The Problem of Social Systems

[NichG]

I think the "engagement" system looks a little too rigid.

Think about it: combat systems aren't set up so that there aren't creatures you can't use certain combat abilities on. You can always TRY to grapple them, for instance (though it may not be a good idea).

A CEO who you could never, under any circumstances, convince to "Go see a movie with me" because he has no Engagement to "see movies" is not a very realistic character.

What if Alice wanted to win herself a rich husband, and was trying to convince the CEO to like her? Does he have to have an Engagement of "wants a trophy wife" to even let her in the metaphorical door?

I made it rigid specifically to force a change in the premise of what that social interaction is there for. It's meant to punish a pattern of thinking that goes like: 'this guy, I absolutely must get this guy in particular to do this particular thing'. Here, its rather about either finding the guy who can be convinced to do the particular thing (find someone whose Engagements matches the intended behavior), or changing the particular thing into one appropriate and tuned to the particular guy.

Can you convince this CEO to go see a movie with you? Actually, its funny you chose that, because there's at least two ways to do it in the Engagements I gave. One is to get their kid to go see the movie and then pull the Hook about spending time with their family. The other is to become a member of the board of directors and say 'lets go see a movie and talk business after'. What you can't do is just say 'hey, lets go see a movie' really, really skillfully.

If Alice wants a rich husband, she can actively search for people who do have an Engagement with a hook 'wants a trophy wife' or analogous things like 'wants an heir' or 'satisfy family demands'. That'd be a good use for something like D&D's Gather Information skill - find an NPC with a specified hook, but you don't get to specify the NPC.

[Max_Killjoy]

I made it rigid specifically to force a change in the premise of what that social interaction is there for. It's meant to punish a pattern of thinking that goes like: 'this guy, I absolutely must get this guy in particular to do this particular thing'. Here, its rather about either finding the guy who can be convinced to do the particular thing (find someone whose Engagements matches the intended behavior), or changing the particular thing into one appropriate and tuned to the particular guy.

Can you convince this CEO to go see a movie with you? Actually, its funny you chose that, because there's at least two ways to do it in the Engagements I gave. One is to get their kid to go see the movie and then pull the Hook about spending time with their family. The other is to become a member of the board of directors and say 'lets go see a movie and talk business after'. What you can't do is just say 'hey, lets go see a movie' really, really skillfully.

If Alice wants a rich husband, she can actively search for people who do have an Engagement with a hook 'wants a trophy wife' or analogous things like 'wants an heir' or 'satisfy family demands'. That'd be a good use for something like D&D's Gather Information skill - find an NPC with a specified hook, but you don't get to specify the NPC.

I like where you seem to be going.

One can find someone who can be made to do a specific thing.
One can find things that a specific person can be made to do.

What one cannot do is make any specific person do any specific thing. No matter how nice the roll, no matter how many points are spent, mundane social interaction cannot force everyone to do anything. Social interaction is not a superpower, and it's not magic.

[Segev]

Oh, sure, finding somebody who already is inclined to go with what you want is often the easiest path. When that is an option, great.

But people can change, too. People can be won over. People can be persuaded to take on new likes. People can be disillusioned with causes and even with hobbies.

If you can't find a better target more amenable to your designs, you should still have at least potential to work anybody around.

No guarantees, and it might be beyond your capability, but the mechanics shouldn't say "nobody could possibly do it."

[Max_Killjoy]

Oh, sure, finding somebody who already is inclined to go with what you want is often the easiest path. When that is an option, great.

But people can change, too. People can be won over. People can be persuaded to take on new likes. People can be disillusioned with causes and even with hobbies.

If you can't find a better target more amenable to your designs, you should still have at least potential to work anybody around.

No guarantees, and it might be beyond your capability, but the mechanics shouldn't say "nobody could possibly do it."

That's where we disagree... there are some things that some people simply can't be convinced to do, or made to feel, no matter how well even the most capable hypothetical character might roll.

[Darth Ultron]

No guarantees, and it might be beyond your capability, but the mechanics shouldn't say "nobody could possibly do it."

But why don't? Do you really think anyone can be convinced to to anything? Would you be willing to say anyone could convince you to do anything? Even something you were very much against?

I guess saying ''you would need to roll 100 on a d20'' is saying it's ''possible'', is that what your talking about? Like a monster might have an AC of 100, but it can still be hit?

And a great many things should be impossible from just a conversation. You won't turn a paladin into a assassin over a quick cup of tea. But, sure, you might turn them to the dark side with a ton of work.

But, mechanically, you'd need a huge set of rules. To just say ''if a person does not want to'' they get a +2 to resist, really does not cut it.

[Segev]

That's where we disagree... there are some things that some people simply can't be convinced to do, or made to feel, no matter how well even the most capable hypothetical character might roll.

It really isn't about "high rolls," not at the front end of it.

If you've got a character who absolutely, positively will not do X, then no amount of high roll will get him to. But what you attack isn't "Do X," then; what you attack is the pillars that support this adamant refusal.

There's no way Bender would ever trust the new model of a robot. The program to make him "compatible" with it didn't "roll high." It created scenarios which he lived through that altered elements of his drives and passions until it worked him into a position where he COULD be persuaded to like that new robot model.

But why don't? Do you really think anyone can be convinced to to anything? Would you be willing to say anyone could convince you to do anything? Even something you were very much against?

"Anyone" of "anything?" Probably not. A sufficiently skilled manipulator with sufficient access to me and the right evidences and willingness to manipulate my environment properly? Maybe. The trick would be convincing me that something I currently find unacceptable is, somehow, acceptable.

Hypothetically, I might be adamantly opposed to taking that which belongs to Alice to give to Bob, no matter how much Bob bribes me to do it. But if Bob were to somehow convince me that it really belongs to Bob, and were to offer me compensation for my services as a repossessor on Bob's behalf, then he might convince me to take the item from Alice and give it to him.

Now, Bob would have to convince me that the item really WAS his. How he goes about this also involves a combination of skills and "moves," whether it involves forging evidence, out-witting me, or simply earning my trust so strongly that I don't doubt it when Bob makes the claim. (How he'd earn that trust probably involves building up a friendship and generally showing me through experience that Bob is trustworthy. And then probably providing a plausible narrative as to why it definitely is his and Alice stole it.)

This works even if I'm a big believer in respect for property ownership, because he's worked around the "It's Alice's; I won't steal it" absolute barrier by removing "It's Alice's" as a defense against the request.

I guess saying ''you would need to roll 100 on a d20'' is saying it's ''possible'', is that what your talking about? Like a monster might have an AC of 100, but it can still be hit?

Again, it's not necessarily about "rolling high enough." If you're using a melee weapon to attack a creature out of your melee reach, it doesn't matter if you roll greater than 10[sup]10[sup] as a final result on a natural 20 on your attack roll; you're not hitting that creature. You have to either make a ranged attack or move into melee range before you have a CHANCE at it.

Likewise, if somebody is absolutely not going to be convinced of something, it should be based on things you can attempt to undermine or manipulate or erode in value to him. No, you can't just "roll high" to convince him, but you can maneuver him to a position where it is no longer an impossible thing to ask of him.

And a great many things should be impossible from just a conversation. You won't turn a paladin into a assassin over a quick cup of tea. But, sure, you might turn them to the dark side with a ton of work.

That is what I propose: that you can put the work in to corrupt the paladin until he is "dark side" enough that he might just be that assassin for you.

But, mechanically, you'd need a huge set of rules. To just say ''if a person does not want to'' they get a +2 to resist, really does not cut it.

You mean, like we have a huge set of rules for combat?

I agree. It would have to be a real, fully-developed subsystem.

[Floret]

No guarantees, and it might be beyond your capability, but the mechanics shouldn't say "nobody could possibly do it."

That's where we disagree... there are some things that some people simply can't be convinced to do, or made to feel, no matter how well even the most capable hypothetical character might roll.

The question is how to balance this. How many things are there that how many people simply can't be convinced of? You seem to think quite a lot, Max; Segev considers that number quite a bit lower (as do I myself). Sure, we disagree, and (with the methods available over a forum) will likely not convince the other side. But where do we go from here?
(Not saying this is the case with you, but these things are prone to sampling bias: If you have been successfully convinced, it very often doesn't look like you were convinced of anything, or that someone worked their diplomancy. If someone tried and failed, it is often much more visible that an attempt of persuasion occured. Also, if I remember correctly, both Segev and I would include "suggesting to your friend you might want to see a movie with them" or "ask a generally willing person out" in "this is technically persuasion at work". Just... rather easy, with little resistance. "Every action you would not have taken, were it not for the input of someone else, was something that could be seen as something you were persuaded/manipulated into doing" is at least my personal view, for discussions on "what should social systems in RPGs be capable of".)
And then there is a whole other question: How many things are there that hom many people SHOULDN'T simply be convinced of? Because we are not really talking about world simulators, but about RPGs. Just because something isn't an accurate representation of how things are in real life, doesn't necessarily mean it can't work that way in a game, to provide more interesting gameplay and more options. (I for one love mechanics like Rolling on Edge in Shadowrun to determine setting details I hadn't previously thought about. Sometimes player's might just have a lucky day, and if I hadn't determined if some NPC likes something... they just might?)

But why don't? Do you really think anyone can be convinced to to anything? Would you be willing to say anyone could convince you to do anything? Even something you were very much against?

Not Segev, but given we had this discussion before pretty much in his camp regarding this: Basically, yes. But.
It might, in the more ingrained cases, require immidiate threats to life or health, large quantities of money (or something else that I really desperately want), or long times of manipulation, torture, brainwashing or gaslighting.
Depending on the tone of the game, I would consider these perfectly possible actions the game system should be able to handle - with appropriate in-world repercussions.

But, mechanically, you'd need a huge set of rules. To just say ''if a person does not want to'' they get a +2 to resist, really does not cut it.

Yes, you would. That is the entire point and the core of the proposal: To give Social interactions rules with the complexity, depth and variety rivaling that of combat in most games, to "better" (However you want to define that, e.g. "more accurately to real life", "more interestingly gamistically") portray social interactions mechanically.

Spoiler: Pointless derailing answer to something 2 pages ago

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Actually, I have just today come back from a LARP where both Parry and Dodge were special abilities: A number of times in 12 hours you could declare "My character is better at combat than I am, They Dodged/Parried your attack, even though I didn't."

Huh. So appearantly this exists in some Larps (Though that technically doesn't qualify as "someone asked for it", just that it exists). It runs somewhat counter to everything I know and love about Larp, but my limited experience might influence my perception in that regard worse than I thought it might.

[Segev]

Just to back Floret's point up: Yes, I would definitely categorize, "Let's go see a movie!" as a use for the social system. I would also categorize, "Let's go see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2!" as such, particularly if the other person(s) in the group all are debating which movie to see.

"Guys, we all like the marvel movies. Only some of us like romances, like Bob and Alice want to go see, and only others of us like animated family features like Jim wants to see. So we should go see GotGv2, since all of us like that kind of thing," is an effort at persuasion. It's trying to use reasoned argument combined with appeal to friendship ("You don't want to force people who don't like romances to sit through it, do you?" is implicit), but it is an effort at persuasion.

If it came to mechanics, the character making that argument would be appealing to whatever Engagement or Intimacy or Hook or whatnot that includes "liking Marvel movies" and "friendship with the group" as levers on which he's pulling.

It probably isn't a HARD one to pull off, assuming he's right about people being fine with GotGv2, but if Alice and Bob were dead-set on that romance, then it might be harder given that they have a contrary urge pulling them towards it.

[Cluedrew]

That's where we disagree... there are some things that some people simply can't be convinced to do, or made to feel, no matter how well even the most capable hypothetical character might roll.

You can fool some people all of the time, you can fool all people some of the time. But you can't fool all people all the time.

Introducing a social system includes placing appropriate limits. I don't even think it would be particularly hard to implement. Some harder things would be the level of detail right and allowing for organic character growth are harder, although still solvable (I hope).

[flond]

But why don't? Do you really think anyone can be convinced to to anything? Would you be willing to say anyone could convince you to do anything? Even something you were very much against?

I guess saying ''you would need to roll 100 on a d20'' is saying it's ''possible'', is that what your talking about? Like a monster might have an AC of 100, but it can still be hit?

And a great many things should be impossible from just a conversation. You won't turn a paladin into a assassin over a quick cup of tea. But, sure, you might turn them to the dark side with a ton of work.

But, mechanically, you'd need a huge set of rules. To just say ''if a person does not want to'' they get a +2 to resist, really does not cut it.

Admittedly, I tend to feel that this falls into the realm of "don't roll for stupid things". Much as I prefer the entirely voluntary Burning Wheel. Apocalypse world's approach of "you need a valid hook to roll" works too.

Yes, this makes the social system a little bit more fuzzy but eh. Fundamentally it's nice to have something that presents a bit of tension and a bit of objectivity.

[Mr Beer]

I run GURPS and there are a variety of socially relevant skills and reaction modifiers available. I usually get the player to make a roll, I apply situational modifiers and if their explanation of how they are attempting to influence the other party is clever/convincing/amusing, then they will get a bonus.

So points in relevant skills, advantages or talents will make the character better at influencing other people, but being clever about it or roleplaying well, makes it more likely to succeed.

Since everything costs points in GURPS, it makes sense that someone who forgo utility in one area in order to be better at influencing people, should be objectively better at doing so, regardless of their roleplaying ability. But at the same time, roleplaying is rewarded.

[Bohandas]

As was pointed out to me recently, there isn't really an equivalent to "roll initiative" for a social encounter. There is no formalized system of rounds, and it's not always clear when a single roll will represent an entire conversation or a single exchange. For a game system to be usable, you need to be able to apply it--or ignore it--in consistent ways.

Ypu need to check out the CRPG Last Word, it actually has mechanics for all of this.

[kyoryu]

The other thing a good social skill should model is influence *over time*. It's very likely you can't get someone to immediately agree to something, or change their view, but you can slowly shift it over time. If you want someone to change political allegiance or religion or something, it is incredibly unlikely that they will do that after a single conversation. However, you can plant a seed, that future and later conversations can take advantage of to shift thoughts and beliefs over a long period of time.

As a trivial example, I highly doubt my wife would have married me if I asked her the first time we met, no matter how persuasive I was.

[NichG]

It really isn't about "high rolls," not at the front end of it.

If you've got a character who absolutely, positively will not do X, then no amount of high roll will get him to. But what you attack isn't "Do X," then; what you attack is the pillars that support this adamant refusal.

There's no way Bender would ever trust the new model of a robot. The program to make him "compatible" with it didn't "roll high." It created scenarios which he lived through that altered elements of his drives and passions until it worked him into a position where he COULD be persuaded to like that new robot model.

If we take a system with rigid constraints like the Engagements and Hooks one, this can still happen. However the metaphor that it forces you to use to conceptualize ways in which it's likely to work is fundamentally different.

That is to say, assuming 'any adamant refusal must be supported by some set of factors; factors can be attacked to weaken them' which suggests a mindset centered around getting the mechanically strongest 'attack' you can so you can erode the pillars as quickly as possible and thereby get to the point you want where the person doesn't make adamant refusals anymore. In D&D, you can bypass DR by carrying around a golf bag of swords of different materials, but most players will realize that in the long run it's simpler to spend your resources to just increase your overall damage output by 10. In combat, generally the way things work is that you don't have the opportunity or inclination to scout out your enemies before you might be tested to see if you can defeat them, so the mindset and habits tend towards general solutions over bespoke ones. Encounters that regularly thwart those general solutions tend to create friction with the players and engender the feeling that they are being specifically blocked from using their abilities.

On the other hand, if we instead have the metaphor of an impenetrable wall with a few cracks and soft spots in it, the focus immediately has to be 'lets find the crack' not 'lets get a bigger wrecking ball'. That encourages approaching manipulation and social interaction from the mindset of the player needing to think about the target rather than needing to think about themselves and their abilities. In the combat analogy, if you just told a character that their enemy was too big to be damaged to death they'd cry foul. But if you said 'the enemy is actually a dungeon - attacking the walls doesn't really do anything except let you move through those areas; but there are core areas, and damage to the core areas can bring down the beast' then you shut down the line of thinking that goes 'okay, I just need to do more damage to the walls' by explicitly saying what will work.

In terms of the Engagements/Hooks thing, it turned out that in the end, yes, it was possible to convince the CEO to go to a movie. Some of the ways would in fact require a lot of surrounding context to be put into place. But as a necessary (rather than convenient) condition of doing so, the person doing the convincing has to understand 'what would make the CEO go to a movie?'. Normally (e.g. in a system without social mechanics at all), understanding that would be something that the player would have to use their own abilities to do. In a system that uses 'forcing' style mechanics, the system is saying 'actually, understanding this is unnecessary for either you or your character'. My attempt with the Engagements/Hooks system was to find something that would say 'understanding the mark is necessary, but the system provides a way to let the character do the understanding and then transmit that understanding to you as the player'. It keeps the necessity of understanding in place, which in my mind is the absolute prerequisites for the results having any level of guaranteed self-consistency.

[Segev]

You say "it's easier to just up your damage by 10 than to carry around a golf bag of swords," but in practice, that's not how players see it. Players certainly will take the +10 damage! But then they'll still want that bag of swords so that they don't have to "pay" that 10 damage due to DR, and instead are doing a net +5 or +6 damage even if they're not doing their "best" damage.

In other words, getting a weapon that is flat +10 damage per hit better than others is HARD, while getting weapons that only suffer 3-4 damage per hit less than your best one, but which have specific DR-piercing properties, is much less so.


Similarly, the difference between "find and identify the pillars you have to shift" and "find and identify the cracks you have to go through" is small. And my proposed solution doesn't remove the latter as an option. Honestly, designed right, the latter would be the EASIER option under most circumstances. Less reliable in the long run, if only because it often requires stronger levels of immediate manipulation and potential trickery to twist agreement out of the specific cracks, but certainly faster.

It's a matter of what you're trying to achieve, how deceitful and unkindly manipulative you are willing to be, and how much time you are willing to devote to the effort.

"Go through the cracks" is for fast-talkers and quick manipulations for near-immediate results that don't require (and probably don't aid) long-term good relations. "Shift the pillars" is for building friendships and convincing people to see things your way philosophically, or for wrapping them around your little finger.

[Max_Killjoy]

I see people try to do this "then you must shift the other person's pillars" thing in conversation when they realize they're not getting what they want or changing the other person's mind.

I don't know if they think it's some sort of clever conversational judo, or something... but it pretty much comes off as transparent, annoying, etc.

[NichG]

You say "it's easier to just up your damage by 10 than to carry around a golf bag of swords," but in practice, that's not how players see it. Players certainly will take the +10 damage! But then they'll still want that bag of swords so that they don't have to "pay" that 10 damage due to DR, and instead are doing a net +5 or +6 damage even if they're not doing their "best" damage.

I've never seen players ever bother with any material other than adamantine for a weapon in D&D. Instead they'll upgrade their +Strength item, upgrade the enhancement bonus on their go-to weapon, use things like Power Attack to turn the +hit into more +damage, and in the case of more hardcore optimizers muck around with things that get them X-stat-to-Y bonuses (such as Slippers of Battledancing) or straight out multipliers. In general, if you have a system which says 'you can do things the complicated way with lower numbers, or the simple way with higher numbers' then in every case I've seen, players instantly gravitate towards just making their numbers high enough to do things the simple way all the time.

Similarly, the difference between "find and identify the pillars you have to shift" and "find and identify the cracks you have to go through" is small. And my proposed solution doesn't remove the latter as an option. Honestly, designed right, the latter would be the EASIER option under most circumstances. Less reliable in the long run, if only because it often requires stronger levels of immediate manipulation and potential trickery to twist agreement out of the specific cracks, but certainly faster.

As a whole, gamers have some very deeply held traditions and biases about how they expect things to work. If you're making a system in which some of those expectations will be wrong, its better to just make it explicitly impossible rather than making it hard in order to attempt to disincentivize it, because the immediate message that people will get on encountering the system is 'this system makes this check way too hard!' or 'I haven't yet found the optimization that the designers expected everyone to use/gotten to the level that we need to be at to do this quest' rather than 'I should try do this some other way'. It's not like that's a foolish mindset even - every game runs on unspoken expectations, like 'when you're suddenly put in an encounter with monsters, the DM probably isn't trying to TPK the party'. So when you change those expectations, you have to be really crystal clear and explicit about it.

Leaving the option to do it the old way means that people won't easily learn how the new way works.

And my point with the 'old way' and 'new way' here comes back to what I was saying earlier, that the major problem leading to really crappy social systems seems to me to be the view that social interaction is basically an alternate form of combat. Thus the emphasis on designing around conflicts, use of social or manipulative 'force', etc. To find an better alternative, I think you need to make a really clean break.

[Segev]

I see people try to do this "then you must shift the other person's pillars" thing in conversation when they realize they're not getting what they want or changing the other person's mind.

I don't know if they think it's some sort of clever conversational judo, or something... but it pretty much comes off as transparent, annoying, etc.

I'm not sure I follow. Can you try to elaborate or rephrase, please?

I've never seen players ever bother with any material other than adamantine for a weapon in D&D. Instead they'll...

I have. It usually involves knowledge of what they're going to face, or is something the ammo-user does, but I have seen it. And once they have the "werewolf weapon," they don't tend to sell it, because now that they have it, being unprepared for future encounters feels off. They'll typically hang on to them until their primary weapon has reached the point that they do more damage even with the DR with the primary than they would with the specialized one.

Yes, players tend to focus on the bigger numbers first, but in real play, they also focus on what works in the game they're playing.

As a whole, gamers have some very deeply held traditions and biases about how they expect things to work. If you're making a system in which some of those expectations will be wrong, its better to just make it explicitly impossible rather than making it hard in order to attempt to disincentivize it, because the immediate message that people will get on encountering the system is 'this system makes this check way too hard!' or 'I haven't yet found the optimization that the designers expected everyone to use/gotten to the level that we need to be at to do this quest' rather than 'I should try do this some other way'.

I've...not really seen this to be the case, in practice. Heck, "I haven't found the optimization the designers expected" is often the lead-in to "oh, I should be doing it THIS way." Because optimization isn't just "bigger numbers." It's technique.

IF optimization were just bigger numbers, we wouldn't have caster supremacy as an issue in D&D. Most of the things casters do that are unassailable by non-casters are "different ways" to solve problems, rather than just bigger numbers.

Leaving the option to do it the old way means that people won't easily learn how the new way works.

You're viewing this as some sort of teaching exercise. I'm viewing it as a game subsystem that is to stand in its own right.

The fact that there are mechanics to use existing hooks (i.e. "working through the cracks") is all that's needed to get people to look to it. Making characters into adamant-willed caricatures who can't ever evolve as people (nor ever be persuaded by any means other than the 2-3 hooks built into them) leads to greater problems of verisimilitude every bit as bad as "I rolled umpteen bajillion on Diplomacy so now he's my mind-slave."

And my point with the 'old way' and 'new way' here comes back to what I was saying earlier, that the major problem leading to really crappy social systems seems to me to be the view that social interaction is basically an alternate form of combat. Thus the emphasis on designing around conflicts, use of social or manipulative 'force', etc. To find an better alternative, I think you need to make a really clean break.

I'm really not viewing it as combat. I'm viewing it as a game, which may be competitive.

It might seem "combat" like when the player of the character doesn't want the character to feel, believe, or act in the way you're trying to persuade the character to act, but that's unavoidable unless you want to remove mechanics entirely and make it just a game of players using real-world social skills, pressures, etc. on each other to convince each other to want the character to do what you want to claim he should.

That meta-"game" exists in most RPGs already, precisely because of the lack of a social subsystem, and leads to frustration over either feeling bullied into having to give in or feeling angry that so-and-so is just refusing to "play in character" by doing what YOU think they should do. That metagaming weasel.

Just like rules for combat avoid the "I hit you!" "No you didn't!" arguments, rules for social interaction avoid the arguments over what is really believable that a character feels, believes, desires, or does.

Now, because "what he does" is the sole agency a player has in the game, we shouldn't let social rules (barring, arguably, magic) usurp that, but that's another topic.

Persuasion is one of two things: Acting on existing desires, drives, fears, etc. to convince somebody they are serving those hooks by acting a particular way, or acting to add, subtract, or change drives, fears, desires, etc. so that the character now has the right ones to let you act on them to convince them to act in their service.



I suppose the point I'm getting at, then, is this: You're arguing for the same final play that I am. I'm arguing that the game should be deeper than you are, however.

The layer I'm advocating doesn't actually control behavior directly. The layer you're advocating does. (Or at least, it allows the handing out of rewards and penalties associated with particular behaviors.) I support that layer's existence.

The layer I'm advocating lets you get under the hood and modify the layer you're discussing, rather than leaving that layer as adamant and unchangeable, with no depth to the character beyond a 2-3 bullet-point list of traits.

[NichG]

I've...not really seen this to be the case, in practice. Heck, "I haven't found the optimization the designers expected" is often the lead-in to "oh, I should be doing it THIS way." Because optimization isn't just "bigger numbers." It's technique.

...

You're viewing this as some sort of teaching exercise. I'm viewing it as a game subsystem that is to stand in its own right.

A game system basically is a teaching exercise. It's trying to communicate a way of regarding what is possible that creates the space for certain kinds of reasoning, even if the players have no prior real life experience in that kind of reasoning. If I e.g. make a game about the politics of a succession war, part of the goal is for players to be able to feel comfortable reasoning about the world that it presents - making sensible plans, etc. Good game mechanics serve to align the way the players think with what should actually work in the world of the narrative. So system design necessarily considers how the elements of the system are going to interact with where people are coming from.

I run a lot of homebrew systems, and play in quite a few 'first time with this system' campaigns, and this issue of mixed messages causing a fallback to previously learned habits is a pattern I've seen repeated quite a bit. Spoilering examples because its a big tangent.

Spoiler

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I think a really good set of examples of this showed up in a campaign of The Strange that we had (based off of the Cypher System). Cypher system breaks with several fairly strongly-held expectations:

- Character powers are not constant, but rather come and go in the form of very common one-use objects. The tradition that this tries to break with is the idea of the primacy of the character 'build'. If Cyphers are where most of your power lies, then presumably you can't make a standard operating procedure or a particular character build, but instead you would have to constantly adapt your strategy during play due to your current set of opportunities. Except that there are various ways around this buried in the system in the form of specific character options in splatbooks and the like. What we found is, players just don't tend to use their Cyphers; they don't trust or rely upon the availability of more Cyphers in the future. As a result, in a system where we should be changing Cypher loadouts on a per-game basis, we mostly had static collections for runs of 5-6 sessions, and instead relied more on the few powers we did get from character build.

- Character baseline preformance does not really increase, but instead you can spike your performance higher and higher as you advance, by spending points from a pool. Someone totally untrained but high level would by default do really poorly at something, but could spend points to do really well on a single instance of that task even if its something completely esoteric. The GM in particular found this one difficult and was always asking people 'do you have a skill involving X' in order to figure out who might plausible attempt things (because the system does still have skills, after all) - but the skills are actually only a small contributor mechanically. So again, the system split its messages - 'what matters is resources, not build... (but here's a way to kinda do it with build)' and that made it harder to adapt. It wasn't quite as hard for the players to start using this mechanic, but it did take a few sessions before players realized that they should basically be spending at least a little Effort before almost every roll, rather than just rolling reflexively.

- XP is intended to be split 50/50 between character advancement and dramatic editing types of uses. The dramatic editing uses are extremely good - things like making multi-use items in a game where items are almost entirely one-use affairs and are the bulk of character power. But XP was almost never used for non-advancement purposes (and I've heard this issue crop up in other groups adapting to Cypher system games). So again, mixed messages mean that players default to what their expectations inform them of.

For another example, I made a system where the conceit was that you didn't become more resilient as you became stronger (e.g. leveled up), but that no matter how strong an attack was you could always avoid it at a constant cost from a resource pool. So the guy with a dagger who tries to slit the throat of a high-level adventurer will kill them in one shot if the adventurer doesn't spend the 3 points or whatever to dodge it - which the adventurer can basically always do as long as they have points. What this should have meant is that the point pool would be treated like HP, and if you were down to say 5 points, needed 3 to dodge, and were facing two opponents, that would be the message that if you don't fall back you're going to die next round. But because attacks actually did do damage to stats (but such that most of the time, two hits with your average weapon would kill anyone), I had a player misinterpret their toughness and get themselves killed based on the fact that just because they had been forced to spend a bunch of points to avoid multiple attacks so far, they had not yet taken damage.

And for an example that went the other way, I made a system of modifications to D&D that introduced a series of abilities that had a kind of Rock-Paper-Scissors interaction but with the environment playing a role. For example, a Speed ability which made someone unhittable unless you could somehow interfere with their vision so they couldn't move without tripping/colliding/etc; an Avoidance ability that mean that the first thing each round to try to make contact with their body would be perfectly avoided with a 100% chance - whether that's a raindrop or a fireball; etc. They were basically impossible to brute force through, so the players started carrying around things like smoke bombs so that they could have the proper counters. I think it also helped that one of the players got one of those abilities fairly early on, and everyone could see otherwise threatening encounters completely fail to touch them because they didn't possess a workable counter.

The fact that there are mechanics to use existing hooks (i.e. "working through the cracks") is all that's needed to get people to look to it. Making characters into adamant-willed caricatures who can't ever evolve as people (nor ever be persuaded by any means other than the 2-3 hooks built into them) leads to greater problems of verisimilitude every bit as bad as "I rolled umpteen bajillion on Diplomacy so now he's my mind-slave."

I'm really not viewing it as combat. I'm viewing it as a game, which may be competitive.

It might seem "combat" like when the player of the character doesn't want the character to feel, believe, or act in the way you're trying to persuade the character to act, but that's unavoidable unless you want to remove mechanics entirely and make it just a game of players using real-world social skills, pressures, etc. on each other to convince each other to want the character to do what you want to claim he should.

See, this is the thing. It's not unavoidable. The way to avoid it is to change the premise of the initiator of the social interaction.

If the initiator assumes that it is a reasonable thing to 'make' someone else feel, believe, or act a certain way, then you get stuck with this outcome. But if we change the way that social interaction's purpose is perceived, then we avoid this problem because the initiator doesn't go in assuming that the question to be answered by the system is 'can I persuade this person of this thing?'. The problem is the habit of seeing NPCs or other PCs as obstacles to be overcome, rather than resources which make certain things possible that would not be without them.

That is to say, the conceit that I am trying to present is the idea that there is no such thing as purely competitive socialization. Any social competition is a competition over control of a larger scale cooperation. The reason is that if it ever becomes purely competitive, the person who is being persuaded can simply slam the door in the other person's face. Someone who refuses to socialize at all has no Engagements and no Hooks, but that also means they have no power either. It is the willingness to take on vulnerability in exchange for influence of that larger-scale cooperation that makes competition possible in the first place. Yes, this is clipping out some hard-coded realities of humans - we would have difficulty turning it all off 100% - but in any game system we make abstractions for sake of clarity.

I suppose the point I'm getting at, then, is this: You're arguing for the same final play that I am. I'm arguing that the game should be deeper than you are, however.

The layer I'm advocating doesn't actually control behavior directly. The layer you're advocating does. (Or at least, it allows the handing out of rewards and penalties associated with particular behaviors.) I support that layer's existence.

The layer I'm advocating lets you get under the hood and modify the layer you're discussing, rather than leaving that layer as adamant and unchangeable, with no depth to the character beyond a 2-3 bullet-point list of traits.

Of course characters can have more depth than the list of their Engagements and Hooks. That list is simply the contact that they make with hard mechanics. Create an opportunity to gain some kind of social influence, tie it to some responsibilities, and if an NPC decides to take you up on that - congratulations, you just imparted them with an Engagement and a few Hooks. The hard line is that the mechanics give you a promise that there are certain things you can do without question - if you meet the conditions of a Hook, you can pull that Hook and get the promised outcome. The mechanics give you absolutely no guarantees outside of that boundary. That doesn't mean that nothing happens outside of that boundary, it's that anything that happens outside of that boundary is formally within the agency of someone other than you at the table.

Combat rules don't say 'the enemy will walk up and attack you'. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or that it isn't a likely outcome. If a squishy mage steps out in the open, maybe that'll bait the enemy to expose themselves, and maybe it won't. But because it lies outside of the envelope of the mechanics, that says that both of those outcomes are equally valid to have happen. By excluding the adoption and abandonment of Engagements from mechanical direction, it explicitly says that those things are not covered under some abstraction of character ability, but rather belong to the decision of the player (or GM) who has responsibility over that character.

Ideally, that should be taken to mean that for those things any question of believability is off the table. What the character does in those circumstances should be taken to be the character's controller communicating or deciding something about the character, rather than them correctly or incorrectly playing them.

[Floret]

I see people try to do this "then you must shift the other person's pillars" thing in conversation when they realize they're not getting what they want or changing the other person's mind.

I don't know if they think it's some sort of clever conversational judo, or something... but it pretty much comes off as transparent, annoying, etc.

If they fail, sure, it comes off as that (Or as "what is that guy on about?"). If they succeed, it usually just registers as "Huh, I never thought about it like this", "Thanks for pointing that out" or something alike. And while this changes the perception of these sorts of things (And, keeping in mind, most persuasion isn't harmful in effect or intent), it is important to view those as what they are - essentially two results of the same action, based on varying skill (or situational awareness, or willingness of target, etc.). Because only if we know what we want to model - for me, social interaction/manipulation in its entirety, not just "the kind of social interaction people try but IRL fail at" - the modelling can work.

A game system basically is a teaching exercise. It's trying to communicate a way of regarding what is possible that creates the space for certain kinds of reasoning, even if the players have no prior real life experience in that kind of reasoning. If I e.g. make a game about the politics of a succession war, part of the goal is for players to be able to feel comfortable reasoning about the world that it presents - making sensible plans, etc. Good game mechanics serve to align the way the players think with what should actually work in the world of the narrative. So system design necessarily considers how the elements of the system are going to interact with where people are coming from.

This sounds to me like a rather strange way of framing it. I think this comes down to two factors:
1. It takes rules as a means to an end. And while that should certainly be true, I think the end it focusses on is "simulation" more than anything - which means that rules that exist primarily for the sake of interesting gameplay (And those should not contradict the world, certainly) are completely off the table. Gamistic satisfaction ("Does this feel good to play")might not be a goal of yours, or even something you abhor, but I don't think it can be completely discounted as irrelevant while designing.
2. While game systems do not exist in a vacuum without other game systems, and I do think it has merit to consider "what do other systems do" while designing, I don't think one can fault a game system for players playing it like another. That sounds, to me, like developing a part of your system not to make it fit in best with what you want it to do, but instead for... well, for what? To make it more palatable to the group of people who are too ingrained in old systems and unwilling or unable to learn new ones and accept their premises?
I mean, take FATE for example. Works... rather differently from most "classic" TRPGs, and most newcomers might not play it to its full potential because of that. But I do not think this should be taken to change the system, but maybe invest time to explain the mechanics better, instead of diluting the intended play experience. Basically: "Learning by doing" is a great way to explain mechanics in any game, but it is not the job of the mechanics themselves to explain themselves, but rather of the game manual or GM. At least from my perspective.

Of course characters can have more depth than the list of their Engagements and Hooks. That list is simply the contact that they make with hard mechanics. Create an opportunity to gain some kind of social influence, tie it to some responsibilities, and if an NPC decides to take you up on that - congratulations, you just imparted them with an Engagement and a few Hooks. The hard line is that the mechanics give you a promise that there are certain things you can do without question - if you meet the conditions of a Hook, you can pull that Hook and get the promised outcome. The mechanics give you absolutely no guarantees outside of that boundary. That doesn't mean that nothing happens outside of that boundary, it's that anything that happens outside of that boundary is formally within the agency of someone other than you at the table.

Well, but what is there to speak against having a system for a player character to create Engagements and hooks? Like, great, you can have set ones and whatever you can convince the GM that it makes sense (Or that the GM decides). But I think there is value in having a system on top of that.
For one, the GM can still say "Nah, makes no sense that this engagement might ever be created". There can still be much of the same area of control over the system. On the plus side, if the GM is unwilling to just decide, or torn between just saying yes or no, involving player skill in it is, I feel, a good way to give the players more agency, and help the GM improvising.

[Max_Killjoy]

If they fail, sure, it comes off as that (Or as "what is that guy on about?"). If they succeed, it usually just registers as "Huh, I never thought about it like this", "Thanks for pointing that out" or something alike.

No. It just comes off like that, full stop, before it has any chance to succeed or fail.

[ImNotTrevor]

No. It just comes off like that, full stop, before it has any chance to succeed or fail.

You are now asserting that nobody has ever led you to change your mind due to new information or correcting a faulty previous assumption. That, in effect, you would be the worst Juror of all time because you would come to some conclusion early on in the trial and all attempts thereafter would be ignored as annoyingly trying to change your opinion/perception of what happened. But here are the phenomena that disprove your perception:

People change political parties.
Juries change their minds according to presented evidence.
People gain new insights into people they dislike.
People learn new ways of looking at situations to better their mood. (This is part of a therapist's job. To help people have a healthier perception of the bad things that happen to them.)

These things are rarely instantaneous, but can be caused by a single person and repeated exposure. I myself while working in car sales changed a person's mind from wanting to buy a dodge Charger (a terrible car for her situation) to buying a Nissan Altima. And this person had been adamany about buying the Charger a week before.

[Segev]

Let's say Jim is friends with Bob, and believes Bob to be a good guy. Bob can generally get Jim to stand up for him if people malign Bob, because of this. Bob can also get Jim to do him favors (and does reciprocate at times).

Alice shows up and wants to convince Jim not to help out Bob in Bob's latest "harmless eccentricity." She starts off with some dire imprecations about Bob being up to no good, and Jim just blows that off because it's nonsense. Bob's a good guy.

Now, Alice could try to hook into that "Bob's a good guy" thing and lie to Jim, telling him she believes Bob is being used by Baron McNasty to do something evil and that Jim should refuse to help Bob with this because Bob would regret it if it succeeded. Or, she could act on her belief that Bob is actually Baron McNasty in disguise and go out and find proof positive that Bob's plan is vile, and show the evidence to Jim.

Under the rigid Engagement system, there is room to argue that Jim could not be persuaded to believe Alice's evidence, because he trusts Bob and Bob says "nope, fake."

One could also interpret Max_Killjoy's objections to having the pillars of belief shifted to mean that if Max were Jim, it would be impossible to convince him that Bob is NOT a good guy and that Bob's plan involves doing horrid things to nice people even if Alice were to get video evidence of Bob gloating about his plan while torturing an orphan's pet puppy in front of him. Because that would involve having to roll some measure of social skill to convince Jim that this evidence is real enough to shift that pillar of belief away from "Bob is a good guy."

Now, you might say, "That's awfully extreme. Alice isn't using persuasion mechanics, here. Max_Killjoy's character Jim is persuaded by the plain evidence!" And perhaps you're right; this is an extremely obvious case.

But evidence is rarely that cut-and-dried. Just how much evidence does Alice have to get to convince Jim that Bob's actually a bad guy? Does Alice's skill in presenting it, does her ability to project sincerity, does even her choice in how to approach the issue impact Jim's decision-making?

I contest that it does, for 99% of people. Probably more. Coming at it with a scolding attitude and smug superiority invites skepticism, whereas presenting it in a way that builds the conclusion naturally in Jim's mind historically has a better chance of convincing most "Jim"s that the evidence is conclusive. Call it manipulative or call it clear presentation, but the fact that presentation method impacts the likelihood that the evidence will be received in the manner intended is true. It takes far more incisive logic to pick apart evidence presented well (but with a bias towards a potentially false conclusion) to find flaws in its reasoning, and similarly more emotional distance to pick apart poorly-presented evidence to realize that it may, in fact, have merit.


And this is just one example of a case where moving an underlying pillar of belief applies.

Coming to like somebody more than when they were a random stranger you just met, or coming to dislike somebody you'd previously thought was your friend, also requires shifting these pillars. For most people, it is not true that no amount of effort on another person's part can cause you to like that person better. Whether that other person is willing and able to put that effort in is another story. But they potentially could.

[Floret]

What ImNotTrevor and Segev said pretty much answers all I could and lines up with how I think about the topic.

[NichG]

If they fail, sure, it comes off as that (Or as "what is that guy on about?"). If they succeed, it usually just registers as "Huh, I never thought about it like this", "Thanks for pointing that out" or something alike. And while this changes the perception of these sorts of things (And, keeping in mind, most persuasion isn't harmful in effect or intent), it is important to view those as what they are - essentially two results of the same action, based on varying skill (or situational awareness, or willingness of target, etc.). Because only if we know what we want to model - for me, social interaction/manipulation in its entirety, not just "the kind of social interaction people try but IRL fail at" - the modelling can work.

I disagree with that analysis, because it turns the skill into something magical - this ineffable factor which you either have it or you don't. I find that point of view to be very limiting - it precludes trying to understand why someone failed to be persuaded. I'd assert that almost all of the time, there is a concrete 'why', and that 'why' was that the person who attempted the persuasion failed to correctly understand the person they're talking to and so chose to attempt to persuade them of something which they cannot be persuaded of.

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

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. 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.

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

This sounds to me like a rather strange way of framing it. I think this comes down to two factors:
1. It takes rules as a means to an end. And while that should certainly be true, I think the end it focusses on is "simulation" more than anything - which means that rules that exist primarily for the sake of interesting gameplay (And those should not contradict the world, certainly) are completely off the table. Gamistic satisfaction ("Does this feel good to play")might not be a goal of yours, or even something you abhor, but I don't think it can be completely discounted as irrelevant while designing.
2. While game systems do not exist in a vacuum without other game systems, and I do think it has merit to consider "what do other systems do" while designing, I don't think one can fault a game system for players playing it like another. That sounds, to me, like developing a part of your system not to make it fit in best with what you want it to do, but instead for... well, for what? To make it more palatable to the group of people who are too ingrained in old systems and unwilling or unable to learn new ones and accept their premises?
I mean, take FATE for example. Works... rather differently from most "classic" TRPGs, and most newcomers might not play it to its full potential because of that. But I do not think this should be taken to change the system, but maybe invest time to explain the mechanics better, instead of diluting the intended play experience. Basically: "Learning by doing" is a great way to explain mechanics in any game, but it is not the job of the mechanics themselves to explain themselves, but rather of the game manual or GM. At least from my perspective.

It's not so much about simulation as it is creating a game where playing with the mechanics of the game actually ends up making the player better at social interaction as a whole, by addressing a core misconception where holding that misconception makes all forms of social interaction unnecessarily difficult.

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.

Well, but what is there to speak against having a system for a player character to create Engagements and hooks? Like, great, you can have set ones and whatever you can convince the GM that it makes sense (Or that the GM decides). But I think there is value in having a system on top of that.
For one, the GM can still say "Nah, makes no sense that this engagement might ever be created". There can still be much of the same area of control over the system. On the plus side, if the GM is unwilling to just decide, or torn between just saying yes or no, involving player skill in it is, I feel, a good way to give the players more agency, and help the GM improvising.

It's a mixed message - it says that the game system wants players to deal with NPCs by using their character skill to craft Engagements. That distracts from what the system is trying to convey.

To put it another way, lets say I wanted to make a system that was going to (in a gamist sense) be all about spatial relationships and positioning. So having things with specific, finite areas of influence is important to keep that gameplay rich. But then someone says 'well you've got this system of reaches and areas and stuff, why not let players design custom weapons that modify their areas of influence?'. By doing so, I would be saying 'you can do well by understanding maneuvering and spatial positioning, or you can do well by assembling the weapon with the 'best' area of influence'. As a result, I have a game which isn't really clear about what it's about anymore, and I risk one or the other part being lost because one method is just objectively better/simpler/more aligned with player preconceptions than the other.

Let's say Jim is friends with Bob, and believes Bob to be a good guy. Bob can generally get Jim to stand up for him if people malign Bob, because of this. Bob can also get Jim to do him favors (and does reciprocate at times).

Alice shows up and wants to convince Jim not to help out Bob in Bob's latest "harmless eccentricity." She starts off with some dire imprecations about Bob being up to no good, and Jim just blows that off because it's nonsense. Bob's a good guy.

Now, Alice could try to hook into that "Bob's a good guy" thing and lie to Jim, telling him she believes Bob is being used by Baron McNasty to do something evil and that Jim should refuse to help Bob with this because Bob would regret it if it succeeded. Or, she could act on her belief that Bob is actually Baron McNasty in disguise and go out and find proof positive that Bob's plan is vile, and show the evidence to Jim.

Under the rigid Engagement system, there is room to argue that Jim could not be persuaded to believe Alice's evidence, because he trusts Bob and Bob says "nope, fake."

One could also interpret Max_Killjoy's objections to having the pillars of belief shifted to mean that if Max were Jim, it would be impossible to convince him that Bob is NOT a good guy and that Bob's plan involves doing horrid things to nice people even if Alice were to get video evidence of Bob gloating about his plan while torturing an orphan's pet puppy in front of him. Because that would involve having to roll some measure of social skill to convince Jim that this evidence is real enough to shift that pillar of belief away from "Bob is a good guy."

Now, you might say, "That's awfully extreme. Alice isn't using persuasion mechanics, here. Max_Killjoy's character Jim is persuaded by the plain evidence!" And perhaps you're right; this is an extremely obvious case.

But evidence is rarely that cut-and-dried. Just how much evidence does Alice have to get to convince Jim that Bob's actually a bad guy? Does Alice's skill in presenting it, does her ability to project sincerity, does even her choice in how to approach the issue impact Jim's decision-making?

I contest that it does, for 99% of people. Probably more. Coming at it with a scolding attitude and smug superiority invites skepticism, whereas presenting it in a way that builds the conclusion naturally in Jim's mind historically has a better chance of convincing most "Jim"s that the evidence is conclusive. Call it manipulative or call it clear presentation, but the fact that presentation method impacts the likelihood that the evidence will be received in the manner intended is true. It takes far more incisive logic to pick apart evidence presented well (but with a bias towards a potentially false conclusion) to find flaws in its reasoning, and similarly more emotional distance to pick apart poorly-presented evidence to realize that it may, in fact, have merit.

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.

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.

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

Now, if for every possible Jim, Alice picked the strategy that worked on that Jim, then you're going to hit a much higher rate of convinced Jims. But as a necessary condition of doing that, the method that ends up being used will be different in each of those cases, and it will necessarily have consequences that extend beyond just the success or failure of the attempt. Some Jims could only be convinced by the inclusion of others that they trust into the conversation, meaning that Alice will have to deal with those people too. Some Jims may need to have a sufficiently personable relationship with Alice before they'll take anything she says seriously, meaning that that relationship will be a thing regardless of what happens with Bob. Some Jims will need to see Bob do something wrong with their own eyes, meaning that Alice has to involve Bob in the convincing process. Some Jims need to be bribed, and so Alice will end up with less money and Jim with more. Some Jims will need to be threatened, which opens Alice up to future legal vulnerabilities. Others will need to be blackmailed, which can have its own reprecussions.

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.

[Max_Killjoy]

Some Jims will have a philosophical commitment to the truth, and so can be convinced by evidence.

As a side note, I would suggest that being convinced by the best evidence available, independently confirmed, does not fall under the umbrella of having been socially manipulated.

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

[jayem]

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.

Presumably it would include a die roll (in sim). So you'd not guarantee success or failure*, just guarantee a chance of success. Which obviously in real life would be reflective of chaotic and hidden variables rather than true randomness, just like combat.

*except in the extreme cases.

[Floret]

Starting now, as the thread is seeing more and more longer posts, I will take the approach of "everything I quote comes in spoiler tags", to make posts more readable. Headline of the tag is mine, everything else in there unchanged.

Spoiler: NichG on how persuasion works IRL

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I disagree with that analysis, because it turns the skill into something magical - this ineffable factor which you either have it or you don't. I find that point of view to be very limiting - it precludes trying to understand why someone failed to be persuaded. I'd assert that almost all of the time, there is a concrete 'why', and that 'why' was that the person who attempted the persuasion failed to correctly understand the person they're talking to and so chose to attempt to persuade them of something which they cannot be persuaded of.

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

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. 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.

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

No. It doesn't turn it into something magical, it simply turn it into a skill. Just because different skill levels produce very different outcomes, doesn't mean one cannot train it, learn it and get better with practice. (For another example, an unskilled musician will produce very different emotions in people than a skilled musician does, but that doesn't mean music is just some "magic" that you have or have not.)
And, if this is all exclusively about the listener - why then, are there people that are more or less persuasive in the real world? Like, if only the listener is important, how do you explain the fact that, the same argument brought forward by two different people has the chance for different reactions? (Sure, biases on the listeners part concerning facts about the speaker might also play a part, but even if you control for that...)
Finding the right spots and noticing when people entrench is absolutely part of the skillset of a skilled persuader, and perhaps the most important part, but there are ways to change people, and to change their opinions, even though they will, as several people have mentioned, take more time than just tickling the right spots.

Spoiler: NichG on Social systems teaching things

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It's not so much about simulation as it is creating a game where playing with the mechanics of the game actually ends up making the player better at social interaction as a whole, by addressing a core misconception where holding that misconception makes all forms of social interaction unnecessarily difficult.

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.

Okay, I admit I was wrong about what I thought you were getting at.
That being said... what? Or, more precisely: Why, or to your last point: So what?
This holds Social systems in RPGs to a standard no other system in TRPGs is being held to. The combat system doesn't teach me combat; the climbing skill doesn't teach me climbing, and any chase sequence system sure as hell doesn't make me better at running away from things, any more than assassins creed does (And quite possibly less). So why should social systems be the exception here? We aren't running a "Persuasion 101" class, we are playing a game with friends.
On top of that, for there to be any possible learning effect, it requires the GM to be the best person at Persuasion, or to at least have a deeper understanding of it than the rest of the people. Because you cannot learn from a person that doesn't know things you don't. Just as, while one might learn tactic from the more tactical combat systems out there? Nothing better than what the GM can pull, because otherwise, you aren't actually practicing and have no chance to grow with the challenges.

Out of interest, what do you think is this "core misconception that makes all forms of social interaction unnecessarily difficult"? Because, since I disagree with you, I seem to hold it, but I have yet to encounter any real core difficulties social interactions supposedly holds.

As a side note, I would suggest that being convinced by the best evidence available, independently confirmed, does not fall under the umbrella of having been socially manipulated.

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

I disagree. I very clearly define the term with "Everything a person does, that they would not have done without the input from someone else" (Excluding, of course, (physical) reactions to physical actions such as starting to bleed when stabbed; and of course excluding butterfly effects). This is not meaninglessness, I would argue; and I would also argue that it holds a better core for building systems on than a vague "People talking to others to make them do things". We need a clear definition that covers every case we want to adress; yet excludes the cases we don't want.
Do you have an alternative definition? How would you sufficiently differentiate persuasion from some of the broader applications of the term brought forward?

Presumably it would include a die roll (in sim). So you'd not guarantee success or failure*, just guarantee a chance of success. Which obviously in real life would be reflective of chaotic and hidden variables rather than true randomness, just like combat.

*except in the extreme cases.

This. Just because something is declared possible via the game system, does not declare it a guarantee; it just declares it possible.

[Max_Killjoy]

I disagree. I very clearly define the term with "Everything a person does, that they would not have done without the input from someone else" (Excluding, of course, (physical) reactions to physical actions such as starting to bleed when stabbed; and of course excluding butterfly effects). This is not meaninglessness, I would argue; and I would also argue that it holds a better core for building systems on than a vague "People talking to others to make them do things". We need a clear definition that covers every case we want to adress; yet excludes the cases we don't want.
Do you have an alternative definition? How would you sufficiently differentiate persuasion from some of the broader applications of the term brought forward?

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.

[NichG]

No. It doesn't turn it into something magical, it simply turn it into a skill.

...

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'.

Okay, I admit I was wrong about what I thought you were getting at.
That being said... what? Or, more precisely: Why, or to your last point: So what?
This holds Social systems in RPGs to a standard no other system in TRPGs is being held to. The combat system doesn't teach me combat; the climbing skill doesn't teach me climbing, and any chase sequence system sure as hell doesn't make me better at running away from things, any more than assassins creed does (And quite possibly less). So why should social systems be the exception here? We aren't running a "Persuasion 101" class, we are playing a game with friends.

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.

On top of that, for there to be any possible learning effect, it requires the GM to be the best person at Persuasion, or to at least have a deeper understanding of it than the rest of the people. Because you cannot learn from a person that doesn't know things you don't. Just as, while one might learn tactic from the more tactical combat systems out there? Nothing better than what the GM can pull, because otherwise, you aren't actually practicing and have no chance to grow with the challenges.

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.

Out of interest, what do you think is this "core misconception that makes all forms of social interaction unnecessarily difficult"? Because, since I disagree with you, I seem to hold it, but I have yet to encounter any real core difficulties social interactions supposedly holds.

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.