during an Investigation/Academics session when we were trying to figure out how one of our enemies worked, said that each success on a roll would yield one relevant book on the topic from the library. When we got three successes, he literally pulled the three books off of his shelf and handed it to the party. This represented a number of hours of IG "study." That session, and the one following it, was about finding out exactly what within these books held the relevant details.

It wasn't very social at all. To make the game not entirely about that, we've done things like have someone roll Politics when it comes to dealing with Consilium bureaucrats if they come around to give us shit about what we're building.

So yeah, it's literally a matter of personal preference. I think you're invalidating Mental-heavy players in favor of Social-heavy ones because you think the latter is "real RP" and the former simply is not.