Posts made by The Sands

@thatguythere said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Edit to add: I would far prefer some hard and fast rules to prevent the worst than all the trust and hopes of cooperation in the world.

The only danger with that is anything hard and fast that you write is going to be open to exploitation by bad actors. I have to make three poses before I can start social combat? Alex walks into the bar. Alex walks over to the pretty girl. "Hi," Alex says. "Nice boots." (Initiate social combat).

I have to have a certain number of sentences/characters before initiating social combat? Alex walks into the bar with a copy of Great Gatsby in one hand. "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since," Alex says, reading out loud to himself (insert the requisite number of characters/lines/words being copy pasted) (Initiate social combat).

@thenomain said in Dark Ages Vampire -- Terra Mariana:

Yeah, even mentioning it makes it come off as antagonistic.
I was going to say "fuck you" about it, but decided that it might come off as caring anymore.

Well, even if you don't care I'm going to apologize. The statement was meant to be a lighthearted jab and to illustrate something I thought was a little amusing. It wasn't meant to make you look stupid or anything (we all make gaffs like that from time to time).

@thenomain Sorry. I thought you were asking if their design philosophy has changed.

@thenomain said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

I don’t know what recent game design philosophies are in the Onyx Path or LARP circles for CoD, but this is the core system that we are still dealing with for that particular game line.

It's a little hard to say exactly what their design philosophy is, vis-a-vis social skills used against others, but they do seem to lean more toward people being forced to undertake actions because of good social rolls. 'Social Combat' isn't simply a term in 2e. There are actual Social Combat Styles characters can learn (although in fairness I believe the first of these were introduced in 1e supplements).

@ganymede said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Insofar as a Vampire game is concerned, that would make Vampires powerful in ways that the game, I don't think, wanted to make exclusive. As if they don't have enough benefits, they have powers that literally make you do what you don't want to do.

I'm sorry. I'm a bit confused. It sounds as though you are worried that vampires would have an ability that mortals don't. Isn't that the whole point of a Discipline, that it's a power that exceeds the boundaries set on normal skills? For that matter isn't that why the character is a vampire and now just 'a mortal with an eating disorder'?

Now if you want to argue that the discipline is unbalanced in the setting you're proposing that's a whole separate issue and can be addressed through modification or removal of the discipline, but saying it's problematic because vampires get it and mortals don't is...odd.

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

HEll, I've said multiple times there should be a list of things social combat should not be able to accomplish.

This is true. However, just about ever example given (I freely admit I might have missed some) of 'things social combat should not be able to accomplish' have been classified as such 'because they skeeve people out'. Not 'they seem to be excessive for the ability of social skills'. Honestly, if a character is somehow legitimately 'tricked' into killing his wife and child I don't have that much of an issue with it because I don't think it violates a reasonable core concept (it violates the concept of 'I'm untrickable' but I don't acknowledge that as reasonable). What I don't want is another character able to talk me into killing my wife and child because they asked me nicely and have a stupid high social pool (and I recognize now that people are saying that won't happen. I'm simply reiterating my concern since it appears unclear).

I would also like to say that I think there needs to be something more coming from the social character than 'I'm rolling dice to trick your character'. There has to be some kind of detail as to how you are tricking my character. You want to argue that you don't have to do that in physical combat, but actually you do, at least to some extent. If I dive behind a bar and take cover you don't just get to roll to hit me. You've got to provide at least some minimal detail for how you're going to take another shot at me (and before anyone screams 'strawman' I'm not saying that everyone is demanding that social combat work that way. I'm simply once again specifying what I think are valid requirements and why).

@lithium said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Nobody has said that social skills should change core concepts of your character with just a single dice roll.
Nobody has.
Except the people who are advocating against Social Combat. The ones who try to strawman the conversation by saying that because someone has so much dice they should be able to break the rules.

In fact when I've expressed concern about social combat and used examples for why I dislike the concept of 'mandatory social combat' the reply has 'but people can be manipulated'. You yourself tried to counter-argument that you would just make a character whose core concept is 'I can't be defeated in combat'.

Not once do I recall you (or any of the other people who seem strongly in the pro-social combat group) saying 'yes, that's probably not something social combat should be allowed to do'.

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

If I blow out your kneecaps with called shots that are recorded by the system and you have Conditions or whatever from those, that should be no different than me making a successful Lies roll to get you to speak out of turn and reveal some type of information

Yes and no. To blow someone's knees out you at least need a gun and ammunition. To just say 'well, I lied to you, so give me the information' is like saying 'I use my Medicine skill to make you sick'. You've got to provide more than that.

And we haven't even touched the issue of how critical this piece of information is. What's the consequence of letting it slip? Embarrassment? Life in prison? I'm going to be much more resistant to releasing the information in the second case than in the first. So how does a system handle that? Allow the opposing player to set the difficulty? You're pretty much right back where you started with the bad actors able to set up their resistance unreasonably high.

Just to be clear, I am not a person who plays lots of combat monsters with no social skills. I'm not opposed to the idea of social combat systems that players can opt into when they want to compete (and maybe even compulsory social combat when there are reasonable limitations to what can be achieved). However, if you're going to argue for a social combat system that will force me to like your character while you act like a complete douche-nozzle then I'm going to argue against it, pretty much in the same way I would argue against a combat system that lets you heal someone while shooting them with bullets.

Out of curiosity has the irony of this argument ever been pointed out? Some people want to maintain that through social manipulation even deeply held beliefs can be altered while being intractable in their rather trivial belief about implementing such a thing in game.

If I've got Medicine I can heal someone, right? How many successes do I need to bring someone back from the dead? I've got 5 Int, 5 Medicine, Professional Training-5: Doctor and skill specialties in Western medicine, Eastern medicine, first aid, trauma surgery, elective surgery, and patient care. Look at all the points I've put into that! Look at how massive my rolls are! How can you maintain that it is fair that I can't bring someone back from the dead. You're invalidating my character concept.

Skills have limits. I'm not saying I'm against 'social combat' but there have to be some pretty clear limits as to what it can do, and unfortunately IMO those limits are probably not going to make the pro-social combat people happy. They don't give you the ability to force another PC to do something (except with some very limited margins such as forcing a character to 'be intimidated').

If you want to be able to force another character to do something then you need to purchase supernatural powers. Likewise, if I want to heal health levels of damage it doesn't matter how much I spend on my skills, attributes, and non-magical merits. I have to purchase some sort of supernatural ability to heal.

@thenomain said in Dark Ages Vampire -- Terra Mariana:

Then what is it about the Doors system that is being hotly contested, here? I get the feeling that there is an argument going on in this thread that is only half-informed.

No. The argument is about mandatory social combat, not any particular system (Doors or otherwise).

I so badly want to make a joke about the fact that the person who said people are only half-informed didn't understand what the argument was about but I'm worried it will come off as a kind of mean/nasty snark rather than joking/teasing.

@jennkryst said in Dark Ages Vampire -- Terra Mariana:

So... I just have to make Sally's concept 'Unbeatable swordswoman who can never be killed,' thus making losing physical combat or death a violation of my concept! Easy peasy.

Earlier I mentioned the implicit aspect that any character can be overwhelmed by force. You can't simply decide that your character concept violates implicit concepts.

If you want a world where the idea of characters having any sort of personal core violates implicit concepts you can certainly do that but I don't think I particularly want to play there. I'd rather play in a game where a player can decide on aspects of their character's personality, and I think that's part of the issue. I'm unbeatable isn't an aspect of personality. I won't accept a bribe is. Mandatory social combat provides excessive limitations to my character's personality.

@thatguythere said in Dark Ages Vampire -- Terra Mariana:

the it should be like physical combat, doesn't take into account that there are certain principles people and character won't cross, the agency side of things doesn't take into account these principles tend to be quite a small number of things.

Yes and no. On one level I would be much happier with a system that is able to take into account things like a character's principles. The issue is that on a more practical level enforcing it becomes very problematic. You run a real risk of the people who want to avoid social combat simply stacking up any mandatory social combat with 'principles that must not be violated', even when it becomes something trivial like trying to go ahead in line, at which point the system is so broken that its no fun being forced into it.

The principles a character 'absolutely will not violate' might be relatively small, but there's a larger number of issues that a character 'won't violate without a very good reason' (and an even larger range of 'resistant to violating). If Sarah looks like a strung out drug addict and she begs Joe not to take her in and says she's only robbing the store because otherwise her pimp is going to have her son killed then Joe might actually go along with it. He probably won't let her take anything (or if he absolutely has no choice he may limit what she takes), will force her to tell her who her pimp is and then makes her agree to a plan so that they can rescue her son and then she turns herself in, but he could conceivable go along with the request under those conditions.

In this context it isn't that he simply won't allow anyone to commit a crime. His principles recognize that the world is not black and white and sometimes rules have to give. However, just because he hasn't taken the absolute 'no exceptions to the law' stance doesn't mean an alternate Sarah should have a hope in Hell of convincing him to allow her to make off with all the loot in exchange for a kiss. In fact, given Joe's 'drive for justice' personality something like that should not only fail outright but it should probably make it -more- difficult for Sarah if she realizes that is a hopeless avenue and moves to some other form of manipulation (such as intimidation), because now Joe is pissed at her.

@lithium it isn't that no one can be manipulated. It's that there are very real limits to manipulation, which social combat systems tend to ignore. If Sarah wants to ask Joe if she can cut in line, hey, that's perfectly fine. Frankly I would rather role play the situation rather than roll play it but that's just me.

Additionally, social situations are way more complex than combat. Yes, people can be manipulated, but not in the same way. In a social situation the action that will manipulate person A in the proper direction can actually manipulate person B in the exact opposite direction, making them more resistant than they were. In a fight anyone who gets punched enough goes down. No one becomes more resistant to being knocked out because they've been punched (except maybe The Hulk). It's a matter of biology.

@jennkryst No, but the exact context of what the possible outcomes are in physical combat is much more limited (a person can only be knocked out or killed). Additionally you get into issues that it is much more obvious ICly when a person is beaten in physical combat. Lastly, there is just an issue with loss of character agency. Again, yes, there is a certain degree of loss of character agency when you lose a fight but it is just such a different issue.

At the end of the day the results of social combat are far more corrosive to most character concepts than the results of social combat. As an example, I make Joe. Joe is a police officer. His dad was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty and Joe is pretty dedicated to the idea of being a police officer. Joe runs across Sarah who is in the middle of robbing a jewelry store.

If Sarah wants to shoot Joe that hasn't invalidated my concept of Joe because there's always the implicit aspect that any character be overwhelmed by force. If Sarah has some nasty supernatural ability that compels Joe to let her go the concept of Joe hasn't really been violated because again, his letting her go isn't a voluntary action.

On the other hand Joe letting Sarah go because she asked nicely and batted her eyes quite definitely is a violation of Joe's concept. Sure, Sarah's dumped a ton of points onto Presence, Persuasion, Striking Looks, Striking Voice, Seductive Grace, Hypnotic Grace, and Grace Jones but all of these are tools to make someone voluntarily do something and Joe's concept is such that such that he's just not going to voluntarily let Sarah go.

And I suppose that's what it comes down to. At the end of the day social combat often boils down to an 'involuntary voluntary action'. The player has no control over what the character does but the character's actions can't honestly be classified as involuntary. In the case of losing a combat or being mind whammied the end result is an 'involuntary involuntary action', and that is far more acceptable.

@saulot said in Singularity: an Eclipse Phase Game:

I love EP, and would be happy to help in any capacity needed.

I'm guessing I'm at least a couple of weeks away before I think the code base is really solid enough to have people kicking the tires and things. I was pretty close to having what I would have called a 'runnable' system, but all that means is it could have handled the features that would be needed when you were 'in play'. Doing things like entering a new character would have to be done by hand. However, as I said up above I'm actually taking a short step back in my code right now to better accommodate forks and backups (I'll be honest, part of me isn't even that sure how critical having forking code will be, but I realized if I didn't put in at least some basic support for it then I could have a real nightmare later).

I'll definitely be needing help, though. As I said, I'm still unsure of what the setting should be. The only thing I've really decided is that it probably should be somewhat limited in scope. It isn't that the rest of the solar system or the areas beyond the Pandora gates don't exist. It's just that they will be 'out of town' if this were a more conventional setting (i.e. off grid locations).

I'm going to need people to test code and tell me what's good and what's bad, people to help with the wiki, and people to run spheres (I'm not even sure what the various spheres will be just yet, but I'm pretty sure that type of organization will still end up being needed). And of course there's going to have to be a bunch of building to be done.

So sort of two steps forward and one step back, I'm going back through some of my code and revising it. Where I use to have your stats determined by your ego, your morph, and your skill (you know, basically how the book has it) it occurred to me to make it so that it is your ego, fork, morph, and skills. Certain things such as traits and moxie are tied to your ego but your actual attributes and skills are tied to your 'fork' (even if you only have a single fork).

This should means there will actually be an ability at the code level for characters to create forks if necessary and should provide a mechanism for backing up egos (a backup is just an alpha fork that isn't running). Unfortunately that means I have to refactor a bunch of code since I was initially looking at the Ego whenever I needed to see what an attribute was. Now I have to look at the ego to see what the current fork is and then look at the fork. Likewise I looked at a table that contained everyone's skills for those skills belonging to the ego (this is an SQL table, not something stuck onto the character object) when I needed to check a value. Now I need to look at the same table but instead of looking for the skills controlled by that ego I need to look at the skills controlled by that ego's current fork.