@Lisse24 said in Eliminating social stats:
Several times in this thread, I've heard people equate using dice as the enemy of creating narrative.
You didn't hear it from me, though, given that I said also in this very thread:
Well, yeah. I already said that I enjoy the weird twists and turns (and quick thinking) that dice often bring to games.
This was a callback to another thing I said which I can't be arsed to scroll back further to find.
I then mitigated this with:
It's just sometimes they bring REALLY BAD THINGS to the gaming experience too and a smart GM will curtail those.
And my 2300AD story is a (very) extreme example of the kinds of really bad things reliance on dice and dice mechanisms can do where only an utter fucking ignoramus would consider the result desirable.
I want to push back on that.
So you want to push back on the man of straw that's … standing there.
I'm quoting WTFE just because this is one place where I've read that argument, but certainly, he's not the only person whose made that argument.
Only you didn't read that argument from me. You wanted to read that argument and you skipped over the parts that didn't fit the argument you wanted to hear.
Here's the core of my argument: MUers are terrible writers. I don't mean that they're incapable of stringing together 3-5 sentences with vivid language in engaging poses. They can absolutely do that, by and large. No, what I mean is that, for the most part, they don't think long term about themes and beats, and what constructs a good narrative.
And dice know more about narrative, themes, beats, etc. Got it.
Ex: "I'm going to have my character lose this conflict so that he can wallow for a bit and then have an awesome comeback," or "The story I'm telling with this character is one of alienation and loss and so, I want to sabotage his own attempt to become Priscus though his inability to connect."
Get a better class of co-player. I have no difficulty finding people who do the fail now to succeed awesomely later thing. Or for that matter the tilt at that windmill eternally without making visible progress thing. Or even succeed scene after scene in ways that incense the opposing characters until a spectacular fall.
And given that I tend to play on systemless MUSHes, so there's NO mechanisms of ANY kind, physical or social, that's … pretty weird that you think this doesn't happen.
Muers don't think that way.
And dice do. Check.
In general, I believe that there are two major stumbling blocks to MUers telling compelling narratives. 1) They don't like losing, and any good story has peaks and valleys. MUers avoid valleys at all costs.
Again I'm just going to have to suggest you find yourself a better class of co-player.
- They don't control everything. Sure, you can be telling a story of alienation, but that doesn't mean all the other chars are going to play along (I've run into this with my char over at F&L, where I had to rejigger my approach to her several times).
Again, while this is the first of your criticisms that I actually recognize from my playing experience, I must once more point out: nor will the dice play along.
In these circumstances, adding random events, and letting a neutral arbiter, such as dice, determine the outcome periodically, even for social interactions, can enhance narrative.
The operative word being "can". Not "will". They "can" enhance narrative (which I've already said in this thread). They "can" (and "do") also utterly fucking ruin narrative. Which is why relying on dice exclusively is a terrible fucking idea unless you're playing RPGs like they're chess games or board wargames or whatever.
They help a player adhere to their character's nature, strengths, and weaknesses, while simultaneously adding challenges and random difficulty for that player to overcome. The knee-jerk, 'well let's just throw away social dice because players don't like losing that way,' will not enhance the narratives told on that game, it will diminish them.
Except that literally every MU* I've seen they already pretty much do ignore the social dice except for when it turns into an argument like this. Part of the problem is that adhering to the use of social dice doesn't reward shit and, to recite an old mantra of mine: YOU WILL GET THE BEHAVIOUR YOU REWARD.
(I have literally been pointing this out for nearly two decades in various incarnations of WORA/SWOFA/MSB/whatever.)
Using social dice (at least as they are implemented in most games, because most games are designed in such a way that the social skills aren't intended for use on fellow players, but on the world) penalizes, not rewards, the people who can string together a cogent, persuasive line of purple prose:
- It penalizes them when they make a gorgeous pose that falls flat because of the dummy dice. The effort and creativity spent on the lead-up falls flat because the die came up snake-eyes (or whatever).
- It also penalizes them when someone who is barely coherent makes a ham-fistedly stupid pose and suddenly they have to have their characters fuck.
In the first case one could argue that the narrative improvement might offset the loss, but in the latter case it's just fingernails on a chalk board.
Social dice, as commonly implemented (in literally every MUSH I've been on that had them) do not enhance narrative. They are an unmitigated failure, in fact, at this. They have caused more bitter and not-at-all-enjoyable (except to misanthropes like me sitting in the sidelines and munching popcorn) OOC drama than they have ever generated good IC drama. They suck like galactic core black holes.
I could be persuaded that there might be ways to make such things work. Hints of these exist in the form of Fate's economy of Fate Points or Spark's economy of Influence. I have seen hard-core gamist players of the strongest, min-maxing variety who play super-tactical games to eke out every advantage conceivable in each and every tactical situation accept temporary setbacks in Fate to collect Fate points for when it counts, accidentally creating nifty narratives along the way. I haven't seen this in Spark yet because I haven't played it, but I can see potential for it there as well. Other games with similar mechanisms abound as well and can likely be kit-bashed to do this.
But the key in all of these is that taking setbacks (socially or otherwise) is actively (and immediately) rewarded, which is why you get the behaviour desired. This is not the case in any MUSH I'm aware of.
