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## (HB) Most Social Actions Should Not Target Characters.

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Orion
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### (HB) Most Social Actions Should Not Target Characters.

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Post by Orion » Thu Sep 24, 2020 6:49 am

Most Social Actions Should Not Target People.
(The “HB” tag in the title is short for 'heartbreaker.” Lately I've been playing a lot of PBTA games and also Blades in the Dark and, health permitting, I look forward to talking about them here at some point. I use this tag to indicate that in this thread I'm specifically not talking about rules-lite games)
I've seen a bunch of discussion about social mechanics recently both on the Den and on various discords, and the conversations I've seen have focused mostly on systems for convincing people to do things or changing their opinions and attitudes. I think some people are hoping to get by with nothing but a system for changing people's minds, and others intend to have other mechanics but see a generic “persuasion” rule as a good place to start. I don't think it is. I think that you may end up needing a generic persuasion or attiude-adjusting mechanic, but you will definitely need other social rules and you should probably start with them and then work your way around to generic persuasion. Here are some of the reasons why:
Persuasion Mechanics Are Incomplete.
Let's look at some examples of the types of things people need to use social skills to get done: they need to get invitations to private events or get someone to sneak them into secure facilities; they need to score contraband goods, locate rare ones, or get a good deal on expensive ones; they need to bargain for specialized or academic knowledge, or get someone to divulge secrets, or learn the common knowledge of a niche community; they need to incite a riot, gather a posse, or recruit mercs; they need to get prisoners to give up intel or hidden loot; they need to convince some or all of the bad guy's men to stand down, desert, or betray him; they need to get directions to a hidden or secret place. Many of these tasks can't be modeled strictly as persuasion exercises because the PCs may not actually know who is capable of helping them out. You can't convince someone to sell you contraband if you don't know any black market dealers, and you can't bribe someone to divulge secrets if you don't know who knows them. One way to handle this would be to break the task down into two discrete parts (Gather Information to find someone and Diplomacy to persuade them, for instance), but I think there's a lot to be said for combining the whole thing into one roll.
Benefits of letting one skill check cover both finding an NPC and also doing business with them? First off, you get to make one roll instead of two. Nice! Also it becomes easier to do degrees of failure and to give every roll interesting consequences. Like if you make Streetwise check to buy contraband, critical failure might mean you try to buy from an undercover cop or that you get mugged by a fake dealer. Major failure might mean that you can't find a dealer, perhaps because several smugglers have recently been pinched or because people don't trust you. Minor failure could mean you find someone but their price is exorbitant or they're temporarily out of stock or the negotiation hits a snag. Blending the two steps into one roll also actually helps opens space for more creativity in the fiction because you can attribute success to whichever half is more interesting. Like if you get a high roll on a Business check and get to buy something expensive at a steep discount, you can decide from context whether this was done by working contacts to compare prices from dozens of merchants and finding the lowest, or by sitting down with one merchant and haggling them down.
So how do you we write rules for this kind of thing? We set numbers for accomplishing tasks, not influencing people. Secret locations have an Obscurity DC to discover them, rare goods have a Rarity DC to acquire them, and so on. Bribing someone into letting you into a palace or prison is probably done as a roll versus the location's Security DC or maybe the staff's Loyalty DC if we're being more granular. This way we can make sure there are things that social characters can reliably do and completely bypass the difficulty of exhaustively modeling one character's psychological makeup. Better yet, we now have the option to make specific characters psychologically unique without shutting down the PCs too badly. If the prison guards collectively have 15 Loyalty, that doesn't mean that each guard will accept a bribe if you roll a 15 for them. It means that some of the guards are corrupt and some of them are loyal and that the difficulty to identify and negotiate with a corrupt guard is 15. If you approach a specific guard you know and try to bribe them, the DM is free to make a judgment call based on what they know about the guard's personality – this particular guard might be one of the loyal ones, although you should get a check to detect this before incriminating yourself. On the other hand, if the DM doesn't have a good reason to object to the player's plans, you can use these generic numbers as guidelines for the stuff like asking the local baron for a favor. How hard is it to get some information or equipment by asking the baron to give it to you? It's however hard it is to get that stuff any other way, maybe with advantage if you have a good relationship.
Maybe You Can Have A Little Persuasion, As A Treat.
I think it's possible to make a game where social skills and even social-focused characters are effective, even if the only thing social abilities can do is connect you with people who already want to help you or do business with you, but I don't actually expect anyone to do. I think that we'll probably eventually include some abilities that are intended to change people's opinions or convince them to take open-ended actions, the kind of thing that people argue about in the social combat threads. Even if you don't let mundane social skills do that, you probably have mind control magic. And if you do have mind control magic and you have “non-magic” characters, then you should probably let “non-magic” social skills also be mind control sometimes. Nevertheless, I think there's some value in carving out your other social systems first and coming back to persuasion at the end – it sharpens the focus of your persuasion system by hemming it in, marking out a narrower scope of scenes where it's appropriate to invoke. A lot of “social combat” threads have broken down because people got stuck in the loop where they go “If social skills can make people switch teams or lose their free will or kill themselves or whatever, then doing a social on someone is a big deal that people will treat as equivalent to drawing swords, at least if they understand that it's happening. But people want to use social skills to make deals and obtain information and haggle and beg for favors. If using a social skill becomes equivalent to opening combat, none of those limited or low-stakes social engagements make any sense.”
If you have one set of social mechanics for finding and making deals with people who already want to be helpful or do business with you, then automatically your generic “persuasion” system becomes more like a coercion system; a set of mechanics you invoke specifically to pressure people into doing things they don't want to do. Sometimes this will be blatant coercion very intimidation, sometimes it might be trying to bamboozle someone with glib friendliness or mind blank them with fairy glamour, but it's not hard to make sure that all your “persuasion” abilities feel shady enough that it would make sense diagetically if people who notice you doing it to them respond by throwing you out, running away, or reaching for weapons.
Last edited by Orion on Thu Sep 24, 2020 6:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
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MGuy
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Post by MGuy » Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:15 am

I think the reason conversations around social mechanics don't focus too much on things that aren't messing with people's feelings, desires, and actions is because that it 'is' the big deal thing where socializing is concerned. It's the most powerful/useful result you can get from any interaction with any person. I don't think that too many people are going to make a fuss on what you set the numbers at when trying to distract a guard or interpret that a guard can be bribed. I also don't think that in most HB games people talk about (at least not here but I've seen it in discords/message boards more focused on narrative games) rules where your dice rolls generate post hoc rationalizations for the mechanical effect they are set to achieve. Usually people aren't introducing the idea that a high roll for bribery 'means' that you get a guard that is now bribable. I think it's an interesting idea and K actually talked about it before here but it hasn't seemed to gain much traction.
Last edited by MGuy on Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Aryxbez » Thu Sep 24, 2020 9:24 am

> So how do you we write rules for this kind of thing? We set numbers for accomplishing tasks, not influencing people. ..This way we can make sure there are things that social characters can reliably do and completely bypass the difficulty of exhaustively modeling one character's psychological makeup.

I think is a pretty capital idea, distancing from personas also allows DM's to not get attached to a random NPC in the moment, so can just resolve the roll and move on. It seems to be putting discussion in a different direction, that I think will help move this forward.
Though as per the Thread Title, I do think PC's should be able to be affected by social rolls, the same way you can expect them to be by Combat, or Spells. My Kneejerk was to think that PC's should be immune, but in order for such a minigame to work, all parties have to be affected in some way.
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Post by PhoneLobster » Thu Sep 24, 2020 11:24 am

I think, even before I came to the conclusions I did. (In large part by actually trying to write an objective valuation based mechanic and realizing just how much of a clusterfuck that would be).
Even before that when I saw someone proposing a social mechanic with a strong proviso of "It must never effect player characters!" I instinctively knew they were proposing something of questionable value.
In fact. I would suggest that stands for almost any game mechanic and the majority of observers. "Not for the player characters" is a huge flashing warning sign of a suspect and shoddy mechanic.
And how could it not be? Effectively if your "rule" requires the proviso "of course this can't possibly be allowed to effect things players actually care about" your rule is by it's own definition something not to be cared about.
So generally I would say, whenever I see "cannot effect PCs", come back when you have a rule that by it's own description is able to have outcomes anyone cares about.
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Post by Harshax » Thu Sep 24, 2020 2:22 pm

In regards to the premise, “PCs can not be socially manipulated”
Just for fun, can someone provide an ingame justification for why PCs can be affected by mind-altering magic but not succumb to the guile’s of a master manipulator. And then, justify why PCs can rely on numbers and dice rules to outwit NPCs, but the MC must be a master manipulator in real life.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Thu Sep 24, 2020 2:56 pm

Personally I'm not sure I want "Master Manipulators" to exist in my game on either end, so I think that just functionally makes most diplomacy systems bad for me.
I have never in my entire life met anyone who believes ~X and then was convinced to believe X in a time frame of a day. I've met lots of people without strong opinions who were tricked into believing X. I've met people who were pressured by societal or friend pressure working on them for weeks and months to believe X. I've met people who are good at picking out the people who already believe X or can be convinced to do so from very little work when I feel like they really shouldn't have had enough information to do that. I've met people who are really good at speaking to a group in a way that makes people with no strong opinion suddenly hate anyone who tells them ~X.
A Social system that has "A fighter appears ready to fight, and you convince them to instead be your best friend in a time that prevents them from murdering you" or "The King hates the stupid fucking elves so much, and you convince him to be good friends with the elves" as any possible outputs are just always going to be failures to me.
I think changing public opinion systems or ways that let you sort out which people are worth talking to are significantly more interesting in that both they have basically no representation in game systems and so are underexplored and better model reality.

> Harshax wrote:In regards to the premise, “PCs can not be socially manipulated”
> Just for fun, can someone provide an ingame justification for why PCs can be affected by mind-altering magic but not succumb to the guile’s of a master manipulator. And then, justify why PCs can rely on numbers and dice rules to outwit NPCs, but the MC must be a master manipulator in real life.

I don't know why people say this ever.
The difference between mind magic and being tricked by a master manipulator is really obvious. The game is a role playing game. The PCs are roleplaying their characters. If the PCs are mind controlled, then the DM is controlling them by roleplaying the person who used mind control on them. If the PCs are tricked by the master manipulator, then the DM controlling them is roleplaying the Player's character's response to events. That's obviously very different, and the argument that PCs are better at roleplaying their character's response to attempted manipulation than the DM is not obviously facially wrong.
You can of course present an argument that actually PCs are really bad at roleplaying their characters response to adversity and therefore DMs or rules statements should dictate PC actions in response to a manipulation not player roleplaying, because while the DM and rules are BAD, the players roleplaying is EVEN WORSE. But this argument only functions once you accept the obvious difference between mind control and being tricked.
Last edited by Kaelik on Thu Sep 24, 2020 2:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Harshax
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Post by Harshax » Thu Sep 24, 2020 3:50 pm

Kaiser Soze is a trope, regardless of anecdotal evidence. People get convinced to do things contrary to their beliefs all the time. And usually, their actions aren't because they've changed their mind, but that they have been lead to believe that doing this action advances or confirms their beliefs.
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Post by Harshax » Thu Sep 24, 2020 3:53 pm

Also, I want to apologize for posting my original question here. I was responding from my phone and meant to continue posting on the yet-another thread.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Thu Sep 24, 2020 4:00 pm

> Harshax wrote:Kaiser Soze is a trope, regardless of anecdotal evidence. People get convinced to do things contrary to their beliefs all the time. And usually, their actions aren't because they've changed their mind, but that they have been lead to believe that doing this action advances or confirms their beliefs.

Kaiser Soze also isn't an example of the thing which I am saying doesn't exist. He convinced a cop that Kaiser Soze, a guy the cop already "knew" existed from previous reports, was behind this crime too and tells a yarn about his history, a thing the cop was not in fact particularly predisposed to reject. The deception such as it was, was that he told a fake story that complied with what the cop already wanted to believe about Soze, and didn't mention that actually, he pulls shit like this blaming Kaiser Soze for shit in the past.
The entire point is the Soze keeps picking up on what the cops want to believe and then telling them it's true, since the name Keyser Soze comes from an FBI agent, and the thing he directs the cops toward is the ex-cop that they were originally looking for in the first place.
Now it isn't true that "some things are tropes therefore all games, or even any games, must include those tropes." The Xantos Gambit is a trope, but one that is in fact very difficult or impossible to have rules for in a game, because the rules if they exist would suck a lot and make things worse.
But it's also true that Roger Kint didn't convince the cops of the exact opposite of what they started believing, he just told them the things they wanted to hear.

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac » Thu Sep 24, 2020 5:40 pm

I've been playing around with setting DCs for coercion-based rolls, and I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not.
I just said "fuck it" and made the Base DC for getting people to do what you want dependent on the objective outcome of the roll instead of its perceived outcome. For example, you give a homeless guy a suitcase full of cash and tell him it's totally not hot and people definitely are not looking for it. If that's actually true and this random guy isn't in much danger, then the Base DC is 3 and you shit out modifiers on top of that. If you're lying and there's a band of goons coming around the corner and they'll fucking kill whoever has the suitcase, then that's fucking suicidal and the Base DC for the check becomes 12 instead (a magnitude or two harder to achieve).
On one hand, this seems kind of weird and metagamey. On the other hand, it's effect-based.
Thoughts?
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Post by Foxwarrior » Thu Sep 24, 2020 5:42 pm

> The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:On one hand, this seems kind of weird and metagamey. On the other hand, it's effect-based.

Isn't that the same hand?
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac » Thu Sep 24, 2020 5:46 pm

It's... it's two hands! Maybe on the same arm, but still!
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Post by Harshax » Thu Sep 24, 2020 6:18 pm

I don’t understand why the DC fluctuated, nor why you would roll in the first place.
It is wrong to inflate the DC unless the homeless guy saw you being chased by goons.
It is wrong to have a DC in the first place, because you could just throw the suitcase into the trash next to the homeless guy and achieved the same thing.
If you’re playing with “objective outcomes”, then you have to consider intent and then produce an objective narrative. If the intent is for the PC to ditch a briefcase then it just happens.
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Post by Orion » Thu Sep 24, 2020 6:23 pm

> Aryxbez wrote:Though as per the Thread Title, I do think PC's should be able to be affected by social rolls, the same way you can expect them to be by Combat, or Spells. My Kneejerk was to think that PC's should be immune, but in order for such a minigame to work, all parties have to be affected in some way.

Well, by characters I just meant "people in the story," NPCs too. The argument is that social rolls should usually target items or locations or information or more abstract objectives and that you should figure out who you were interacting with during the post facto interpretation of the roll. That said, yes, if your game has pro-active NPC factions, there's no reason that they can't take social action targeting the player's assets and information.
Suppose the players are visiting a city where they know hostile agents are active, so they're trying not to let anyone find out where the party sleeps at night. You have some system that determines how much security they can have given the types of activities they're doing, so you figure out that the PCs rented room have an Obscurity DC 20 or whatever. Once a day, or every time the PCs take a social action, or on some other schedule, you should let the enemy faction make a Surveillance (or Gather Info, etc.) roll against the party's Obscurity. If they succeed, then you work with the players to figure out what the breach was. You can propose narratives that involve a PC getting persuaded or tricked into revealing the location, and there's a good chance the players will accept if it's an entertaining story (maybe some people started goading the party barbarian until he challenged them to a wrestling contest at his place). Players usually are reluctant to let their characters be deceived because they fear the consequences, but in this case the consequences are known and locked-in. If the player does veto the suggestion, though, you can easily re-direct. Maybe the Barbarian player says his character wouldn't take the bait, but would get spooked and go home to warn people, not realizing that he was already being tailed, or whatever.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac » Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:03 pm

> Harshax wrote:I don’t understand why the DC fluctuated, nor why you would roll in the first place.
> It is wrong to inflate the DC unless the homeless guy saw you being chased by goons.
> It is wrong to have a DC in the first place, because you could just throw the suitcase into the trash next to the homeless guy and achieved the same thing.
> If you’re playing with “objective outcomes”, then you have to consider intent and then produce an objective narrative. If the intent is for the PC to ditch a briefcase then it just happens.

That's what I get for using someone else's example, I suppose. Intent is what I'm going for here - if you're trying to convince someone to do something that you know is going to probably fucking kill them, then that should be more difficult than convincing... I dunno, some security guard to look the other way.
Does that make more sense? I feel like the more I discuss this topic, the less I understand.
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Post by Harshax » Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:33 pm

> Suppose the players are visiting a city where they know hostile agents are active, so they're trying not to let anyone find out where the party sleeps at night. You have some system that determines how much security they can have given the types of activities they're doing, so you figure out that the PCs rented room have an Obscurity DC 20 or whatever. Once a day, or every time the PCs take a social action, or on some other schedule, you should let the enemy faction make a Surveillance (or Gather Info, etc.) roll against the party's Obscurity. If they succeed, then you work with the players to figure out what the breach was. You can propose narratives that involve a PC getting persuaded or tricked into revealing the location, and there's a good chance the players will accept if it's an entertaining story (maybe some people started goading the party barbarian until he challenged them to a wrestling contest at his place). Players usually are reluctant to let their characters be deceived because they fear the consequences, but in this case the consequences are known and locked-in. If the player does veto the suggestion, though, you can easily re-direct. Maybe the Barbarian player says his character wouldn't take the bait, but would get spooked and go home to warn people, not realizing that he was already being tailed, or whatever.

So in this scenario, I'd start the players at TN-0 to avoid detection. And, as a setup to this scenario, the players will have a finite number of Turns to prepare for their voyage. You could just go around the table and have each player state what they will do to avoid detection in the city. But, it is important that every player states one action. Why? Because loose lips, sink ships. No character is suspended in a vacuum until the player decides to do something, therefore, there is always some chance that the player gets detected.
Each player is going to roll against TN-0 initially. A player can choose to perform an action that assists another player's preparation or contributes to their Obscurity later when the adventure picks up in the foreign city.
Actions by players:
1. I'm going to use my resources to plan a clandestine departure to the foreign city.
2. I'm going to make a bunch of purchases and advertise a party for the local elite which takes place on or after we've snuck out of the city.
3. I'm going to send word ahead to agents to prepare a safe house.
4. I'm going to shunt myself to the astral plane to avoid detection and leave my body in a box on the cart we'll use to get to the next city.
Tally up all the successes and failures, this is the DC the player's roll to avoid detection when doing actions in the next city.
Later, if they get caught, it doesn't ever matter why. They failed one too many dice rolls or whatever. The player can insist their stone-cold barbarian can't be bluffed, but it doesn't actually change the outcome of detection. Let's say the player describes an absolute 100% batman move that makes their position 100% invisible from the enemy. If they failed the roll, it just means the enemy Agents realized the barbarian's location was a dead-end, so they doubled their surveillance on another party member.
I still think we're all still fumbling around what precisely constitutes a social situation. So I'm going to start with a premise: Social interaction implicitly requires all participants to be abiding by the same social contract.
Our ability to make combat rules are pretty straight forward. The intent of all parties is to kill, drive-off or otherwise neutralize their opponent. All rules regarding combat are designed to reach the conclusion of each participant's intent.
I propose that social interaction excludes any actions that break the social contract. In a civil culture, for example, Intimidation is not a social action. To be effective, Intimidation must have an end result that leads to violence. Therefore, we can't include Intimidate checks in social rules. In cultures where intimidating people to get your way is the norm, Intimidation is just the word for Diplomacy and violence is always an option. But in this case, those are two different mini-games.
If you can't summate social interaction rules in one or two sentences, you've already failed to insulate yourself from whataboutifs.
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Post by merxa » Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:41 pm

What of cases where they don't know, you mistakenly hand someone a poisoned gift, does convincing them to take the gift harder because it is unknowingly poisoned?
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac » Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:50 pm

> merxa wrote:What of cases where they don't know, you mistakenly hand someone a poisoned gift, does convincing them to take the gift harder because it is unknowingly poisoned?

Are you talking about a situation where only the GM knows how objectively dangerous something truly is? Like if I, as a player, try to hand someone a poisoned gift, but neither I nor my character know it's poisoned, does that still increase the DC beyond what I would expect? I want to say no because that sounds fucked up and irritating for players for the GM to go "lulz actually you fail this check because you were trying to get them to do something that's more dangerous than you thought LMAO!!!"
At the same time, that doesn't sound very objective to me. I'm not sure.
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Post by Harshax » Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:56 pm

I can't begin to figure out what the precise scenario merxa is proposing, but if I was an MC proposing a scenario where there was a secret "fuck you" to the players, I'd write it on a card and place it face down in front of the players, unveiling it when they've deduced the secret or when the secret takes effect.
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Post by PhoneLobster » Thu Sep 24, 2020 9:26 pm

> Harshax wrote:I can't begin to figure out what the precise scenario merxa is proposing,

It's a question on whether character intent and knowledge meaningfully effects the action. There are questionable interactions if it does.
So, for instance, your best liar suddenly becomes your most charismatic idiot while your cunning geniuses become bad at lying.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac » Thu Sep 24, 2020 9:31 pm

What about player intent, though?
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Post by Harshax » Thu Sep 24, 2020 11:36 pm

I'm still not sure I follow. It seems some of you are trying to equate several character actions to the same player intent. And I believe this is inherently flawed thinking.

> The PC tries to ingratiates an NPC with a gift that ...

they knows is poisoned. - Deceit vs. Notice/Empathy/Knowledge.
they think is poisoned. - Deceit vs. Notice/Empathy/Knowledge.
they know is worthless. - Deceit vs. Notice/Evaluate.
they think is worthless. - Deceit vs. Notice/Empathy/Evaluate.
they know is valuable. - Diplomacy vs. Notice/Evaluate.
they think is valuable. - Deceit vs. Notice/Empathy/Evaluate.

> and the NPC reacts ...

(assuming PC success)
in favor of the PC
in favor of the PC
in favor of the PC
in favor of the PC
in favor of the PC
in favor of the PC

> and the NPC reacts ...

(assuming PC fails)
in favor of the NPC
in favor of the NPC
in favor of the NPC
in favor of the NPC
in favor of the NPC
in favor of the NPC
Only one statement above matches a character action with a player's intention: "The PC tries to ingratiate an NPC with a gift the they know is valuable." All the rest of the statements are deceptions.
You might wonder why I listed several opposing skills for the NPC in some of the examples. At first, I was trying to think of what an NPC could oppose a deception with, then I realized that the deceit gets more elaborate with every "what if". Whether you want to check each skill, accumulate inputs to a notice or simple flip that many coins is up to you. The best lies are simple.
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Post by Harshax » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:42 am

My super-simple social heartbreaker. I'm only going to describe meaningful interactions that are important to a scenario. Random or inconsequential bullshit that happens during a game is absolutely not worth my time.
Characters have 3 attributes: Body, Mind, Soul
Body: physical actions
Mind: mental actions
Soul: social actions
Bog standard NPCs are rated 0 in all 3 attributes.
Task resolution is 2d6 vs. TN. TN-0 is a difficult action and the player succeeds difficult actions on a roll of 8.
Immediate Social Interactions:
MC sets the scene. "The players walk past an exclusive club. There is a doorman selectively admitting carousers."
PC states their intention. "I want to get into the club."
PC states their character's action. "I tell the doorman to let me in. I speak confidently. I flash him the profile of my awesome body. I offer him 20$"
Since this game only has 3 attributes, there can generally only be three inputs and in the example above, two were leveraged.
The character used their body to appeal to the doorman.
The character used their confidence (soul).
But the character also offered a bribe. Wealth is a thing outside of 3 attributes and the MC decides this is scene-appropriate and gives the PC a +1.
That's a total of 3 inputs. 2d6 + Body + Soul + Bribe vs. TN 8.
But wait, the player has an alterior motive! The player doesn't intend to actually give the doorman 20$.
The roll is 4 inputs but two cancel out. 2d6 + Body + Soul + Bribe - Deception vs. TN 8.
But wait, the player doesn't have an alterior motive, but the 20$ is fake.
It is still 4 inputs. 2d6 + Body + Soul +1 Bribe -1 Forgery vs. TN 8.
A success means the PC gets into the club without complication.
A failure means the PC gets into the club with complication.
But what about ...
You can't have infinite inputs in social interactions, for the same reason you can't throw Pistol in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors.
If you've sat down to a game that measures degrees of failure through the lense of Body, Mind and Soul, then pastiche or hutzpah or whatever has to be crammed into one of those three attributes or discarded. Any added detail that leverage the same attribute should be ignored or discard the previous input. This ultimately depends on the rng and degree of detail your rules outline.
Is this useful? Shall I continue?
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Post by PhoneLobster » Fri Sep 25, 2020 2:18 am

> Harshax wrote:Is this useful? Shall I continue?

I don't know, how does it tie in with the not effecting PCs thing again?

> The Adventurers Almanac wrote:What about player intent, though?

Well, I can't read the minds of players. Can you?
If in the end if you are just kicking it all to player GM negotiations it ends up being real world manipulation and social skills deciding the entire thing and that's bad in several ways. The most obvious is simply that what you have there might as well be Fairy Tea Party but is probably slightly worse, and surely the whole point here was to replace that, at least some of the time, with something better.
Not to mention who cares about anyone's intent. You are negotiating based on the value of outcomes that can be unknowable and changeable and sometimes needs to be secret.
A bribe to a guard to get into a club. What value does that have? Does the player remember something about the club the GM forgot? Does the GM know something about the club that the player isn't supposed to know? Is the player fishing just to see if the DC is high enough to indicate that "here be dragons"? What if there is just a chance that it's worth going in, should that be rolled/determined first so you can have the objective DC for the action correct, again does that DC reveal things it shouldn't? What if the GM had wildly different ideas about the WHY of the value of the visit to the players and they spend hours of play trashing the place, beating up the patrons and searching for secret treasure rooms when the GM only valued it highly because the club band was going to perform a song that imparted important information about a significant local mythical beast?
What about the bribe? That was just a modifier that made something else easier. But a creative player will come back if the situation calls for it and leverage THAT as a blackmail threat to control the guard or get something from them. A thing which made achieving your earlier goals easier, also turned out to be, innocently and unexpectedly, an already achieved different later goal? How do you value that?
You cannot use objective valuations for many reasons, but one of them is even if you eliminated character subjectivity, you cannot eliminate your own (and your players) subjective limitations.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Fri Sep 25, 2020 2:30 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac » Fri Sep 25, 2020 2:31 am

I don't know how to value ANY of this because it seems like every single variable that goes into a conversation has a million different things to consider that change depending on the situation. Sure, you can't have infinite inputs in a social encounter... but you can have so many inputs that it might as well be infinite. Trying to fix one problem just seems to create others.
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