The Problem of Social Systems

[Segev]

To put it another way, its not about the speaker, its about the listener.

It's about both, actually. The listener has triggers, hooks, likes, dislikes, drives, and a streak (however broad) of stubbornness, and where he digs in his heels and what motivates him is something that is all part of the speaker's job to figure out.

The question is at what level we abstract these things.

As most social "systems" currently work, we're abstracting them as if we said, "A defender has agility, weapon skill, armor, and combat strategy, and the attacker has to figure these things out and use his own skill with his weapon and his own tactical acumen to get around that often enough to beat up the defender," and then made it a "Melee Skill Roll" against a fixed DC to see if the attacker wins the fight.

D&D alone breaks down the combat abstraction to have an AC, a to-hit bonus, damage rolled, hit points, saving throws, and a whole tangled mess surrounding grappling, tactical movement, etc.

What I'm advocating is breaking down social subsystems into representing the actual points of interest for the listener as well as the speaker's ability to discern and play off of them. But a complete person can be slowly (or sometimes not-so-slowly) brought around to new interests, or caused to lose faith in something, so we need mechanics for that, too.

I would personally abstract the precise means of presentation of facts, evidence, lies, innuendo, etc. to the "skill roll," just as combat abstracts the precise motions and timing of maneuvering a sword past a foe's shield and over-extended weapon to the chink in his armor with an attack roll.

However, what the target wants/fears/cares about is still the hook the speaker is trying to play upon.

(And, I don't know if you believe in "love at first sight," but if it's a trope that is to be considered valid for a given game, then some measure of instant-engagement-building should be feasible. Though I would render it rare.)

Someone skilled at persuasion can for example recognize when a given conversation is hitting a wall and causing the other person to entrench. At that point, they don't just speak better, they change what they are trying to achieve.

Sure. But that is also possible to represent by a skill. And no, they don't need to change what they're trying to achieve, only how they're trying to achieve it. Depending on where the abstraction level lies, this may mean the speaker gets information about what would work better, or it may mean that the speaker is assumed to have found the "right" approach thanks to the high roll.

If this was at a meeting or something like that, they might switch from trying to convince the person they're talking with to trying to disengage them and start up some conversation with the rest of the room, because its obvious that no matter what they're not going to make that first person budge.

Maybe. But that could just as easily be represented by not being able to roll well enough to meet a given DC as it could "nope, sorry, you didn't guess the right hook/the GM didn't provide a hook that can achieve that."

Or as another example, when giving information, they can realize what a person would do upon receiving and verifying a certain piece of information, and then provide that or withhold it in order to shape their behavior.

Sure.

But that only works with the specific things for which the listener is receptive to external information.

No, it just works better the more receptive the prospective listener is to external information. It takes more skill to present external information in a way that doesn't seem "external" or "forced" on the listener if he'd object to it. There's a lot of persuasion that comes in the form of "Make him think it's his own idea." And that really is a skill.

It's a mistake to assume that because you see someone convince someone with a piece of information at one point that anyone could be convinced of any arbitrary thing by that same process. Ultimately, by making that mistake, most of the time the attempt is going to fail in the form of one of two common disengagements: 'I don't believe you' and 'I don't care'.

Nobody's making that mistake, except you insofar as you assume that's what people are describing.

The thorny thing is, the players who already understand this well can basically just RP persuasion effectively. So then how do you get players who don't understand this onto the same page? You can't do it by just saying 'try to persuade via RP' because they don't feel confident in doing that. If you try to do it with a system that lets people brute force the social interaction with character abilities, then those players will never actually get better at thinking about how to actually accomplish persuasion - the system gets in the way of improvement in that case. So instead you need a system which breaks down the ineffable aspects of persuasion into explicit pieces that have clear relations, so its possible to step back and think 'what would work according to these game rules?' rather than 'what would work on a real person?'. If the game rules are well-crafted so that these things are similar, then by getting better with the game rules, someone will also learn how to get better at the real thing.

Learning to make your Diplomacy modifier hit +40 on the other hand is not going to teach you anything about how to be diplomatic.

Why do you keep assuming, despite my repeated statements and detailed explanations to the contrary, that that last sentence adequately describes what I'm getting at?

The whole goal is to translate the real social nuances that people skilled at persuasion can utilize into game mechanics so that people skilled at playing a game can move them like game-pieces, in the same way that combat translates real physical nuances of swordplay into game mechanics so that people skilled at playing a game can make gameplay moves within the mechanics to simulate that swordplay.

I would say that under no circumstances can Alice realistically expect to be able convince Jim. That is to say, there is no strategy or skill or plan of action that Alice can construct independent of Jim given that evidence which guarantees success. That is in essence what a mechanic does - it says, if you put together all the factors such that the rules say this works, then it works.

I never suggested that Alice's plan should be independent of Jim. I have said quite the opposite.

If Alice wants to persuade Jim via a hook or engagement or whatever that he currently lacks, she will need to play on ones he has to build new ones until she gets him to the point where he has the hook she wants to use. It's probably easier, for one-off effects, to play to existing ones. That alone encourages finding ways to use existing ones rather than "brute forcing" it.

Add in that you can't "brute force" it if you don't have an "in" to make that new engagement or hook, and it gets even less accurate to use that phrase.

Some Jims will have a philosophical commitment to the truth, and so can be convinced by evidence. Some Jims will have a commitment to staying out of trouble and will take the evidence as reason to fear that they might get caught up in things and so, whether they're convinced or not, they'll act convinced just to satisfy that need. But on the other hand, some Jims will put loyalty above reality, and saying anything that suggests something wrong about Bob will turn that Jim into an enemy no matter how skillfully it is presented - because those Jims ultimately want to be loyal to Bob more than they want to be ethical. And some Jims will categorically hate being used in the social schemes of others and the moment that a stranger mentions a non-stranger they'll entrench and disengage.

And each of those could be undermined, except possibly true blind loyalty to Bob that goes to sycophantic, self-destructive, would-die-for-him obsequiousness. It's up to Alice to figure out what the nature of Jim's feelings for Bob is, and how to attack it.

The most important factor that determines whether Alice can use evidence to convince Jim to go against Bob is not Alice, it's Jim.

Yes and no. Alice needs to have the skill to ferret out the nature of Jim's friendship with Bob. Alice also needs to have the skill to present her case in a way that Jim would be receptive to. That can mean that she doesn't ever speak to him directly about Bob, but instead works a conversation around until Jim finds himself accidentally bad-mouthing Bob. It could mean that Alice presents situations that evolve until Jim realizes he is uncomfortable supporting Bob. It could mean that Alice doesn't mention Bob at all, but just attacks the favor he's asked of Jim, so that Jim's now only thinking about and focused on that "favor" and its consequences and costs.

At some level, this is abstracted into Alice's mechanics. Either they are such that the GM tells Alice's player what she can figure out about Jim, or they are such that Alice's player states what she wants to do and the GM lets her roll; if Alice rolled well enough, her choice of approach was good (possibly strategically and tactically tested to see what worked before moving in for the metaphorical kill).

I would assert that looking at this situation as 'I must get Jim to believe my evidence' is a fundamental mistake about the nature of persuasion.

I assert that looking at it as, "It's hopeless to convince Jim because he doesn't have a hook that cares about anything but his friendship to Bob," is making Jim a caricature rather than a character, and a system which doesn't support deeper influence is a bad system.

Sure, if Jim doesn't want to believe it or doesn't care, that means the evidence isn't effective. But at some level, "I try to attack the troll with a club," is ineffective because it doesn't MATTER, and you have to decide whether to use a torch, a fireball, a vial of acid, or find a way to remove his regeneration (there are spells for that).

Alice may find that trying to build in Jim an appreciation for truth takes too long.

But if Alice's goal is to drive a wedge between Jim and Bob, then that shouldn't be fundamentally impossible because Jim is incapable of having his Engagements changed. It might be difficult, and she might have to figure out a good way to do it, but it should be FEASIBLE, with enough time and effort and skill.

Some of the descriptions in these threads of what posters want to count as "social manipulation" just dilute the term to meaninglessness.

For starters, it can't lump together raw intimidation, and deceitful manipulation, and openly cooperative decision-making between two people who want to come to a mutually happy course of action, and one person changing their position based purely by objective facts presented by another person having nothing to do with the second person's "charm" or "personality".

This isn't just a game system question -- those are fundamentally different sorts of human interaction.

Call it something else, then, that's broader, because the point is to develop a subsystem that encompasses all of those things. If they're achieved via different stats and approaches, much the same way grappling is achieved differently than hitting with a spear is achieved differently than damaging orcs with a fireball, that's fine. Great, even.

But they're all about influencing behavior and beliefs. Drives and desires. Fears and cravings. Choices.

[Floret]

For starters, it can't lump together raw intimidation, and deceitful manipulation, and openly cooperative decision-making between two people who want to come to a mutually happy course of action, and one person changing their position based purely by objective facts presented by another person having nothing to do with the second person's "charm" or "personality".

This isn't just a game system question -- those are fundamentally different sorts of human interaction.

1. Isn't it? I mean, again, at least I am not aiming for world simulator, I am aiming for a game system. That should simulate in some respects, but I don't care much about accuracy in that regard.
2. Sure, they are different enough that you can differentiate them. But, as Segev already mentioned: All of those are on some level part of "social interactions where multiple outcomes are possible", and would in the end have to be part of the subsystem. Call them something else, if you like, I find "manipulation" works rather well as an umbrella term, but then again I am not a native speaker.

Spoiler: NichG on Skills

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There are things which we must call skills because we can't resolve them into something where understanding is useful. In the musician case, the ability to properly play notes - finger movements, etc - is hard to resolve or explain further than 'well, the better musician practiced more' or 'the better musician has more talent' - non-transferable explanations, basically. Understanding it doesn't let you hit notes any better. So its just a skill.

Then there are things wihch people do skillfully, but which can be broken down and understood in an independent and objective way, in such a way that obtaining that understanding actually transfers some of that ability. For example, musical composition. A composer could learn it by practice or intuition, but it's possible to take the composer out of it entirely and understand from the point of the song itself, why it works as it does and why it achieves the effect that it does.

The perception that persuasion is like the former rather than the latter inhibits peoples' ability to become better at persuasion, because its very easy for them to conclude 'it just takes something that I don't have'. That's the 'magic' I was referring to - the belief that there is nothing left to be understood and that it should just come down to some ineffable innate 'ability'.

This distinction is fundamentally artificial, and does not represent any real fact in the world. I mean, sure, some people have more of a talent for certain things, might start out at a higher level or pick things up quicker. But... have you ever learned an instrument? Because it is perfectly possible to break this playing down in an independent and objective way. Instrument teachers do it all the time, when they teach their kids how to move the fingers, what things can help with orientating where they go, to listen to tones better, how to perform certain special actions etc. (The specific list of things might be coloured by my experience with Cello)
Every single skill in this world can be broken down, studied, looked at closer, and this extracted knowlege be used to learn it. Persuasion is, in this respect, no different to anything else, true. But nothing is. Not even "art" skills.

Spoiler: NichG on the sense of Social systems

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Unlike combat or climbing or chases or assassination, we have the world's most nuanced system for resolving social interaction available to us at no real personal risk - actually socially interacting. Why don't we just use that? Well, generally what it comes down to is that the players each have a different level of comfort or skill at it, which gets in the way if the unconfident player wants to play the social manipulator. So instead, we need a system in place to make that possible. But that often comes at some cost of nuance. As a result, I require a lot more to sell me on the benefits of a social system that I do to sell me on the benefits of a combat system. It puts me in the position that when I see the kinds of social systems that games have, I'd generally rather not have one at all. But that's not because its impossible to have a good one, its just that all of the ones I've seen have been worse than just not having one. So to engage with that, I'm trying to construct one which would satisfy me.

The primary design element to do that is to make one such that over time, the players become more confident and more skilled at social roleplay, so that the quality which is achieved ends up actually being higher than what one would have seen just by muddling through. That means that the system should make thinking about social situations clearer and easier - it should make it easier to learn.

Two reasons against this.
One, the perception that social interactions at the gaming table can ever represent what is actually happening in-game with anything but the most vague degree of accuracy - not enough, for my tastes. (Seriously, if my character wants to charm an NPC I am not going to do the same things with the GM as I would with a real person I wanted to charm. Because of course not. Just as, if I want to Intimidate someone, I am not going to scare their player ****less. Even the "risk-free" ends at the point any character involved is trying unethical actions.) On top of that, the location, climate, and tons of other factors influencing social situations simply are different.
And - I don't want to give some sort of replacement for the people who just can't pull it off. For me, TRPGs should fundamentally separate player and character skill, and for that, I need systems, that ideally should be fun to play. Sure, playing out conversations can be fun! But I don't see it as the be-all and end-all, or even as something that has to stand in contention with having mechanics.

Spoiler: NichG on

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If you want to learn good tactics from a tactically poor GM, use asymmetric encounters where you're under-powered compared to your enemies. I've definitely had players teach each-other and myself things at tables where I was the GM, including a player who was very good IRL at social manipulation.

But in this case in particular, it's even better: the one who is teaching isn't the GM, but the system itself - in the same way that chess or Go can teach you certain ways of thinking about things even if you just play out variations with yourself. It's a framework to make certain things which happen socially less mysterious and more explicit, while also factoring out confounding elements.

I highly doubt that a book or text can teach social interaction beyond the basics. There needs to be praxis, and if the goal is to teach social skills, there needs to be a competent teacher, that goes beyond just the book.

It's the perception that the correct model for social interaction is that one picks a target, determines a goal, and then (and only then) uses 'skill' in order to achieve the goal given the target. As opposed to taking seriously that picking the target and determining the goal are mutable elements in the broader context of pursuing interaction.

Or to put it another way, seeing someone succeed at persuading someone else and not realizing all of the things that the person could have attempted to persuade that person of but decided not to because it simply wouldn't work.

But generally, this is how social interaction is approached. You don't simply think "Let's get SOMEBODY to do SOMETHING". People have specific goals in mind. If, for that goal, there is a choice of person, great! Then picking the target is of course important, and is something a skilled socialite can do.
But if that is not an option? Then you work with the target you have, and in the end, either succeed or fail. But, as a famous GM often says: "You can certainly TRY."

I think you are describing something as a linear interaction, which can work in all and any direction, and somehow miss that for any manipulation to be attempted? There has to be an intent, and that intent usually has a specific goal, and often a specific person. It might well run into more problems than just getting SOMEONE to do SOMETHING, but that would have to be represented by the system and should not be a reason against a system in the first place.

[NichG]

This distinction is fundamentally artificial, and does not represent any real fact in the world. I mean, sure, some people have more of a talent for certain things, might start out at a higher level or pick things up quicker. But... have you ever learned an instrument? Because it is perfectly possible to break this playing down in an independent and objective way. Instrument teachers do it all the time, when they teach their kids how to move the fingers, what things can help with orientating where they go, to listen to tones better, how to perform certain special actions etc. (The specific list of things might be coloured by my experience with Cello)
Every single skill in this world can be broken down, studied, looked at closer, and this extracted knowlege be used to learn it. Persuasion is, in this respect, no different to anything else, true. But nothing is. Not even "art" skills.

I'm not going to push back on this point at the detail level because this is broadly compatible with where I want to go with it: that you don't have to just stop at 'he's just good at persuasion', because an instance of persuasion can be broken down into factors which don't require some ineffable quality that can't be understood OOC.

Two reasons against this.
One, the perception that social interactions at the gaming table can ever represent what is actually happening in-game with anything but the most vague degree of accuracy - not enough, for my tastes. (Seriously, if my character wants to charm an NPC I am not going to do the same things with the GM as I would with a real person I wanted to charm. Because of course not. Just as, if I want to Intimidate someone, I am not going to scare their player ****less. Even the "risk-free" ends at the point any character involved is trying unethical actions.) On top of that, the location, climate, and tons of other factors influencing social situations simply are different.
And - I don't want to give some sort of replacement for the people who just can't pull it off. For me, TRPGs should fundamentally separate player and character skill, and for that, I need systems, that ideally should be fun to play. Sure, playing out conversations can be fun! But I don't see it as the be-all and end-all, or even as something that has to stand in contention with having mechanics.

We have different goals from playing then. I am generally looking for an things which allow me as a player to come as close as possible to experience what it's like to be that character, rather than to accurately portray a specified character while keeping myself separate. So a system that lets me actually mentally get into the mindset of a spy or an investigator or a diplomat is better than one which gives me the tools to model a spy or investigator or diplomat while keeping my distance.

But generally, this is how social interaction is approached. You don't simply think "Let's get SOMEBODY to do SOMETHING". People have specific goals in mind. If, for that goal, there is a choice of person, great! Then picking the target is of course important, and is something a skilled socialite can do.
But if that is not an option? Then you work with the target you have, and in the end, either succeed or fail. But, as a famous GM often says: "You can certainly TRY."

I think you are describing something as a linear interaction, which can work in all and any direction, and somehow miss that for any manipulation to be attempted? There has to be an intent, and that intent usually has a specific goal, and often a specific person. It might well run into more problems than just getting SOMEONE to do SOMETHING, but that would have to be represented by the system and should not be a reason against a system in the first place.

This response 'people have specific goals in mind ... you work with the target you have and in the end succeed or fail' is exactly the kind of thing I mean by that misconception. You don't have to have specific goals in mind. You don't have to actually accept that you are restricted to a particular target and must just do the best you can. By abandoning both of those beliefs, you become much, much better at pulling things off - not just in socialization or persuasion, but in all sorts of endeavors.

For example, I was an academic for a time, and everyone in my professional circle to one or other degree made their living asking other people to donate money (in the form of applying for grants). In the extreme case of this, I met someone who could fairly reliably pull in grants to start new research institutes (so a larger scale of funding that most researchers are normally dealing with). His explanation for how that worked was that it was more about going into situations while keeping an eye out for the opportunity to make small pushes that could have big effect, rather than choosing something and focusing on that thing. That might mean that even though he really wanted to make research X happen, instead he'd make a place for research Y which wasn't X but had something to do with X - but as a result, the funding opportunity and chance of success are a hundred times higher, because he shifted his goal in the interaction in favor of one that was actually most achievable while still providing some utility towards what he actually wanted.

In a tabletop RPG, the myopia of having to deal with the thing placed in front of you is encouraged by the way that encounter design tends to work: enter a room, there are monsters, fight the monsters. Can't fight the monsters? Well the DM shouldn't've put them there! There's a guard in front of the door saying we can't have an audience with the king? Well, we have to persuade the guard to let us have an audience with the king of course! When maybe what the group should be doing is to persuade the king to summon them for an audience, or get some other government functionary to just give them the information they wanted without having to go through the ruler of the land, or get someone else to go in front of the king as their proxy, or ...

[Max_Killjoy]

1. Isn't it? I mean, again, at least I am not aiming for world simulator, I am aiming for a game system. That should simulate in some respects, but I don't care much about accuracy in that regard.

The game mechanics need to "feel" sufficiently like the thing you're depicting, or for some/many players, it's going to generate dissonance and push them out of the flow of the roleplaying experience.

2. Sure, they are different enough that you can differentiate them. But, as Segev already mentioned: All of those are on some level part of "social interactions where multiple outcomes are possible", and would in the end have to be part of the subsystem. Call them something else, if you like, I find "manipulation" works rather well as an umbrella term, but then again I am not a native speaker.

"Manipulation" in the context of interpersonal interaction implies an adversarial interaction, involving coercion, deceit, etc.

This distinction is fundamentally artificial, and does not represent any real fact in the world. I mean, sure, some people have more of a talent for certain things, might start out at a higher level or pick things up quicker. But... have you ever learned an instrument? Because it is perfectly possible to break this playing down in an independent and objective way. Instrument teachers do it all the time, when they teach their kids how to move the fingers, what things can help with orientating where they go, to listen to tones better, how to perform certain special actions etc. (The specific list of things might be coloured by my experience with Cello)
Every single skill in this world can be broken down, studied, looked at closer, and this extracted knowlege be used to learn it. Persuasion is, in this respect, no different to anything else, true. But nothing is. Not even "art" skills.

The "skills as magic" distinction does, however, apply to how some gamers perceive certain skills. In the context of this discussion, some gamers seem to look at social skills as magic, or a black box. At the risk of being harsh, some gamers struggle with social interaction, and therefore on some subconscious level treat high social aptitude as a sort of magical ability that can accomplish anything if you just "roll well enough". And because it's harder to offer up concrete examples of the limits (compare to "how far can a person jump" or "how far can someone throw this stone" or "how much can a person lift" or "what's the range on this cannon"), and fiction is full of nonsensical examples of weaponized talk (hero talks at the villain until he wins just by talking, charmer talks her way past the guards to a Top Secret facility, or the like), the problem is exacerbated.

[Knaight]

"Manipulation" in the context of interpersonal interaction implies an adversarial interaction, involving coercion, deceit, etc.

That's connotation more than denotation though, and a lot of that is because it's comfortable not to think about the extent to which that overlaps with friendly interactions.

Or, to quote Schlock Mercenary (which I know you're fond of), "All conversation is psychological warfare".

[Max_Killjoy]

That's connotation more than denotation though, and a lot of that is because it's comfortable not to think about the extent to which that overlaps with friendly interactions.

Or, to quote Schlock Mercenary (which I know you're fond of), "All conversation is psychological warfare".

It's a sentiment I happen to not agree with.

I happen to think that it's possible for 2+ people of good intent to have a conversation that's not laced with ulterior motives, withheld facts or falsehoods, searching for levers, traps and gotchas, leading questions, etc.

E: which may be why I have so little patience for when people pull that crap in these discussions.

[Segev]

There need be no ulterior motive for it to still be persuasion. If I want to go see Big Hero 6 with a group of friends, I am not being deceitful and I have no ulterior motives when I consider presenting it as a super hero movie to my friends who like super heroes, a family movie to those who like that sort of thing, and a movie set in "San Fransokyo" to the anime fan.

What elements I emphasize has no hidden motive, but can have a big impact on whether I persuade a given friend to come to the movie with me.

[Floret]

I'm not going to push back on this point at the detail level because this is broadly compatible with where I want to go with it: that you don't have to just stop at 'he's just good at persuasion', because an instance of persuasion can be broken down into factors which don't require some ineffable quality that can't be understood OOC.

Uhm, sure, you will see no argument from me there. But... what point exactly are you making, then? Because noone actually argued that there is something just incomprehensible, "magic" about persuasion, just that it is something that people... do, yaknow? Just like people can swing swords, or smith armor, or pick pockets, all of which can be abstracted as a skill in RPGs.

Spoiler: NichG on immersion as a goal

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We have different goals from playing then. I am generally looking for an things which allow me as a player to come as close as possible to experience what it's like to be that character, rather than to accurately portray a specified character while keeping myself separate. So a system that lets me actually mentally get into the mindset of a spy or an investigator or a diplomat is better than one which gives me the tools to model a spy or investigator or diplomat while keeping my distance.

Meh. I have found the immersion gainable from TRPGs to be somewhat lackluster, and like to focus on what I feel are much greater strenghts of the system.
I mean, I somewhat get how people get immersion from TRPGs, and I wouldn't say "kill all immersion", I am just willing to sacrifice it for things that I feel they do better - satisfying gameplay, the ability to play something that is just beyond your capabilities, etc.
Seeing this difference in goal it is certain that we might have different opinions on how to achieve the ideal gamestate. (Which might even vary. I like different games for very different purposes and reasons, and imagine you might do something similar).

Spoiler: NichG on misconceptions and compromise

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This response 'people have specific goals in mind ... you work with the target you have and in the end succeed or fail' is exactly the kind of thing I mean by that misconception. You don't have to have specific goals in mind. You don't have to actually accept that you are restricted to a particular target and must just do the best you can. By abandoning both of those beliefs, you become much, much better at pulling things off - not just in socialization or persuasion, but in all sorts of endeavors.

For example, I was an academic for a time, and everyone in my professional circle to one or other degree made their living asking other people to donate money (in the form of applying for grants). In the extreme case of this, I met someone who could fairly reliably pull in grants to start new research institutes (so a larger scale of funding that most researchers are normally dealing with). His explanation for how that worked was that it was more about going into situations while keeping an eye out for the opportunity to make small pushes that could have big effect, rather than choosing something and focusing on that thing. That might mean that even though he really wanted to make research X happen, instead he'd make a place for research Y which wasn't X but had something to do with X - but as a result, the funding opportunity and chance of success are a hundred times higher, because he shifted his goal in the interaction in favor of one that was actually most achievable while still providing some utility towards what he actually wanted.

You become better at pulling THINGS of, sure. But, generally not what you want to pull off. Look, my point is: If you have, as your goal "get with person X", then the fact that you might, if you were willing to switch things up, get with person Y, is completely irrelevant for you.
Likewise, if you goal is "get in bed with someone", the ability to gain a competent chess partner for the evening might not appeal to you, at all.
So, in short: Of course a willingness to compromise widens your chances to achieve at least something, generally speaking. This is not something I would debate.
What I WOULD debate is that, at least in my experience, people aren't that willing to compromise - or only somewhat. (One could model such things as "partial success", if one uses very simplified scales; Intimidating the goblins enough to sheath their weapons, but not enough to make them run, for example. There are games that do that) So, sure, encourage people to think in broader terms, and use skills for reading people to discern what you may be able to get from them liberally! But... when it comes to social interactions, usually there are goals involved that are more specific.
And, in some cases, compromising undermines the whole reason you were doing something to begin with. Do you want to get with a person because you love them? Then why in all hells WOULD you compromise?

In a tabletop RPG, the myopia of having to deal with the thing placed in front of you is encouraged by the way that encounter design tends to work: enter a room, there are monsters, fight the monsters. Can't fight the monsters? Well the DM shouldn't've put them there! There's a guard in front of the door saying we can't have an audience with the king? Well, we have to persuade the guard to let us have an audience with the king of course! When maybe what the group should be doing is to persuade the king to summon them for an audience, or get some other government functionary to just give them the information they wanted without having to go through the ruler of the land, or get someone else to go in front of the king as their proxy, or ...

That is not a problem I have experience with. I have never played in a game system that really thinks about things in terms of "encounter", or ever had players unwilling to think outside the box (Sometimes in ways requiring me to rewrite basically everything on the fly. Fun evenings!) or in more complicated or convoluted ways.
So, I don't think designing games just to combat a problem certain specific players have with thinking outside the box and in any but the most direct way is really necessary, or even much possible - it is much more a problem with the people playing, than it is with the game itself.

The game mechanics need to "feel" sufficiently like the thing you're depicting, or for some/many players, it's going to generate dissonance and push them out of the flow of the roleplaying experience.

Sure. I might be more lenient on things? Like, FATE Accellerated, for example, definitely goes too far for me (even though that, too, tries to simulate something).
Different people will have different thresholds.

"Manipulation" in the context of interpersonal interaction implies an adversarial interaction, involving coercion, deceit, etc.

Hm. Doesn't sound like I missed something, but for my feeling it is, as Knaight pointed out, just a connotation, and not actually part of the denotation. So... I mean it in the most value-neutral way possible, and only use it due to lack of a better, more connotationally neutral term; but I still feel the need for a term to use, and it is the best I have found as of yet.

The "skills as magic" distinction does, however, apply to how some gamers perceive certain skills. In the context of this discussion, some gamers seem to look at social skills as magic, or a black box. At the risk of being harsh, some gamers struggle with social interaction, and therefore on some subconscious level treat high social aptitude as a sort of magical ability that can accomplish anything if you just "roll well enough". And because it's harder to offer up concrete examples of the limits (compare to "how far can a person jump" or "how far can someone throw this stone" or "how much can a person lift" or "what's the range on this cannon"), and fiction is full of nonsensical examples of weaponized talk (hero talks at the villain until he wins just by talking, charmer talks her way past the guards to a Top Secret facility, or the like), the problem is exacerbated.

I haven't really seen anyone in this discussion treat social skills as anything close to magic, or unexplainable. And, sure, some gamers have their share of problems with social interactions, that happens. But I don't think it is really the job, place, or even much within the capabilities of RPGs to teach them social skills, or teach them how persuasion works.
The only thing I have seen, and am myself guilty of is considering social skills a fair bit more powerful than some other people in the discussion seem to think they are. I personally have my reasons for believing that - and my explanations for why the other side might have their perspective, perfectly in line with my worldview, but I am sure you have a similar explanation for mine, and we won't really get anywhere debating who is in the right.

It's a sentiment I happen to not agree with.

I happen to think that it's possible for 2+ people of good intent to have a conversation that's not laced with ulterior motives, withheld facts or falsehoods, searching for levers, traps and gotchas, leading questions, etc.

E: which may be why I have so little patience for when people pull that crap in these discussions.

There need be no ulterior motive for it to still be persuasion. If I want to go see Big Hero 6 with a group of friends, I am not being deceitful and I have no ulterior motives when I consider presenting it as a super hero movie to my friends who like super heroes, a family movie to those who like that sort of thing, and a movie set in "San Fransokyo" to the anime fan.

What elements I emphasize has no hidden motive, but can have a big impact on whether I persuade a given friend to come to the movie with me.

1. What Segev said
2. It is really, really hard, to find a clear line to draw on where ulterior motives begin (In many examples not so much hidden, but... still very clearly a purpose to the interaction, which would make it fall under the label of "manipulation/persuasion" as I would define it). Seriously. If I really like a person, and therefore want to spent time with them, so I try to arrange a meeting - does that count as ulterior motives? I clearly want something from that person, and I kinda want it for my own benefit, even though I am very certain the other person will benefit as well. What about a booty call to a friend with benefits? Does that count as ulterior motive? We are still well within the real of "mutual enjoyment" and "good intent", but there is a rather clear motive? Then what about chatting to someone in a bar, with similar purposes, who is receptive to the advances - is this now an ulterior motive?
For a different topic, is a meeting I arrange with a professor for the purposes of discussing ideas and progress on a coursework ulterior motives? They gain... pretty much nothing from it, and I do - but it is perfectly moral for me to try and arrange that, isn't it? And if I pull some arguments for why earlier might be better, despite their busy schedule - is that now not good intent anymore?

Point being, where do you draw the line? Because there clearly is some point at which it veers into "not okay/immoral/evil", sure. But that point, from my perspective, is way beyond the point where "I am pulling strings to achieve goals, if really consciously or not" begins. Any discussion in which I am not merely imparting information (And sometimes even those) has some motive behind it, and whether or not I achieve this motive, will in some parts be depending on my abilities to convey it in a way that the other person finds agreeable. There is no malicious intent needed for this to be true.

[Psikerlord]

Best social system I know of:

You roleplay the conversation first. GM either straight up adjudicates result, or if result is uncertain, assigns a modifier (+1, +2, adv/disad or whatever) depending on what's said. Then roll.

So you get both player skill and character skill in the mix.

[NichG]

Uhm, sure, you will see no argument from me there. But... what point exactly are you making, then? Because noone actually argued that there is something just incomprehensible, "magic" about persuasion, just that it is something that people... do, yaknow? Just like people can swing swords, or smith armor, or pick pockets, all of which can be abstracted as a skill in RPGs.

The point was about the necessity of adding something like a success check once the details of the listener and the argument have been decided, as well as what doing that suggests to players. If you have one system where e.g. making a well-chosen argument to a person who ultimately wants to agree is worth, say, a +10 to the check - but other ineffable factors such as Charisma and abstract 'skill' and the die roll contribute +/- 30 to the check, you're communicating that what's going on is more about those ineffable factors than about the choice of argument and goal.

So when earlier you suggested that you might as well let people try even when the argument is bad, the reason to not do that is that ultimately suggests that the argument and the listener are not actually the factors that ultimately decide things, but rather some kind of inherent awesomeness of the way the character said it which can't be grasped by those outside of the game.

If you make the perfect argument and fail, or make a terrible argument and succeed, I'd argue that's the kind of thing that makes it feel like characters have lost their agency - because the player whose character is being convinced can look at it and say 'come on, its obvious this is a stupid deal, my guy isn't that dumb' or 'come on, this fundamentally goes against what my guy believes in'. Whereas, if the system works by getting players to give away knowledge of what their character could be convinced of, then no matter what happens it's going to be compatible with how the player is developing their character.

Meh. I have found the immersion gainable from TRPGs to be somewhat lackluster, and like to focus on what I feel are much greater strenghts of the system.
I mean, I somewhat get how people get immersion from TRPGs, and I wouldn't say "kill all immersion", I am just willing to sacrifice it for things that I feel they do better - satisfying gameplay, the ability to play something that is just beyond your capabilities, etc.
Seeing this difference in goal it is certain that we might have different opinions on how to achieve the ideal gamestate. (Which might even vary. I like different games for very different purposes and reasons, and imagine you might do something similar).

Yeah. Generally for just inherently satisfying gameplay I tend to either go for computer games or for very simple abstract games like Go - the first because the automaticity makes it possible to have richer gameplay mechanics without the tediousness of actually resolving things by hand, and the second because the rules become minimally tedious. Tabletop games offer an open-endedness that neither of the others can approach, and that open-endedness is necessary for me to really feel as though everything about my character's thought processes and actions could potentially matter, which is I think is essential for immersion (once I start thinking things like 'no matter what I do, its going to end up being some modifier to some roll' then I tend to lose immersion and stop bothering to be creative or engaged)

You become better at pulling THINGS of, sure. But, generally not what you want to pull off. Look, my point is: If you have, as your goal "get with person X", then the fact that you might, if you were willing to switch things up, get with person Y, is completely irrelevant for you.

...

What I WOULD debate is that, at least in my experience, people aren't that willing to compromise - or only somewhat.

You can't always get what you want. Wanting too much, too specifically means that you will generally fail at being satisfied. The skill in this sort of thing is in actually realizing why you want something, and then using that to obtain flexibility in actually achieving something useful. I agree that people often aren't that willing to compromise. I would just say however, this is the lion's share of why they often fail at things, or feel as though things are unfair or impossible.

That's also why its important to make a system where it's crystal clear about when compromise is necessary and not give mixed messages. I've encountered many players and groups of players that would choose to fail and get nothing rather than to compromise and get something, because they ultimately can't shake the belief that there must be some way to do things without compromise.

I'm perfectly fine with a system where, if someone can't compromise at all in a social interaction, they fail 100% of the time unless the other person already wanted what they're trying to persuade them of. Social interaction is, fundamentally, about compromise - if the other person doesn't get something from talking with you, they can easily choose to just not speak with you at all. If you enter that kind of situation believing that compromise is an inherently unnecessary thing, you're going to get stonewalled all the time and constantly fail (because, after all, in that point of view there's no reason your target should compromise either).

That is not a problem I have experience with. I have never played in a game system that really thinks about things in terms of "encounter", or ever had players unwilling to think outside the box (Sometimes in ways requiring me to rewrite basically everything on the fly. Fun evenings!) or in more complicated or convoluted ways.
So, I don't think designing games just to combat a problem certain specific players have with thinking outside the box and in any but the most direct way is really necessary, or even much possible - it is much more a problem with the people playing, than it is with the game itself.

In my experience, the 'thinking outside the box' is more local scale 'lets collapse the ceiling on him rather than fighting him' kinds of things instead of 'actually, maybe we don't even have to go to this dungeon'. The general arc of it is that the players get into some situation, they find that they don't like the trajectory that the situation is on if things were to follow the standard sequence, so they try more and more creative things to try to escape that sequence. But usually the underlying premises and goals are left alone.

It's absolutely critical to design systems with player behavior in mind, or you get muckups like how D&D's designers thought that people would play wizards primarily as blasters.

[Floret]

Spoiler: Psikerlord on his favourite system

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Best social system I know of:

You roleplay the conversation first. GM either straight up adjudicates result, or if result is uncertain, assigns a modifier (+1, +2, adv/disad or whatever) depending on what's said. Then roll.

So you get both player skill and character skill in the mix.

Unless you want player skill out of the mix, which is generally my goal. Nothing against roleplaying a conversation out, and maybe even give a modifier - but generally, I want the fact that a character has social skills cost as much investment as the fact they have combat skills (So a player that is OOC very capable but refuses to pay the points will not get far; what makes your character powerful should be somewhat balanced by the points you invest in them); and I want players who aren't able to OOC be able to pull off social things. (If the fact is general, I do advise them to maybe not play a socialite, and have never had someone insist. Heck, for my 5 Rings campaign heavy on socialisation and rhetorical manouvers I just didn't invite some of my regulars, knowing they might not be comfortable with that level of talking. But even someone generally capable can have brainfarts - sure, their characters might as well have, but they are supposed to be capable, are in a very different situation than the players. And characters are not, and should not, in my view, be bound by the player's skills. Not in TRPGs.)

Spoiler: NichG on Skills

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The point was about the necessity of adding something like a success check once the details of the listener and the argument have been decided, as well as what doing that suggests to players. If you have one system where e.g. making a well-chosen argument to a person who ultimately wants to agree is worth, say, a +10 to the check - but other ineffable factors such as Charisma and abstract 'skill' and the die roll contribute +/- 30 to the check, you're communicating that what's going on is more about those ineffable factors than about the choice of argument and goal.

So when earlier you suggested that you might as well let people try even when the argument is bad, the reason to not do that is that ultimately suggests that the argument and the listener are not actually the factors that ultimately decide things, but rather some kind of inherent awesomeness of the way the character said it which can't be grasped by those outside of the game.

If you make the perfect argument and fail, or make a terrible argument and succeed, I'd argue that's the kind of thing that makes it feel like characters have lost their agency - because the player whose character is being convinced can look at it and say 'come on, its obvious this is a stupid deal, my guy isn't that dumb' or 'come on, this fundamentally goes against what my guy believes in'. Whereas, if the system works by getting players to give away knowledge of what their character could be convinced of, then no matter what happens it's going to be compatible with how the player is developing their character.

But just because the skill is abstract, it doesn't mean something ineffable is going on? Just... that it has been abstracted into a skill. RPGs abstract all the time, for everything, just to different degrees (FATE more so than Dark Eye, for example)
Also, people IRL can be surprisingly deaf to arguments, no matter how logical or good. To pretend that "good argument" is the be-all and end-all of all social interaction calls into question many political decision made... ever, really. Calls into question all the people who make utterly dumb decisions by not talking to each other. There is simply much, much more to this than merely the simple facts presented, and deciding to abstract it doesn't make it "magic".
(Minor example, rather recently I spent 3 months agonizing about whether or not some former friends still liked me after a situation involving mutual acquaintance blew up. Rational argument said and says I should have just called, but... I didn't. Because people are not just pure logic, and emotion is a messy thing.)

But well. The main argument comes down to immersion again - and I, for one, am perfectly happy to say "yeah, what you said IRL was a bit crude, but you do have the skill, and none of us really are in the situation our characters are, so... yeah, your character didn't ACTUALLY say it like that". Or even "yes, your argument was good, but they are simply very, very apt at deflecting these things/While you talked very confidently, the fact that you stumbled over the hem of your clothes while moving during the speech kind of dampened your point and called your competence into question." (Something the player runs no risk of whatsover, but the character well does. The situations are not equivalent, and I really don't like to pretend they are by just playing out social interactions without involving the game mechanics.

Spoiler: NichG on Immersion

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Yeah. Generally for just inherently satisfying gameplay I tend to either go for computer games or for very simple abstract games like Go - the first because the automaticity makes it possible to have richer gameplay mechanics without the tediousness of actually resolving things by hand, and the second because the rules become minimally tedious. Tabletop games offer an open-endedness that neither of the others can approach, and that open-endedness is necessary for me to really feel as though everything about my character's thought processes and actions could potentially matter, which is I think is essential for immersion (once I start thinking things like 'no matter what I do, its going to end up being some modifier to some roll' then I tend to lose immersion and stop bothering to be creative or engaged)

Well. For satisfying immersion, I go to Larps, where there are (close to) no rules, and the situation I am in as close as possible to my characters, if one takes things as "real-person safety" into account. What I have experienced there, where I have my full brain capacity to get into character, am actually feeling and seeing everything around them and don't have to imagine that while sitting, just gets me closer and deeper into things than TRPGs ever could.
And, yes, Open-endedness is an incredible thing RPGs can offer! One of the other reasons I play them. The things you mention ring true to reasons why I play - just not because they benefit immersion, but... well. Because I value them for themselves, mostly.
And for the point of "some modifier on some roll" - that is a problem of the specific system, not one looking for gameplay - generally, what I experience in TRPGs, decisions made by players are/should be essential to what happens. (And, the more varied the gameplay, the more likely it will be something entirely different than "just some modifier")

Spoiler: NichG on compromise

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You can't always get what you want. Wanting too much, too specifically means that you will generally fail at being satisfied. The skill in this sort of thing is in actually realizing why you want something, and then using that to obtain flexibility in actually achieving something useful. I agree that people often aren't that willing to compromise. I would just say however, this is the lion's share of why they often fail at things, or feel as though things are unfair or impossible.

That's also why its important to make a system where it's crystal clear about when compromise is necessary and not give mixed messages. I've encountered many players and groups of players that would choose to fail and get nothing rather than to compromise and get something, because they ultimately can't shake the belief that there must be some way to do things without compromise.

I'm perfectly fine with a system where, if someone can't compromise at all in a social interaction, they fail 100% of the time unless the other person already wanted what they're trying to persuade them of. Social interaction is, fundamentally, about compromise - if the other person doesn't get something from talking with you, they can easily choose to just not speak with you at all. If you enter that kind of situation believing that compromise is an inherently unnecessary thing, you're going to get stonewalled all the time and constantly fail (because, after all, in that point of view there's no reason your target should compromise either).

Compromising too much can also lead to failing at being satisfied.
Like, yes, I agree: Compromise can help things happening along. This is how compromising works - give people things they want, and they are more willing to give things in return. But if a compromise veers too far off what you actually wanted, even after contemplation, acting as if a compromise is the solution is being dishonest.
People are more than mere logic, and some things simply cannot be divided down.
(Also, there are ways to circumvent logical thinking even more. If you put your initial bid above what you actually want, the "compromise" you get might just be exactly what you want. Time pressure can make people prone to bad decisions, etc. Now, of course, those things are at the very least sketchy, but sketchy RPG characters have a right to exist.)
And I would not be fine with a system that includes a 100% failure rate in such a situation, or at least applied very carefully. High, nigh-on impossible? Sure.

Spoiler: An example

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Maybe an example from the 5 Rings campaign. A member of court is suspected to have orchestrated a murder, and maybe also a murder attempt on the PCs. Obviously, accusing him would mean political death. And he would never admit to it, getting him to do that would, indeed, be probably impossible.
Now, inviting him over for an evening of polite conversation, marvelling at a painting (that had been shown to other members of court for great approval) and sake, a general nice distraction from the boredom of a winter encased in a snowstorm. Something one could turn down, but only under difficulty, if presented right - the social conventions of the country do their part.
Now, if in this situation, the sake is a bit more powerful than usual (Spiked, actually), the conversation very carefully veering into topics where the guy might (And, did, due to the setup being successful) let things slip that were while somewhat harmless in and of themselves, in the context of the suspicions painted a picture clear enough to make their boss intervene. (The fact that the courtier seduced the guy afterward, while the "victim" was sleeping from the combined facts of "spiked sake" and "Having someone over" and while rummaging through his things found a somewhat interesting piece of paper which didn't say anything - but had a cifer used in a different, suspicious case - didn't hurt, of course.)
Did the group compromise here? Because, the focus on the target was just as present. They did their best to erode his defenses, with ideas I cannot find fault with - neither from a gamistical standpoint (A tense situation, with interesting choices with meaningful consequences for how things went), nor really a "this isn't how people work" one.

Spoiler: NichG on thinking in or out of boxes

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In my experience, the 'thinking outside the box' is more local scale 'lets collapse the ceiling on him rather than fighting him' kinds of things instead of 'actually, maybe we don't even have to go to this dungeon'. The general arc of it is that the players get into some situation, they find that they don't like the trajectory that the situation is on if things were to follow the standard sequence, so they try more and more creative things to try to escape that sequence. But usually the underlying premises and goals are left alone.

It's absolutely critical to design systems with player behavior in mind, or you get muckups like how D&D's designers thought that people would play wizards primarily as blasters.

The example above may also serve as an example of what my players tend to come up with. The only thing presented was "Someone at court is a murderer". They searched out info for who might qualify; then came up with ideas on how to eliminate suspects; then arranged for the most likely subject to end up in a situation where they might compromise themselves enough for their boss to intervene.
And this is one of the less "out-there". In Shadowrun, they once completed a run by arranging a meeting between two people that were not part of my original writeup at all, in a place that also wasn't part of my writeup. I still think this is a problem with the players, or maybe even with the way the GM presents things, than with the system not "encouraging thinking in broader terms".

Maybe I also don't see the problem because usually my players do think about what kinds of hooks a person might have to be moved to do what they want (Which is something I tend to do as well with my characters, in the rare instances I get to play.). Like, they don't just have one method of begging, but choose their approaches depending on what they (think they) know about a person, or situation. Granted, if I have not decided if a person has a hook of a certain direction, and it isn't answered by personality, I find having the players roll on Edge/Void/Whatever is used in the system for "luck", to see if I will be lenient in determining the fact or not, to be a much more satisfying and productive way of dealing with things than just stonewalling everything that isn't in line with the facts I had thought about.
Because, in the end, if you insist on "finding the gaps" you put there, you tend to make players hesitant to try things, to be creative, and to think outside the box, and veer them towards thinking "what might the GM have thought how this is solvable". Not answering what they think might be the best way, but what they think I think might be the best way, and in the end this leads to less interesting games.

I don't quite think that the problem you describe is due to designing for player behaviour, but instead due to not designing thoroughly enough. Search your system for exploits, and playtest outside of your circle, with people with different playstyles. Magic often falls prone to that, by simply not thinking the possibilities through, a class might end up being much more powerful than imagined, simply because there was a more efficient way to play that class than the one the designers intended. (CRPG example: Guild Wars 2's dungeons were perfectly balanced, and challenging for groups with tanks, healers and damage dealers. But... somehow it was forgotten to try the method of "everyone does as much damage as possible", and with that strategy suddenly the metagame was dead, pure damage the norm and the content more or less a joke difficulty-wise.)
But other than "check for minmaxing options you might not want", I don't think situations like these can really teach us much.
Maybe this falls under "design for player behaviour", but I really see "Design in a way that the system actually does what you think it should" as the issue here. And as the issue that should be focussed on.

[NichG]

But just because the skill is abstract, it doesn't mean something ineffable is going on? Just... that it has been abstracted into a skill. RPGs abstract all the time, for everything, just to different degrees (FATE more so than Dark Eye, for example)
Also, people IRL can be surprisingly deaf to arguments, no matter how logical or good. To pretend that "good argument" is the be-all and end-all of all social interaction calls into question many political decision made... ever, really. Calls into question all the people who make utterly dumb decisions by not talking to each other. There is simply much, much more to this than merely the simple facts presented, and deciding to abstract it doesn't make it "magic".
(Minor example, rather recently I spent 3 months agonizing about whether or not some former friends still liked me after a situation involving mutual acquaintance blew up. Rational argument said and says I should have just called, but... I didn't. Because people are not just pure logic, and emotion is a messy thing.)

Not about the facts presented or rationality per se, but about the argument being the thing that the recipient wants to hear or is ready to believe. It's a good argument for that listener, not for a different listener.

The reason to not abstract goes back to what Segev and I were discussing earlier. If you look at something like combat, there's a richness in the system because you don't abstract too violently. You have to care where characters are positioned with respect to each-other, what their ranges are, etc. In a social system, if you just abstract to a kind of roll -> pass/fail mechanic, then the details of 'why' that worked are lost, and that in turn limits the richness and connectedness of the outcomes. It also limits how much the individuality of the participants in these situations can shine through. If your particular brand of conviction and your particular pecadilloes are summed up as '+5, -7' then they don't really matter - they're just fluff, since the numbers are all comparable objects. But if your vulnerability means you're always getting seduced, but the other guy's vulnerability means he's always getting lured to gamble, and you really let those distinctions be solid, then the experiences of those two characters will be very different. Just like the archer and the fighter will feel different from each-other in a combat involving a battle mat and obstacles and so on, whereas if you abstract away spatial relations the distinction tends to get lost.

Compromising too much can also lead to failing at being satisfied.
Like, yes, I agree: Compromise can help things happening along. This is how compromising works - give people things they want, and they are more willing to give things in return. But if a compromise veers too far off what you actually wanted, even after contemplation, acting as if a compromise is the solution is being dishonest.
People are more than mere logic, and some things simply cannot be divided down.
(Also, there are ways to circumvent logical thinking even more. If you put your initial bid above what you actually want, the "compromise" you get might just be exactly what you want. Time pressure can make people prone to bad decisions, etc. Now, of course, those things are at the very least sketchy, but sketchy RPG characters have a right to exist.)
And I would not be fine with a system that includes a 100% failure rate in such a situation, or at least applied very carefully. High, nigh-on impossible? Sure.

The whole 'this DC is impossibly high' thing is almost always a bad DM habit; a cop-out of not wanting to actually be on record for saying 'no' but actually wanting to say 'no'. Any finite difficulty isn't a difficulty, its a challenge. I only ever tell a player 'this is nigh-on impossible' when what I really want to communicate is 'high levels of optimization are okay and are encouraged in this campaign'. Whenever I've made or encountered ridiculously high DCs in campaigns (100s to 200s range for D&D; a couple 100s in 7th Sea and L5R), the players always eventually manage to hit them. The lesson I've learned from this is, setting very high DCs is how you tell players to step up their game. It makes the conditions for success concrete, and gives them a reason to push to that extreme when they might not have had one before. The absolute worst is when you do this in a system where there are no consequences for failure - that's just asking for ten minutes of the player rolling repeatedly until they get it.

If that's not my intent, I always, always say 'this is outright impossible' rather than just making it hard. And if I am going to do that, it's good to also explicitly outline the conditions which determine possibility or impossibility so that the player can reach that determination on their own (which makes it so that I'm not just shutting down their idea because I didn't like it, but rather that they're trying to work out how to achieve something in a well-defined scenario).

Spoiler: An example

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Maybe an example from the 5 Rings campaign. A member of court is suspected to have orchestrated a murder, and maybe also a murder attempt on the PCs. Obviously, accusing him would mean political death. And he would never admit to it, getting him to do that would, indeed, be probably impossible.
Now, inviting him over for an evening of polite conversation, marvelling at a painting (that had been shown to other members of court for great approval) and sake, a general nice distraction from the boredom of a winter encased in a snowstorm. Something one could turn down, but only under difficulty, if presented right - the social conventions of the country do their part.
Now, if in this situation, the sake is a bit more powerful than usual (Spiked, actually), the conversation very carefully veering into topics where the guy might (And, did, due to the setup being successful) let things slip that were while somewhat harmless in and of themselves, in the context of the suspicions painted a picture clear enough to make their boss intervene. (The fact that the courtier seduced the guy afterward, while the "victim" was sleeping from the combined facts of "spiked sake" and "Having someone over" and while rummaging through his things found a somewhat interesting piece of paper which didn't say anything - but had a cifer used in a different, suspicious case - didn't hurt, of course.)
Did the group compromise here? Because, the focus on the target was just as present. They did their best to erode his defenses, with ideas I cannot find fault with - neither from a gamistical standpoint (A tense situation, with interesting choices with meaningful consequences for how things went), nor really a "this isn't how people work" one.

I'd say they compromised: rather than convincing the villain to confess, they convinced him to drink a cup of liquid. Once drugs (or knives, or mind control magic, or ...) come into it, it's no longer a question of persuasive arguments. The thing they realized is that they didn't need to get the villain to confess, they only needed to get him to drink, and that they had the ability to make drinking sufficient to get them what they ultimately wanted.

Now as to whether or not its how people work, that comes down to the NPC. I'd say that the fact that this works tells me some very specific things about the NPC, which I would consider preconditions for this plan actually going off the way it did. Those things are now true of that NPC, whether you intended them to be or not. For an NPC, that's generally not a big deal, but if this was a player's character I could see them rightfully pitching a fit about it if those things were incompatible with how they imagined their character.

Specifically, if I put myself in the mindset of the villain. Things we start with, that aren't part of characterization:

- I am already worried about these people enough that I tried to have them killed
- I have a social station that obliges me to observe certain protocols in order to maintain it (this would be an Engagement/Hook pair in the system I described, btw - in an L5R society, violating hospitality traditions would surely come with an Honor hit at the least, and if I'm relying on that Honor in order to be above accusation in this trial...)

Now, the part that could be a problem with characterization: I'm being invited by the people I tried to have killed, who are investigating me. Of course I can't refuse without becoming vulnerable to accusation, so I have to do something. Your version of this character went with basically no counter-plan in mind, no backup or protections, no caution at all, and treated it as if he was in control. That suggests a character with a good dose of moustache-twirling megalomania, or a character who is answering a deeper insecurity with the need to behave as if they're untouchable even in situations where they're obviously vulnerable. These aren't uncommon villain archetypes, but they're not mandatory aspects for a villain to have.

My villain, for example, might instead do the following: It's obviously a trap and I can't refuse. So I accept, but with a plan to turn the invitation against my enemies. This means that I'm going to go there with the plan of finding some excuse to be insulted by their hospitality, so that I can either force them to let me leave and have an solid excuse to deny further contact with them or even lodge complaints about them if their investigation gets closer to me, or so that they escalate and I can get a second to duel them in my stead and actually kill them off in a legitimate fashion. To do this, I'm going to bring a guest whom I can be offended on behalf of. Perhaps a co-conspirator who will play up the situation, or just someone with a little known trigger which I will make sure is hidden. This also gives me a way to disincentivize them from simply outright killing me when I arrive (e.g. claiming self-defense or somesuch), since there would be a secondary witness. I don't know specifically that they're going to poison the sake, so its not like I'd be able to anticipate and defend against that in particular, but I'd go expecting some kind of move on their part which might make me generally cautious about things. If I brought a co-conspirator, odds are that once I started to get loopy they could see this and make an excuse for us to leave before our enemies got anything out of me. It's quite a different characterization - calculating, paranoid, and a bit psychopathic rather than egotistic and theatrical, but that's a kind of villain that can exist too.

I would be pretty put out if my villain PC suddenly had to hold the idiot ball through no specific vulnerability of his own, just because the others rolled well on their planning check. Because that actually alters that villain's characterization in an important way.

The example above may also serve as an example of what my players tend to come up with. The only thing presented was "Someone at court is a murderer". They searched out info for who might qualify; then came up with ideas on how to eliminate suspects; then arranged for the most likely subject to end up in a situation where they might compromise themselves enough for their boss to intervene.
And this is one of the less "out-there". In Shadowrun, they once completed a run by arranging a meeting between two people that were not part of my original writeup at all, in a place that also wasn't part of my writeup. I still think this is a problem with the players, or maybe even with the way the GM presents things, than with the system not "encouraging thinking in broader terms".

Maybe I also don't see the problem because usually my players do think about what kinds of hooks a person might have to be moved to do what they want (Which is something I tend to do as well with my characters, in the rare instances I get to play.). Like, they don't just have one method of begging, but choose their approaches depending on what they (think they) know about a person, or situation. Granted, if I have not decided if a person has a hook of a certain direction, and it isn't answered by personality, I find having the players roll on Edge/Void/Whatever is used in the system for "luck", to see if I will be lenient in determining the fact or not, to be a much more satisfying and productive way of dealing with things than just stonewalling everything that isn't in line with the facts I had thought about.
Because, in the end, if you insist on "finding the gaps" you put there, you tend to make players hesitant to try things, to be creative, and to think outside the box, and veer them towards thinking "what might the GM have thought how this is solvable". Not answering what they think might be the best way, but what they think I think might be the best way, and in the end this leads to less interesting games.

Different experience from me. I find that players are hesitant when they don't have a clear way to evaluate the chance of success of something. Often, one player being hesitant means that the group becomes hesitant as a whole. In the worst cases I've e.g. seen a player propose a completely workable plan, then have another player shut it down based on an imagined problem with it, and then the entire party dynamic gets frozen with a 30 minute debate. I tend to have a 'tyranny of the individual' rule when that starts to happen - once I notice it, I go around the table saying 'okay, what do you do right now?' so that people don't feel like they have to justify what they want to do in order to try it and see what happens.

When the scenario is sufficiently clear that evaluating feasibility is actually in the players' hands, then I find that my players tend to be more daring. They can work out a plan and know without having to ask me (or others at the table) whether it should or shouldn't work.

Now, what you don't want is for there to be secret reasons why things will hit hard failure. If there are hard failures, put them in the open - that way it won't feel like being stonewalled, it will just feel like that's the scenario. I don't feel stonewalled when I can't change the range of my melee attack just by rolling really well on an attack roll, because that's just how things work. If I were told 'this creature has a power that makes the first melee attack each round miss' then I'd accept that more easily than if I were told e.g. 'You rolled a 93? That's a miss.'

Maybe this falls under "design for player behaviour", but I really see "Design in a way that the system actually does what you think it should" as the issue here. And as the issue that should be focussed on.

An indie (computer) game studio I follow had a bunch of posts about game design when they were working out the kinks of a strategy game. What they found from player reports is that there was a fun, easy way to do things, but that you could gain a slight (basically negligible) advantage by doing something tedious instead - and as a result, players felt compelled to do the tedious thing even though it made the game un-fun for them. It's not that it was game-breaking to do that thing, it's that the game communicated to the players 'this is how a skilled player should play', and that was at odds with the way that the developers had anticipated people playing - meaning that the game felt tedious even though there was nothing explicitly forcing it to do so.

It's that kind of thing. It's not just stuff being broken, its that the way a system is set up encourages a certain line of thought. You want to be on the right page about where that line of thought is going, or you're going to have dissonance when it comes to actual play situations.

[Segev]

Best social system I know of:

You roleplay the conversation first. GM either straight up adjudicates result, or if result is uncertain, assigns a modifier (+1, +2, adv/disad or whatever) depending on what's said. Then roll.

So you get both player skill and character skill in the mix.

Would you say, then, that the best combat system would be:

You roleplay combat first, describing every blow and counter-blow and tactic used. The GM either straight up adjudicates the result, or, if it's uncertain, assigns a modifier (+1, +2, adv/disad or whatever) depending on the description. Then roll a single "combat skill" check.

Would that be an ideal combat system, to you?

The reason to not abstract goes back to what Segev and I were discussing earlier. If you look at something like combat, there's a richness in the system because you don't abstract too violently. You have to care where characters are positioned with respect to each-other, what their ranges are, etc. In a social system, if you just abstract to a kind of roll -> pass/fail mechanic, then the details of 'why' that worked are lost, and that in turn limits the richness and connectedness of the outcomes. It also limits how much the individuality of the participants in these situations can shine through. If your particular brand of conviction and your particular pecadilloes are summed up as '+5, -7' then they don't really matter - they're just fluff, since the numbers are all comparable objects. But if your vulnerability means you're always getting seduced, but the other guy's vulnerability means he's always getting lured to gamble, and you really let those distinctions be solid, then the experiences of those two characters will be very different. Just like the archer and the fighter will feel different from each-other in a combat involving a battle mat and obstacles and so on, whereas if you abstract away spatial relations the distinction tends to get lost.

This is touching strongly on what I'm aiming for. It's a lot easier to get the chronic gambler to play a game of chance wherein you can get him in a compromising position (indebtedness, a trap, simply get him to let slip information while he's focused on the game...) than it is to get him to simply do you the favor you want him to do by brow-beating him with conversation, or by offering to sleep with him, or by promising him concert tickets.

Meanwhile, the lush would be far more easily bribed to talk by offering him a fine, strong wine, than he would be convinced to join a gambling game.

Heck, just as a really simple example, let's say you want to get by a guard.

If he's a lush, offering him a fine, strong drink will likely see him sloshed within the hour and make slipping by him either trivial or at least a lot easier.

If he's a chronic gambler, you might be able to either distract him with a game of chance or get him indebted enough (or use the friendly game to get him to like you enough) to let you by.

If he's a lech, it's probably easier to seduce him away from his post for some debauchery - or at least some heavy petting in that alley over there.

Again, these are extremely simplistic examples. More complex characters will have more hooks and motives and drives to play with, and which have to be overcome.

I'd say they compromised: rather than convincing the villain to confess, they convinced him to drink a cup of liquid. Once drugs (or knives, or mind control magic, or ...) come into it, it's no longer a question of persuasive arguments. The thing they realized is that they didn't need to get the villain to confess, they only needed to get him to drink, and that they had the ability to make drinking sufficient to get them what they ultimately wanted.

See, I don't see that as "compromising." That's just taking a different approach. It backs up my claim that "getting what they want" isn't, actually, impossible. This courtier has as a desire "don't let them prove I'm the murderer," but that doesn't make him immune to any effort which would cause him to slip up and reveal it.

Now, if the party were insistent on getting his confession, they could go about it a couple of ways: they could torment and torture and intimidate him until he was so terrified that he would confess to ANYTHING (including the truth) to make it stop; they could torment/torture/whatever him until he threw himself on his master's mercy and tearfully confessed just to convince his master how dire the threat was (or confessed in blubbering panic); they could work on him and work on him until he had such a change of heart that his pure guilt made him confess.

Most of these, especially the last, would be ridiculously hard. Possibly impossible.

But the "possibly impossible" is due to a high DC, not because the GM is afraid to say "no" when he really means it, but because it's just that hard to do. And it may not be "a high DC" so much as "a series of really hard-to-pull-off actions over a long period of time, any one of which if failed foils the whole attempt or at least requires starting over from a long ways back."

But if their goal was to get the murderer to stop wanting to murder THEM, blackmail might work (at least in making him stop trying), as might actively befriending and allying with him. If his motive for murdering them becomes overwhelmed by his motives for keeping them alive, his behavior will change even if he won't confess.

In this case, their goal was revealing him. So they took actions that played on his nature.

Of note, to me, is the seduction action: in L5R, seduction is one of those skills that mechanically does nothing. It just tells the player of the target character that his character "feels desire." Whether the character acts on that desire is up to the player. Entirely. So a GM or a player can no-sell the most sexy seductress ever every single time. Good RP would suggest you shouldn't, but there's no consequence to doing so (and often great benefit in avoiding whatever cost the sexytimes would inflict upon your character).

I would prefer there to be actual mechanical rammifications to turning down (or accepting) the seduction, based on how well the seductor rolled and potentially what hooks in the target character were played upon.

I put myself in the mindset of the villain. Things we start with, that aren't part of characterization:

- I am already worried about these people enough that I tried to have them killed
- I have a social station that obliges me to observe certain protocols in order to maintain it (this would be an Engagement/Hook pair in the system I described, btw - in an L5R society, violating hospitality traditions would surely come with an Honor hit at the least, and if I'm relying on that Honor in order to be above accusation in this trial...)

Now, the part that could be a problem with characterization: I'm being invited by the people I tried to have killed, who are investigating me. Of course I can't refuse without becoming vulnerable to accusation, so I have to do something. Your version of this character went with basically no counter-plan in mind, no backup or protections, no caution at all, and treated it as if he was in control. That suggests a character with a good dose of moustache-twirling megalomania, or a character who is answering a deeper insecurity with the need to behave as if they're untouchable even in situations where they're obviously vulnerable. These aren't uncommon villain archetypes, but they're not mandatory aspects for a villain to have.

With just those considerations, he would drink almost none of the sake, and would not be seduced. In fact, the temptations of the sake are non-existent for the GM, as are the temptations of the flesh. And the GM has determined that the concerns of the character are as you listed, which doesn't include any desire for pleasurable drink nor pleasurable...ahem...company.

Even if the character would normally enjoy pleasurable activities, the objective examination is that risking it is not worth it. The social skill comes in plying the target NPC with "just one more drink" and with a sense that "a little won't hurt" until he's taken far more "little" steps over the line than he realized and he's lost control of the situation. But none of that can happen without convincing the GM that it "should." And the GM has no way of gauging this other than an arbitrary "well, did they roll high? Is that high enough to count?"

Different experience from me. I find that players are hesitant when they don't have a clear way to evaluate the chance of success of something.

This is quite true. In real life as well as in gaming. I think people game because they have a BETTER grasp of chances of success in game situations. Which is another reason having well-defined mechanics makes things easier to decide.

If you can evaluate Murderous Courtier-san to learn his hooks, that gives you a move you can certainly make to discover potentially-useful future moves. Knowing his hooks, you can have a firmer grasp of the chances of success of any given course of action, and can plan accordingly. You can strategize how to build up or knock down hooks and drives, and how to capitalize on them.

Now, what you don't want is for there to be secret reasons why things will hit hard failure. If there are hard failures, put them in the open - that way it won't feel like being stonewalled, it will just feel like that's the scenario. I don't feel stonewalled when I can't change the range of my melee attack just by rolling really well on an attack roll, because that's just how things work. If I were told 'this creature has a power that makes the first melee attack each round miss' then I'd accept that more easily than if I were told e.g. 'You rolled a 93? That's a miss.'

Generally good advice. Again, knowing he's got absolutely no interest in your seductress tells you that you are not going to succeed at getting him to do her any favors...yet. She has to figure out how to make him interested, possibly using existing hooks.

The truth is that the unspoken hook a seductor uses is "(practically) everyone likes sex." They also play on typical sexual preferences.

People who genuinely lack those hooks are incredibly rare. Some have them less strongly than others, and some have them as overriding as any addiction, but those without them entirely are rare in the extreme, and probably should have special note made of it in their mechanics.

Likewise: food/hunger temptations. Really, anything to do with appetites.

An indie (computer) game studio I follow had a bunch of posts about game design when they were working out the kinks of a strategy game. What they found from player reports is that there was a fun, easy way to do things, but that you could gain a slight (basically negligible) advantage by doing something tedious instead - and as a result, players felt compelled to do the tedious thing even though it made the game un-fun for them. It's not that it was game-breaking to do that thing, it's that the game communicated to the players 'this is how a skilled player should play', and that was at odds with the way that the developers had anticipated people playing - meaning that the game felt tedious even though there was nothing explicitly forcing it to do so.

It's that kind of thing. It's not just stuff being broken, its that the way a system is set up encourages a certain line of thought. You want to be on the right page about where that line of thought is going, or you're going to have dissonance when it comes to actual play situations.

Valuable knowledge.

But I still say that saying, "There's no way to introduce a new preference, like, dislike, or emotional tie," fails because it makes for unrealistic people. I think if you make the hooks clear enough and design the rules such that USING hooks is how things get done, the fact that using existing hooks is faster than building new ones will lead people to realistic efforts to use the social system.

If you can bribe the lush security guard with wine, why would you decide you instead need to bash your head against the wall of convincing him to take up gambling as a hobby in order to lure him away, eventually, with the promise of a game of chance? Just offer him the wine.

[NichG]

See, I don't see that as "compromising." That's just taking a different approach. It backs up my claim that "getting what they want" isn't, actually, impossible. This courtier has as a desire "don't let them prove I'm the murderer," but that doesn't make him immune to any effort which would cause him to slip up and reveal it.

In the specific context of talking about persuasion mechanics, it is compromising. That is to say, the characters in that story didn't make a successful persuasion attempt to get the courtier to slip up and reveal their crime. They instead made a successful alchemy attempt to create a truth serum, thereby changing the thing that they needed to persuade their target to do in order to obtain what they ultimately actually wanted.

That kind of case would still play out the same way if I were to say 'persuading the courtier to confess is impossible' - because the crafty players realized that they didn't have to persuade the courtier to confess, they just had to persuade the courtier to drink a cup of sake. So rather than butting their heads up against the infeasible direct method of 'c'mon, confess!', they changed their immediate goals and thereby made the persuasion attempt fall along the lines of what the courtier couldn't reasonably refuse.

In other words, this is the desired mode of play.

Even if the character would normally enjoy pleasurable activities, the objective examination is that risking it is not worth it. The social skill comes in plying the target NPC with "just one more drink" and with a sense that "a little won't hurt" until he's taken far more "little" steps over the line than he realized and he's lost control of the situation. But none of that can happen without convincing the GM that it "should." And the GM has no way of gauging this other than an arbitrary "well, did they roll high? Is that high enough to count?"

A system with explicit guarantees creates a space that doesn't have this sort of ambiguity, while still allowing characters to act according to whims or subtle points. What it does is to say 'within the explicit guarantees, the GM doesn't need to be convinced for something to work; outside of it, the decision of whether it works or not is entirely up to the controller of the character you're trying it on'. So basically, if you try to seduce a character who doesn't have a 'vulnerable to seduction' flaw, their player can still decide to have the character go for it - but by putting it outside of the mechanics, it says that it's entirely their option as to whether their character happens to be enough of a lech for it to work.

Or to put it another way, it recognizes explicitly that there are aspects of a character which are undecided, and grants the agency to make decisions about those aspects to the controller of the character rather than to the person attempting to forward a manipulation. If someone tries a seduction, they are asking an honest question 'can your character be swayed by this?', permitting the other controller to decide that aspect of their character. The answer is allowed to be either 'yes' or 'no' with no judgement made by the system of one being more correct than the other.

By tying social powers and influence to mandatory vulnerabilities, you make sure that almost every character has some ways in which they can be shifted. But it's up to the controller rather than the interlocutor to present what those will be - to choose the nature of that character.

But I still say that saying, "There's no way to introduce a new preference, like, dislike, or emotional tie," fails because it makes for unrealistic people.

If a character's controller voluntarily accepts the new preference, like, dislike, or emotional tie, then the character can acquire such a thing even if there are no mechanics for it. If you try it and the character's controller goes for it, congratulations! But by not having mechanics by which an external agency can force that issue, I'm explicitly giving the right to make that decision to the character's controller. If a player says 'my character is an asexual hermit, and the fact that you dared try to talk with him means we're enemies now' then you may not think that character is particularly realistic, but I'd rather the system respect and support the controller's choice of characterization than another player's judgments about realism.

Letting it happen but with an impossibly high DC is the mixed messages thing again. It's saying that the system is okay with it - that its a valid mode of play - as long as you sufficiently minmax your check. I'd rather just say 'it is not a valid mode of play to try to override a character's characterization'.

[Segev]

No, "If the character's player voluntarily accepts it" as the only way to get it done is the same as saying, "If the player of the persuading character is persuasive enough to convince the player of the persuaded character to allow his character to be persuaded."

It removes mechanics entirely.

It takes it from being a game and into being a social exercise for the players, where they have to convince/persuade/trick/manipulate/whatever each other, rather than having their characters do it to the other characters.

[Max_Killjoy]

No, "If the character's player voluntarily accepts it" as the only way to get it done is the same as saying, "If the player of the persuading character is persuasive enough to convince the player of the persuaded character to allow his character to be persuaded."

It removes mechanics entirely.

It takes it from being a game and into being a social exercise for the players, where they have to convince/persuade/trick/manipulate/whatever each other, rather than having their characters do it to the other characters.

First, it doesn't have to have intricate social mechanics to be a game.

Second, I'd rather risk it "not being a game", than risk allowing players (or the GM) to violate the agency of the player when it comes to their character's personality, fears, goals, desires, aversions, etc.

Third, there's no difference in actual effect between allowing other players (or the GM) to impose in that manner upon a player's PC, or allowing the mechanics to impose in that manner upon a players's PC.

[NichG]

No, "If the character's player voluntarily accepts it" as the only way to get it done is the same as saying, "If the player of the persuading character is persuasive enough to convince the player of the persuaded character to allow his character to be persuaded."

It removes mechanics entirely.

It takes it from being a game and into being a social exercise for the players, where they have to convince/persuade/trick/manipulate/whatever each other, rather than having their characters do it to the other characters.

Only if the players are for some reason refusing to actually use the hook system which does give them explicit mechanics for convincing people.

If they use the system, they don't have to persuade anyone OOC of anything. If they want to try to do it themselves they can - and anyone at the table has the right to say in response 'my character is not having any of that, use the mechanics or get lost' if they want.

It's like someone deciding to stunt during combat rather than use the attack mechanics. It might work. You can try. But if you go outside the system, you no longer have any guarantees.

[ImNotTrevor]

First, it doesn't have to have intricate social mechanics to be a game.

Second, I'd rather risk it "not being a game", than risk allowing players (or the GM) to violate the agency of the player when it comes to their character's personality, fears, goals, desires, aversions, etc.

Third, there's no difference in actual effect between allowing other players (or the GM) to impose in that manner upon a player's PC, or allowing the mechanics to impose in that manner upon a players's PC.

You acquiesce to having your character messed with in ways you may not always like the moment you allow random numbers to determine outcomes.

I see no real difference between declaring that your character is unaffected by well-structured and well-delivered arguments, and declaring that your character is unaffected by punches to the face.

They both make the character boring in their own ways. A character who never changes positions and never compromises and is never convinced to act against their own interests is boring. They suffer from a sort of Dudley Do-Right complex and are, in the end boring. Because we love characters for their struggles, not their achievements. A character with no internal struggle is exactly as boring as a character with no external struggle.

Superman is never threatened by anything. As a reader, I never feel like superman is in any real danger of any sort. He's boring.
Superman also never flinches in his decisions or moral stance, making him doubly boring. It is telling that two of the most popular depictions of Superman involve him being a "bad guy." In Injustice, where he becomes a straight-out villain (more popular but dumber because it has thr exact same problem from the other end) and Superman: Red Son, where Superman lands in Siberia instead of Kansas and is raised as a communist. The second of the two is actually interesting, because Superman has moral struggles for a change. He follows Stalin but understands that the dictator's methods are not what he claims to stand for. Superman genuinely wants what is best for his fellow men, but his methodologies and philosophies about it are from an entirely different worldview. His actions get called into question not only by others, but himself. Others speak words that influence his thinking and actions, and this is wildly important to his character.

It is the only Superman story that did not bore me 3 pages in, and he faces no real physical threats.

So, frankly, I enjoy when my characters are influenced. I make the rules about how it plays out and what my character thinks about all this, but I will play to the mechanical outcome even if it is begrudging and will eventually have some comeuppance inflicted.

TL;DR
Static characters that hold their central beliefs and never, ever compromise and are never, ever made to doubt and never, ever experience internal struggle are boring to me.

[NichG]

You acquiesce to having your character messed with in ways you may not always like the moment you allow random numbers to determine outcomes.

I see no real difference between declaring that your character is unaffected by well-structured and well-delivered arguments, and declaring that your character is unaffected by punches to the face.

They both make the character boring in their own ways. A character who never changes positions and never compromises and is never convinced to act against their own interests is boring. They suffer from a sort of Dudley Do-Right complex and are, in the end boring. Because we love characters for their struggles, not their achievements. A character with no internal struggle is exactly as boring as a character with no external struggle.

Doesn't follow. We're talking system design here, which means that we're exactly discussing which aspects of a character should be messed with and in what ways. You could have a system where the players make no decisions and everything including the party's goals and strategic choices is based on die rolls. You could have a system where the only die roll is to determine who moves first, and everything else is up to fancy. Or, a system where the only die roll determines who moves first and everything else is a deterministic game of chess.

The recent discussion hasn't been about whether characters should be affected by things or not, it's been about defining mechanically what constitutes a 'well-structured and well-delivered argument' that is capable of hitting home. It's not 'should characters be immune to punches?', its 'should punches require being within 5ft of the target to have a non-zero chance of hitting?'

An internal struggle that consists of 'people in the world with high enough scores in persuasive skills to be able to force certain kinds of agreement' isn't actually an internal struggle anyhow. It's just a particular form of external struggle; one which I find to be particularly unsatisfying when it's being forwarded as a good way to have the sort of things character self-doubt brings to other fiction. I already have someone walking up and punching a character to provide that kind of struggle, having a refluffed version where the punching is done with words doesn't add anything. Having something that ultimately isn't just another flavor of punching on the other hand, that's where there might be something worth consideration.

[ImNotTrevor]

Doesn't follow. We're talking system design here, which means that we're exactly discussing which aspects of a character should be messed with and in what ways. You could have a system where the players make no decisions and everything including the party's goals and strategic choices is based on die rolls. You could have a system where the only die roll is to determine who moves first, and everything else is up to fancy. Or, a system where the only die roll determines who moves first and everything else is a deterministic game of chess.

The recent discussion hasn't been about whether characters should be affected by things or not, it's been about defining mechanically what constitutes a 'well-structured and well-delivered argument' that is capable of hitting home. It's not 'should characters be immune to punches?', its 'should punches require being within 5ft of the target to have a non-zero chance of hitting?'

An internal struggle that consists of 'people in the world with high enough scores in persuasive skills to be able to force certain kinds of agreement' isn't actually an internal struggle anyhow. It's just a particular form of external struggle; one which I find to be particularly unsatisfying when it's being forwarded as a good way to have the sort of things character self-doubt brings to other fiction. I already have someone walking up and punching a character to provide that kind of struggle, having a refluffed version where the punching is done with words doesn't add anything. Having something that ultimately isn't just another flavor of punching on the other hand, that's where there might be something worth consideration.

You forget that I was responding to someone making the argument that they should be able to ignore/deny any social roll outcome and/or won't touch systems which contain such.

Maintaining that context is important.

Yes, there is discussion to be had about mechanics and how to do it, on which I prefer to take the lighter approach to basically everything. It's easier on me and my players, and since we're a fairly chill bunch who value hijinks, shenanigans, drama, and cool happenings more than strict and unyielding character accuracy at all times, we have a blast.

My ideal system is pretty much what Apocalypse World does. Any negotiation that isn't a threat involves making an offer. Your roll determines how effective your bargaining is. Maximum success can mean that you even wriggle out of actually holding up your end of the deal.
With PCs, it functions based on treats for the player if they acquiesce. Saying yes means marking XP, and/or saying No means unhighlighting a stat (making it much harder to gain XP this session. And if it happens twice, makes it impossible.) The roll determines whether you deliver the carrot, the stick, both, or neither. What the other player does is up to them. All mechanical consequence is meta. The narrative layer consequences... maybe not.

[NichG]

You forget that I was responding to someone making the argument that they should be able to ignore/deny any social roll outcome and/or won't touch systems which contain such.

Maintaining that context is important.

Yes. You were responding to Max_Killjoy's point which was in response to Segev's points, which had to do with choosing where to put the line and whether or not a specific form of manipulation needs to be included in a system. When taking Max's comments in that context, your response felt like a non sequitur to me.

My ideal system is pretty much what Apocalypse World does. Any negotiation that isn't a threat involves making an offer. Your roll determines how effective your bargaining is. Maximum success can mean that you even wriggle out of actually holding up your end of the deal.
With PCs, it functions based on treats for the player if they acquiesce. Saying yes means marking XP, and/or saying No means unhighlighting a stat (making it much harder to gain XP this session. And if it happens twice, makes it impossible.) The roll determines whether you deliver the carrot, the stick, both, or neither. What the other player does is up to them. All mechanical consequence is meta. The narrative layer consequences... maybe not.

I don't like the PC vs NPC part of that (due to the nonsensicality that arises from the bargainer being more important than the offer). But I agree that incentive-based systems are a reasonable approach for PC vs PC. However, I think its possible to do better, since incentive-based systems are still kind of one-note in that they're still approaching things from the point of view of a conflict resolution mechanic, and ultimately I think the non-conflict aspects of social interaction are much richer than the conflict-based aspects, and are handled poorly by such things.

[Max_Killjoy]

I don't like the PC vs NPC part of that (due to the nonsensicality that arises from the bargainer being more important than the offer). But I agree that incentive-based systems are a reasonable approach for PC vs PC. However, I think do its possible to do better, since incentive-based systems are still kind of one-note in that they're still approaching things from the point of view of a conflict resolution mechanic, and ultimately I think the non-conflict aspects of social interaction are much richer than the conflict-based aspects, and are handled poorly by such things.

One of the worst things about most social resolution mechanics I've seen is that they assume an adversarial, zero-sum, win-lose situation -- that all social interaction is conflict, that all social interaction is about power, about one person imposing an action, belief, decision, whatever, on another person.

This can be seen underlying the surface even in some systems that are supposedly not built upon it.

[flond]

One of the worst things about most social resolution mechanics I've seen is that they assume an adversarial, zero-sum, win-lose situation -- that all social interaction is conflict, that all social interaction is about power, about one person imposing an action, belief, decision, whatever, on another person.

This can be seen underlying the surface even in some systems that are supposedly not built upon it.

Yes, because once again those are the times you want a system.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yes, because once again those are the times you want a system.

1) When the rules encode only conflict into the mechanics, it leads some/many players to see through that lens and view all interaction as conflict.

2) I disagree with the notion that mechanics and rules are only for conflict and need only account for conflict.

3) I disagree with the idea (largely Edwardian, but espoused by others) that "conflict resolution" (only roll when there is conflict, identify the abstract narrative conflict and roll to resolve that, never roll unless failure is at stake) is superior to "task resolution" (identify the specific discrete thing that the character wants to attempt, and roll to determine whether they succeed, and/or the speed of completion, and/or the degree of success, depending on the setting and game circumstances).

[flond]

1) When the rules encode only conflict into the mechanics, it leads some/many players to see through that lens and view all interaction as conflict.

2) I disagree with the notion that mechanics and rules are only for conflict and need only account for conflict.

3) I disagree with the idea (largely Edwardian, but espoused by others) that "conflict resolution" (only roll when there is conflict, identify the abstract narrative conflict and roll to resolve that, never roll unless failure is at stake) is superior to "task resolution" (identify the specific discrete thing that the character wants to attempt, and roll to determine whether they succeed, and/or the speed of completion, and/or the degree of success, depending on the setting and game circumstances).

1. That sounds like their problem.

2. This was my bad. I meant this specifically in the realm of "social interaction" fundamentally, I think that non-adversarial social interaction generally doesn't need an arbitration (or at least, any arbitration of non-adversarial social interaction probably is only going to be involved in a fundamentally thematic context (e.g. a narrative game like Chuubo's where talking about your feelings gives you XP). Outside of that, I think social rules are a useful abstraction. A way to avoid something unpleasent or unuseful.

3. This is irrelevant to this discussion. I am using conflict in its more general sense. (I prefer conflict to task resolution in the GNS sense. But I also prefer very different games to you I suspect.)

[NichG]

IME, the thing systems actually provide is to concretize aspects of how the world will work. That allows for planning, and also provides channels which guide the players' way of assessing a situation - both in terms of their options, and in terms of explaining causality - what does it 'mean' that you are Dexterous, what does that do?

So if you only have systems for conflict, your game will primarily be about conflict. If you only have systems about cooperation, that's what your game will focus on.

[ImNotTrevor]

Yes. You were responding to Max_Killjoy's point which was in response to Segev's points, which had to do with choosing where to put the line and whether or not a specific form of manipulation needs to be included in a system. When taking Max's comments in that context, your response felt like a non sequitur to me.

I was responding only to the idea of the line laying at the particular extreme of "social influence is never permitted ever on my character," and illustrated why I disagreed.

I don't like the PC vs NPC part of that (due to the nonsensicality that arises from the bargainer being more important than the offer).

I will state that in the rules you do need a sensical offer that would actually appeal in some sense to trigger the roll. Offering to pick someone's nose for them in exchange for all of their Barter will get you laughed at or shot, depending on who you're offering this to. (Basically, the system has a "do what makes sense above all else" clause.)

But I agree that incentive-based systems are a reasonable approach for PC vs PC. However, I think its possible to do better, since incentive-based systems are still kind of one-note in that they're still approaching things from the point of view of a conflict resolution mechanic, and ultimately I think the non-conflict aspects of social interaction are much richer than the conflict-based aspects, and are handled poorly by such things.

AW doesn't really have rules for anything that isn't rooted in conflict, entropy, or danger. Or all three. This is mostly a stylistic choice. But then again the Seduce/Manipulate roll kinda skirts that line. It never says they have to be directly opposed to you. You use it to make relatively benign deals, too. It just triggers when you offer someone something in exchange for them doing something you want them to do. Other PbtA systems have their own particulars, but if I wanted to build a deeper system I'd build from this base rather than a 3.5-esque combat system emulation but for social interaction. I like my conflicts resolved in maybe 3-5 rolls, tops.

(I should also mention that most rolls in AW have between 3 and 18 distinct possible outcomes, not including the vague ones like "prepare for the worst." The roll for intimidation, for instance, can resolve in any of 16 different ways in first edition, if I remember my counting right.)

[Max_Killjoy]

IME, the thing systems actually provide is to concretize aspects of how the world will work. That allows for planning, and also provides channels which guide the players' way of assessing a situation - both in terms of their options, and in terms of explaining causality - what does it 'mean' that you are Dexterous, what does that do?

So if you only have systems for conflict, your game will primarily be about conflict. If you only have systems about cooperation, that's what your game will focus on.

Take as another example of this, a game system without any rules for non-lethal attacks / damage.

How many players will stop to consider something other than lethal attacks?

[Psikerlord]

Would you say, then, that the best combat system would be:

You roleplay combat first, describing every blow and counter-blow and tactic used. The GM either straight up adjudicates the result, or, if it's uncertain, assigns a modifier (+1, +2, adv/disad or whatever) depending on the description. Then roll a single "combat skill" check.

Would that be an ideal combat system, to you?

Definitely not! But in my book, combat is completely different to social interaction, and treating them differently is how it should be.

[Floret]

Since I was too busy the last few days, only some broader points to not bog down the discussion too much. Segev and ImNotTrevor answered many of the things I would have anyways.

Spoiler: NichG on abstraction

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The reason to not abstract goes back to what Segev and I were discussing earlier. If you look at something like combat, there's a richness in the system because you don't abstract too violently. You have to care where characters are positioned with respect to each-other, what their ranges are, etc. In a social system, if you just abstract to a kind of roll -> pass/fail mechanic, then the details of 'why' that worked are lost, and that in turn limits the richness and connectedness of the outcomes. It also limits how much the individuality of the participants in these situations can shine through. If your particular brand of conviction and your particular pecadilloes are summed up as '+5, -7' then they don't really matter - they're just fluff, since the numbers are all comparable objects. But if your vulnerability means you're always getting seduced, but the other guy's vulnerability means he's always getting lured to gamble, and you really let those distinctions be solid, then the experiences of those two characters will be very different. Just like the archer and the fighter will feel different from each-other in a combat involving a battle mat and obstacles and so on, whereas if you abstract away spatial relations the distinction tends to get lost.

Sure. Different levels of abstraction. No argument from me here. And I would much rather play with a system that has consequences beyond just the numbers, sure. Very often this is the job of the GM, to track what is being done, and it can be divorced from the numbers: A gun to a guys face might add +X to a persuasion roll, and will matter just as much as a charming face for the roll itself and for the persuasion being done; but beyond that have very different ramifications story-wise (And mechanics-wise, as those consequences lead to different checks, difficulties for follow-up rolls, etc.)
But yes, this is why I, as Segev, am arguing for a system with a bit more depth than just a pass/fail.
What I still don't see is what this has to do with whether social skills are magic or not (They're not, we all agree), or even with the scope of what can be accomplished by them.

Spoiler: NichG on my example

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I'd say they compromised: rather than convincing the villain to confess, they convinced him to drink a cup of liquid. Once drugs (or knives, or mind control magic, or ...) come into it, it's no longer a question of persuasive arguments. The thing they realized is that they didn't need to get the villain to confess, they only needed to get him to drink, and that they had the ability to make drinking sufficient to get them what they ultimately wanted.

Now as to whether or not its how people work, that comes down to the NPC. I'd say that the fact that this works tells me some very specific things about the NPC, which I would consider preconditions for this plan actually going off the way it did. Those things are now true of that NPC, whether you intended them to be or not. For an NPC, that's generally not a big deal, but if this was a player's character I could see them rightfully pitching a fit about it if those things were incompatible with how they imagined their character.

Specifically, if I put myself in the mindset of the villain. Things we start with, that aren't part of characterization:

- I am already worried about these people enough that I tried to have them killed
- I have a social station that obliges me to observe certain protocols in order to maintain it (this would be an Engagement/Hook pair in the system I described, btw - in an L5R society, violating hospitality traditions would surely come with an Honor hit at the least, and if I'm relying on that Honor in order to be above accusation in this trial...)

Now, the part that could be a problem with characterization: I'm being invited by the people I tried to have killed, who are investigating me. Of course I can't refuse without becoming vulnerable to accusation, so I have to do something. Your version of this character went with basically no counter-plan in mind, no backup or protections, no caution at all, and treated it as if he was in control. That suggests a character with a good dose of moustache-twirling megalomania, or a character who is answering a deeper insecurity with the need to behave as if they're untouchable even in situations where they're obviously vulnerable. These aren't uncommon villain archetypes, but they're not mandatory aspects for a villain to have.

My villain, for example, might instead do the following: It's obviously a trap and I can't refuse. So I accept, but with a plan to turn the invitation against my enemies. This means that I'm going to go there with the plan of finding some excuse to be insulted by their hospitality, so that I can either force them to let me leave and have an solid excuse to deny further contact with them or even lodge complaints about them if their investigation gets closer to me, or so that they escalate and I can get a second to duel them in my stead and actually kill them off in a legitimate fashion. To do this, I'm going to bring a guest whom I can be offended on behalf of. Perhaps a co-conspirator who will play up the situation, or just someone with a little known trigger which I will make sure is hidden. This also gives me a way to disincentivize them from simply outright killing me when I arrive (e.g. claiming self-defense or somesuch), since there would be a secondary witness. I don't know specifically that they're going to poison the sake, so its not like I'd be able to anticipate and defend against that in particular, but I'd go expecting some kind of move on their part which might make me generally cautious about things. If I brought a co-conspirator, odds are that once I started to get loopy they could see this and make an excuse for us to leave before our enemies got anything out of me. It's quite a different characterization - calculating, paranoid, and a bit psychopathic rather than egotistic and theatrical, but that's a kind of villain that can exist too.

I would be pretty put out if my villain PC suddenly had to hold the idiot ball through no specific vulnerability of his own, just because the others rolled well on their planning check. Because that actually alters that villain's characterization in an important way.

Sorry, I appearantly didn't make the example clear enough: The guy didn't actually set assassins on the PCs - just someone from the same organisation. That was - wrong - conjecture on the PCs part, but my fault in presentation here on the forum.
He was also specifically tasked with finding out how much they already know (Unknowing that the PCs had been attacked. Low-level members and stuff). The PCs actually masked their investigation of him pretty well, amongst other things by inviting other people over for similar things as they did him (Which I did abstract to a contested roll between their "Courtier" and his "Investigation" skills, granted, because I saw no use in playing those out, and they were only to manipulate him). So at the point of the meeting, he saw an excellent opportunity to feel them out, and was simply underestimating them. His guard was listening at the door, and he did try to get the PCs to talk, but... his sake was simply way more powerful than theirs, he unable to detect the toxin, and so one thing led to another. (Also I rolled just terribly on his rather sizable defense pools. Several contests came down to a difference of 3 or less points, still, but as I said at the table: "The dice seem to know the guy is ****faced").
...Which details are important for telling a story so it can be fully comprehended one often realises way after the fact.

But, okay. If this falls into the area you label "compromise", I kinda see your point? Though I don't see a clear distinction between this and the "shift the pillars" approach Segev mentioned. Like, what you described as compromising sounded very different from the concrete example, and I am no longer sure we are discussing different things, instead of just calling them different things.

Spoiler: NichG on player hesitation

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Different experience from me. I find that players are hesitant when they don't have a clear way to evaluate the chance of success of something. Often, one player being hesitant means that the group becomes hesitant as a whole. In the worst cases I've e.g. seen a player propose a completely workable plan, then have another player shut it down based on an imagined problem with it, and then the entire party dynamic gets frozen with a 30 minute debate. I tend to have a 'tyranny of the individual' rule when that starts to happen - once I notice it, I go around the table saying 'okay, what do you do right now?' so that people don't feel like they have to justify what they want to do in order to try it and see what happens.

When the scenario is sufficiently clear that evaluating feasibility is actually in the players' hands, then I find that my players tend to be more daring. They can work out a plan and know without having to ask me (or others at the table) whether it should or shouldn't work.

Frequent questions of "what do you do" help when the game slows down, yeah. But this is just general GMing, and not really only applicable to planning, I find?
If the game gets bogged down in 30 minute debates, I think the GM could probably do a better job at keeping the pace. Sure, if the players feel they have all the time in the world, they might overthink things. The trick is not giving them that time, but still enough they don't feel rushed into things.
Whatever the case, while I can see the problem being solved with what basically amounts to a drop-down menu of options, I see no real way in a truly free game to solve this issue other than player and GM coordination. It might be a compatability problem, or one with expectations! If the GM wants a very loose-hands off playstyle, and the players would like a more railroady experience, this can get messy.
But I genuinely think that whatever the problem here is, a game system can only do so much (or, not so much) to solve it.

Spoiler: NichG on broken games

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An indie (computer) game studio I follow had a bunch of posts about game design when they were working out the kinks of a strategy game. What they found from player reports is that there was a fun, easy way to do things, but that you could gain a slight (basically negligible) advantage by doing something tedious instead - and as a result, players felt compelled to do the tedious thing even though it made the game un-fun for them. It's not that it was game-breaking to do that thing, it's that the game communicated to the players 'this is how a skilled player should play', and that was at odds with the way that the developers had anticipated people playing - meaning that the game felt tedious even though there was nothing explicitly forcing it to do so.

It's that kind of thing. It's not just stuff being broken, its that the way a system is set up encourages a certain line of thought. You want to be on the right page about where that line of thought is going, or you're going to have dissonance when it comes to actual play situations.

I'd still define that as broken, as in "not doing what it is supposed to". The system is supposed to reward the way the designers want you to play, to make the game fun. If it doesn't do that, and there is a "better" way to do things, the system no longer functions as intended, i.e. has broken.
And thus, I'd still see "Design the game with care to make sure it does what you want it to do" as the core problem at hand. People gravitating towards the most "optimal" way I would see as an argument why you should be very careful to do that, not as a different issue.

Spoiler: Segev on the usefulness of dice

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With just those considerations, he would drink almost none of the sake, and would not be seduced. In fact, the temptations of the sake are non-existent for the GM, as are the temptations of the flesh. And the GM has determined that the concerns of the character are as you listed, which doesn't include any desire for pleasurable drink nor pleasurable...ahem...company.

Even if the character would normally enjoy pleasurable activities, the objective examination is that risking it is not worth it. The social skill comes in plying the target NPC with "just one more drink" and with a sense that "a little won't hurt" until he's taken far more "little" steps over the line than he realized and he's lost control of the situation. But none of that can happen without convincing the GM that it "should." And the GM has no way of gauging this other than an arbitrary "well, did they roll high? Is that high enough to count?"

Precisely why I like the dice to decide that thing. I am simply not in any way close enough to a situation where I can sufficiently judge if what is happening ingame would be enough to convince my NPCs (or PCs) to go along with things. While the words might be the same, the setting isn't, the situation isn't, and in many aspects for good reasons. I know how much my judgement differs between "sober" and "drunk as all hell", or the myriad of other factors at play here, so how would I dare to claim I can sufficiently judge the effects of those on an NPC when I am not actually facing them? Many social things make this worse, as playing them out at the table would actually be, while maybe not impossible, kinda wrong to do. I don't actually want my players to seduce me IRL for their characters to have a shot at seducing my NPCs. I don't want my player to get me drunk (I wouldn't be a good GM anymore). And even if I did that, I cannot reach the equivalent situation, lacking (in this case) the painting, the poison, the setting, the cultural priming, the time to play out the entire evening, the fact that the player and his character are just utterly different from one another, and so on and so forth.
So, no. I don't want to arbitrate that based purely on my rather lackluster simulation of the situation at the gaming table. I want the rules to do that for me, just as they do in any other situation we are not equivalently playing out (Which, at the table, is every situation.)
(Though I would add that I did set the concerns of the character as "I am bored out of my mind at this winter court", so drinks and... company were definitely in there at least to some degree.)

Spoiler: Segev on Seduction doing nothing

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Of note, to me, is the seduction action: in L5R, seduction is one of those skills that mechanically does nothing. It just tells the player of the target character that his character "feels desire." Whether the character acts on that desire is up to the player. Entirely. So a GM or a player can no-sell the most sexy seductress ever every single time. Good RP would suggest you shouldn't, but there's no consequence to doing so (and often great benefit in avoiding whatever cost the sexytimes would inflict upon your character).

I would prefer there to be actual mechanical rammifications to turning down (or accepting) the seduction, based on how well the seductor rolled and potentially what hooks in the target character were played upon.

Funnily enough, while it certainly is not the ideal way to do things (as especially doing it on PCs might amount to a bit too much mindcontrol); I don't actually play the rules this way. If my players roll well enough on a seduction the target is actually susceptible to? Yeah, sure. I just give it to them, why not. (Which is why I had the courtier's player roll on Void as the nearest thing to a "luck/universe is on your side" stat to determine if murderous-courtier-san was actually into guys, since I had not set any details concerning this beforehand (but not for the sake). After the temptation attempt started, since there was no attempt to feel it out further. Which he turned out being, but I often don't feel like arbitrating these things in a vacuum.)

Take as another example of this, a game system without any rules for non-lethal attacks / damage.

How many players will stop to consider something other than lethal attacks?

Dunno. In Shadowrun (Which SHOULD have rules for pretty much everything but appearantly consistently doesn't) my players constantly do things that require me to make up rulings on the fly, for things that they want to try, that have little to no base in what the rules permit.
I think this is an issue of perspective: If you look at the rules, and then decide from that list of options what to do; or if you describe what you do, and then the GM or general consensus say which rules to apply. Usually I play with the latter. Now, I will admit that the setting, in part by the powerlevel the rules allow, sets a certain expectation for what players might try. But I have rarely seen anyone not try anything because there were no rules for it. (I have seen them try things BECAUSE there were rules that explicitly put it on the table, yes; and have done that myself quite often, but never in the negative)

Definitely not! But in my book, combat is completely different to social interaction, and treating them differently is how it should be.

But why treating them differently in this way, requiring rules, the player sacrificing power in other areas for their character being competent at it, and straight-up GM arbitration and control as the be-all and end-all in one case, but not in the other?