What skill/social systems work?

[Cluedrew]

Wow, this thread managed to mention three systems I have never heard of.

One thing I would like to add a bit of wait to is: For what? I think D&D's skill system barely deserves the title. But if you want to quickly resolve some one off bonuses or flavour options it is good enough, doesn't get in the way and takes minimal time to learn.

Powered by the Apocalypse not only has working rules, but the individual systems tend to pick very deliberate subsets of possible things to cover. Things like the "magic" system are obvious examples. Less obvious examples is one of my favorite hacks has rules for trips because it is about wilds and surviving in the great hostile outdoors. Another has rules for updating the plan because it is a heist game where you have a plan and things will go wrong and force you off the plan. Others don't have these rules.

Even within one type of system Exalted's social system may not do a good job of portraying realistic conversations, but it is a great tool for over the top social manipulators. I mean not all of that was intentional, but considering the characters Exalted is designed for, I'm not surprised they made the mistakes they did.

[Quertus]

For a very light social system, 5e is about 3/4 of the way there. The ideal, bond, and flaw that any important NPC should have is a list of traits that are theoretically discoverable, and any social interaction that plays on them will generally get a reaction. How closely those reaction matches to the socializing character’s desires will be a factor of how well the player rolls (convincing the target that his blandishments are sincere and relevant) and how well the line of discussion really ties the ideal, bond, or flaw to what the character rolling the skill wants.

This is still quite light, because “how well it lines up” and “what is a reasonable response” are very fuzzy, but it at least narrows the gap on what the rolls are trying to achieve.

I'm… not exactly sure that that qualifies as a "system", any more than other fluff, like eye color.

This is really the key here, and the whole "social skills aren't magic."

Any social skill usage really comes down to one of two scenarios:

1) Getting someone to choose one thing they value over another thing they value. This is generally the pleasant type of social interaction.

2) Getting someone to choose to avoid something they don't want by giving up something they value. This is generally unpleasant (threats and intimidation)

Either of these can be accompanied by lies.

But in general, people won't give up something they value for nothing. They'll want something. This can be an abstract thing - it doesn't have to be material.

It's also useful to think of things in terms of values, and tactics (I've heard other terms for these but I forgot them). I "want to provide for my family" so "I'm working as a guard." is a great example. Getting people to change tactics is comparatively easy, compared to getting them to change values.

Normally I just eyeball this stuff and go from there, but I think you could use this as a starting place for a more mechanized system. Even allowing some "tactics" to become goals in some kind of hierarchical chain, with stats on how deeply held and important they are (which may not be the same thing), and how various things support each other.

Like, if a guard was a guard to protect the city, because he feels the nation is his home, because he believes the king is working for the best interest of all and is a good leader, then a sufficient attack on "the king is a good leader" could break the whole chain from there. Or something. I mean, again, for me just eyeballing this stuff is cool, but if someone wanted to mechanize it that's probably where I'd start.

A game built from the ground up around answering the question, "why?" certainly could have potential. But, how can we make it so that it can have the fidelity of modeling the full chain of "why" questions that leads to my "vegetarian Nazi (etc etc etc)" - ie, that leads to a believable NPC who is more than a cardboard cutout who can only be interacted with from one direction - while still making something that people would actually go through the effort to play?

It's probably the headache, knee, and painkiller talking (or loosening the tongue), but sometimes I get the impression that there are plenty of gamers who do think that social skills are some sort of magic.

And even if they don't, they often seem to consider social interaction with NPCs a waste of time, and want to get the social maneuvers out of the way so they can get to other things, so spending 5 minutes on figuring out how to influence the guard gets more negative response than 2 hours spent on fighting a few guards...

"What's the BAB DC to kill him"

"But you haven't positioned yourself to hit him. And, even if you had, he immune to nonmagical weapons. Also, combat isn't just a single roll in this system - it's a strategic 'back and forth', with opportunities to respond to your opponents' actions."

"Why do you have to make things so difficult? I just want to kill him, so I can get back to the 'mapping the dungeon, and making new friends' minigame."

Yeah, if that felt like a less likely exchange than its "ignore social tactics, and simplify it to a single die roll, so that we can get back to combat" counterpart, there's probably a reason for that.

[Segev]

I'm… not exactly sure that that qualifies as a "system", any more than other fluff, like eye color.

It doesn't. It's about 3/4 of a system.

Let's look at what most "systems" are now: They're either "roll to see if you can Diplomacy them into obedience," or they're "role-play it out, and try to read the NPC through the DM's acting well enough to figure out what the NPC wants and/or is thinking so you can come up with an argument you can convince the DM would convince the NPC."

By having specific...knobs and levers, let's call them...in the form of Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws, with some rules half-way there to figure out what those are for a given NPC, you now have at least some idea, once you learn them, what your role-played arguments might be. You still have the gap of asking how close to the mark your arguments are in the DM's eyes, which he uses to set the DC of any finalized rolls, but it gets us closer.

It also lets us start thinking of the right intermediate steps to ask questions about: You know what drives the NPC, now what are you going to say to play on those drives? Okay, you have to convince the NPC that you're sincere, truthful, and right about what you're saying. So that's at least one roll, barring exquisite evidence that makes it an auto-success. Then you have to convince him that it matters, or that it really is tied to his interests in a useful way to you. Once that's done, you've either convinced him, or have one more persuasion-type roll to convince him that doing what you want will take the factors you've got him believing in and coalesce them into a course of action he now believes he wants to take.


Or something like that.

Yes, it's fuzzy. It's only 3/4 of a system, not a system. But it's a heck of a lot more than the starting points of "role play it out and try to socialize the DM" or "make a single roll to mind-control the NPC."

[JoeJ]

By having specific...knobs and levers, let's call them...in the form of Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws, with some rules half-way there to figure out what those are for a given NPC, you now have at least some idea, once you learn them, what your role-played arguments might be. You still have the gap of asking how close to the mark your arguments are in the DM's eyes, which he uses to set the DC of any finalized rolls, but it gets us closer.

To build on this a little bit, if you're able to engage the NPC in small talk for a minute or two it should be pretty easy to discern at least one personality trait, ideal, bond, or flaw. I'd make it a DC 10 at most Wisdom (Insight) check. (Now, how hard it is to get them to participate in small talk obviously depends hugely on the circumstances, and might, in some cases, require a Charisma check.)

[Morty]

I don't think "roll to mind-control the NPC into obedience" is as common as people make it out to be. When I investigated social systems while trying to homebrew one for Dark Heresy 2E, I used Exalted 3E of course, but also the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG and Black Crusade (since it's also a FFG WH40K) system. The main issue with those wasn't "mind-controlling NPCs into obedience", but the fact that they were adversarial. They focused on two characters engaging in negotiation (ASoIaF) or vying for influence on others (Black Crusade), with clear victory and loss conditions. This isn't going to apply to most situations.

[Max_Killjoy]

Well, right after "social skills are magic" on the list of bad starting points for social systems in RPGs come "all social interaction is about winning and losing and power" and "social interaction is just like combat".

[Segev]

Well, right after "social skills are magic" on the list of bad starting points for social systems in RPGs come "all social interaction is about winning and losing and power" and "social interaction is just like combat".

To some degree, this is simply because it's when you want to change the dynamics of a relationship, or get a specific behavior, that you invoke mechanics. I don't think even the most hard-core gamist is asking for game rules to model having a simple conversation on philosophy beyond, say, what 3e's Sense Motive and Bluff skills might have (in order to lie about what you believe or see if somebody is prevaricating). And those legitimately don't need to be more than a single opposed roll per conversational point, if not less than that.

[JoeJ]

Well, right after "social skills are magic" on the list of bad starting points for social systems in RPGs come "all social interaction is about winning and losing and power" and "social interaction is just like combat".

All social interaction is not necessarily about winning and losing, but unless there is some kind of conflict you don't need a system to handle it. There don't need to be rules about whether you can convince a merchant to sell you some of their merchandise for a price the merchant thinks is fair, or whether a bored bystander waiting at a bus stop will talk to you about the weather. It's only when you're trying to convince an NPC to do something they weren't already willing to do that there needs to be some sort of rule.

[Max_Killjoy]

To some degree, this is simply because it's when you want to change the dynamics of a relationship, or get a specific behavior, that you invoke mechanics. I don't think even the most hard-core gamist is asking for game rules to model having a simple conversation on philosophy beyond, say, what 3e's Sense Motive and Bluff skills might have (in order to lie about what you believe or see if somebody is prevaricating). And those legitimately don't need to be more than a single opposed roll per conversational point, if not less than that.

All social interaction is not necessarily about winning and losing, but unless there is some kind of conflict you don't need a system to handle it. There don't need to be rules about whether you can convince a merchant to sell you some of their merchandise for a price the merchant thinks is fair, or whether a bored bystander waiting at a bus stop will talk to you about the weather. It's only when you're trying to convince an NPC to do something they weren't already willing to do that there needs to be some sort of rule.

But even those social interactions that are "an issue in question" and "trying to convince someone" don't need to be adversarial or zero-sum or power/dominance to still sometimes need mechanics.

[Segev]

But even those social interactions that are "an issue in question" and "trying to convince someone" don't need to be adversarial or zero-sum or power/dominance to still sometimes need mechanics.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to get across, here.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that it should be completely modeled on combat. What I've been discussing would encompass convincing somebody to engage in a win/win by, in part, convincing them that the suggested course of action IS a win/win, through knowing what they would consider a "win" and demonstrating that the proposal achieves this. The mechanics involved would center around figuring out what the other person considers a "win" and convincing them of the truth of your pitch regarding making that "win" come about.

[JoeJ]

But even those social interactions that are "an issue in question" and "trying to convince someone" don't need to be adversarial or zero-sum or power/dominance to still sometimes need mechanics.

Absolutely. Unlike combat, a social interaction mechanic needs to allow for the possibility of a non-zero-sum (i.e. win/win) outcome. And I agree with Segev that 5e gives you levers to bring that about, but fails to explain how to use those levers to resolve an actual situation in the game. (At least, that's my understanding of his position.)

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm not really sure what you're trying to get across, here.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that it should be completely modeled on combat. What I've been discussing would encompass convincing somebody to engage in a win/win by, in part, convincing them that the suggested course of action IS a win/win, through knowing what they would consider a "win" and demonstrating that the proposal achieves this. The mechanics involved would center around figuring out what the other person considers a "win" and convincing them of the truth of your pitch regarding making that "win" come about.

I was responding to Morty's comment about systems that seem to treat all social interaction as inherently adversarial, and noting that it's another one of those bad assumptions that seem to often go unquestioned as a basis for a social interaction system in RPG rules.

[Morty]

I don't really know how many social systems have this problem; those were just the two I investigated, while Exalted 3E sidesteps this issue and many others neatly. I guess you could call Chronicles of Darkness' system adversarial, though I don't know if I would. It never came up in my chronicles. That might be my fault more than the system's, but it is weirdly focused.

[Segev]

I was responding to Morty's comment about systems that seem to treat all social interaction as inherently adversarial, and noting that it's another one of those bad assumptions that seem to often go unquestioned as a basis for a social interaction system in RPG rules.

Ah, I see.

I think that stems from almost every other time we roll dice in an RPG, it's adversarial. Either combat, or a contest, or man vs. nature. Climb, Craft, et al are either successes or failures to overcome a difficulty presented by the world or environment or the like.

[NichG]

Ah, I see.

I think that stems from almost every other time we roll dice in an RPG, it's adversarial. Either combat, or a contest, or man vs. nature. Climb, Craft, et al are either successes or failures to overcome a difficulty presented by the world or environment or the like.

I've been trying to actively avoid this in my current vein of system design as a bit of an experiment to expand the space. In the thing I'm working on now (will start running this weekend, so we'll see how it goes), dice are only ever rolled to determine the extent of a successful effect, never to determine success or failure. It's somewhat cribbed, philosophically, from 2ed 7th Sea. Basically, dice rolls generate resources which can be expended to produce or amplify outcomes. Mechanics correspond to guarantees - if you have the mechanic for something, you can do it at 100% success; if you don't have the mechanic, you can attempt it but the GM decides what happens; if you like how it goes, there's a resource you can spend to turn that into a mechanic for the future. Gradations are expressed as derived statistics that determine prerequisites for applying a mechanic (you can't hit if its out of range, you can't climb if it exceeds the steepness of a slope that your ability lets you climb, etc) or in variable costs.

In a conflict model, its like having a system where you never roll to hit, you only roll for damage. So there is some equivalency - e.g. if you get insufficient resources for what you wanted to achieve, you can interpret that as failure. But it doesn't use the ideas of 'success' or 'failure' as the building blocks underlying a roll, so hopefully that shifts the general feel and philosophy of the system.

[Cluedrew]

To NichG: That sounds interesting I'd be interested in hearing more about it as you get further.

So rather being adversarial perhaps the better way to frame it would be simply "something is at stake". So success or failure can be at stake, but degree of success can also be at stake as well. Consider Powered by the Apocalypse which has miss, weak hit and strong hit as its three outcomes.

But there is not a lot at stake in a friendly conversation. Unless you model encouragement and get some bonuses out of friends chatting, which is sort of a think in real life (I was chatting with friends before this and it put me in a good mood) but that level of mental health effects is not something most systems represent. Maybe a really granular survival game about a small group of survivors struggling to keep their spirits up as they desperately search for some way to life another day would but that is hardly most systems.

(Also combat is not really zero-sum game, it is strictly loss in most systems (and in real life) where it is more about who looses less. So the sum would be negative.)

[NichG]

To NichG: That sounds interesting I'd be interested in hearing more about it as you get further.

So rather being adversarial perhaps the better way to frame it would be simply "something is at stake". So success or failure can be at stake, but degree of success can also be at stake as well. Consider Powered by the Apocalypse which has miss, weak hit and strong hit as its three outcomes.

But there is not a lot at stake in a friendly conversation. Unless you model encouragement and get some bonuses out of friends chatting, which is sort of a think in real life (I was chatting with friends before this and it put me in a good mood) but that level of mental health effects is not something most systems represent. Maybe a really granular survival game about a small group of survivors struggling to keep their spirits up as they desperately search for some way to life another day would but that is hardly most systems.

(Also combat is not really zero-sum game, it is strictly loss in most systems (and in real life) where it is more about who looses less. So the sum would be negative.)

Teaching would be an example of a friendly social interaction where there's a difference between when it's done skilfully or poorly. Similarly, a lot of management and mediation-type interactions (helping someone express the source of their confusion, helping someone come to a decision, getting a meeting to stay on topic and conclude in a timely fashion). Also just getting information someone in a friendly setting can be non-adversarial but where the coherency and relevancy of the information you get depends on social skill.

[Jakinbandw]

So I've finally got something that I want to share. It's the social interaction system that I am developing for a fairly high powered game. I wanted to try to do something slightly different than DnD with my system, so the system comes in two parts: Fist it treats social interaction like combat in that there are turns and each round every single PC and NPC that wishes gets a chance to interact. This is so that all the players have equal time in the spotlight rather than one taking over and hogging the spotlight until the social interaction is over.

The second is that most of my system involves the bartering of favours. This means that the PCs can offer a favour to have an NPC do something for them. The PCs are also encouraged to keep their word by gaining bennies each time they return or do a favour.

My social interaction system is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

And the Index for my larger system (still in progress) is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...2WqphED_s/edit

[jayem]

So I've finally got something that I want to share. It's the social interaction system that I am developing for a fairly high powered game. I wanted to try to do something slightly different than DnD with my system, so the system comes in two parts: Fist it treats social interaction like combat in that there are turns and each round every single PC and NPC that wishes gets a chance to interact. This is so that all the players have equal time in the spotlight rather than one taking over and hogging the spotlight until the social interaction is over.

The second is that most of my system involves the bartering of favours. This means that the PCs can offer a favour to have an NPC do something for them. The PCs are also encouraged to keep their word by gaining bennies each time they return or do a favour.

My social interaction system is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

And the Index for my larger system (still in progress) is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...2WqphED_s/edit

Looks to have had quite a bit of thought put into it.
Where you say "rules of social interaction for for those times", I suspect the first "for" should be an "are" ?

I suspect you might want to double the number of 'levels' of favours also... There doesn't seem to be a lot of room once you add bonuses. I feel you don't want to no-sell an extremely law abiding policeman missing a parking ticket, it just should require ridiculous amounts of effort on your part.

[Jakinbandw]

Thanks for catching that!

I suspect you might want to double the number of 'levels' of favours also... There doesn't seem to be a lot of room once you add bonuses. I feel you don't want to no-sell an extremely law abiding policeman missing a parking ticket, it just should require ridiculous amounts of effort on your part.

On one hand you are right, but on the other I made it this way to make it easy to work with. People can easily remember these levels, and I worry that if I doubled them, people would start getting hung up if a favour was Small, or Very Small.

Also, you can convince the law abiding policeman to ignore a ticket... If you're friends with them. Bonds lower the level of favours asked for. So If you have a medium bond, you'll owe the policeman a large favour (assuming they have the archtype policeman and the major quirk Always Does Things By the Book)