Posts made by Lain

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain

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.

This is what I said. These are the two things that there is a difference between. This is the statement you challenged when I answered with apples and rocks. I'll work on my writing while you work on your reading comprehension, eh?

Here is what I said:

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.

Here is what you said in response:

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.

I'll give you an upvote because this conversation is going in circles.

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

You argued that comparing mental skills to social ones is comparing "apples and rocks," and that "it's my personal preference" can be used to justify getting rid of social skills, but not mental skills.

You argued this. So while you were busy calling me an idiot, you were, in fact, being an idiot. The irony.

No. I did not. "Apples and rocks" was referring to the difference between 'you're doing it wrong' and 'I would like to try it this way'. I have not spoken to anything but you calling WRONGFUN on people who are trying to have a discussion about the sort of fun that they want to have.

You might want to work on your writing skills, then, because the context says otherwise:

"If you can do X, then you can do Y as well."

"There's a huge, very significant difference, actually."

The context says you're talking about X and Y being incomparable. Even if you meant something else.

That said, I do fundamentally agree with you on this being a matter of personal preference, if that's any consolation.

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

Except "I lie <clatter of dice>" is about as immersive as "I cook the meth <clatter of dice>" or "I fortify the Sanctum <clatter of dice>" or "I cast magic missile against the goblin <clatter of dice>."

I think you're missing the point that some of us are saying that "I cook the meth" is no more satisfactory than "I lie" or "I treat the patient" or "I fight Bob". We come for immersion. We come for story. We expect some measure of detail in poses -- all poses. Social skills are a little different because they're harder to fake. Not everyone has a BS-o-meter tuned for medical stuff or meth cooking, but everyone has a BS-o-meter tuned for socialization, and socialization comes up literally all the time.

It's fine to have a different point of view. Really it is. It's not okay to dismiss the alternative as some form of "I just want my character to be immune to social stuff" powerplaying just because you don't understand and/or agree with it. That's insulting and dismissive. Lots of games do this successfully. It's not some alien concept that's never been tried.

This is you telling me not to be insulting and dismissive.

@faraday

LOL. I'm not even going to respond to that one.

This is you being insulting and dismissive.

If you want me to not be insulting and dismissive to you, you're going to have to refrain from being insulting and dismissive to me.

Now. Onto your point: social skills aren't harder to fake. Especially if you keep it in somewhat vague terms: "Her eyes glaze over and her lower lip starts trembling. Something about this seems so innocent and helpless." There. This pose can be used for basically any plea of helplessness. Just because you, faraday, might be able to call these crocodile tears for what they are OOC does not, in fact, mean that a character will. People fall for really obvious manipulative ploys IRL all the time. If you don't believe me, go to any real life setting where people interact with each other regularly. If you don't bury your face in your palms at least once a day because you catch some third party making a BS manipulation/powerplay/whatever on another third party and you notice it but the target doesn't, you're autistic as fuck.

That's what is so awful about humans: we're gullible as hell. Most people acquiesce to, if not outright fall for, blatant and obvious lies, deceptions, and hollow threats all the fucking time. We see it in fiction and in real life all the time: people falling for really stupid shit.

We know from this that if anything, especially in the context of an RPG, faking social ability is, if anything, easier, since it's the norm in fiction for otherwise intelligent and capable characters to fall for really stupid shit all the time. It's even more plausible for gullible or weak willed characters to fall for really stupid shit, as well.

You can write off practically all obvious cringe shit from a Cheetos American neckbeard's interpretation of seduction with "there's a certain je ne sais quoi about his character." Whereas, you simply cannot make meth by mixing ammonia and bleach -- at least, not to the best of my knowledge -- because that's just not how chemistry works.

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain

Are you for real? Yes. That is exactly what I was saying, because I was snarking at you over refusal to acknowledge that 'let's try it this way' and 'you are doing it wrong' are two different statements. There IS a huge difference, and if you genuinely think that there is not, you fail at social interaction and would obviously need to go with not having to RP stuff out. I was calling you an idiot.

Look at the context.

Me:

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.

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.

You argued that comparing mental skills to social ones is comparing "apples and rocks," and that "it's my personal preference" can be used to justify getting rid of social skills, but not mental skills.

You argued this. So while you were busy calling me an idiot, you were, in fact, being an idiot. The irony.

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain

No. The only reason they're leading to that conclusion is because you refuse to acknowledge they could be interpreted any other possible way. Your premise (that X leads to Y, and therefore Z is true) is incorrect, because it is only for you that X must lead to Y. This is where 'personal' comes in for personal preference.

So what you're saying is when you said this:

@Lain

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.

You weren't making any statements aside from ones about your personal preference? Are you sure? This cannot be undone.

@Sunny People are free to run a game with no social stats, but if their stated reasons also lead one to the conclusion that we should also remove mental and physical stats, yet they don't feel like doing so, it does make their stated reasons invalid. If the stated reason somebody gives for supporting Policy A also supports Policy B (which they say they oppose), they either start supporting both, admit their stated reason is very flawed, or begin engaging in cognitive dissonance.

The idea of a game with no social stats but mental and physical ones is not invalid, but the arguments presented in this thread for such a game undoubtedly are.

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

It is this mentality, specifically, that I am addressing. That just because you don't understand why someone might have a different preference than you, they MUST have this particular motivation.

I'm interested in hearing some other potential motivation, but so far, all other motivations presented (immersion, autonomy, etc) can be used as bases for getting rid of mental/physical stats as well. And so far everybody, yourself included, has insisted that it's totally different because reasons. So forgive me for being a bit flippant when I'm condescended to about reasons that just aren't there.

@Thenomain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Thenomain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain

You may be running into an interesting community conceit: That we RP for immersion. Tabletops, as we know, RP for many reasons but mostly for sitting around playing a game.

I'd like to hear how your friends would do in a LARP or other situation where personal actions are more to the fore, and not 'I lie <clatter of dice> and win!'

Except "I lie <clatter of dice>" is about as immersive as "I cook the meth <clatter of dice>" or "I fortify the Sanctum <clatter of dice>" or "I cast magic missile against the goblin <clatter of dice>."

That, er, is exactly the point, yes.

I'm not sure what your point is. It hardly seems in contradiction to my own about the analogy between deleting social stats vs physical or mental stats

@Thenomain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain

You may be running into an interesting community conceit: That we RP for immersion. Tabletops, as we know, RP for many reasons but mostly for sitting around playing a game.

I'd like to hear how your friends would do in a LARP or other situation where personal actions are more to the fore, and not 'I lie <clatter of dice> and win!'

Except "I lie <clatter of dice>" is about as immersive as "I cook the meth <clatter of dice>" or "I fortify the Sanctum <clatter of dice>" or "I cast magic missile against the goblin <clatter of dice>."

The conceit isn't just that people play RPGs for the sake of immersion, but specifically that social dice don't count for anything. You'll notice that on WoD games, there's way less objection to people using supernatural abilities to override their autonomy. My character can use Dominate on someone to make them do my bidding because magic. He can shoot that character and make them die without me knowing how to do so. He can cook meth without me knowing how to do so, either.

So in conclusion, it's not about autonomy, it's not about believability, it's not about immersion, and it's not about suspension of disbelief, it's about "my character is above the bullshit, just like me!"

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

Anyone who doesn't see a difference between 'if you play this way you are wrong' and 'I would like to try and play like this' has a problem.

Sure, but nobody is arguing that certain playstyles are wrong except those who write off social stats mattering as "rollplaying."

@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.

@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

So if you can suspend disbelief for factual inaccuracy, why not for low interpersonal skill?

Various folks have tried several times to explain why, but since it was buried in other walls of text, I will pull them out for emphasis:

1. Because social ability comes up in literally every pose, whereas those other skills are not "in your face" as often.

2. Because what (most of us) are griping about is not the borderline "I can suspend my disbelief" zone, but the "OMG really?" cringe-worthy stuff like in @Arkandel's recent example.

1. I'm not sure if you've ever read a combat pose.

2. Bleach-and-ammonia analogy. It's so obviously wrong that your cook meth roll should autofail. And further analogously, this thinking says "I cook meth" should not cut it.

@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.

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

You still are not adding anything, and you will not add anything. You can continue to write great treatises on this subject, but your content has 100% been covered before. We've been grappling with this for decades, and it's been the same conversation almost every time. You're by all means encouraged to argue for arguing's sake to convince people who have entrenched their positions over said decades, just be aware that's all you're doing.

If I'm not adding anything, then neither are you, or anybody else for that matter. Which raises the question of, why are you getting so butthurt at me in particular?

@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.

@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.

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

This is why I'm very much with @Arkandel on 'nah, fuck it, just toss the shit out.'

But how does this differ from

'you better be able to RP charm if you want to be charming.'

Or

'you better be able to RP cooking meth with chemical accuracy to cook meth'

?

@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.

I guess I'm old fashioned. I still AnimeBytes, the private tracker.

@Arkandel There's a marked lowering of quality since D&D started writing it, which feels bad to me. It's all too predictable now. It's better than most other TV I see, but I continue to watch it mostly because of how much of it I've already watched.